Amy Winehouse en NY. Diva del Rock & Blues.

Music Review | Amy Winehouse Ver Artículo Original

Disillusioned Diva With Glimmers of Soul By JON PARELES Published: May 10, 2007

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Amy Winehouse, the English retro-soul chanteuse, appeared at the Highline Ballroom Tuesday.

Amy Winehouse is a tease. The songs on her second album, "Back to Black" (Universal Republic), revive the sound of 1960s and 1970s soul with tales of plunging into temptation and toughing out the consequences. She drinks, she cheats, she falls for the wrong guys, she cries; she refuses rehab with a magnificently simple refrain, "I said no, no, no." But the way she delivers those songs is far less forthright. At the Highline Ballroom on Tuesday night, she treated them with a shifting blend of casualness and concentration, arbitrary improvisation and precise inflections. She connected with the songs only intermittently, though when she did, she made a listener want more. Ms. Winehouse is English, and British soul singing has always been at least once removed from its African-American sources. It doesn't have the foundation that American singers often get by singing in church, since British singers are more likely to learn soul style from their record collections. Ms. Winehouse, 23, is also separated from the music she draws on by a generation or two. Soul is a vintage style for her, a retro choice. Her backup band, the Dap-Kings, included two male singers in dark suits doing synchronized dance moves. They made a sartorial contrast to Ms. Winehouse in her halter top, tattoos and low-cut jeans, occasionally pointing a finger or pouting to hint at an old soul pose. Ms. Winehouse has grown up on hip-hop's version of R&B, which chops the old dramatic arcs of soul and gospel into sound-bite hooks and showy, almost randomly applied slides and turns. Her voice glints with possibility: tart, smoky, ready to flirt or sob, and capable of the jazzy timing of a Dinah Washington or the declamation of soul singers like Martha Reeves and Carla Thomas. What she doesn't have, and may not want, is the kind of focus the older singers brought to their songs. Onstage Ms. Winehouse added a British layer of detachment with a performance that switched between confession and indifference. She made songs like "Just Friends" — about trying to pull away from an illicit affair, because "the guilt will kill you if she don't first" — into games of tone and phrasing: withholding a line and then breezing through it, stretching out a note over the band's steady beat (and its not-so-straightforward riffs; the horns quoted Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"). But as the set continued, she started to dig into the songs. The moaning, gliding notes took on an ache or a flamboyance, and the pauses became sly and coquettish or pained. Her spontaneity grew both defiant and playful. It didn't always work. In "Rehab" her elongated phrases may have intended to suggest she was dragging her feet, but instead she robbed the song of its punch lines. Yet every so often she would simply nail a line, a verse, a whole song: inserting a suspenseful silence before the profanity that leaps out of "Me and Mr. Jones," or sounding both mournful and perversely self-satisfied in "You Know I'm No Good," or capturing the self-deluding hope and repeated disappointment of "Back to Black." If Ms. Winehouse were a purely old-fashioned soul singer, she'd just be a nostalgia act, though one with some telling songs. Her self-consciousness, and the bluntness she has learned from hip-hop, could help lead soul into 21st-century territory. But on Tuesday her performance only partly lived up to what her voice and her songs might hold. And a set that lasted less than an hour made her even more of a tease.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

The Wall Street Journal. Satisfacción Cero

Comprar artículo en Wall Street Journal Américas. May 9, 2007 4:05 a.m. The Wall Street Journal Satisfacción cero. Por Jonathan Clements Por qué lo que tenemos nunca es suficiente. Puede ser que en Estados Unidos tengamos una mejor calidad vida y más libertad que en muchos otros países, pero en la búsqueda de la felicidad no nos va tan bien. Estados Unidos es hoy más rico que nunca. Pero las encuestas muestran que sus habitantes no son más felices que hace 30 años. El problema: no somos buenos en descubrir qué es lo que nos hará felices. Constantemente estamos deseando autos más lujosos y salarios más altos y, al principio, esas cosas elevan la felicidad. Pero el brillo de la satisfacción se opaca tan pronto empezamos a querer otra cosa. Del mismo modo, les decimos a nuestros amigos que nuestros hijos son nuestra gran felicidad. Sin embargo, las investigaciones demuestran que la llegada de los niños reduce la felicidad de los padres cuando tienen que enfrentar las dificultades y el estrés que implican. Esto genera una pregunta obvia: ¿Por qué deseamos siempre más? Los expertos dan dos explicaciones. No estamos hechos para ser felices. Fuimos creados para sobrevivir y reproducirnos. No estaríamos aquí si nuestros ancestros no hubiesen luchado para proteger y alimentar a sus familias. La promesa de la felicidad, entre tanto, es sólo un truco para alegrarnos el camino. ¿No le gusta la idea de que estamos engañados por un sistema de instintos antiguos? La culpa es entonces de las creencias de la sociedad. Trabajar duro y criar hijos puede que no nos haga más felices, pero estas creencias permiten que la sociedad siga funcionando. Y los que aceptan esas creencias prosperan y transmiten esos valores a sus hijos. Somos malos para hacer pronósticos. Considere el estudio de los académicos Daniel Kahneman y David Schkade, quienes les preguntaron a estudiantes universitarios del centro de Estados Unidos y del sur de California dónde pensaban que la gente como ellos sería más feliz. Ambos grupos escogieron a California, en gran parte por el clima cálido. Y cuando se les preguntó qué tan satisfechos estaban con sus propias vidas, ambos grupos dijeron que eran felices por igual. Cuando predecimos lo que nos hace felices, estamos influidos por cómo nos sentimos hoy. Si hacemos las compras de la semana justo después de almorzar, compraremos de forma más selectiva. El inconveniente: unos días después miraremos insatisfechos un refrigerador vacío. Y quizás aún más importante es que fallamos al anticipar qué tan rápido nos adaptaremos a las mejoras en nuestra vida. Pensamos que todo va a ser maravilloso cuando nos mudemos a una casa más grande. No nos damos cuenta que, después de unos meses, nos será indiferente el espacio adicional. La experiencia debería ayudarnos a evitar esos errores repetitivos. Pero no lo hace, en parte, porque no nos acordamos bien cómo nos sentimos realmente, dice el profesor de psicología de la Universidad de Harvard Daniel Gilbert, autor de Tropezar con al felicidad. Un ejemplo: trabajamos duro para lograr el próximo ascenso porque estamos seguros que eso nos hará felices. Nos olvidamos que la última vez que obtuvimos un ascenso, fue un poco frustrante. No está de más confrontar la realidad, dice Gilbert. Suponga que será más feliz si se muda a un pequeño pueblo rural, adopta un hijo o deja el trabajo y se convierte en profesor de matemáticas en una escuela secundaria. No se fíe de las opiniones de quienes viven en pueblos pequeños, han adoptado niños o se convirtieron en maestros. En cambio, dedique algún tiempo a observar a estas personas y vea si son felices. Privacy Policy Subscriber Agreement & Terms of Use Mobile Devices RSS Feeds Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Puentes colgantes de los Incas.

SCIENCE

How the Inca Leapt Canyons By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Published: May 8, 2007 CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

E. George Squier (Harper and Brothers) Engraving, from "Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas" An Inca suspension bridge in 1877

— Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.

Angel Franco/The New York Times The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson. An Inca suspension bridge in 1877

Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots. So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man's torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century. One of the last of these, over the Apurimac River, inspired Thornton Wilder's novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey."

Related Web Link Watch John Ochsendorf's 2005 Talk to the Library of Congress on Engineering in the Andes Mountains

Although scholars have studied the Inca road system's importance in forging and controlling the pre-Columbian empire, John A.Ochsendorf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here said, "Historians and archaeologists have neglected the role of bridges." Dr. Ochsendorf's research on Inca suspension bridges, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, illustrates an engineering university's approach to archaeology, combining materials science and experimentation with the traditional fieldwork of observing and dating artifacts. Other universities conduct research in archaeological materials, but it has long been a specialty at M.I.T. Students here are introduced to the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient technologies as applied in transforming resources into cultural hallmarks from household pottery to grand pyramids. In a course called "materials in human experience," students are making a 60-foot-long fiber bridge in the Peruvian style. On Saturday, they plan to stretch the bridge across a dry basin between two campus buildings. In recent years, M.I.T. archaeologists and scientists have joined forces in studies of early Peruvian ceramics, balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; and also the casting of bronze bells in Mexico. They discovered that Ecuadoreans, traveling by sea, introduced metallurgy to western Mexico. They even found how Mexicans added bits of morning-glory plants, which contain sulfur, in processing natural rubber into bouncing balls. Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building. The Peruvians, knowing nothing of the arch or iron metallurgy, instead relied on what they knew best, fibers from cotton, grasses and saplings, and llama and alpaca wool. The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons. The Peruvians apparently invented their fiber bridges independently of outside influences, Dr. Ochsendorf said, but these bridges were neither the first of their kind in the world nor the inspiration for the modern suspension bridge like the George Washington and Verrazano-Narrows Bridges in New York and the Golden Gate in San Francisco. In a recent research paper, Dr. Ochsendorf wrote: "The Inca were the only ancient American civilization to develop suspension bridges. Similar bridges existed in other mountainous regions of the world, most notably in the Himalayas and in ancient China, where iron chain suspension bridges existed in the third century B.C." The first of the modern versions was erected in Britain in the late 18th century, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The longest one today connects two islands in Japan, with a span of more than 6,000 feet from tower to supporting tower. These bridges are really "hanging roadways," Dr. Ochsendorf said, to provide a fairly level surface for wheeled traffic. In his authoritative 1984 book, "The Inka Road System," John Hyslop, who was an official of the Institute of Andean Research and associated with the American Museum of Natural History, compiled descriptions of the Inca bridges recorded by early travelers. Garcilasco de la Vega, in 1604, reported on the cable-making techniques. The fibers, he wrote, were braided into ropes of the length necessary for the bridge. Three of these ropes were woven together to make a larger rope, and three of them were again braided to make a still larger rope, and so on. The thick cables were pulled across the river with small ropes and attached to stone abutments on each side. Three of the big cables served as the floor of the bridge, which often was at least four to five feet wide, and two others served as handrails. Pieces of wood were tied to the cable floor. Finally, the floor was strewn with branches to give firm footing for beasts of burden. More branches and pieces of wood were strung to make walls along the entire length of the bridge. The side covering, one chronicler said, was such that "if a horse fell on all fours, it could not fall off the bridge." Still, it took a while for the Spanish to adjust to the bridges and to coax their horses to cross them. The bridges trembled underfoot and swayed dangerously in stiff winds.

Robert Spencer for The New York Times M.I.T. students, above, weaving cable for their own bridge.

"Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear," said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. "The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico." Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist of ancient technology who helped develop the M.I.T. program, said that in learning "how objects were made, what they were made of and how they were used, we see people making decisions at various stages, and the choices involve engineering as well as culture." From this perspective, she said, the choices are not always based only on what works well, but also are guided by ideological and aesthetic criteria. In the casting of early Mexican bells, attention was given to their ringing tone and their color; an unusually large amount of arsenic was added to copper to make the bronze shine like silver. "If people use materials in different ways in different societies, that tells you something about those people," Professor Lechtman said. In the case of the Peruvian bridges, the builders relied on a technology well suited to the problem and their resources. The Spanish themselves demonstrated how appropriate the Peruvian technique was. Ephraim G. Squier, a visitor to Peru from the United States in the 1870s, said of the Apurimac River bridge: "It is usual for the traveler to time his day's journey so as to reach the bridge in the morning, before the strong wind sets in; for, during the greater part of the day, it sweeps up the Canyon of the Apurimac with great force, and then the bridge sways like a gigantic hammock, and crossing is next to impossible." Other travelers noted that in many cases, two suspension bridges stood side by side. Some said that one was for the lords and gentry, the other for commoners; or one for men, the other for women.

Carl T. Gossett Jr./ Adriana von Hagen, / Robert Spencer for The New York Times The first steel section, top, being installed on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1963. The last remaining Inca bridge in Peru, center, was the model for the M.I.T. bridge project. John A. Ochsendorf of M.I.T., bottom, showing cable made in Peru.

Recent scholars have suggested that it was more likely that one bridge served as a backup for the other, considering the need for frequent repairs of frayed and worn ropes. The last existing Inca suspension bridge, at Huinchiri, near Cuzco, is virtually rebuilt each year. People from the villages on either side hold a three-day festival and gather stiff grasses for producing more than 50,000 feet of cord. Finally, the cord is braided into 150-foot replacement cables. In the M.I.T. class project, 14 students met two evenings a week and occasional afternoons to braid the ropes for a Peruvian bridge replica 60 feet long and 2 feet wide. They were allowed one important shortcut: some 50 miles of twine already prepared from sisal, a stronger fiber than the materials used by the Inca. Some of the time thus gained was invested in steps the Inca had never thought of. The twine and the completed ropes were submitted to stress tests, load-bearing measurements and X-rays. "We have proof-tested the stuff at every step as we go along," said Linn W. Hobbs, a materials science professor and one of the principal teachers of the course. The students incorporated 12 strands of twine for each primary rope. Then three of these 12-ply ropes were braided into the major cables, each 120 feet long — 60 feet for the span and 30 feet at each end for tying the bridge to concrete anchors. One afternoon last week, several of the students stretched ropes down a long corridor, braiding one of the main cables. While one student knelt to make the braid and three students down the line did some nimble footwork to keep the separate ropes from entangling, Zack Jackowski, a sophomore, put a foot firmly down on the just-completed braid. "It's important to get the braids as tight as possible," Mr. Jackowski said. "A little twist, pull it back hard, hold the twist you just put in." No doubt the students will escape the fate of Brother Juniper, the Franciscan missionary in Wilder's novel who investigated the five people who perished in the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey. Brother Juniper hoped to discern scientific evidence of divine intervention in human affairs, examples of "the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven." Alas, he could not; there is some of both good and evil in people. So his written account was judged heretical. He and his manuscript were burned at the stake. If the students' bridge holds, they will have learned one lesson: engineering, in antiquity as now, is the process of finding a way through and over the challenges of environment and culture.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007