Famed gospel singer Andrae Crouch was rushed to the hospital Sunday night after falling ill in the shower at his L.A. home ... TMZ has learned.
The 71-year-old Grammy winner behind "Let the Church Say Amen" tells us he was "overcome by heat" during his shower ... and shouted for his assistant and his twin sister to call for help.
An ambulance arrived to the scene -- and Crouch was transported to a nearby hospital. A few hours later, doctors determined Crouch was OK, and he was cleared to go home.
We spoke to Crouch ... who tells us he suffers from diabetes and suspects his condition contributed to the incident in the shower.
The singer tells us he feels better now, but adds, "Diabetes is no fun."
He adds, "Thanks to all my fans for all your prayers and support."
Powell mentored Motown artists like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and the Supremes. "Ladies dance with their feet, not their buttocks," she'd tell the girl groups.
Tony Ding/AP
In 2007, decades after Maxine Powell had retired from training a generation of black artists at Motown, a reporter from a Cleveland television station askedif anyone had been particularly difficult for her to work with.
Powell cut her off before she finished. "I don't have that," she said. "No one is difficult. Each person is a beautiful, unique human being. So if you have a problem and you're acting negative, you have been conditioned."
She went on. "So I said to my students, 'Allow me to help you unlearn that and realize and discover what a beautiful flower you are.'"
Powell, who died this weekend at the age of 98, was Motown's director of artist development during its heyday, and her job was to teach the label's young musicians how to present themselves in public. "They did come from humble beginnings," she told the Cleveland reporter, "some of them from the projects, some of them were using street language, some were rude and crude."
But to audiences at the time, those beginnings would have been invisible. For a long stretch in the 1960s, Motown's clean, factory-precise sound dominated popular music. The label's roster — the Temptations, the Supremes, The Jackson 5 — helped desegregate the radio waves. Motown was a kind of machine: songs were written by committee and artists had their images meticulously managed and cultivated. This meant that Motown's artists made incursions into places that black artists were not often seen; according to a Contemporary Black Biography interview, Powell told artists she was preparing them for "the White House and Buckingham Palace."
Body language. Everybody walks, but I teach how to glide. I teach how if you drop something, how to pick it up. If your slip comes down around your feet, how to stand in the basic standing position and step out of it smiling, with your hip bones pushed forward and the buttocks pushed under. You never, never protrude the buttocks because it means an ugly gesture, you see? They learned all of those things. I was turned loose to do whatever was necessary to make the artist look first-class.
"You don't need as much as some, but you close your eyes when you're singing, and people think you're asleep, I told him," Powell recalled. "And you slouch. So we'll work on those two things."
She also worked with the Temptations, Tammi Terrell, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. ("But I didn't do anything for Stevie," she told Rebecca Roberts. "Stevie was always beautiful.")
"Two days a week when you were back in Detroit you had to go to artists' development," Smokey Robinson said. "It was mandatory. You went there and learned so many things about being in show businesses."
But Powell said that her work wasn't simply about prettifying pop stars — she saw it as part of the larger fight for black progress. "All my life I was thinking of things that would help my race become outstanding and I thought of class and style...two things that would be accepted around the world," she told the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Just this summer, Powell told people gathered at an event in her honor that she would "teach until there's no breath left in my body." And indeed, Martha Reeves, the lead singer of the Vandellas and later a member of Detroit's city council, said she dispatched Powell to schools and retirement homes to teach children and the elderly about "poise and pride."
Today, black artists don't have trouble making it to the White House. Beyonce was the toast of the inaugural ball in 2008, and Jay-Z, her husband, was on the dais during the President Obama's second inauguration this year. Black artists no longer need charm school to burnish their palatability with white audiences; today, authenticity has as much cachet as respectability, if not more. Motown desegregated the airwaves, normalizing black celebrity enough that black people would eventually not always have to be perfect in public spaces. (Indeed, many of the artists that Powell tutored – Gaye and Terrell, in particular — later dealt with their demons in the limelight.) That's a reality that Maxine Powell and Motown helped to bring about, even if that may not have been their intent.
To the last, Powell was a picture of grace.
"Thank you so much for being here," Roberts said to her on All Things Considered.
Impeccable as always, Powell responded: "You're perfectly welcome."
Using an IP camera in lieu of a dedicated Internet-connected baby monitor can have its advantages. But it also comes with some profound security risks. Here's how to secure your baby cam and keep hackers at bay.
Stepping out for a day to recharge his batteries, Leonardo DiCaprio went to a local cafe with a group of friends in New York City this afternoon (October 18).
"The Great Gatsby" super star wore a gray setter cap, shades, a dark blue long sleeved shirt and jeans as he chowed down with a few of his closest pals.
In related news, the 38-year-old American icon is already at it again with a brand new film, in pre-production, and set for release on November 15th of this year. The movie's title is "The Wolf of Wall Street."
According to the synopsis, the drama/biography is "based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, from his rise to a wealthy stockbroker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government."
ISTANBUL (AP) — Two Turkish Airlines pilots held hostage in Lebanon by militants since August have returned home.
Turkish television channels showed live images Saturday night of pilots Murat Akpinar and Murat Agca arriving at an airport in Istanbul. They arrived on a Qatar Executive private jet.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials greeted the pilots on the tarmac.
The two were freed as part of a deal that saw nine Shiite pilgrims from Lebanon freed from captivity in Syria.
It's unclear if the third part of the deal has been executed, which calls for the release several dozen women held in Syrian government jails. That was a key demand of Syrian rebels who were holding the Lebanese pilgrims.
How do consumers create markets? The case of the minimoto
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: Mary-Ann Twist JCR@bus.wisc.edu 608-255-5582 University of Chicago Press Journals
Consumers have the power to do more than just respond to products that companies put on the market; they can actually change and develop new markets, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
"Firm-centric models of market development view consumers as relatively passive, downstream actors, whose agency and ability to affect a market are limited to decision making in a realm of choices controlled by marketing institutions," write authors Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten (both Aalto University). "Recently consumer culture scholars have explored the power of various kinds of consumer resistance to change markets or develop new ones."
The authors studied the emergence and growth of a new market within the motorcycle industry, the minimoto. The original minimoto is a child's minibike that has been modified significantly to be ridden and raced by adults. Minimoto aficionados are passionate about the bikes, and there is currently a thriving global market for parts to modify stock minibikes from major manufacturers such as Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha.
The mainstream motorcycle industry has always viewed minimotos as a niche product in a shrinking segment of dirt bikes. The authors explain the emergence of the minimoto market as a process in three stages: consumer innovation, where creative consumers mobilize available objects and other resources to overcome barriers; community formation, when creative consumers engage other people in the same activities, leading to the development of products, practices, and infrastructures; and a final stage of market emergence.
"Such organic market emergence distributes the risk and the investment of market building broadly among consumers rather than concentrating it at the level of the firm," the authors write. "And it offers insight into the kinds of actors that have the power to shift markets in fundamental ways."
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Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten. "Consumption-Driven Market Emergence." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2014. For more information, contact John Schouten or visit http://ejcr.org/.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
How do consumers create markets? The case of the minimoto
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Mary-Ann Twist JCR@bus.wisc.edu 608-255-5582 University of Chicago Press Journals
Consumers have the power to do more than just respond to products that companies put on the market; they can actually change and develop new markets, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
"Firm-centric models of market development view consumers as relatively passive, downstream actors, whose agency and ability to affect a market are limited to decision making in a realm of choices controlled by marketing institutions," write authors Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten (both Aalto University). "Recently consumer culture scholars have explored the power of various kinds of consumer resistance to change markets or develop new ones."
The authors studied the emergence and growth of a new market within the motorcycle industry, the minimoto. The original minimoto is a child's minibike that has been modified significantly to be ridden and raced by adults. Minimoto aficionados are passionate about the bikes, and there is currently a thriving global market for parts to modify stock minibikes from major manufacturers such as Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha.
The mainstream motorcycle industry has always viewed minimotos as a niche product in a shrinking segment of dirt bikes. The authors explain the emergence of the minimoto market as a process in three stages: consumer innovation, where creative consumers mobilize available objects and other resources to overcome barriers; community formation, when creative consumers engage other people in the same activities, leading to the development of products, practices, and infrastructures; and a final stage of market emergence.
"Such organic market emergence distributes the risk and the investment of market building broadly among consumers rather than concentrating it at the level of the firm," the authors write. "And it offers insight into the kinds of actors that have the power to shift markets in fundamental ways."
###
Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten. "Consumption-Driven Market Emergence." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2014. For more information, contact John Schouten or visit http://ejcr.org/.
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
On Tuesday night, Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to be awarded the Man Booker Prize in its 45-year history. Catton's book The Luminaries and those of her fellow finalists make up what has been hailed as perhaps the best shortlist in a decade, and they have been my companions for the past few weeks. It's a list spanning continents and styles, with a debut novel at one end and, at the other, one by a veteran who speculated that his latest book could well be his last.
It's not every year that I'm tempted to take on the marathon read in advance of the announcement, but this shortlist promised so much: the chance to embark on explorations that would take me to the story of a young girl's life in Zimbabwe, to the New Zealand gold fields, to an English village struggling with seismic social change, to an encounter between Japan and America, to a mother's story in a time before the New Testament, and to the center of a radical Indian political movement. This is everything an international prize should offer readers; a journey around the world and in and out of lives, a chance to discover new voices, to celebrate the many forms a novel can take, to be transported. This is one year that the Man Booker Prize achieved just that.
The judges praised NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names for prose that offered a "fresh adventure in language." It's a fiercely accomplished debut that follows the life of a young girl named Darling, from a childhood of deprivation and poverty in a shantytown in Zimbabwe to the uneasy adolescence of a new life in Detroit. Just as Bulawayo's protagonist and her friends bend and twist English until it becomes their own language, so too does the author take the idea of the novel and, with confidence and dexterity, shape it to tell the painful truth of diaspora.
Such skilled innovation is evident too in Harvest, by Jim Crace, the award-winning author of Quarantine and Being Dead. In his fable of villagers who find their ancient way of life under threat, Crace is at his very best. Harvest defies easy classification, taking on the biggest questions of our existence as social beings and compressing them into vividly drawn characters whose actions challenge a reader's perceptions of their own time and place.
Eleanor Catton's debut novel, The Rehearsal, was shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian First Book award.
AP
Eleanor Catton's debut novel, The Rehearsal, was shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian First Book award.
AP
The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin is a book read in an afternoon, and remembered long after. Mary, mother of a murdered son, struggles to mourn in the presence of a menacing character recognizable as the writer of the Gospel of John. As her watcher questions and cajoles, demanding a version of events that Mary cannot endorse, Toibin shows us how history is made, in the determined shaping and reshaping of stories. Bold, intense and exquisitely crafted, this iconoclastic imagining is a power pack of a book that, at only 81 pages, presents a daring interpretation of what a novel can be.
Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being plays with ideas of perception and interconnectedness from the title page onward. Her eponymous narrator, who lives on a remote Canadian island, finds a plastic bag washed up on the beach. In it is a Hello Kitty box containing the diary of Nao, a girl struggling toward womanhood in modern-day Japan. Ruth's own writing has stalled, and as she immerses herself in Nao's story, and that of the girl's 104-year-old Zen Buddhist grandmother, Ozeki braids together the lives of the three women. It's an intricate pattern of cause and effect, skillfully batting the stories of Ruth and Nao back and forth until the reader feels she has entered a conversation across space and time, unraveling some of the mysteries of existence along the way.
Cause and effect are also at the core of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, a tale of two brothers set in Kolkata and Rhode Island. One, Subhash, leaves home for a new life in America; the other, Udayan, stays behind, deeply involved in the politics of his country. Udayan's radical affiliations lead to his brutal execution by security forces. While perhaps the most conventional title on the shortlist in terms of form, Lahiri's work is a measured and thoughtful meditation on home, family and the enduring effects of personal choice.
In a shortlist of memorable titles, this year's winner, The Luminaries, by Canadian-born New Zealander Eleanor Catton, is a masterwork of structural brilliance. Set in the gold fields of New Zealand in 1866, the book tells the stories of 20 characters, all of whom are implicated in an untimely death, a suspected suicide, a disappearance and a stolen fortune. While there is a compelling narrative — a mystery to be solved — there are also archetypal characters rendered alive with dialogue, and a plot that seduces the reader with revelations and reversals at every turn.
If the shortlist this year has offered up new ways to appreciate how a story may be told, Catton's win celebrates a writer whose powers of innovation are deeply rooted in an understanding of what it takes to hold a reader in her grip for 800-plus pages, never losing their attention.
Ellah Allfrey is an editor and critic. She lives in London.
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