Latest news with #Oates
Spectator
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
2709: Our set
The unclued lights are of a kind. One of them consists of two separate theme-words juxta-posed: one is of two words and two have to be paired. The letters in the red squares spell another theme-word and the letters in the yellowsquares can be arranged to form yet another (two-word) theme word. Across 1 Realise she can be awkward (6) 11 Pedro's 'See you later' makes Oates laugh (5,5) 14 Bravo, gents, maybe May's first flower (5) 18 Sky lad mixed polyester resins (6) 19 Bristle at small letter (4) 22 38 with mould in relief (6) 24 Obtain oil that's for cooking the chop? (9) 25 European birds in the housetops? (5) 26 Less convincing Debussy composition (2,3) 28 Will on trial around 10 a.m. (9) 30 One quarrelling with some unpopular guerrilla (6) 33 Lamb's father ate duck on ramble (4) 36 Possibly seated and quite composed (6) 39 Gradually reduce silly oaf's fee (4,3) 41 Rows bring crying, reportedly (5) 42 Lizard Vasco beheaded (5) 43 Weapon causing problem to Central Edinburgh (6,4) 45 Rock group with each secret runaway (6) Down 1 Demands performances from the past, it appears (6) 2 Cadbury import raised in BOAC accident (5) 3 Unfriendly US spies invading Laos on manoeuvres (7) 4 Mist conceals last bits of deciduous trees (6) 5 Records keeper at the reception desk (5) 7 On board help, we hear, for the 2020s, say (6) 9 Musician Holland suggests gemstones (5) 10 Breaks for readers of Butterflies (6) 12 Early telegraphic transmitter could possibly plan course (7,3) 16 I ban 30 Across organising old forfeit (3-7) 23 Soldiers surrounding a base (4) 27 Muse of ill repute, note (7) 30 Acid recluse shuns society (6) 31 Disprove arbiter on Aussie truck (6) 32 Birthplace of firm (6) 34 Doctor musical material (6) 35 Cockney fellow's present at French département (5) 37 Let everyone scream (5) 38 Terence or Penny Black (5) Download a printable version here. A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 14 July. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@ or post to: Crossword 2709, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
John Oates Reveals the One Hall & Oates Song He'd Most Like to Be Remembered for (Exclusive)
John Oates is opening up about the one song he'd most like to be remembered by PEOPLE spoke to the Hall & Oates musician at the 2025 Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony He also details his upcoming song, "Enough Is Enough," with Clyde and Gracie LawrenceJohn Oates knows a thing or two about songwriting. The 77-year-old Hall & Oates musician is opening up about his vast catalog of music as he releases new solo work into the world with "Enough Is Enough," a collaboration with Clyde and Gracie Lawrence, out this Friday, June 20. Looking back, if Oates had to reflect and choose a single song from his discography to be remembered by, he knows which one he'd pick. "I probably go back to 'She's Gone,' the song that Daryl [Hall] and I did in the early '70s because it has stood the test of time, and that's the mark of a great song," he tells PEOPLE at the 2025 Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony in N.Y.C. on Thursday, June 12. Originally released on the duo's 1973 album Abandoned Luncheonette, "She's Gone" reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart three years later. The song is included on Rolling Stone's best 500 songs of all time list. "When you're honoring songwriters here at the Songwriters Hall of Fame, you're honoring songs that are legendary and songs that are timeless, and that's the key," he adds of longevity. These days, Oates remains quite the active songwriter. Just about a year after releasing his last album, Reunion, he's gearing up to release "Enough Is Enough" with the Lawrence siblings. "I got turned on to them, and I started listening to their albums, and I really got inspired," he said of Clyde and Gracie, who perform in the band Lawrence. "I was sitting at my alone one day and I said, 'Boy, I wish I could write a song that sounded like Lawrence.' That was kind of a goal I set for myself, so I did, and when I did I said, 'Well, you know, this kind of does sound like them.'" At the time, Oates wasn't able to come up with a second verse for the song. "So, I took one of their verses and put it in my song," he explains. "I sent it to them, and I said, 'What do you think?' And they loved it and they said, 'Let's do it together.'" "Since then, we've become friends," he says. "We've done a show together, and they're amazing." Oates declares the "Whatcha Want" band is "everything that's good about young pop music." Despite spending quite a long time in a duo himself, Oates didn't have any guidance for the Lawrence siblings while working together. "I don't give advice to anybody, but especially not them," he says. "They're a brother and sister team. They know what they're doing." "They're very, very professional and they're so talented," he adds of Lawrence. "They don't need my help. I'm just thrilled that we could do something together." Read the original article on People
Los Angeles Times
16-06-2025
- Los Angeles Times
In Joyce Carol Oates' luridly seductive ‘Fox,' a pedophile teacher ends up dead
'Fox' opens in October of 2013 with the grisly discovery of a wrecked white Acura and a dismembered body at the bottom of a South Jersey ravine. Joyce Carol Oates calmly winds the mystery backward through the repulsive actions of the deceased before he meets an untimely death, building fear alongside fascination before she finally reveals how he came to his end — and at whose hand. Francis Fox, pedophile, is a smug, deceitful middle school English teacher, practiced in the art of seduction and the rewards and punishment psychology of B.F. Skinner. Fox has been moving from school to school for years, disguising his identity to escape the consequences of his actions. When he vanishes from the Langhorne Academy and his disappearance is investigated by Det. Horace Zwender, there is no dearth of likely suspects: He has wronged everyone from his college girlfriend to the academy's headmistress; he has abused girls at multiple schools. He's lied to everyone, and nobody truly knows him. 'Fox' has the bones of a potboiler but is supported by the sinew of the author's elegant structure and syntax. She draws on natural imagery and a haunting sense of the macabre, castigating the reader's too-easy assumptions. The book incorporates a delightfully complicated, interwoven cast of characters in small-town New Jersey; elements of class, gentrification and divided families create opportunity for misunderstanding and misdirection. The novel is a whodunit, but to reduce it entirely to that distinction would be inaccurate. Like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's 'Lolita,' which Oates' protagonist references and dismisses frequently, Fox's story is inescapably abhorrent yet enthralling. As Nabokov wrote of his own novel, it lacks a moral, and a moral center. That's not the point, though. Oates understands, as always, how to keep us on the hook. Discussions of Fox's likability are also moot: He's repulsive and unreliable, a monster. His graphic, dehumanizing actions are meant to turn stomachs. He's a known liar. The author carefully reveals the story of Fox's fate, circling the Wieland wetlands ravine again and again. There are any number of sympathetic suspects, or perhaps an easy, less disturbing explanation. One thing is clear: Almost every character believes that Francis Fox deserved to die. There are hard lines of propriety between Fox and the rest of the world, and despite — or perhaps because of — that, Oates makes plain that seduction, narrative and instruction each entail the exercise of power. When the teacher, typically a loner, learns that other faculty members 'encounter maddening students … whom, however hard they try, they can't seduce,' he muses: 'Seduce is not the word. No. Can't reach is the preferable term.' Oates leads us through Fox's lurid world, drawing deliberately uncomfortable parallels between his calculated actions and the work of novelists and teachers, each of whom must also use enticement and enchantment to reach their mark. Her dark protagonist is highly educated, allowing him to deftly anticipate the actions of his potential victims and accusers. The DNA of 'Fox' is thus in art and literature: Francis Fox uses both to develop his outer and inner life. Fox imagines his girls as Balthusian waifs, attracting him with a distracted air of seduction. He obsessively disdains 'Lolita,' remarking often on the impractical physicality of Humbert's sexual relationship; in doing so, he reveals his unhealthy fixations and predilections. 'Fox' similarly explores Edgar Allan Poe's life. Poe is credited with writing the first American detective story, and Oates writes in the same vein. But Fox is fixated on Poe's dead-girl literature and his real-life marriage to a child bride. Oates seems to posit that we allow whatever entertains, and we return to whatever has entertained before. She picks at the American lionization of our creative heroes, especially those with asterisks next to their names because they've abused young women. That society allows such men to become heroes is as troubling as her protagonist's actions. It appears that she wants us to indict us, too. Fox calls himself alternately 'Mr. Tongue' or 'Big Teddy Bear' when he brings his eager seventh-grade charges to his basement office to snuggle, kiss and photograph, luring them there with the promise of comments on their writing and drugging them with benzo-laced treats. 'It was his strategy,' Oates writes, 'as soon as possible in a new term, to determine which girls, if they were attractive, were fatherless. For a fatherless girl is an exquisite rose on a branch lacking thorns, there for the picking.' The lurid scenes where Fox abuses students like Genevieve, his favorite 'Little Kitten,' in his locked office are vile. Yet in addition to fitting the stereotypical profile of a pedophile, he also wields abusive and cold-blooded coercion in the classroom. Following the 'principle of intermittent reinforcement, in which an experimental subject is rewarded for their effort not continuously, or predictably, but intermittently, or unpredictably,' he grades 'in a way designed to shatter her defenses: it will be impossible for her not to feel relief, gratitude, some measure of happiness when her grade improves, thus she will be conditioned to seek a higher grade.' This is a chilling reminder that artistic mentors can be abusive in many different ways. Francis Fox torments his pupils at every level, using calculated psychology to entice and to destroy. 'Fox' hauntingly explores the way that beguiling figures can inspire, create and shape art. Oates presents the idea of malignant artistic inspiration. One of Fox's charges keeps his darkest secrets in a 'Mystery-Journal.' The mystery of Fox's death gets resolved, yet Oates doesn't end there: Her ending changes who has the power. Twisted expectation and manipulated attention are both hallmarks of artistic creation. In the wrong hands — like Francis Fox's — they're instruments of torture. In the author's, they're tools. The allusive nature of 'Fox' and its twist ending shows how greatness that comes from awfulness can be inconveniently, unquestioningly good. What do we do with the idea that the worst offenses can also sometimes create art? Readers, consumers and audiences haven't yet come to peace with that, just like we haven't come to terms with how to separate art from a monstrous artist. Oates wants us to turn pages and squirm. Partington is a teacher in Elk Grove and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
San Francisco Chronicle
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Hall & Oates singer calls yacht rock a joke created by ‘two jerk-offs in California'
Daryl Hall is not a fan of yacht rock, even if his band, Hall & Oates is frequently classified as one of the genre's most prominent acts. 'This is something I don't understand,' the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee told acclaimed music producers Justin Richmond and Rick Rubin on an episode of their ' Broken Record ' podcast released on Thursday, May 8. 'First of all, yacht rock was a f—ing joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre.' The term came up in conversation after Richmond brought up the Doobie Brothers, the San Jose rock band often associated with the genre characterized by its catchy, relaxing tunes. 'It's just R&B, with maybe some jazz in there. It's mellow R&B, smooth R&B. I don't see what the yacht part is,' Hall insisted. The term was coined by J.D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Star and Lane Farnham, who created the mockumentary web series 'Yacht Rock' in 2005 about the West Coast soft rockers of the 1970s and '80s. Decades later, filmmaker Garrett Price was inspired by the project to make his own, 'Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary,' released in 2024. Other major yacht rock artists include Steely Dan, Toto and Christopher Cross. Hall and his bandmate John Oates have frequently been linked to the genre. The Philadelphia rock duo had been performing together since the 1970s and experienced a resurgence in the early 2000s when the term yacht rock first started circulating. But Hall chalks it up to a misunderstanding. 'People misjudged us because they couldn't label us. They always came up with all this kind of crap — soft rock and yacht rock and all this other nonsense,' Hall continued. 'None of it really describes anything that I do.' Oates, on the other hand, doesn't seem to share Hall's animosity. 'I think yacht rock was the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection,' he said in a 2007 interview with Seattle Weekly. 'They were the first ones to start to parody us and put us out there again, and a lot of things have happened because of yacht rock.' The two former bandmates fell out in November 2023 after Hall accused Oates of betraying him by trying to sell his share of their joint business venture, Whole Oats Enterprises. They haven't played a show together since October 2022.
Perth Now
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
'I never understood it': Daryl Hall hates that Hall and Oates were labelled yacht rock
Daryl Hall has branded yacht rock a "f****** joke" and says his band Hall and Oates were "misjudged" as the sub-genre. Originally the name of a 2005 comedy series by J.D. Ryznar, Hunter Stair, and Lane Farnham, yacht rock was often used to label soft rock acts of the mid-1970s to mid-1980s - but it's not a label the 'Maneater' hitmaker ever wants to be associated with. Speaking on the 'Broken Record' podcast, he bemoaned: 'This is something I don't understand. First of all, yacht rock was a f****** joke by two jerk offs in California and suddenly it became a genre. 'I don't even understand it. I never understood it.' The 78-year-old musician says people found it hard to put Hall and Oates in a box, so they would use the terms yacht rock and soft rock. He added: 'It's just R'n'B, with maybe some jazz in there. It's mellow R'n'B. It's smooth R'n'B. I don't see what the yacht part is.' Daryl went on: 'People misjudged us because they couldn't label us. 'They always came up with all this kind of c***, soft rock and yacht rock and all this other nonsense. And none of it, none of it really describes anything that I do really.' Other bands who were branded yacht rock included Toto, Steely Dan, and The Doobie Brothers. Meanwhile Daryl recently insisted he'll never work with John Oates again. The singer sued his former musical partner in 2023 to stop him from selling their stake in their publishing company, Whole Oats Enterprises - a move he branded "the ultimate partnership betrayal". He was unable to talk about the legal wrangle, but he admitted things had gone too far for them to reunite. He told the Sunday Times' Culture magazine in March: "That ship has gone to the bottom of the ocean. I've had a lot of surprises in my life, disappointments, betrayals, so I'm kind of used to it... 'I've been involved with some pretty shady characters over the years. That's where the problems start.' Daryl also admitted he feels frustrated that his prolific songwriting in Hall and Oates - who sold 60 million records - has largely gone unrecognised. He said: 'The songs with his lead vocal are the songs he wrote, and all the other ones, which is about 90 per cent, are the ones I wrote... "It was very frustrating.'
