Noah Garabidian, contrabass | Don Pendleton, percussion
Photos: Time Warner

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On Friday, April 25 at 7 p.m. the South Pasadena Public Library Community Room will showcase illustrious California State Poet Laureate Al Young and the Suezenne Fordham Chamber Jazz ensemble for a return engagement. A year ago he read (and even sang) to an appreciative, enthusiastic audience who filled the venue on the date proclaimed as “California State Poet Laureate Day” by the South Pasadena City Council.

Al Young’s wondrous poems and warm, vibrant recitations (and singing) were artfully accompanied by the Suezenne Fordham’s group. Young later declared the show one of the highlights of his lengthwise tour of the Golden State which concluded the next day at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. Suezenne Fordham added that she considers their extemporaneous pairing in South Pasadena last year as one of the highly accomplished group’s high water marks. She promises an even larger combo this time around.

California was the first state to honor a Poet Laureate, conferring the honor upon Ina Donna Coolbrith in 1915. The poetry circle she founded still exists today. For the rest of the past century California honored various Poets Laureate with lifetime appointments. It wasn’t until 2001 that Sacramento enacted legislation that revamped the Poet Laureate program and gave it more sharply defined public responsibilities, a 2-year term, and an appointing system. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger named Al Young as the successor to Quincy Troupe in 2005.

To put it mildly, Al Young, has been an extremely popular choice. Outgoing and blessed with magnetic communication skills, he possesses the ability to inspire audience members of a broad spectrum of backgrounds and sensibilities. Young has written over 20 books during his illustrious career, including his most recent, Something About the Blues. His many honors include two American Book Awards, roughly equivalent to one individual winning two Super Bowl MVP trophies. As a screenwriter he’s worked with Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Pryor.

– Steve Fjeldsted
City of South Pasadena Librarian

The free Author Night program is presented by the South Pasadena Public Library, the Friends of the South Pasadena Public Library, the Arroyo Vista Inn, and the South Pasadena Chamber of Commerce. The Library Community Room is located at 1115 El Centro Street. No tickets or reservations are necessary. Doors open at 6:30 and refreshments will be provided by the Friends.

Photo: Maurice Grants

Showcasing the dynamic musical stylings of Suezenne Fordham’s Chamber Jazz ensemble.

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Go to the New York Times original

In the late 1950′s, University of Michigan students Joe Dassin (son of Jules Dassin), Bernie Krause, Bill McAdoo and Al Young, working as The Songsmiths, performed vocal and instrumental folk music in and around Ann Arbor.

Jules Dassin
Photo: Courtesy BBC

April 1, 2008

By RICHARD SEVERO
New York Times

Correction Appended

Jules Dassin, an American director, screenwriter and actor who found success making movies in Europe after he was blacklisted in the United States because of his earlier ties to the Communist Party, died Monday in Athens, where he had lived since the 1970s. He was 96.

A spokeswoman for Hygeia Hospital confirmed his death but did not give a cause, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Dassin is most widely remembered for films he made after he fled Hollywood in the 1950s, including “Never on Sunday” (1960), with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he later married; “Topkapi” (1964), with Ms. Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell; and the 1954 French thriller “Rififi.”

But before his blacklisting he had also carved out a successful Hollywood career making noir movies like “Brute Force” (1947), a prison drama starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn; “The Naked City” (1948), an influential New York City police yarn that won Academy Awards for cinematography and editing; and “Thieves’ Highway” (1949), about criminals who try to coerce truckers in California.

Mr. Dassin’s last major effort before his exile was “Night and the City” (1950), a film shot in London starring Richard Widmark (who died last Monday) as a shady but naïve wrestling promoter and Francis L. Sullivan as a predatory nightclub owner. Some critics called it Mr. Dassin’s masterpiece.

“Dassin turned Londontown into a city of busted dreams and nightmare alleys,” Michael Sragow wrote on salon.com in 2000. “He mixed the fantastic and the real with masterly ease.”

The producer Darryl F. Zanuck had assigned the film to Mr. Dassin just as Mr. Dassin was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never did testify, but testimony by the directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle, who recalled Mr. Dassin’s Communist Party membership in the 1930s, was damning enough to sink his career.

Mr. Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 because, he said, he was “unemployable” in Hollywood. In Paris, unable to speak much more than restaurant French when he arrived, he encountered hard times and remained largely unemployed for five years. In need of money, he agreed to direct “Rififi,” a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. A memorable sequence is of the robbery itself, lasting about a half-hour and filmed without music or dialogue.

Mr. Dassin also acted in the movie, under the name Perlo Vita, playing an Italian safe expert. He won a best-director award for the film at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. By the time he wrote and directed “Never on Sunday,” a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute (Ms. Mercouri), the anti-Communist witch hunt in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.

Mr. Dassin also had a role in the movie, as a bookish American from — like Mr. Dassin himself — Middletown, Conn., who tries to reform the prostitute. His directing and screenwriting were nominated for Academy Awards.

The movie was a moneymaker and its title song was a hit, though some critics found the script predictable. Ms. Mercouri became Mr. Dassin’s second wife in 1966, two years after he directed her in “Topkapi,” another film about jewel thieves, the prize in this case being gems from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

Jules Dassin was born in Middletown on Dec. 18, 1911, one of eight children of Samuel Dassin, an immigrant barber from Russia, and the former Berthe Vogel. Shortly after Jules was born, his father moved the family to Harlem. Jules attended Morris High School in the Bronx.

He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, a decision he recalled in 2002 in an interview with The Guardian in London. “You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

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Go to the original at Sacramento News & Review

By Kel Munger

Want to create real economic stimulus? Stop taxing artists. That’s the most intriguing suggestion put forward by California’s poet laureate, Al Young, in his keynote address to the gathered poets laureate of California’s cities and counties.

Titled “Line Breaks and Tax Breaks: Poetry and Democracy,” Young’s address covered a lot of ground, but easily the most welcome idea—at least, to the gathered poets—was his suggestion that we consider following the lead of the Republic of Ireland and exempt the creators of art from taxes on money earned from their work.

“At first, there were concerns about the loss of revenue, but the people involved pointed out, ‘What revenue?’” Young said, to laughter. What happened instead was both that Irish artists began to stay in Ireland, while artists from other places began to gather there. “And we all know,” Young pointed out, “how their economy benefited.” He drew a comparison to the way that neighborhoods with a concentration of artists (such as Sacramento’s Midtown) will soon attract other businesses and residents.

“The vitality of the arts attracts businesses,” he said.

The first-ever gathering of poets laureate throughout the state, sponsored by the California Arts Council, the Sacramento Poetry Center, the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Council, the California State Library and California Poets in the Schools, includes many poets whose appointments are unfunded. Even those who receive a stipend usually spend all of it on their projects—poetry is not, and never has been, a money-making proposition.

But the arts once brought glory to their patrons, as Young pointed out. “The arts are food,” he said. “They are what nurtures and nourishes us.” He exhorted the gathered poets laureate, who included Sacramento’s Julia Connor, to bring poetry into the public sphere as much as possible. And Young stressed the economic advantages to local governments when they put the arts first.

“We have to mine our cultural treasures,” he said. “The arts are something that people will come from afar to take part in, if they know about it.” The task of the poets laureate is to get the word out.

Of course, art—especially poetry—has a lot to contribute to democracy. Young noted the way that W.H. Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939,” made its way around the Internet in the days after 9/11. “In times of darkness, times of impending crisis, poetry always comes back,” he said.

But poetry’s power is dangerous, at least in some places. “In other parts of the world,” Young said, “poetry can get your head chopped off. Here, we let people say anything they want and ignore them equally.”

Um, maybe not if they actually make money. In America, money talks.

Go to the San Francisco Chronicle original

By Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, April 11, 2008

California poet laureate Al Young will receive the Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement when the 27th annual Northern California Book Awards are given out at a gala celebration at the San Francisco Public Library on Sunday afternoon.

Young’s most recent books are “Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006″ and “Something About the Blues.”

The Fred Cody Award is named for the beloved bookseller who founded Cody’s Books with his wife, Pat, in Berkeley in 1956.

At the ceremony, all the award winners, in six categories, will be announced.

Since 1981, the Northern California Book awards have been bestowed by the Northern California Book Reviewers, a volunteer group of book reviewers and book review editors (formerly known as BABRA), who each year choose the best published books written by Northern California authors.

The 2008 nominees are:

Fiction: “Sacred Games” by Vikram Chandra, “The Great Far Away” by Joan Frank, “A Handbook to Luck” by Cristina García, “A Far Country” by Daniel Mason and “Locke 1928″ by Shawna Yang Ryan.

General nonfiction: “The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance” by Fritjof Capra, “Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline” by Lisa Margonelli, “Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution” by Thomas McNamee, “Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life” by Robert B. Reich and “Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race” by Richard Rhodes.

Creative nonfiction: “Ticket to Exile: A Memoir” by Adam David Miller, “Back on the Fire: Essays” by Gary Snyder, “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics” by Rebecca Solnit, “Poor People” by William T. Vollmann and “The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific” by Julia Whitty.

Poetry: “Frail-Craft” by Jessica Fisher, “Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005″ by Robert Hass, “Expectation Days” by Sandra McPherson, “The Second Person” by C. Dale Young and “Embryoyo” by Dean Young.

Translation: “The Book of Psalms: A Translation With Commentary,” translated from Hebrew by Robert Alter; “The Palestinian Lover” by Sélim Nassib, translated from French by Alison Anderson; “Driftwood” by Lo Fu, translated from Chinese by John Balcom; “Exile and the Kingdom” by Albert Camus, translated from French by Carol Cosman; and “Closed for Repairs” by Nancy Alonso, translated from Spanish by Anne Fountain.

Children’s literature: “Penguins, Penguins Everywhere!” by Bob Barner, “The Apple Doll” by Elisa Kleven, “Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra” by Wendy Lichtman, “The Hound of Rowan: Book One of The Tapestry” by Henry H. Neff and “Why War Is Never a Good Idea” by Alice Walker, illustrated by Stefano Vitale.

Special Recognition Award: River of Words, the annual environmental poetry and art contest, which is conducted in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book.

The awards are sponsored by Northern California Book Reviewers, Poetry Flash magazine, the Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco Public Library & Friends of San Francisco Public Library, Mechanics’ Institute and PEN West.

Northern California Book Awards Ceremony is 1 p.m. Sunday at Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco. After the ceremony, a book signing and reception with the authors will be held in the library’s Latino/Hispanic Room.

For information about the free event, call (510) 525-5476 or go to www.poetryflash.org.

E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/11/DDPV101GSL.DTL

This article appeared on page E – 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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