Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further

Lee Dorsey - "Night People"...hangin out lookin at each other

Band Playing Music

Stevie and Diana

The Mayor

AMES, Iowa -- It sounds like a made-for-TV movie: A homegrown hero nicknamed "The Mayor" returns to resurrect the team he once led to glory as a golden-haired, sharp-shooting star years ago.

The reality is that Iowa State is gambling on Fred Hoiberg, a rookie head coach, to turn around a once-exciting program that has fallen to the bottom of the Big 12 after four straight losing seasons and looks nothing like the one where he starred in the 1990s.

The Cyclones have given Hoiberg a five-year contract to do just that, introducing the former Iowa State player as its new men's basketball coach Wednesday.

Fred Hoiberg, who scored nearly 2,000 points for Iowa State from 1991 to 1995, now will try to lead the Cyclones from the bench.
"If I thought I was going to fail, I would have never come here," said Hoiberg, whose base salary is $800,000 per year.

Hoiberg is an Ames native who married his high school sweetheart, Carol, and became one of the most popular players in school history. Hoiberg scored nearly 2,000 points during his career at Iowa State from 1991-95, leading the Cyclones to three NCAA tournament appearances. The school retired his jersey in 1997.

Hoiberg later played 10 seasons in the NBA with the Pacers, Bulls and Timberwolves before a heart issue forced him to retire in 2006. He spent several years in the front office for the Timberwolves before the Iowa State opened up with Greg McDermott's departure for the job at Creighton.

"We will miss Fred Hoiberg dearly. He was on track to become president of an NBA team because of his broad range of skills and ability to connect with people," Timberwolves president of basketball operations David Kahn said in a statement. "But we recognize this opportunity is a dream come true for Fred and are happy and excited for him."

Athletic director Jamie Pollard said Hoiberg contacted him four years ago about the Iowa State job but that the timing wasn't right.

Pollard reached out to Hoiberg on Sunday night when it looked as though McDermott might be headed to Creighton. When McDermott made it official Monday, Pollard drove to Minnesota to meet with Hoiberg face-to-face.

Hoiberg said that playing for the likes of Larry Brown, Flip Saunders, Kevin McHale and former Cyclones coaches Johnny Orr and Tim Floyd has prepared him well for his first head coaching job.

"I've have all these mentors, all these role models," Hoiberg said. "I'll take a piece from each one of those guys and put that into my plan."

Hoiberg promised to run an uptempo style and said hiring a top staff will be his first priority. He will keep assistant T.J. Otzelberger, promoting the Cyclones' lead recruiter to associate head coach. Former Cyclone great Jeff Grayer, who was hired by McDermott just last week, will stay.

"I'm going to learning a lot this year, so I'm going to really, really have to lean on these guys," Hoiberg said.

He is walking into a program that's been in upheaval for months. The Cyclones, who were expected to contend for a postseason berth last season, finished 15-17 and were hit hard by player defections this spring.

Craig Brackins declared for the NBA draft, and fellow standout Marquis Gilstrap had his appeal for an extra season of eligibility denied by the NCAA. Three others, including starting center Justin Hamilton, have announced plans to transfer.

Hoiberg met with the players late Tuesday and the early returns are positive.

"He has a lot of credibility. He's played in the NBA, he's worked in an NBA front office, he's played for multiple Hall of Fame coaches," Cyclones guard Scott Christopherson said. "From my standpoint, how can't you trust a guy that has had all those successes?"

Hoiberg was one of the players credited for helping create "Hilton Magic," a term used to describe the Cyclones' home gym during its rocking heyday. There hasn't been a lot to cheer about of late, but Iowa State is banking on Hoiberg to rebuild the program.

"I hope and I think I can get the arena filled again, and get the magic back to this place," Hoiberg said.

Pollard believes the hire is not the risk it might appear to be, though Hoiberg's legacy as "The Mayor" could be at stake.

"I said to him ... the day you accept this job, you'll never have as great a legacy as you had before you accepted it," Pollard said. "The day you get announced, before you even say one thing, they'll be people that say you can't do this, you can't do that.

"The first time you coach a game, they'll say you don't do this, you don't do that. And Fred knows that, and I'd argue he's taking a bigger risk than we are."

Sharon Jones Calling Some Crackers Out

Ms. Spektor

We Grow Up Too Fast

Morning Benders - "Promises"

From An Email My Dad Sent Me

In the Tehran of my childhood, John Wayne was a household name. His Hollywood star began to rise over Iran in the late 1950s, but it was in the 1970s—when every weekend we could count on a cowboy show—that “John Vayne” became part of our everyday lives. His renown didn’t derive from his sexy costars or the excellence of his films or even our fascination with the accent. John Wayne came to us dubbed into Farsi, and it was the dub that made the man. He was not so much translated as alchemized by the wizards of Persian dub into a new alloy, a man who walked like a cowboy but talked like a dude from south Tehran.
Wayne’s tough-but-tender talk was delivered in the slang of downtown knife fighters and hero-thugs, an urban subculture known as jahel: men with switchblades and a strict code of honor, not unlike the lonesome heroes of the Wild West. In keeping with jahel tradition, the Iranian Wayne and his gang insulted the honor of parents and family members alike, swore by Ali and Allah, and addressed each other with the most diverse, absurd, and expressive epithets they could find.
Every time an actor turned his back, the dubbers, freed from any obligation to sync with the image, would throw in some slangy insults—corpse washer, stinking vulture—and during gunfights there was always time for jahel philosophizing. Ducking bullets, John Wayne spies a drunk on a porch and mumbles, “Lucky bastard, so totally oblivious to the world.” In Rio Bravo, when Wayne and Dean Martin start at a creaking sound, only to discover a stabled mule, there ensues between the sheriff and his sidekick a barrage of donkey-related swear words. All this with cheery disregard for the script and the authority of its creators.
The art of the Persian dub has an unexpected lineage. When the talkies first came to Iran in the 1930s, distributors continued to treat them like silent movies, interrupting the films with occasional “he said, she said” text panels in Farsi. But literacy was rare, so professional reciters would pace up and down the theater aisles, belting out reductive translations. Another strategy for domesticating foreign cinema was splicing. When a cowboy entered a saloon, for example, the doors swinging in his wake might fade to a popular and sultry singer belly dancing—not to fool viewers into thinking she was a stage act inside the local Texas juke joint, but to mash up that difference. Then the film would wipe seamlessly back to the Western drama of the cheats at the poker table. No one complained about incongruence or bastardization—the downtown audience was quite happy with the pastiche.
We were, it seems, much better at stealing than at imitating. When the three soldiers in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory are being led out to their execution—a tragic scene of prolonged silence and tension, in the original—the Persian dub has them pleading for their lives, pitifully, comically, in the vernacular of downtown Tehran. They beg to kiss the hands and feet of the colonel, to be his slave, his sacrificial kid. They implore him to “get down from your donkey” and spare their worthless lives. The disjuncture is breathtaking—as if Akira Kurosawa had given Robin Williams a free hand at dubbing Ran into English.
What made the best dubs so good was that they added another register, a meta-commentary that created and revealed subtexts in the films. One classic sequence takes place in The War Wagon, an average film with two big stars, John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, as reluctant partners. Douglas is a slick, dandyish womanizer who’d shoot his mother in the back; he has just left the company of a pair of prostitutes to make a deal with Wayne. Here he is wearing a silk robe with an elaborate Asian dragon stitched on the back while Wayne, who is shaving, appears in a plain full-body undergarment with a holster buckled around his waist. Wayne explains that the gun is always with him because these days, you can’t trust anyone. It’s a throwaway line, obvious and predictable. But then, as Douglas turns to exit, revealing the dragon on his robe, Wayne’s Persian voice offscreen whispers something like, “Well, well, check out the dragon.” Obviously not in the original, it’s a catty under-the-breath comment, a perfect subversion of the manly Hollywood cliché that preceded it.
Then it’s Douglas’ turn. In his own room, he ponders Wayne’s comment about trust. He is pensive and amused, as signaled by the raised eyebrow, the wrinkled forehead, the upturned lip. In the original, he is silent. But in the Persian dub, when Douglas turns and takes off his robe, his voice calls out in self-admiration: “Now that’s what I call a great body.” From these scenes will develop a very strong homoerotic relationship between the two stars and half-outlaws, who in the Persian version address one another as “my love.”
At times there was something uncanny about the dubbing. Often the off-camera voices would seem to issue from a disembodied spectator rather than one of the characters; they said the sorts of things a viewer might say. Some secondary character was always commenting on John Wayne’s height, while a heroine’s sexiness was an occasion for a playful remark. As Dean Martin gets a shave from the delicate, razor-wielding hands of Angie Dickinson, a John Wayne–sounding voice moans, “Oh, I’d die to be hurting like your beard, dude.”
Persian dub died a slow death in the late 1970s with the spread of corporate notions of ownership, stricter enforcement of copyright, and a growing sense of loyalty to the original. The revolution of 1979 hammered in the final unironic nail: Foreign films were banned and unavailable, and the original dubs were locked deep in the archives.
The glory of Persian dub, while it lasted, was that it didn’t hide the artifice of film or its theatrical, scripted element. On the contrary, by showing that the original lines were just as made up as the dubbed ones, it seemed to acknowledge something even more postmodern: that social roles, like acting roles, depend on artifice, and that perhaps all cultural forms develop through acts of mistranslation.
There were a thousand invented lines in every dubbed film, but they weren’t meant to fool anyone. Seeing the Persian dubbers get away with one more aside, one more joke, one more invented aphorism brought us closer to the films in a conspiratorial kind of way. They made them ours.

Wooden Spoon Trick (Foreign)

What the Black Man Wants

Let me not be misunderstood here. I am not asking for sympathy at the hands of abolitionists, sympathy at the hands of any. I think the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just. I look over this country at the present time, and I see Educational Societies, Sanitary Commissions, Freedmen's Associations, and the like,—all very good: but in regard to the colored people there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. [Applause.] The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. Gen. Banks was distressed with solicitude as to what he should do with the Negro. Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don't disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot- box, let him alone, don't disturb him! [Applause.] If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone,—your interference is doing him a positive injury.Gen. Banks' "preparation" is of a piece with this attempt to prop up the Negro. Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. [Applause.] Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live. He will work as readily for himself as the white man. A great many delusions have been swept away by this war. One was, that the Negro would not work; he has proved his ability to work. Another was, that the Negro would not fight; that he possessed only the most sheepish attributes of humanity; was a perfect lamb, or an "Uncle Tom;" disposed to take off his coat whenever required, fold his hands, and be whipped by anybody who wanted to whip him. But the war has proved that there is a great deal of human nature in the Negro, and that "he will fight," as Mr. Quincy, our President, said, in earlier days than these, "when there is reasonable probability of his whipping anybody." [Laughter and applause.]

Frederick Douglas