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author

The Backstory of an Underground Classic in Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth

February 18, 2021 by Zack Schonfeld

 

“The first book ever written about 24-Carat Black”

I’ve been a professional music journalist for eight years, but I’ve been fascinated by sampling in hip-hop–that is, the technique by which music producers use fragments of preexisting recordings, such as a drumbeat or vocal hook–for much longer. As a teenager, I was blown away when I heard a Curtis Mayfield track in the wild and realized I recognized it from a Beastie Boys album, or when I recognized a Frank Zappa deep cut that had been sampled by Madvillain. For me, sampling has been an unlikely vehicle of music discovery. I’ve fallen in love with albums both classic (Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On) and obscure (Funk Factory’s self-titled 1975 gem) after hearing them sampled in hip-hop.

It was sampling that got me interested in 24-Carat Black, a relatively obscure ’70s funk group whose music echoes throughout hip-hop nearly 50 year later. Briefly signed to the legendary Stax Records, 24-Carat Black completed just one album, a brooding, ambitious 1973 concept album titled Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, before disbanding and sinking into obscurity. Yet over the last few decades, their music has become a near-ubiquitous sample source for rappers and producers. 24-Carat Black’s evocative grooves and hooks have been sampled by rap legends like Nas, JAY-Z, Eric B. & Rakim, and even Kendrick Lamar, on his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 album DAMN. 

In 2018, when Kanye West sampled the group on Pusha T’s album Daytona, I began tracking down surviving members of 24-Carat Black and investigating their unusual story. I was fascinated by the odd discrepancy between the band’s cultural endurance and their lack of name recognition, and I was riveted by the remarkable stories the band members told me about their brief rise and fall under the direction of Stax arranger Dale Warren, who composed their music. Most of all, I was struck by the reality that the surviving musicians have never been able to receive royalties from the continual samples of their music; some of them are still living in poverty, a brutal irony given that inner-city poverty was the primary theme of 24-Carat Black’s only completed album.

My new book, Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth (Bloomsbury, 2020), recounts the album’s backstory as well as tracing its rebirth as an underground classic in the ’90s rap community. It’s the first book ever written about 24-Carat Black, rooted in hours of interviews with the original musicians. (The book is part of the 33 ⅓ series, in which each volume focuses on one classic album.) It is my sincere hope that the book will help bring some long-denied recognition and justice to 24-Carat Black, and pierce some of the mysteries that have shrouded this unusual masterpiece for 48 years.

Filed Under: Cover Stories Tagged With: author, funk, Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth, Hip hop, rap, Zach Schonfeld

Getting to Know Marlene Fischer: Cherished Blogger, Now Celebrated Author

November 13, 2020 by Ella Ilan

The Wedding of Danielle and Eric

Armonk resident Marlene Fischer holds many titles. Besides being a mom, wife, lifelong writer, blogger, and a college essay editor, she jokingly adds “food shopper” and “stain removalist” to her list of roles. Raising three boys, it often seemed like food shopping and laundry were her main gigs. Book author, however, is Fischer’s newest title.

Never imagining that she would one day write a book, Fischer just successfully self-published her first book, Gained a Daughter But Nearly Lost My Mind: How I Planned a Backyard Wedding During A Pandemic. (Editor’s Note: Order on the net or inquire at your favorite local bookstore or gift store for availability.)

A new empty nester, with her youngest son away for his freshman year at college last year, Fischer was just acclimating to her new life and blogging about it when the pandemic began. She suddenly found herself with her husband working from home and the two of them sharing a very full house with all three sons and her oldest son’s fiancée at the start of the pandemic.

Navigating meals, everyone’s needs, a never-ending mess, and the challenges of a pandemic became the subject of Fischer’s hilarious and poignant musings on her Facebook page blog, which currently boasts about 12,000 followers.

The title of her Facebook page, “Thoughts From Aisle 4,” was suggested by her oldest son, and derived from her voicemail message on her phone for many years; “Sorry I missed your call. I’m probably in Aisle 4 at the grocery store. I will call you when I’m done.”

“A Source of Light”

Inspired by Erma Bombeck’s irreverent writing, Fischer is relatable and humorous. In addition to posting on topics such as handbag shopping, aging, politics, and random observations about life, many of her posts relay stories about the frustrations and joys of raising her three boys. For younger moms, it brings hope to see that no matter your worries, they all turn out just fine, just like Fischer’s bright young responsible sons. Judging by her followers’ comments, the page has been a source of light, humor and silver linings throughout many months of quarantine. It was easy for readers to feel emotionally invested in Fischer’s excitement over her oldest son’s impending nuptials and the trials and tribulations of planning a wedding during a pandemic. Many could relate to Fischer’s excitement over her relationship with her new daughter-in-law with stories such as being invited by the bride to help choose a wedding dress. Fischer believes the wedding planning was so captivating to her followers because “it was a good distraction for everybody” during the anxiety-ridden quarantine period.

Realizing that the couple’s planned wedding, a large fancy event originally planned in Washington D.C., the bride’s hometown, was no longer possible due to Covid, they decided to get married on their intended wedding date in the Fischer’s backyard with only close family members attending. “My goal was to make it so amazing that they wouldn’t want another wedding,” explains Fischer.

Fischer describes the backyard as having looked magical between the tiki torches, the tables, and the landscaping and plantings that Fischer’s husband had painstakingly tended to for weeks. The family incorporated beautiful and meaningful Jewish traditions throughout the wedding.

The wedding was an Armonk celebration in every way. There was a drive-by parade of local friends and neighbors and it felt like everyone in town was rooting for them to have a great day. Fischer was glad to be able to support local small businesses struggling through the pandemic by patronizing the town’s retailers for the food, attire, and décor.

The ceremony was officiated by Rabbi Joshua Strom of Congregation B’nai Yisrael in Armonk who actually met the bride and groom at a Phish concert in Mexico. The couple’s shared bond with the Rabbi over Phish aligned perfectly with their wedding logo incorporating the Phish logo, Phish shirts for the guests, the bride and groom dancing their first dance on a trampoline to a Phish song, and everyone dancing the night away to a Phish cover band, Uncle Ebenezer.

Still glowing from the wedding, Fischer decided this story had to be a book. Rewriting her blogs and adding material to create a more cohesive story, she successfully wrote her first book, a labor of love, with the help of her long-time best friend and editor Helene Wingens.

The Wedding of Danielle and Eric

A Family Affair

Fischer credits her husband for always being supportive. “I call my husband Mr. Aisle 4 and he often proofs my stuff. It’s really a family affair. One of my boys likes to criticize while the other two like and share everything. We all have our different roles.”

In the meantime, Fischer has held several book signings in town at some of her frequent hangouts including outside the local market. A book signing inside Aisle 4 of the market was not possible due to Covid.

Excerpt from Gained a Daughter but Nearly Lost My Mind: How I Planned a Backyard Wedding During A Pandemic, by Marlene Fischer

“The Battle Royale”

We had a battle going on at my house. More specifically, outside my house. It was my husband vs. the woodland creatures.

My husband had wisely left all the wedding details to me, save one; the garden. He decided to use this opportunity to beautify our yard in advance of the kids’ BIG DAY.

He bought flowers and planted them in the front beds. And the back beds, amongst the rocks. And it was good. But it wasn’t good enough. So, I went with him to the nursery and bought more flowers to keep the other flowers company. I was happy to go because it wasn’t like I was getting out much.

And then he planted those flowers as well. Since our yard backs on the woods, creatures like deer and chipmunks like to nibble on our flowers. To combat this danger, he bought deer repellant. Which sort of smells like a combination of urine and vomit.

Every few days my husband, bless his heart, went outside and sprayed all the flowers. And then we all headed inside and closed all the windows because it smelled that bad. Good luck to any animal who wanted to eat our flowers after my husband had sprayed; all I can say is that they would have had to be really hungry.

Then my husband went back to the nursery a third time and purchased bushes. And he hired people to plant all those bushes because it was too big of a project for him to tackle alone.

He also planted his annual vegetable and herb garden and put a higher fence around it to keep chipmunks and rabbits from enjoying our basil and lettuce. I do enjoy the produce we pick from the garden; we’ve got a real farm to table thing going on. Nothing tastes better to my husband than food he grew with his own hands.

Did I mention the tiki torches? My husband felt we needed tiki torches to keep the bugs away. We were now the proud owners of about twenty tiki torches which he strategically placed around our backyard. He refilled the torches regularly and ordered extra fluid just in case we ran out.

I have to give him credit where credit is due. He transformed our backyard into a tropical paradise. I sort of felt like I was in Hawaii except then I remembered I was in my backyard during a pandemic and not Hawaii.

I really hoped that he would win his war against nature. Because if he didn’t, I feared it would break him.

Filed Under: Cover Stories Tagged With: author, Blogger, book, Marlene Fischer, wedding

Chappaqua’s David Shimer Explains Why he Wrote “Rigged” and the Potential for Election Interference

June 28, 2020 by Grace Bennett

David Shimer discussing “Rigged” on CNN with Michael Smerconish.

This month, I had the pleasure of catching up with Chappaqua’s David Shimer, the author of the new and much heralded book Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference (Knopf; June 30, 2020), which examines the century-long history of election interference. In glowing reviews, the Washington Post  called Rigged “newsworthy,” “absorbing,” and “damning,” and NPR described Rigged as an “authoritative book” and “fascinating reading.” General David Petraeus, a former CIA director, labeled Rigged “a clear-eyed, highly readable, meticulous history of foreign electoral interference, in which revelations abound.” And Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, has said that Rigged “should be read by everyone who wants to defend democracy now.” 

Shimer is also a member of the Chappaqua community. He was the valedictorian of his class at Horace Greeley High School (class of 2014), received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Yale, and is currently pursuing his doctorate in international relations at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. Shimer has reported for the New York Times from five countries, and his foreign policy analysis has appeared in the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and the New Yorker. With so much at stake ahead of November, Rigged strikes me as an essential and timely book, so I thought I would pick Shimer’s brain about Rigged and the threat of Russian meddling in the 2020 election.  (The link to purchase is here.) – Grace Bennett

What precipitated the writing of Rigged?

The idea for Rigged first emerged in my mind in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was reporting for the New York Times from Berlin, and Russia had just interfered in America’s presidential election. While in Germany, I spent several hours interviewing a former Stasi officer named Horst Kopp. He told me about a covert operation he helped execute in 1972, to interfere in a vote of no confidence in West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Because of the Stasi’s intervention, the vote failed, and Brandt remained in power. This story fascinated me: A foreign intelligence service had changed the outcome of a democratic vote of succession. I spent the next year researching the Stasi’s operation under the supervision of Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale.

I then went to Oxford to pursue my doctorate, by which point I was set on studying the evolution of foreign operations to interfere in electoral processes. My research took on a life of its own. I became obsessed with this topic, because I was and remain convinced that studying the past is essential to understanding Russia’s attack in 2016 and to defending our elections moving forward. I ended up traveling across six countries examining KGB, CIA, and Stasi archives and interviewing more than 130 people, including eight former CIA directors and a former KGB general. The result is Rigged, which restores history to the subject of covert electoral interference, examines Barack Obama’s struggle to defend against Russian interference and Donald Trump’s refusal to recognize this threat, and explains what our country should be doing to secure its elections today.

If you could choose three takeaway messages you’d like readers to remember from your book, what would they be?

The first is that Russia’s 2016 operation marked the evolution rather than the creation of a practice. For about a century, with brief interruptions, Moscow has been targeting elections all over the world, including in the United States. The KGB sought to interfere in America’s 1960, 1968, 1976, and 1984 elections, as I detail in my book, with tactics eerily reminiscent of Putin’s. Across these operations are patterns that can and should instruct our response to the Russia threat. The most basic one is that covert electoral interference always involves efforts to manipulate voters or to alter actual ballots. To defend an election is to defend against both forms of attack.

Second, the United States was more exposed in 2016 than is publicly understood. I interviewed 26 former advisors to Barack Obama, including John Brennan, Susan Rice, Jim Clapper, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus. From those conversations I learned that in the summer and fall of 2016, the Obama administration’s foremost concern was that Russian hackers would alter the voter data and even the vote tallies of American citizens. On Election Day itself, a secret crisis team in the White House was bracing for Russian intelligence to manipulate our voting systems. All the while, Russian actors were manipulating American voters across social media and with hacked emails, and Putin suffered no consequences for doing so until after the election.

And finally, it is essential for readers to recognize the purpose behind Russia’s electoral operations: to undermine our democracy and the democracies of the world. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union interfered in elections in order to advance communism, an ideology. Putin has adopted a subtler strategy. He is interfering in elections here and abroad in order to promote divisive and authoritarian-minded candidates, sow chaos, and delegitimize the democratic process of succession. Putin likes candidates like Trump because they degrade their democracies from within.

Can you tell us about the special relevance of your book to the upcoming election?

Reports have already emerged that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election. The sovereignty of our democracy is on the line. What I do in my book is provide a basis to understand operations like Russia’s, to reanalyze 2016 with an eye toward the future, and to elucidate how Americans can help to safeguard their democracy this November and beyond.

What can Russia do to interfere in the 2020 election?

The first question on my mind is how Russia will seek to manipulate public opinion between now and November. In 2016, to sow division and advantage Trump, Russian actors stole and released Democratic Party emails and spread propaganda across social media. Something history reveals is that these types of tactics, to influence voters, are constantly evolving. It remains to be seen what’s next.

The second question is whether Russia will escalate from influencing voters to altering actual votes. In 2016, Russian hackers penetrated election systems across the United States. The day of the election, Obama’s security chiefs believed that Russia could manipulate the ballot box in Trump’s favor. There is no guarantee that Putin will refrain from authorizing such an attack this time around. In fact, he may feel emboldened to act more aggressively, because Barack Obama, who at least tried to defend our elections, is no longer president. In his place is a president who has openly invited Russia and China to take steps that would help him electorally. Some of the Trump administration officials I interviewed acknowledged that Putin must realize that Trump will not punish him for manipulating the 2020 election, so long as he benefits. Putin is the type of leader who pushes as far as he can without provoking much pushback. And with Trump, there is never any pushback when it comes to Russia.

What can we do to protect our elections?

Joseph Stalin and his successors spent decades trying to spread communism, so we contained communism. Today, Putin is working to tear apart democracies from within, so we need to renew our democracy and help our allies do the same. This process starts at home. The United States should be fortifying its electoral infrastructure, to ensure that Russia cannot alter the votes of American citizens, while also reducing the effectiveness of operations to manipulate voters. And abroad, the next president should lead a coalition of democracies against the threat of covert electoral interference. I explain how to achieve both of these aims in Rigged, which I hope my fellow community members will read!

 

Filed Under: Stay Connected Tagged With: author, David Shimer, Democracy, Electoral interference, Rigged

Dave Barry Returns Home to Speak at North Castle Public Library

March 11, 2017 by Inside Press

“At Easter, each person was issued a potted hyacinth, and we’d sing a song that had a lot of “alleluias” in it, and every time we’d get to one, we’d all hoist our pots over our heads. This is the truth. Remember it next time somebody tells you Episcopalians never really get loose.” ”—Dave Barry

Dave Barry. Photo by Ezra Goh.

Armonk, NY—Best-selling humorist and author Dave Barry returns to Westchester County this spring where he will speak before a live audience in his hometown of Armonk. “Dave Barry: A Homecoming” will occur Thursday, April 6, 2017 at 7:30 p.m., at the North Castle Public Library’s Whippoorwill Hall in Armonk, NY. General Admission is $50 per person. An exclusive reception with the author begins at 6 p.m. Reserved tickets can be purchased at EventBrite.   

Barry is a columnist with the Miami Herald. He joined the Herald in 1983. Barry attended elementary and middle school in Armonk, and was voted “Class Clown” when he graduated in 1965 from Pleasantville High School. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper columns in 1988, and has since written more than 30 books, including the Peter and the Star Catcher series. This past September, he published his latest called Best. State. Ever. A Florida Man Defends His Homeland.

Barry has been called the “Mark Twain of the Baby Boomer Generation.” Often, he writes about childhood and parenting, including his days in Armonk, where he and his family attended St. Stephen’s Church, located in the historic Bedford Road District on Route 22 near Interstate 684. The church is currently celebrating its 175th anniversary.

Proceeds raised by the Barry appearance will fund capital improvements St. Stephen’s. The church’s parish hall serves as a meeting and service facility for a number of Westchester County non profits, including the North Castle Boy Scouts. The Treasures Consignment store is also based at the hall. Treasures is a significant contributor to the Mt. Kisco Food Pantry.

Copies of Barry’s newest book called Best. State. Ever. will be available for purchase on site. The author will sign books following his appearance.  

Filed Under: Happenings Tagged With: author, Best.State.Ever, Dave Barry, Humorist, North Castle Public Library

Sujean Rim: Author, Illustrator (and Charlie’s Mom) Calls Chappaqua Home

September 1, 2015 by The Inside Press

Sujean6

Although she flies somewhat under the radar locally, Sujean Rim has quite a loyal fan base of moms and young kids for her books like Birdie’s Big Hair and the just-released Birdie’s First Day of School. She holds readings regularly at the Chappaqua library that always draw a crowd.

Her next Birdie book is due out for Halloween 2016. This will be followed by a loosely autobiographical tale personified by bears plus two other non-Birdie books in the pipeline with Scholastic. In addition to her children’s books, she creates very well-regarded illustrations for clients like Bloomingdales, Barnes & Noble, Uniqlo, Jockey and UNAids.

Sujean and her husband Bob (also an artist) are proud parents to Charlie who will start first grade at Coman Hills this fall. She notes, “My husband and I have always loved children’s literature and have been reading to Charlie since he was still in my belly! We still read about two to five books together every night. Our art studio is in our home so he enjoys drawing with us when we work and considers himself a ‘serious artist’ too.”

She adds “CCBF is my favorite event! It has really been a fun way to connect with so many readers, fellow authors/ illustrators and of course, my neighbors. I can’t wait to participate again this year!”

Sujean will read and talk about Birdie’s First Day of School at the Chappaqua Library on Thursday, September 3rd at 4:30.

–Dawn Greenberg

Filed Under: Cover Stories Tagged With: author, Chappaqua, Inside Press, literature, Sujean Rim, theinsidepress.com

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