Here’s the first trailer for “Into the Woods,” Rob Marshall’s adaptation of the famed Stephen Sondheim musical. Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, James Corden and Johnny Depp all star in what, we wish, will be a better movie musical than “Les Miserables.” (Not that anyone would know “Into the Woods” is a musical since no one sings in the trailer.) “Into the Woods” is out on Dec. 25.
Check out photos from “Into the Woods” below.
Each week, the HuffPost Entertainment team will compile and share some of our favorite tracks discovered across the web, whether they are brand new tunes, new music videos or newly discovered artists.
Lil B – “No Black Person Is Ugly”
Lil B blesses us with a song that he posted to YouTube with a question: “MOST POWERFUL SONG OF DECADE?” With a more (and rare) focused flow and a reminder that everyone, no matter the color of their skin or what some magazine prints, is beautiful, Lil B provides us with the answer. He also tells listeners to never breach the right of sexual consent. Lil B is bringing the sunshine. Lil B is a legend. THANK YOU BASED GOD.
RDGLDGRN – “Turn”
Taking the more indie route of their hip-hop, reggae, indie, go-go four-pronged attack, RDGLDGRN’s “Turn” tells listeners to “turn up” in the midst of mellowed-out head bobber. It’s a little confusing, but what’s not confusing is right now, because you’re a little drunk, surrounded by your best friends on a cool summer evening and this song just came on, so life is good.
Big K.R.I.T. – “Pay Attention” ft. Rico Love
Big K.R.I.T. proves again and again with each release that he is one the finest rappers in the game. “Pay Attention” allows K.R.I.T. to showcase his perfect Southern flow overtop of spacey production, teaming up with Rico Love for a sexier vibe than his typical output.
For BDK – “What I Must Find”
Stumbling upon the self-described emotional post electronic genre, there is something truly magical about the music For BDK creates. Everything about “What I Must Find” — the stunning visuals, heart-rending vocals and transient production — is narcotic and we couldn’t quit if we tried.
QuESt – “Automatic”
You may not have heard of QuESt yet, but with tracks like “Automatic,” he’s guaranteed to become one of hip-hop’s biggest names. A fantastic two-part cut, QuESt brings the lyrics, intensity and flow reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar. That’s not meant to diminish his individuality, it just speaks volumes when you drop a track that sounds like it could have been one of the best cuts off “Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City.”
Jessie J – “Bang Bang” ft. Ariana Grande & Nicki Minaj
Jessie J recruits Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj for one of the catchiest songs of the year. Driven by claps and a simple beat — with a dash of gospel — it’s impossible not to break out in dance.
G-Unit – “Come Up”
We’ve heard a number of freestyles from the freshly reunited G-Unit, and finally we get an original track. 50 Cent said his crew was working like they were fighting for a record deal and the smooth “Come Up” proves it true.
MNEK – “Wrote A Song About You”
MNEK is due for a meteoric rise a la Sam Smith. The 19-year-old U.K. native steadily unleashes his vocal capabilities in “Wrote A Song About You,” pairing the club-friendly smash with a set of ’90s psychedelic visuals.
Paperwhite – “Take Me Back”
Pigeons & Planes hit the nail on the head when they wrote that we might be reaching critical mass with ’80s synth-pop. But Paperwhite does it so right you can’t be mad.
Rich Homie Quan – “No Alibi” ft. PeeWee Longway
Rising ATLien Rich Homie Quan’s “No Alibi” feels like a throwback to some Juvenile or Youngbloodz without losing touch with the times. Recruiting PeeWee Longway, the rappers trade bars back and forth so seamlessly that it feels like the duo entered the game together.
Peace – “Lost On Me”
English outfit Peace dropped their first single from their upcoming second album and “Lost On Me” is a funky jam that deserves its place among the summer closing jams.
Rustie – “Attak” ft. Danny Brown
Give Danny Brown any beat and he will find a way to rap over it. Give him an incredible beat from rising producer Rustie and he will (continue to) redefine the rap game.
Two years ago, I stopped coloring my hair and realized I had unintentionally done something radical. People assumed my long, gray hair was a statement against our culture’s celebration of youth and our rigid conventions of beauty. Or, conversely, they assumed my hair revealed an inherent laziness on my part.
“I don’t mind gray hair on a woman,” a man told me once over a glass of wine, as if I had forgotten to shower or wear deodorant.
“I could never let my hair go gray,” a friend said to me. “I mean, yours looks OK, but my mother would just die if I let my hair go like that.”
“Good for you!” a stranger screamed across the parking lot at the public library. “Good for you! Don’t you ever let anyone tell you you need to color you hair!”
And while I appreciated this man’s enthusiastic endorsement of my… umm… lifestyle choice, I was not quite sure it was deserved. I got my first gray hairs when I was in my early twenties. Back then, I considered my gray hairs to be purveyors of doom, and so I began what would become years of touching up, dyeing, and highlighting away every gray strand, every indication that I might, one day, be old.
At first, I did my own coloring, and sometimes the resulting colors were shades that actually appeared naturally in other humans. Most of the time, however, I emerged from these hours-long sessions with locks of varying shades of plum and purple, hints of Ronald-McDonald orange and Big-Bird yellow. Once, when my older son was 3, he took one look at my freshly-dyed hair and burst into tears.
“Your hair is purple!” he screamed.
“Honey, it’s not purple,” I said.
But there was too much evidence to the contrary.
“It is! It is!” he sobbed.
By the time I was in my early thirties, I had learned to let a professional do my coloring, and as my hair grew grayer and grayer, I went to the colorist’s at increasingly narrow intervals — every other month, every six weeks, every four weeks. By the time I was 40, I was going every three weeks. The entire procedure — color, shampoo, scalp massage, blow-dry — took about three hours and cost half of what I earned in a week, yet two weeks after this epic coloring session, my hair once again looked like someone had run a white paintbrush over my part.
And so one day a couple of years ago, I just decided that was it. I called my long-time stylist and made an appointment for — gasp — just a cut.
“Wait,” my stylist said when I arrived. “They only put you down for a cut. We’ll need rework the schedule a bit to fit in your color.”
“No,” I explained. “I’m going to stop coloring.”
My hairdresser was my age, heroin-addict skinny with butt-length, carrot-colored hair and a myriad of fading tattoos — a ring around her thin wrist, a rose above her right breast, a branch on her left ankle. She stood behind me and in the reflection in the mirror, her scowl was lopsided and crinkly around the edges.
“You can’t be serious,” she finally said.
I was serious, I told her.
“You’re going to look 10 years older,” she said. “Are you prepared for that?”
I was prepared for that. I was 45 years old, and no amount of hair dye was going to make me look 20. Plus, there were plenty of other women who wore their gray hair beautifully. My mother was one of them.
Back in the seventies, my mother had a jet-black bob like Jackie Kennedy, but she stopped dying her hair some time in the eighties. Now, people constantly told her she looked years younger than she was. Her secret? She always wore vivid colors, and she never went anywhere — the grocery store, hiking, water aerobics — without earrings and plenty of bright lipstick — blazing lava, plum explosion, true red.
Personally, I was a fan of drab colors — browns, blacks, grays — and I knew a splash of colorful lipstick was not suddenly going to transform me into my perky, upbeat mother. It just wasn’t me. Still, while I was growing out my hair, the thin, gray band around my scalp got increasingly wider, as if I were wearing a giant, white headband, and finally, I decided a splash of color here and there couldn’t hurt.
And so I invested in a few brightly-colored scarves, a couple of flashy tops. My daughter also convinced me to buy a long, purple wrap. The wrap became my new go-to item — the thing I wore to every single event I attend for an entire spring and summer and part of the fall. However, every time I put it on, rather than feeling fresh-faced and lively, I was reminded of perhaps the greatest transgression I ever committed against my mother, something far worse than all my teenage shenanigans combined.
I was in my early twenties, and my mother was younger than I am now — in her early forties — when I gave her a book I thought she would like. My daughter was 2 at the time, and I was pregnant with my son, and I saw this as a moment of bonding — a moment when I could say to my mother, “I, too, am a woman, and I understand the difficulty of growing older in a society that honors youth.” The book was When I Grow Old, I Shall Wear Purple, which Thrift Books describes as an “enchanting collection of writings and photographs evokes the beauty, humor and courage of women living in their later years.”
Later years. My mother was the same age I was when I took up mountain biking, the age when I embraced the craft beer movement and began road racing, the age when I was just beginning to be calm in my mind and comfortable in my body, the age that Esquire just praised as the time when women are most alluring. My mother opened the book — a birthday gift — and paused with it in her hands. Her eyes were wide and dark, her lovely, fuchsia lips twitching up and down, searching for words. A sliver of wrapping paper clung to the book’s back cover.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
There was the briefest pause, and then the silence gave way to thank you and how thoughtful, and the moment was gone.
That was over 20 years ago. Now, my mother actually is growing older, and, at 47, I suppose I am too. Today, I no longer balk at the insinuation inherent in my head full of gray hairs — the implication that I am surely and swiftly heading where we are all heading, if we are lucky — to old age. And whenever I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror or in a photo one of my kids snaps on a cell phone, I see a bit of my mother — the red undertones in my skin, the certain way I hold my jaw — and I think of that stranger in the library parking lot, and I simply think, well, yeah. Good for me. Good for me.
Earlier on Huff/Post50:
There were several meetings. Eight white men and two white women. Was this a meeting of the Mormon Glee Club? The New White Citizens Council? Perhaps a Klan meeting? No. That meeting was the creative team for the new James Brown movie, “Get On Up.”
Welcome to post-racial Hollywood where if you host a fundraiser for Barack Obama, you’re freed of the burden of hiring black writers. And where a rich white producer can jokingly declare, “I’m black.”
Indeed, all the producers, writers, and the director of the James Brown movie are white. No black people were hired until a few weeks before the cameras started rolling, the actors. In fact, several of the people involved in this whitewash are British. The Brits have a fetish for black projects.
This is the Donald Sterling message: don’t bring them to the game. There are over fifty black iconic biopics and black-themed movies in development in Hollywood, including multiple Richard Pryor projects, five Martin Luther King projects, multiple Marvin Gaye projects, and civil rights projects, and only one or two have an African American writer. Our entire history has been given over to white writers.
When the late David Wolper was producing “Roots” thirty-something years ago, he hired no black writers. When asked why, he was quoted as saying: “They’re too close to the material.” I guess we’re still too close.
This Hollywood apartheid against the African American writer could be understood if the writers being hired were of such quality as to be beyond reproach artistically. With rare exception, that is not the case. Sift through the morass, and you’ll find a group of hacks, insiders, and drinking buddies. The executives are trading our icons around like baseball cards.
How do these insiders, pals of the executives, become experts on black culture overnight? Wikipedia. In case you didn’t know, the entire black experience is on Wikipedia. Here is a typical day in Hollywood. Agent calls a writer, tells him he got him an interview for “this black guy who was really important.” The writer says cool, goes to the wiki pages, memorizes them, takes the meeting and wings his “knowledge” of the black icon. That’s it. He gets the job.
You see, the first thing people do in this town before hiring someone is look in the mirror. What I see in front of me is beauty, brains, and competence, Oh, and hipness. Yep, that’s who I’m gonna hire: me!
If ever a project required black creative involvement, it was this one. James Brown was the blackest entertainer in the history of America. The blackest. There was nothing integrationist about his art, at all. He never tried to crossover. You had to come to him. He was iconic and not just musically.
And yet, where did producer Brian Grazer hire to embody this blackest of black men? Three white writers, two of them from England. Then more producers were added, all white, and a white director, who has said that he sees this as a movie about singing and dancing. Bingo. Now we’re ready to make a black movie. It doesn’t matter a bit that one of the producers is a famous rock star who played with Brown a few times and lifted some of his moves. James Brown belongs to us, the black masses, and for us to be excluded from the creative team that made this movie is an obscenity. I’m aware that Spike Lee was involved briefly, but the finished product looks like a Mitt Romney family reunion.
Let me tell you who James Brown was, really, not the Wikipedia James Brown.
He was a civil rights icon. Put James in the pantheon of the most impactful black men of the 20th century, and he would not be out of place. How can I make such an assertion? One song: “I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
Before that song, if you wanted to start a fight with a man of color, all one had to do was call him black. Up until the mid-sixties, we were trying define ourselves: not colored anymore, now Negro. But black was not something we called ourselves. And along comes this little man and proudly states, “I’m black and I’m proud!” He took the thing that the oppressor used to bludgeon us and made it a weapon of pride for us.
That song caught on like wildfire. One day, our heads were down, the next day, our heads were held high, proud of who we were. We had all these groups, civil rights groups, Muslims, Panthers, but it was JB who gave us our swagger. That song lifted up an entire race! He put us on his back and carried us. Dr. King gave us our rights. JB gave us our dignity. Civil rights icon? You better believe it.
When that song came on the radio, cars stopped in the street. People turned up their radios, came out of their houses, and sang along with it; radio stations put it in a loop and played it for hours. The next day people greeted each other with “Hello, black man!” “My black brother.” JB made black beautiful overnight.
But the focus of this movie is singing and dancing. When we are kept out of the room, that is what you end up with, a pale Wikified imitation of what a great man was.
And yet, if someone decided to do the Gloria Steinem story, you better believe women would be involved; they’d have to be. Can you fathom ten men sitting in a room, male writers, directors, and producers all staring at their navels grunting: “I am woman, hear me roar”? But that won’t happen because people in this town respect women.
It’s too late to save JB, but maybe there’s hope to save the other icons from the Wiki-fueled humiliation of having their stories told by people who have no organic connection to us or our struggle.
A new SpongeBob SquarePants movie is heading to the big screen, and this time the Bikini-bottom crew is looking a little different. Starting in the typical 2D format of the TV series, SpongeBob and friends are forced ashore while chasing down the bad pirate, voiced by Antonio Banderas, in order to save their hometown. Enter a brand new 3D look, as well as some sweet superpowers. Watch the trailer below.
Now that I’ve finished my book on Legendary Locals of Center City Philadelphia (the publication date is September 8th), I find my mind drifting back to a few of the most important people in the book.
One of them is 19th Century Philadelphia writer George Lippard. Not many people have heard of Lippard, unlike the multitudes who have heard of Edgar Allen Poe, who was a close friend of Lippard’s. Lippard was born in Chester County, and received a haphazard education in a Methodist seminary at fifteen years old in upstate New York before deciding that he really didn’t want to be a preacher. Lippard discontinued his studies and headed back to Pennsylvania but not, as it turns out, to live with his parents, who were very ill — his mother had TB and his father was severely crippled — but with his grandfather and two aunts in Germantown.
The young writer-to-be loved Germantown and the woods around the Wissahickon Creek, so it is likely that much of his time was spent hiking and exploring the area, especially the old Indian trails there. This idyllic interlude was cut short at his father’s death in 1837, when Lippard was not given any part of the estate. The empty “last gesture” from his father caused young George to become penniless. Although he would work as a law assistant at various city law firms, the work was sporadic and not enough to support him, so he wound up on the streets of the city, a virtual vagabond, sleeping in the open, in abandoned buildings, under trees or along the banks of the Delaware. His life for a period of time was much like the lives of the aimless drifter types we see standing in front of convenience stores today offering to hold the door for you (for a tip), or the traffic panhandlers who carry cardboard “I am homeless” signs while parading through traffic lanes on Aramingo Avenue.
All of this happened during the horrible Depression of 1837-1844, but the experience provided Lippard with a sense of how poor people are treated by the very rich, and how difficult it is for poor people to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” when confronted with the biases and barriers set up by the wealthy ruling class.
Despite these difficulties, Lippard managed to find time to write a novel, Lady Annabel, which his friend Edgar Allen Poe read and didn’t think half bad, despite Poe’s somewhat condescending attitude towards his writer friend. Since writing novels rarely brings in a lot of cash, Lippard found a newspaper job at the (Philadelphia-based) Spirit of the Times newspaper, where he wrote satirical columns that attacked the rich and other writers. He also did crime reporting, something that appealed to his somewhat lurid imagination, since Philadelphia at the time had passed from her former Colonial glory to a much lower status, often described as a “place for murder and intrigue.”
Lippard’s writing courted a lot of controversy, although he soon became a best selling novelist, despite the fact that literary critics, those arbitrars of taste (librarians perhaps?) called much of his work “trashy.” He also cut a daring personal figure because he resembled the young poet Lord Byron with his thick eyebrows almost connecting above the bridge of his nose, and his long straight hair framing an angular face which many were quick to describe as poetically dreamy and good looking. Lippard, as a columnist for “The Spirit,” had plenty to say if only because homelessness had made him aware of the terrible treatment of the down and out in the City of Brotherly Love. This fact set him on a mission: to become a writer “for the masses.”
While the so-called master of the macabre, Poe, may have condescended to Lippard as a “lesser version of himself,” many readers today who have had a chance to read Lippard’s novels and essays come away with the feeling that, “Lippard makes Poe look like Mother Goose.” Appreciation for Lippard, in fact, has had a “sleeper” quality to it — unlike Poe’s meteoritic rise immediately after his death (he was especially praised and appreciated in France). To this day, Lippard is often referred to as “Poe’s Philadelphia Friend,” although many have come to appreciate his unique sensibility.
Lippard, in fact, wrote of the way that Poe was treated during his life in an essay published after his friend’s death. “…One day, news came that the poet was dead. All at once the world found out his greatness. Literary hucksters who had lied about him, booksellers who had left him to starve, gentlemen of literature, who had seen him walk the hot streets of Philadelphia without food or shelter — these all opened their floodgates of eulogy, and slavered with panegyric the man whom living they would have seen die in the next ditch without one effort to save him. This is the joke of the thing,” Lippard concludes.
In his travels about the city, Lippard loved to wear colorful, flamboyant capes, under which he always carried a dagger or two. He also carried a cane in the shape of a sword and had a belt or brace of loaded pistols around his waist. Such shenanigans today would get him thrown into the back of a police wagon or sent to the psyche ward at Friends Hospital. But Lippard had no interest in writing for critics or for the upper classes — or, if there had been a Free Library system when he was writing, in obtaining a speaker’s slot in a literary lecture series. Lippard, in fact, had his eye set on the working class masses and put his energy into becoming an early labor union organizer, forming the Brotherhood of the Union in 1849, an organization that sought “the unity of all workers.” By October 1850, there would be Brotherhood chapters in nineteen states.
As if the formerly homeless writer didn’t have enough to do, he was also a newspaper publisher and editor, publishing the Quaker City weekly for some 15,000 readers, a publication that enhanced his reputation as a radical reformer against the elite.
A true romantic, he married his sweetheart, Rose Newman, 26, on a large rock overlooking Wissahickon Creek. The couple had one child but both Rose and the child died from TB in 1851 right around the time that his sister Harriet and her two children died from the same disease. Suddenly, life’s tragedies became too much for the fearless writer. He found it hard to go on. It is said that in his despondent state he became suicidal and came very close to throwing himself off Niagara Falls but was talked out of it by friends.
Lippard’s role as a “working class hero” did not preclude a talent for eloquent and powerful public speaking. When I read references to Lippard’s talents as a speaker, I can only conclude that he spoke the King’s English, meaning that he didn’t cut corners or fall into a world of embarrassing grammatical and rhetorical blunders, such as saying youse for you.
He contributed much to the mythology of the city. For one thing, he gave Philadelphia its sobriquet, “The Quaker City,” and his short story, “Ring, Grandfather, Ring,” (published in 1847) details the doings of the Second Continental Congress at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and ends with a bit of fiction, or how the Signers of the Declaration rang the Liberty Bell atop Independence Hall so hard after the signing that the bell actually cracked.
Lippard’s “how the Liberty Bell got its crack” story still fools people, but at the same time it is a testament to the power of Lippard’s pen that fiction and myth has been allowed to override historical truth.
Lippard died at 31 years of age in 1854 of TB just like his wife, sister and child before him. His death came well before the start of the Civil War although it is said that his writings on slavery awakened Abraham Lincoln to the plight of slaves. Lippard’s Gothic sensational style and his interest in esoteric spirituality give many of his works a prophetic ring. In his book, Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime, Lippard wrote that it was his intention to write a book that “describes all the phases of a corrupt social system, as manifested in the City of Philadelphia.”
Lippard writes: “To the young man or young woman who may read this book when I am dead, I have a word to say: Would to God that the evils recorded in these pages, were not based upon facts. Would to God that the experience of my life had not impressed me so vividly with the colossal vices and the terrible deformities, presented in the social system of this Large City, in the Nineteenth Century…”
These are damning words, enough to make one wonder if his criticism of the city perhaps helped to seal his fate when it came to the cultivation of his legacy by politicians and those same “elite” legacy-makers that he once railed against.
I thought of George Lippard recently when I came across a series of online articles about a July 2013 exhibit entitled Philadelphia Literary Legacy at the Philadelphia International Airport in Terminal A-East. The purpose of the exhibit was the celebration of 200 years of Philadelphia writers, past and present, and to display for one year photographs, book covers and biographies of 50 authors, playwrights and poets from the time of the Declaration of Independence.
Sounds like a great idea to boost the city’s legacy, doesn’t it?
The writers chosen to be part of the exhibit were picked by a number of librarians in the Philadelphia Free Library system. While the names of widely known historic authors, like Thomas Paine, are predictable shoo-ins, the exhibit’s selection process slipped into dicey mode when it came to contemporary writers. Were authors chosen on the number of books they sold? Does a chick lit novelist or politically appointed city poet compare to an I.F. Stone (chosen) or to a Pearl S. Buck (chosen), or even to a George Lippard (chosen, thank God) or to an Agnes Repplier (chosen), once the leading essayist in the United States and often referred to as the Jane Austen of America?
Politics are always involved in selections of this nature, and that’s why it gets dicey when city and governmental bodies get into the business of designating who is (and who’s not) a literary cultural icon.
Think for a moment of the librarians who recommended what writers to include in the exhibit. Librarians are not writers or literary critics. If anything, they are book processing technicians who tend to skim books for shelving purposes. Yes, you read that correctly, they are book processing technicians. They may be experts on the latest abbreviated reviews (of books), and they may be opinionated as to what books they think are good or bad, but this is as related to authentic literary insight as a fly is related to a Wissahickon hiker.
Just ask George Lippard!
Studies show that the biggest mistake entrepreneurs and businesses make on social media is not investing enough. Though experts continue to espouse the virtues and benefits of social media, many businesses and thought leaders have failed to make it a priority.
Companies that invest time, energy, and resources in social media marketing are reaping the many tangible and non-tangible benefits it brings. Are you investing enough? Or are you treating social media as an afterthought?
Here are five tell-tale signs that you may be treating social media as an afterthought (and what you can do about it!)
1. You let a whole day go by without posting on any network.
A whole day without marketing your business online? That’s crazy! Your inconsistency shows your audience that you aren’t trustworthy. Even if it is subconscious, your potential clients lose faith in your ability to provide consistency in other aspects of your business.
Solution: Use an online tool such as Hootsuite to pre-schedule posts each week. While you still want to make time each day for engagement and relationship-building, you can rest comfortably knowing that your broadcasts are providing steady cover, day in and out. If you can’t even find the time to schedule your posts, consider outsourcing your social media.
2. Your posts all happen in clusters.
Do you have a steady stream of posts appearing throughout the day, every day? Or do you find yourself trying to make up for a week of absence by spending three hours in a single clip jumping to several networks? If the latter is more your style, you have no system in place for getting visibility and building relationships with potential customers. By treating social media as an afterthought, you are neglecting simple activities that can grow your business. Instead of clustering your posts. you want your messages to be sprinkled throughout each day.
Solution: Devote time each week or each morning to pre-schedule your posts so that they appear every hour or two. And take five to 10minutes each day to respond, comment, and share others’ posts (Did you know? These engagement posts can be scheduled to appear over the course of the day, also).
3. You post only when you have something to promote.
Many entrepreneurs say that they have no reason to post on social media because they have nothing to promote. This reasoning goes against the spirit (and effectiveness) of social media. Unless you’ve built trust, provided consistent value, and established strong connections with your community, promoting a product or service on social media will yield abysmal results. Those who are givers on social media (delivering value,, sharing, showing kindnesses) see the best results when it comes time to promote a product or service.
Solution: Learn to dig your well before you are thirsty. If you wait until you have something to promote on social media, it is already too late. It takes time to build strong relationships, so begin now. And don’t stop. Then when you have sometime to promote, your contacts will be more likely to listen and respond.
4. You broadcast only.
For social media marketing to be effective, it is absolutely necessary to engage, acknowledge, thank, and share others’ posts. Your audience can’t connect with you if all you do is broadcast your message. They want to relate, associate, join your cause. They will jump on board if they see you as an ally.
Solution: Think of your social media marketing as an interactive workshop, rather than a one-sided lecture. Ask opinions, respond to questions and comments, support others by sharing their posts, show appreciation and thank people when they share and comment.
5. You are tactical, rather than strategic.
Your posts, engagement, and relationship building appear to be haphazard, rather than planned. Proven tactics are important, but without following an overall strategy, you don’t have specific goals to reach, and you are constantly reinventing the wheel, attempting new things, and starting over.
Solution: Decide on your main social media marketing goals. Based on these objectives, map out a plan of action, and stick to it — consistently. You will be rewarded.
When you treat social media as an important part of your overall marketing — instead of as an afterthought, you will see valuable results.
(To learn more about outsourcing your social media, visit the Ghost Tweeting site.)
It’s been two months since Dr. Maya Angelou transitioned into immortality. Of course, that’s a poetic way of saying she died. During the scramble to find out which famous figures would eulogize one of the most inspirational poets of the 20th century, I began to wonder what Angelou was like when she was alone. That’s who I wanted to mourn.
Dr. Angelou’s life as a single mother and stripper appears in monochrome on the pages of biographies, but in her mind, they likely existed in living color, as components of what made her monumental.
Singer India Arie speaks about her relationship with Dr. Angelou, as well as her own journey, from anonymity to stardom, and how those elements intersect. This is what was said:
Dr. Maya Angelou inspired millions of people around the globe. In certain ways, I feel your music and message mirrors her essence. How did you two come to meet?
India Arie: I was curious why you thought of me when you wanted to do a piece on Maya Angelou. I thought maybe you thought she and I were similar, which is a compliment, but super far-fetched. But now that you say my work mirrors her essence, it makes sense — I could see that.
My artistic coach Hilda Williams became friends with Maya Angelou’s assistant, and that’s how I got to meet her.
The real thing is, my life fell apart in 2009. I started thinking about — well, ‘who am I?’ I was trying to be the things people wanted me to be–it’s how it works in the music business with every artist; people only want you to make them money.
I had my mom too — she wanted me to do things — so I had it coming from all different angles.
I was asking myself, ‘who do I want to be?’ I created this thing I called a ‘hero board’ [laughter]. And I put all the people that are my heroes on the board and wrote a short biography about each one. I put myself on the board, and wrote what I wanted my biography to be at the end of my life. It’s crazy; I still have that board in my common place in my home.
My life was torn to pieces, and I was giving myself time to reflect on how it got there. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out who my ultimate hero was. It had to be a person who had a lifestyle I admired. That was the thing, my lifestyle in the music business was not quite me — more than not quite, it wasn’t me at all. That’s when Maya Angelou came to mind.
She was a person whose essence I felt closest to. Just her face and her voice. And quality of her work, the values she speaks of. I met her a year after that in Harlem, at her brownstone.
I had so much to tell her. I remember I said: “Can I just jump in?”, and she said, “Go.” I like when people are straight to the point, especially when it comes to talking about something emotional. She said,”Go.”
She and I had a talk that changed my life.
I told her, “I’ve been really struggling, and I want to know, when was the last time you felt not empowered?” I was going to ask her how she healed herself, but I didn’t get to ask the question because she thought for a long time — I mean a long time. She was really thinking about it, and she finally answered, “Never.” She said, “I could never feel not empowered as long as I’m telling the truth. As long as I’m truthful, I’m not giving my power away.”
What do you think made her so special?
Maya was more honest than most people. She was honest at a time when her life could have been in danger for it. She was honest in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. She embodied what I think love really is. I think love is acceptance of people.
Her legacy, for me, is that she was a great human being, and she showed us that we all could be that. She didn’t have magical powers. She chose to walk through life in such a way that had so much integrity that you couldn’t help but to respect her.
I’m in a climate, the entertainment business, where people use sexuality in ways that are degrading instead of beautiful. I love that the sensuality in her work is pleasant, it wasn’t like she was a nun. That’s something I admire about her and I want to do in my work. People would be surprised when Maya Angelou would flirt. She had that quality.
In the beginning of your career, was it difficult adjusting to stardom? Did life change for you drastically?
Um. [laughing] I have to laugh at that one because my life did change. My life changed so fast that it wasn’t enjoyable. I went from being a really sensitive, spiritual and emotional artist (you can tell if you listen to my music), to working 20 hour days and being on 5 airplanes a week. Being in front of crowds of people, offstage, you know, and at meet-and-greets. Then there was all the make-up. There were people making sure I didn’t wear the same thing twice. All of these things, it was just too much for a person like me. It wasn’t my nature. I always thought my nature was the music. I didn’t know how to handle it at all. I retired two times. It was like, I want to make music, but can’t do this.
It was harder on me than I ever could have imagined. I went from playing guitar under a tree in Savanna, Georgia, going to my art classes, talking to people, in five years, to the Grammys. And being shut out [in 2002, India was nominated for seven Grammys, and was snubbed], and the whole politics of the thing. Clive Davis and the rest.
Would you share with me what happened with the skin bleaching scandal?
I wrote an open letter about the skin bleaching thing [fans accused India of bleaching her skin]. It was crazy. I finally got someone to talk about me, and this is what they say. If I had retweeted all the things people were saying to me…I was called every misogynistic word you could use for a female. I was like whoa. I knew that it wasn’t me people were attacking, it was something inside of people that was triggered. But I didn’t put that thing inside of you. There were people saying, “I love you, India Arie,” one day on twitter, and the next day, they call me… everything. There were literally two people I saw that said something reasonable to me on twitter. Two people, out of 200,000 plus followers. I went on Oprah, and that incident is what made my appearance noteworthy, but I had a bigger story to tell.
If fame and money aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, what should be the goal for entertainers and artists?
That’s something human beings have to figure out. It’s a myth that one thing can happen and make your life better forever, or that you’ll be happy forever because of this one thing. A lot of us think it’s money, others think it’s fame, and if someone has money and fame they should be happy. People think that until they’ve been there. Every person who’s made a big chunk of money early, or got introduced to fame young, knows, it’s just one more thing to be responsible for. I’ve never heard of a person who was happy because they got rich. It takes certain worries off your plate, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have this plate you need to deal with. You don’t know who your friends are, your parents are asking for things–my mother never asked me for anything, which I’m blessed for — but I have friends who spent all their money buying their parents cars.
And your friends think you’ve changed. I could tell you a million things, but you know where I’m going with that.
The advice I’d give to a young, sensitive artist, is figure out how to define what it means to give your power away. For me, that means giving anything outside of yourself the power to define how you feel about yourself. You’re going to sit across from people who see the world differently from you, you are a product to them. That doesn’t mean you have to see yourself that way. Figure out what your spiritual practice is, and make that the center of your life.
What are two qualities you would like to improve about yourself?
[long pause]
1.) I’m an isolationist. That’s not good.
2.) I walk a fine line between opinion and judgement. That’s something I’d like to heal about myself. I don’t want to be judgmental. I work on myself, I guess it’s part of being in the public eye.
What are three qualities you like about yourself?
1.) I like my power of concentration.
2.) I like that I do not lie about music, ever. I don’t care if it’s Stevie Wonder and he asks me what I think about something, I’m going to tell him.
3.) I like that I’m not insincere about love.
Where are you in your evolution today?
I just want to be able to continue to grow. Once I put out Acoustic Soul, the music industry expected me to keep doing it again. Every time I put out an album, I had to fight for it to be different. I’m not 23 anymore. I’m not 27 anymore. I’m not 30. I’m not that person. There’s no way I can pretend. I’m putting out what’s in my heart. You can’t have an artist with a seven album deal and think they’re going do the same over and over.
Now, I want to do what I’m inspired to do. I’m writing songs for dear friends.
Ferrari Sheppard is Editor-in-Chief of Stop Being Famous
There is a lot of really good, really helpful information about breastfeeding out there. But between the internet and the abundance of insights from well-meaning (but often woefully misinformed) friends and family, there is also a lot of misinformation.
We asked a team of breastfeeding experts for some of the most stubborn myths they hear day in and day out. Here’s what they said:
Myth #1: Breastfeeding is easy.
Yes, babies and mothers are hardwired for breastfeeding. And yes, for some new moms it does come easy. But the notion that for most women it is a completely seamless process, with no learning curve, is just plain wrong. Some women and their partners have a hard time conceiving, and some mothers and babies struggle to get the hang of breastfeeding, explained Pat Shelly, an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant and director for the Breastfeeding Center For Greater Washington. “A question I still get asked, after doing this for 35 years, is ‘How come it’s so difficult?'” she said.
Know that you haven’t somehow failed if you find yourself struggling. Shelly urges moms to find a qualified professional who can offer guidance.
Myth #2: Pain is normal.
Breastfeeding isn’t always a cinch, but that doesn’t mean it should hurt. “We know that breastfeeding pain is common, and part of the reason why it’s common is because we’ve been teaching mothers these holds and positions for the last few decades that we’ve learned actually make it more difficult and painful,” said Nancy Mohrbacher, an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant and co-author of Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers. Most of those holds mimicked bottle feeding, she added, but recently breastfeeding experts have embraced more natural positions — letting a mother recline with her baby resting his weight against her body.
But whatever the culprit behind your breast pain, don’t accept it in silence, she said. Get help.
Myth #3: You can prep your breasts.
It’s a good thing to think about breastfeeding before your baby arrives, to clarify what your goals are and work through logistical concerns, like where you’ll pump if you return to work. But you don’t need to do anything to your breasts to get them ready. “Nipples do NOT need to be toughened up,” New York City-based International Board Certified Lactation Consultant Leigh Anne O’Connor explained. “If they get calloused, it is because of a bad latch,” she added — not because you somehow failed to get your nipples in shape ahead of time.
Myth #4: The more water you drink and the healthier you eat, the more milk you’ll make.
Hydration and good nutrition are important for breastfeeding mothers, just as they’re important for pregnant women (and frankly, for anyone at any stage in his or her life). But nursing women need not go overboard. “Someone wrote me recently and she was concerned that she had to eat a perfect diet in order to produce good milk,” Mohrbacher said. “I told her there was no reason to restrict herself in that way.” Yes, some mothers may need to alter their diets in order to accommodate babies with certain sensitivities, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
Likewise, drinking a lot of liquids will not dramatically affect a woman’s milk supply or quality. “Women who are looking to increase their milk supply can go on these relentless journeys, changing their diet and what they drink, when in reality there’s a lot more involved,” Shelly said.
Myth #5: Your breastfed baby can never have a bottle.
This one’s a little tricky. There are babies who will have a difficult time going back and forth between bottles and the breast in the very beginning, Mohrbacher said. “They’re not born with labels,” she added, “so you don’t know if you’re going to have that issue or not.” But if your baby does get a bottle at some point early on, that does not mean breastfeeding is ruined or that he or she is definitely going to suffer from so-called “nipple confusion.”
“In reality, many babies are given bottles,” said O’Connor. “The way a baby handles a bottle is different than the way a baby handles the flow from her mother’s breast. More often a baby chooses the easier way, so it is more a flow preference than ‘confusion.’ With the right guidance, a baby can move from breast to bottle and back again.” Again, if you need help making that happen, ask a professional.
Myth #6: Your newborn will eat every two to three hours.
“An older child may have a more consistent nursing pattern like this,” Mohrbacher said. “But most babies younger than six weeks will feed more randomly — sometimes bunching feedings close together, sometimes going for four- to five-hour sleep stretches.” Talk to your baby’s pediatrician about what ideal early feeding “schedules” (a loose idea) look like, and be prepared to breastfeed your new infant on demand.
Myth #7: Women who breastfeed get less sleep.
Formula-fed babies can generally go longer between feedings, because formula takes longer to digest — but that doesn’t mean their parents are clocking long, restful nights of sleep while their breastfeeding counterparts struggle. First, every baby is different and every baby’s sleep pattern is different and a lot of factors, other than food, go into that. Furthermore, breastfeeding mothers who keep their babies in close proximity to them have the benefit of not having to get up, prepare the formula, warm the bottle, and so on, Shelly said, as well as a surge of oxytocin that can help lull moms back to sleep.
It’s not a contest between breastfeeding and formula-feeding parents to see who can get more sleep. But the idea that breastfeeding mothers inherently get fewer ZZZs is just not true, Shelly argued.
Myth #8: Only birth mothers can breastfeed.
“It is a myth that if you adopt a baby you cannot breastfeed,” O’Connor said. “If a mom previously breastfed a biological child, she may be able to get away with just pumping. If not, then often a combination of hormones and pumping are needed to nurse an adopted baby.” Talk to your health care provider about your options well in advance and remember — “the thing about breastfeeding is that it comes in so many colors and every woman’s experience will be different,” O’Connor said.
Myth #9: Breastfeeding = fool-proof birth control.
“Breastfeeding can be effective birth control,” O’Connor said, but only if certain conditions are met. According to Planned Parenthood, women can use breastfeeding as a form of birth control in the first six months after giving birth if they’re breastfeeding exclusively (meaning that baby is not drinking anything else), nursing at least every four to six hours and have not yet gotten their period again. But it’s not foolproof — 1 in 100 women who practice continuous breastfeeding will get pregnant, and 2 in 100 will if they don’t always practice it correctly, Planned Parenthood estimates.
Myth #10: If you’re going back to work, you need to start pumping and storing right away.
This one depends a lot on your particular circumstances: Whether you’ve got leave, how long that leave is and what your office conditions will be like when you return. But working moms do not need to stress over filling their freezer with container upon container of frozen “just-in-case” breast milk. “Many moms think they must stock their freezer in the early months if they are going to be working full time,” O’Conner said. “While this may be true for those moms who are unable to pump at work, it is not true for those who are able to.” In other words, when it comes to pumping and storing, it might be okay to cut yourself some serious slack.
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One Miami sports journalist recently tried to poke fun at LeBron James in a full-page ad, but two Ohio newspapers said no.
Sports Illustrated reported that Dan LeBatard, an ESPN Radio host, said he wanted to take out an ad with the words “You’re Welcome, Lebron” and “Sincerely, Miami Heat Fans.” LeBatard complained that James has yet to thank his Miami supporters since announcing that he is returning to the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The radio show called the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Akron Beacon-Journal to inquire about placing a full-page ad, but both newspapers said that they declined. This is what the ad might have looked like, according to one Twitter user’s mock-up:
I would pay for this…. pic.twitter.com/bnHCguU3G4
— BANDWAGON HEAT LIFER (@itsleooo) July 29, 2014
LeBatard later released a statement saying that the idea was just a “shameless attention grab.”
The Plain Dealer, of course, is the same newspaper that celebrated James’ return to Cleveland with this front page.
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