What 'Jinx' and 'Serial' mean for journalism, the way you praise your child can make them a narcissist, The Sonics and more on this week's Tuesday Reviewsday.
How and when should sex ed be taught in school?
Police in Los Angeles have arrested an 11th student from Venice High School in connection with the alleged sex crimes that came to light last week. While details are still emerging in this specific case, it raises questions about how sex ed is taught in schools: what's required, what's considered appropriate and what's effective.
We're joined by Dr. Norman Constantine, director of the Center for Research on Adolescent Health and Development at the Public Health Institute and professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
'The Jinx,' 'Serial' usher in a new era of true crime storytelling
The HBO documentary series "The Jinx" is an exploration of the life and suspected crimes of real estate millionaire Robert Durst. Durst's wife disappeared in 1982, his best friend was shot to death in 2000, and in 2003, Durst was acquitted for the murder of his neighbor. At the outset of the series, Durst's guilt or innocence was still an open question, but in the final moments of the series finale, audio was revealed of Durst in the bathroom whispering to himself, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."
"The Jinx" and WBEZ's podcast "Serial" are heralded as ushering in a new form of real time, impactful journalism. On the day before the final episode of "The Jinx" aired, Durst was arrested and charged with the murder of his friend, Susan Berman. In a press conference Tuesday morning, Durst's attorney stated that the warrant for his arrest in Los Angeles was issued based on a TV series, not the facts.
Host Alex Cohen spoke with Eric Deggans, NPR's TV critic, who wrote an article about the success of the shows and what this means for the future of true crime storytelling.
True crime docudrama is not a new genre, but Deggans says that "The Jinx" and "Serial" stand apart from their predecessors in that there's a sense that the audience is uncovering the story right along with the people who are reporting the story. Audiences are drawn by the open possibility of more to come.
"They're working on a case that's still in play...There was a sense that something could still happen."
Social media, Deggans says, is also fueling the sense of engagement that people feel with these stories.
"You have a whole other conversation happening on social media that we did not have when other classics of the true crimes genre were published like 'In Cold Blood' or 'Thin Blue Line'...What we saw with 'Serial' was that people were trying to do their own detective work...I imagine that we may see that with 'The Jinx' as well."
When asked what the popularity of these shows means for the future of true crime docudramas, Deggans said that the variety and depth of characters in these two projects will be hard to replicate.
"These kind of crimes don't grow on trees and that's the reason why these programs are so impactful...There will be a lot of people trying to mimic this show's success, but this feels like lighting in a bottle."
The Brood: How to praise kids without turning them into narcissists
Praising a child for doing something great seems pretty uncontroversial. A little self-esteem boost never hurt anyone, right? But what if how you phrase that praise could increase a child's chances of becoming a narcissist?
According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, parents who overvalue their kids could be raising their children's levels of narcissism. And there's reason to believe that's a bad thing for society.
Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University, explains, "We know that narcissism is related to aggressive and violent behavior. And there's some troubling trends. Over the past several decades, narcissism levels have been going up and empathy levels have been going down."
So how to respond when your three-year-old draws a really great fire truck (like the example above)?
Bushman says, "It's better to say something like 'You must have tried really hard' than to say 'You must be really smart.' Because if you say 'You must be really smart,' and they try another task and fail on it, then they may assume 'Well maybe I'm not so smart after all.'"
Psychologist Enrico Gnaulati agrees that it's better to praise the behavior than it is to praise the child.
"You really want to praise effort as much as possible," Gnaulati says, "because that's something within a child's control."
Where you can run into problems, Gnaulati says, is with praise like, "You're great!" Or with complimenting a child on "something as ineffable as intelligence or attractiveness... that somehow is this permanent part of a child that is there regardless of how they prove themselves."
It's an idea that writer Livia Gershon touched on in a recent essay for Pacific Standard called "Don't Give My Kid an Award in School."
When Gershon's second-grader was recently awarded a "Leader of the Month" award at school, he thought it was "stupid." And she kind of agreed.
"What bothered me is that my son gets a lot of praise at school for being a good student, for being smart," Gershon says.
"He's a kid who's middle class, his parents are middle income, pretty highly educated people and he's in a school where a lot of kids aren't," Gershon says. "And I think that setting him up as 'You're doing particularly well,' a lot of that comes from things that he has absolutely no control over."
It's not that her son isn't a great, hard-working kid, Gershon says. It's that other kids in his class, like "Sonia," who has different skills (like knowing how to navigate the neighborhood and being quick to help out with chores), don't get the same kind of recognition.
"The fact that my son gets a lot of praise for the things that he is good at in class, and she doesn't get so much praise for the things that she's good at," Gershon says, "That seems to me unfair and kind of setting them up for having really different experiences of school."
California bar seeks to add pro bono requirements for new lawyers
The state bar is looking to require new lawyers to complete 50 hours of legal work for free or reduced rates to help the more than 1 million Californians who can't afford it.
Long Beach museum explores Mexican identity through 20th century
The new show at the Museum of Latin American Art features rare cubist paintings by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo's 1933 work, My Dress Hangs There, and singular photos of Mexican artists side by side with their surrealistic artwork.
What: Mexico: Fantastic Identity 20th Century Masterpieces from the FEMSA Collection
Where: Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90802
Phone 562.437.1689
When: Saturday, March 14 – Sunday, July 5, 2015
More info here.
Listen to new music from Feufollet, Niyaz and The Sonics
It's time for Tuesday Reviewsday, our weekly new music segment. This week music journalist Steve Hochman joins Alex Cohen with a list of new songs from some artists who've been around for a while.
Steve Hochaman
Artist: Feufollet
Album: Two Universes
Songs: "Tired of Your Tears," "Questions sans résponses"
Notes: A centerpiece of young Louisiana band Feufollet's live sets in recent years has been turning Eno's '70s art-rock chestnut "Baby's On Fire" into a Cajun two-step. The funny thing is they do it without really changing the song much — other than singing in French and adding accordion and fiddle. It's something of an in-joke that only a small handful of fans get, but it shows both musical wit and ambitious vision. There's nothing quite as startlingly radical on the group's new album, the followup to 2010's "En Couleurs," which earned a Grammy nomination for best zydeco or cajun album. But the imaginative spirit and daring is evident throughout, even if in more subtle ways.
Much of this comes from accordion and guitar player Chris Stafford, who co-founded the band with fellow Lafayette Cajun music prodigies more than 15 years ago, before he'd even turned 10 (the band’s name means "wisp" or "little flame"). Watching the band evolve, both in music and lineup, through and beyond the members' teen years in appearances at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has been thrilling. While Cajun music has been the core, all along there's been a spirit of invention and originality with a wide range of tastes and influences brought in, with Stafford as the musically voracious catalyst.
Here, though, he hands most of the songwriting and singing role to newer member Kelli Jones-Savoy, a Cajun by marriage but coming from more of an Appalachian folk background. Singing largely in English, Jones-Savoy brings a touch of twang to the band, heard alluringly on the opening "Tired of Your Tears." It's not Taylor Swift, let alone Tammy Wynette. But it might well appeal to fans of either.
It’s also not Cajun legends the Balfa Brothers or BeauSoleil. But they’ve hardly abandoned the traditions — "Cette Fois," for one example, is right in the Cajun mode and will get dancers two-stepping in the dance halls. With the creative ways of expanding on and re-envisioning that, Feufollet cinches its spot at the forefront of a new generation of Acadiana artists at once honoring their traditions and extending its scope.
As such, throughout the album, the music lives up to the title. Stafford sings "Pris Dans la Vie Farouche," a '50s-ish Waltz written by bassist Philippe Billeaudeaux in the style of the region's classic swamp-pop (a two-worlds approach of an earlier generation), followed by another romantic waltz, Stafford's "Early Dawn," with more of an alt-Americana feel.
The thing is, they're not crossing back and forth between the two universes, but bringing them together as one. More than just two universes, really. It's a regular string theory going on here, all working nicely together on the album’s glorious closing song, the cosmically quizzical "Questions sans résponses" — "Questions Without Answers."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAzARFOZyM4
Artist: Niyaz
Album: The Fourth Light
Songs: "Tam e Eshq." "Man Haramam"
Notes: Can the poetry and inspiration of 8th century Sufi mystic Rabia Al Barsi be made relevant today? You bet it can, in the hands of Niyaz, the always-compelling project of married couple Azam Ali and Loga Torkian, long-time L.A. residents who relocated to Montreal a few years ago.
Mixing ancient and modern is Niyaz's specialty. In this, its fourth album, it's been refined into slinky tracks deftly weaving modern electronics through melodies, rhythms and instrumentations derived from various Islamic cultural traditions, centered on their own Persian roots.
In the same way, they weave the image of Rabia, credited as the first female Sufi mystic, with the issues facing women around the world today. Little survives of her words, but her influence is felt through the ages, including being cited through generations of those who came after, though her work and role is often marginalized in the patrician world of religious orthodoxy, just as she suffered great hardships of poverty and slavery in her life.
Crucially, as they balance the old and new, they also balance the message with the art. They are honoring a poet, after all, not a polemicist, and there’s a poetic quality to both the words (even if we can't understand them) and the music. The translations reveal them not so much about women's struggles, but about love and the meaning of love — the sorrows of wont and of separation, the suppression and oppression of one’s love, and supreme aspirations to love, in the tradition of the Sufi poets, love both earthly and spiritual. That much of it has a solid beat somehow makes it more so.
Ali's singing, as always in Niyaz and her many other ventures, are masterful both in technique and emotional resonance. And here she adds the electronic programming to her role, taking over for former member Carmen Rizzo and at all turns enhancing and illuminating Torkian's virtuosity on a wide variety of traditional and modern instruments.
Many of the songs were written by the two, including the very traditional-oriented "Tam e Eshq (The Taste of Love)" and the seductively somber "Man Haramam (I Am Sin)." Others come from folk and classical sources: Opener "Sabza Ba Naz (The Triumph of Love)" is from an Afghan folks song. "Yek Nazar (A Single Glance)." is based on two folk songs from the Khorassan region of Iran. "Eyvallah Shahim (Truth)" is by Turkish composer Arif Sag, and some of the album was recorded in Istanbul with local musicians.
Niyaz, it says in the liner notes, is committed "to creating music with a deep social message aimed at uniting people from different cultural and religious backgrounds through out shared humanity." A lofty, noble goal, certainly. Channeling that into compelling art, though, is a neat trick that they pull off elegantly.
Niyaz will perform at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles on May 28.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4UysR6gAw
Artist: The Sonics
Album: This Is the Sonics
Songs: "Bad Betty," "The Hard Way"
Notes: The most furiously, relentlessly rockin' show I've seen in the last few years was by a group of guys in their 60s and 70s. Not the Rolling Stones. Not Neil Young & Crazy Horse, though they all comported themselves credibly. No, this is the Sonics — which happens to be the title of the Tacoma band's new album, its first since 1967, and a full 50 years after its debut album in the prime of the garage-rock era.
The current incarnation includes three original members — singer-keyboardist Jerry Roslie, guitarist Larry Parypa and sax honker Rob Lind, who first started playing together in 1960 — joined by bassist Freddie Dennis and powerhouse drummer Dusty Watson, a little younger but veterans of this kind of music. The originals have aged well and so has the sound, made to last from the rough and tumble northwest circuit in which it was forged five decades ago. That durability was already evident when their '60s recording "Have Love Will Travel" turned up in a car commercial a couple of years ago with its unbeatable fuzzed-up charge. And while they never had a hit — even as such Northwest peers as the Kingsmen ("Louie, Louie") and Paul Revere & the Raiders became radio staples — in the intervening years, Sonics recordings of "Psycho" and "Strychnine" became cherished templates for several generations of punks, grungers and garage-rockers.
That’s still there in abundance on the new album, recorded pretty much live in, as they put it, "earth-shaking mono" by producer Jim Diamond, who'd helped shape the sound of Jack White and the White Stripes, the earth-shakers of the more recent neo-garage movement. But judging from how they sounded in concert of late, Diamond didn't have to do anything other than get it on tape.
As in the past, a good portion of the songs are rock and R&B covers — "I Don’t Need No Doctor," Willie Dixon's "You Can’t Judge a Book By the Cover," Hank Ballard's "Little Sister," among them, all played with rough-shod, break-neck urgency. One of the highlights, though, is a new original, "Bad Betty," co-written by Lind. And maybe the most delightful surprise is the frantic, barb-edged version of the Kinks' "The Hard Way," harder than Ray Davies and band ever played in their prime. Oddly, this is from the Kinks' '70s concept album era (Schoolboys in Disgrace), not its '60s garage-rock heyday. It just goes to show that not only is garage-rock timeless, it's ageless.
The Sonics will be at downtown Los Angeles' Regent Theatre on May 9.