Part II: Speed
Would Loretta Lynch echo Holder on civil rights? Jeffrey Toobin | November 7, 2014
[Time 2]
(CNN) -- New junior federal prosecutors literally started in the basement of the U.S. courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. I moved into my subterranean office in January 1990. A few weeks later, Loretta Lynch moved into her new digs down the hall. We were assistant U.S. attorneys in the Eastern District of New York, which covers Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island.
The work of this U.S. attorney's office is unglamorous, especially for new hires. Our jurisdiction included John F. International Kennedy Airport in Queens, so our introductory cases often involved low-level drug smuggling, especially the "swallowers" who ingested condoms full of cocaine or heroin. Lynch thrived in that chaotic environment.
And now, two-plus decades later, it looks like she will be the next attorney general of the United States.
She has been U.S. attorney twice in the courthouse where she came up -- first under President Bill Clinton and currently under President Barack Obama. She is not a well-known figure, even in New York. She is a workhorse, not a show horse, and she has flourished doing the hard, ordinary work of federal prosecution -- narcotics cases, organized crime (always big in Brooklyn), public corruption (ditto) and civil rights violations.
Lynch has showed her strengths more as an administrator than as a courtroom performer. She always had good relations with the U.S. attorney's "clients" -- the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other law enforcement agencies. Still, against heavy pressure from the New York police, she led a full investigation and prosecution of the horrible assault of Abner Louima by NYPD officers in 1997.
She is a tough and successful New Yorker, but she has also never forgotten her North Carolina roots. There is a Southern graciousness about her (and her accent), and it will certainly be on display in any confirmation hearings.
Two major questions loom over her prospective tenure as attorney general. First, will she continue the emphasis on voting rights that Eric Holder displayed? The answer is almost certainly yes. Like Holder, she comes from the generation after the civil rights movement, but it is part of her DNA, and that will come through in her priorities.
The more interesting question involves drugs. Holder moved carefully but steadily to reduce federal prosecutions of low-level narcotics offenses, especially marijuana. In addition, he started plans to lower the sentences of federal inmates who were convicted under those laws. Will Lynch continue these efforts?
She has no public track record on these policy issues, though she has aggressively prosecuted narcotics offenders in Brooklyn. This area offers a possible route for cooperation with some Republicans, like Sen. Rand Paul, who were sympathetic to Holder on this issue.
In any event, one verdict is clear: Lynch has come a long way from that basement we shared.
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Source: CNN Opinion
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/07/opinion/toobin-loretta-lynch/index.html?hpt=op_t1
Lil Buck Elevates Jookin’ to an Art ——Dancer Lil Buck combined a style of Memphis street dancing with the rigor of classical ballet, astonishing everyone from Madonna to Damian Woetzel with his graceful moves JASON GAY | Nov. 5, 2014
[Time 3]
It was morning, breakfast time, in the Bowery Hotel in downtown New York City, and in the plush, low-lit lobby, a hushed crowd in expensive-looking T-shirts and denim huddled over laptops and lingered over cappuccinos. In the middle of the room, the dancer Lil Buck was talking about music and anticipation—how he’s learned in his 26 years to not just feel a rhythm but to predict what’s coming next, staying one step ahead, as if he, not the musician, were in control of the song. “I try to feel like, ‘How would I want the beat to go?’ ” Lil Buck said. He began to elaborate further, but then stopped. “I can give you a visual.”
Lil Buck reached for his smartphone and, with a magician’s flair, began flicking a thumb through his playlist, keeping the screen pointed directly at me, away from his eyes. After scrolling for a few seconds, he dialed up a random song—it turned out to be “Forbidden Love” by the composer Abel Korzeniowski, off the soundtrack to the 2013 film Romeo and Juliet. As a piano melody began, Lil Buck lifted himself out of his chair in his baseball cap and T-shirt and black pants and started to move, curling his neck and unraveling his long arms. “I jump inside of the music,” he said, lifting his toes off the floor. “I mess with the tempo. You know how with an equalizer, you can see the music go up and down? That’s what I do.” He bent his knees and glided in small squares on the carpet, appearing to levitate. “Being a vessel for sound. You see it in my body.”
Behind him, a handful of hotel guests looked over at the man suddenly dancing in the lobby. This was jaded New York City, where everybody thinks they have already seen everything, but it was hard not to be entranced. This elegant ripple of movement and footwork, exuberant and seemingly gravity resistant—this is why people around the planet have clamored to watch Lil Buck, why in just a few years he has progressed from street performances and open auditions to ovations in New York and China and collaborations with the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Madonna at the Super Bowl. “Lil Buck is one of a kind,” said Benjamin Millepied, the director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet. He could dance like this anywhere. He could do this in a concert hall, on the Great Wall of China or in a TV commercial (that was Lil Buck dancing as the lead hamster in that endlessly played KIA ad)—or here, in a boutique hotel, over morning coffee. He was a step ahead of the music, as if occupying a new kind of body.
“I still haven’t seen anybody do a lot of the things that I do,” Lil Buck said. “I’m my own entity. I’m my own alien.”
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[Time 4]
Lil Buck rose to fame, as so many people do these days, with an Internet moment. If you go to YouTube, you can find it: a 2011 performance with Yo-Yo Ma at an arts benefit in Los Angeles. It is a breezy outdoor setting, and as the cellist begins to play Camille Saint-Saëns ’s “The Swan,” Lil Buck flutters his arms and glides around the concrete on his sneakers. As he arcs his back, angles his neck and fully inhabits the song, it becomes obvious that the audience has never seen anything quite like him before. A few times, you can hear someone gasp.
This was not the first time Lil Buck had performed “The Swan”—he’d developed the piece in 2007, back in his home city of Memphis, Tennessee, with one of his early dance mentors, Katie Smythe. But among the audience members this time was the film director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Her), who captured the performance on his phone and uploaded it. To date “The Swan” has more than 2.7 million views—not a massive number compared to, say, a Katy Perry video, but still extraordinary for what is essentially a home video of a dance collaboration.
The video made Lil Buck an Internet sensation, but his success had hardly arrived overnight. Born Charles Riley in Chicago in 1988, Lil Buck—a childhood nickname that stuck—was raised in Memphis, where in his early adolescence he became fascinated by jookin’, a locally grown dance movement rooted in hip-hop and earlier forms of street dancing, such as the Gangsta Walk. Memphis jookin’ emphasized fluidity and footwork, sometimes on tiptoes; at its best, it offered the illusion of floating in slow motion. Lil Buck became obsessed. He practiced religiously, wearing out sneakers and competing in “battles” against young Memphis talent. “He started doing a lot of stuff with his ankles, balancing on his toe as long as he could,” said Craten “Jai” Armmer Jr., a musician and filmmaker who was chronicling the jookin’ scene at the time and is now Lil Buck’s manager. “Buck has always been an extreme style dancer.”
“I didn’t really have that natural feel when I first got into it,” Lil Buck recalled. “I just jumped into it, trying crazy things.”
In his teens, Lil Buck began dancing at Memphis’s New Ballet Ensemble and School, where his jookin’ was interjected with a dose of the discipline and rigor of ballet. From the start, his talent appeared undeniable, and the school took him under its wing, providing him with a scholarship and a job. “His charisma as a performer, it’s magic,” said Smythe, New Ballet’s CEO and artistic director. She believes the ballet instruction Lil Buck received helped with his turns, his balance and what Smythe called his verticality, giving his jookin’ a new height and posture. “He started to adopt elements from each form into his improvisation, trying things out and playing with them,” Smythe said. “All of a sudden, his jookin’ was different from everyone else’s.”
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[Time 5]
At 19, Lil Buck set out for Los Angeles, where he encountered Damian Woetzel, an acclaimed director and former principal dancer for the New York City Ballet. Woetzel’s wife, the former NYCB prima ballerina Heather Watts, had been an early admirer of Lil Buck’s talent—“Buck makes you want to cry,” she told me—and Woetzel was similarly taken. Lil Buck had already experienced some professional breakthroughs—he’d choreographed a rollicking music video, “Tightrope,” for the singer Janelle Monáe—but the well-connected Woetzel introduced him to a new wave of admirers, including Yo-Yo Ma. “When I met him, [his success] was very much built on astonishment at his dancing ability,” Woetzel said. “But there was a whole other side, his ability to fuse worlds.”
That fusing ability may be Lil Buck’s signature gift, his apparent ease at moving between artistic settings and collaborators, picking up pieces and techniques and translating them into something original. Lil Buck has often been described as a 21st-century dancer, and like a viral phenomenon, there is something modern and platform-agnostic about his style; it works before an art-world audience or among school kids or on TV. In the past few years, Lil Buck has tried a little bit of everything. He’s been an artist in residence at the Vail International Dance Festival and the Aspen Institute; he traveled to Beijing with Yo-Yo Ma (and Meryl Streep) for a U.S.–China cultural summit; he served as a judge on the show So You Think You Can Dance; he made his debut with the New York City Ballet in a piece choreographed in collaboration with the French artist JR. A year ago, he performed with Cirque du Soleil in a Michael Jackson–inspired show; before that, Lil Buck went out on the road with Madonna. You can find video of him in Madonna’s Cleopatra-themed 2012 Super Bowl halftime show, performing a nimble backflip before an audience of hundreds of millions. (“Pressure,” Lil Buck said, smiling.) Not long ago, he said, Madonna had sent him a pair of Riccardo Tisci–designed Nikes as a birthday gift. “He adapts to the environment he’s in,” said the filmmaker Ole Schell, who made a short film about Lil Buck’s trip to China.
This fluidity has elevated Lil Buck to a rare position: the dancer as emerging pop star. Over the past generation and a half, mainstream culture has relegated dancers mostly to backup ornamentation; the familiar scene is the artist singing with a cluster of choreographed bodies, their faces often obscured, names seldom promoted. Lil Buck, conversely, has been the solo star of his own Gap commercial; he has chatted about jookin’ with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. “I think he’s going to make dance more important,” said Watts. “He is making dance more important. Young people know who Lil Buck is.”
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[The Rest]
Lil Buck is polite about this type of praise but doesn’t take his growing celebrity for granted. He is not so far removed from humbler days of L.A. auditions and realizes there are many extraordinary talents who would crave such opportunities. “I strongly believe dance has its own power,” he said. “It’s not for background. I believe you can be just as entertained watching dancers without other artists in front of them.” (Madonna, he said, has been a real advocate: “She started off as a dancer and really understands dancers. She gets to know you as an individual artist.”) Already Lil Buck has been described as the Baryshnikov of jookin’, and he speaks reverentially of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. But at a certain point the comparisons stop, and he occupies his own individual orbit. “I want to be Lil Buck,” he said. “I want to be known for Lil Buck.”
“He’s very much his own guy,” said Woetzel. “He’s sui generis. It’s not been done.”
As his profile has grown, Lil Buck’s schedule has become even more hectic—though he’s based in Las Vegas, more and more of his life unfolds on airplanes and in hotels. “It still feels nonstop,” he said. He admitted there are moments when he wakes up and isn’t certain where he is. “It’s happened a few times.” Maintaining relationships is difficult. “I am very single right now,” Lil Buck said. He leaned over the table and spoke directly into my tape recorder, as if to emphasize the point. “Single ladies, you know what I am saying? You want to come to a show?” He laughed. “I’m single, but it’s working for me. It’s hard to have a relationship when you’re traveling so much.”
Artistically, these are important years. Watts believes most dancers enter their physical prime in their late 20s and early 30s; Lil Buck is still developing, pushing the boundaries of his body, which has grown leaner partly as the result of a vegan diet. (In September, Lil Buck was taking a rare rest after spraining an ankle.) Earlier in the summer, before a residency in Aspen, he had traveled to Paris to make a short film with the artist JR. “He likes to say yes,” said Woetzel. “But you can’t do everything.” Smythe hopes he will return to Memphis for additional ballet work; she sounded a bit like Yoda hoping Luke Skywalker would return for more Jedi training.
Lil Buck feels he is just getting started, but he has visions for his post-performing future, including building his own company and serving as its artistic director. “I know my body won’t be able to do all this crazy stuff forever,” he said. He knows there will soon be other great dancers chasing after him. They already are, especially back in Memphis, where Lil Buck’s brilliant and improbable journey started. “I love it,” Lil Buck said. “I want the younger guys to come up to me and say, ‘Man, I’ll battle you one day. I’m going to get you.’ I’m like, ‘I hope so! That means you’ve got to go harder than I went. And I’m still going hard. So good luck with that!’ ”
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Source: The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/articles/lil-buck-elevates-jookin-to-an-art-1415236752
Steven Moffat Explains Why Doctor Who Companions Are Young, Attractive Girls, and It Sure Makes Sense James Plafke | May 9th 2012
Background info: Doctor Who is a giant TV series in the UK. The TV play was named after the main character in this story, who is a different species from human, called TimeLord, and always has a beautiful companion traveling through time and space with him. The current showrunner is Steven Moffat, also known as the main creator of Sherlock, a mini TV series on BBC.
[Time 6]
Not too long ago, we got word that Doctor Who will, par for the course, get a new companion in the upcoming season to replace Amy Pond and Rory Williams: Jenna-Louise Coleman. As you might notice, she’s quite pretty, which might also lead you think about the past companions, all of which (from the 2005 reboot series) are attractive, most of which are empirically gorgeous. With the whole hullabaloo that seems widespread on the Internet regarding the Doctor someday being played by a female, one might also run into people speculating or complaining about how most of his companions are, by and large, young, attractive females. Showrunner Steven Moffat has a pretty simple answer regarding that, and it sure makes sense.
No, Catherine Tate isn’t unattractive, but she’s not part of the group to which Moffat is referring, which contains four out of five young, super gorgeous females. Speaking in an interview in Doctor Who Magazine, Moffat addressed why, canonically speaking, young, attractive females always seem to end up as the companion:
“…you are always going to have the same sort of person, just because it’s the same man choosing them, and it’s the same person being chosen.
I think the function of a companion is pretty simple. I don’t think that’s very difficult. It’s just a question of who credibly is going to agree to go in the TARDIS? Who’s going to do it? Is it going to be a mother of 15 children? No. Is it going to be someone in their 60s? No. Is there going to be a particular age range? I mean … who’s going to have a crush on the Doctor? You know, come on! It’s more than a format. It’s evolved from good, dramatic reasons.”
That sure makes sense, doesn’t it? As far as we’re aware, the Doctor is heterosexual; he had a wife and children back before he traveled the universe in his blue box, and with the recent series, he’s fallen in love with a female, and has only been attracted to females (in other standalone love affairs). He travels the universe alone, and the whole thing about his character is that he’s the loneliest being in the universe. So, logically, what would the loneliest being in the universe (who really hates being lonely) do? Look for companionship. And whatever that being’s sexual identity might be (whether it straight, gay, or pansexual, as we’ve experienced with Captain Jack) is probably what that being would lean toward when trying to stave off loneliness. “Okay, but why are the young, attractive females always straight and love the Doctor?” you might ask. Another simple answer: People are more likely to be drawn to people they’re drawn to, so a straight female with a propensity for crushing on mysterious, ridiculously charming, heroic men will probably go ahead and follow that kind of crush.
Basically, it’s all logic and probability.
(via Blastr)
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Source: The Mary Sue
http://www.themarysue.com/steve-moffat-doctor-who-companions-attractive-girls/
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