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This morning, Pottermore released the list of special guests that will be attending the opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios Hollywood.

Among those in attendance are Harry Potter stars, Warwick Davis, Tom Felton, Evanna Lynch, James Phelps and Oliver Phelps for the red carpet Grand Opening on April 5.

For this Wizarding World, they are bringing in the most magic they can. The actors will be joined by very special guest, the brilliant John Williams. The Oscar Award-winning composure of Hedwig’s Theme and other movie scores we know and love so much, will be joining the others on the red carpet. We certainly hope a full orchestra will be following in toe, and Mr. Williams will take up the baton to provide the music for the night!

Pottermore reports:

“A new magical world is lying in wait. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter opens on 7 April at Universal Studios Hollywood.

“And to celebrate, Harry Potter actors…will be on the red carpet at the Grand Opening on 5 April.

“They’ll also be joined by a very special guest: Oscar-winning composer John Williams, who scored the first three Harry Potter films, including the iconic Hedwig’s Theme.

“Following in the footsteps of Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Japan, the Hollywood attraction will bring back some of the fans’ favourite rides, as well as a few new surprises.

“For example, the ride Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey – which is featured at both the Orlando and Japan theme parks – will bring new state of the art 3D-HD technology for the first time in the US, promising visitors a trip with a, well, whole new dimension. The Flight of the Hippogriff will be Universal Studio Hollywood’s first outdoor rollercoaster.

“Until the opening day, you can obsessively check for updates on Universal Studio Hollywood’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages while you wait.”

John Williams – composer of the first three Harry Potter film soundtracks – is set to receive the 44th AFL Life Achievement award at a gala tribute on June 9th 2016, marking the first time a composer has been honoured by the American Film Institute.

“John Williams has written the soundtrack to our lives,” said Sir Howard Stringer, Chair, AFI Board of Trustees. “Note by note, through chord and chorus, his genius for marrying music with movies has elevated the art form to symphonic levels and inspired generations of audiences to be enriched by the magic of the movies. AFI is proud to present him with its 44th Life Achievement Award.”

Over 150 titles spanning seven decades are owed to Williams’ ingenuity. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993) and the Star Wars (1997) sountracks are composed by Williams, along with famous collaborations with Steven Spielberg which include Jaws (1975), E.T. (1982) and Schindler’s List (1993). The newest Star Wars films will also be composed by him.

He has had the most Oscar nominations (49) of any living person, and has won 5 Oscars in total.

The Wrap reports:

‘The AFI Life Achievement Award dates back to 1973 and is presented to a single honoree each year “whose talent has in a fundamental way advanced the film art; whose accomplishment has been acknowledged by scholars, critics, professional peers and the general public; and whose work has stood the test of time.”

The 43rd AFI Life Achievement Award honored Steve Martin, and other recipients include Mel Brooks (2013), Tom Hanks (2002) and Meryl Streep (2004).’

Join us here at Leaky in congratulating John Williams on another amazing (and well-deserved) achievement!

Wednesday, 28 May marks the 33rd anniversary of the death of Mary Lou William. Williams was an African-American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and contemporary of both Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, is often overlooked as a key contributor to the jazz movement of the 20th century.

Born in Atlanta, Williams had her first taste of arranged music while attending church in her hometown. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1915 only spiked her interest in music, specifically jazz, as the city was a stop on the Theater Owners Booking association route, a vaudeville circuit for African-American performers.

Williams was first able to truly experiment with her musical talents as the pianist and arranger for the band Andy Kirk’s 12 Cloud’s of Joy. She came to this opportunity through her husband, who was the saxophonist for the band. Williams continued to arrange for the group creating household hits like “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” “Little Joe from Chicago,” and “Roll ‘em” until her departure from the band in 1942.

Mary Lou Williams by William Gottlieb, c. 1946. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Williams’s arrangements were not limited to Andy Kirk’s band. Her compositions were featured by jazz greats including, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Lunceford. The New York Philharmonic performed Williams’s Zodiac Suite at Carnegie Hall in 1946. The Suite was composed of twelve arrangements, each labeled for a sign of the zodiac and all inspired by different jazz musicians.

Facing gender barriers in the states that hindered wide-spread success, Williams traveled to Europe in the 1950s. After performing in both London and Paris, Williams’s returned to the Unites States and simultaneously entertained a brief intermission in her musical career to concentrate her efforts on more religious pursuits.

Returning to music in the late 1950s, Williams reentered the scene with more of a devout lens. Throughout the late 1950s and 60s, Williams composed a number of religious arrangements and musical masses including “Hymn in Honor of St. Martin De Porres,” “Mass for Lenten Season,” and most notably “Mass for Peace and Justice” which was later renamed “Mary Lou’s Mass.” This last mass was the musical backdrop to Alvin Ailey’s series of dances presented under the same name and was also performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1975 as the first jazz music performed in this iconic cathedral.

Williams returned to secular composing in the last decade of her life and also worked as an artist-in-residence at Duke University up until her death in 1981.

Grove Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its lengthy entry on the renowned jazz singer Mary Lou Williams. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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John Williams, the famed composer behind Hedwig's Theme, will be honored with a lifetime achievement award at this year's Classic Brit Awards in October.

Williams composed the soundtrack for the first two "Harry Potter" films, but is also well known for composing the soundtracks to "Star Wars," "Schindler's List," "Jurassic Park" and "ET."

Dickon Stainer, co-chairman of the Classic Brit Awards committee, said:

"John Williams has crafted some of the most memorable film scores for over half a century and we are delighted that he has kindly accepted the Lifetime Achievement award in honour of his fine work."

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By Elvin Lim

If NPR values public deliberation as the highest virtue of a democratic polity, it did its own ideals a disservice last week when it fired Juan Williams without offering a plausible justification why it did so. On October 20, Williams had uttered these fateful words on the O’ Reilly Factor:

“…when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Anxiety and worry make for poor public reasons. Quite often discomfort is a façade for prejudice – an emotion that knows no reasonable defense. Some men feel uncomfortable when women speak up in the corporate board room. Some straight men and women feel uncomfortable that they are serving with gays in the military. And some black men feel uncomfortable when they see people dressed up in Muslim garb on airplanes.

Perhaps there is a case that Juan Williams should have been fired because he allegedly harbored xenophobic sentiments, but that was not the official reason why he was let go. Williams was fired because he articulated his discomfort, not because he felt said discomfort.

According to NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, Williams had repeated fallen short of NPR’s standards that their news analysts should “avoid expressing strong personal opinions on controversial subjects in public settings.”

Notice that nothing was said about either the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Williams’ emotional opinions. And so the emotions, though felt, were not addressed, and a learning moment was missed. NPR was indeed being politically correct, but what has not been noted is that its political correctness played to both sides of the ideological spectrum: in censoring Williams’ speech, it played to the Left, but in censoring its real reasons for doing so, it played to the Right. As a result NPR’s action impressed no one.

Discomfort is an emotion. And emotions are just manifestations of reasons not yet expressed. Sometimes, when these reasons are legitimate, so are the emotions that come attached to them. Righteous anger, for example. But other times, when these reasons are illegitimate, then the emotions attached to them are necessarily illegitimate. Xenophobia, for example. But if we don’t talk about the reasons behind the emotions – which NPR has elected to do – then a learning moment was missed. No doubt, NPR found it difficult to publicly articulate the claim that feeling anxious in the presence of someone in Muslim garb may be a natural, but not a reasonable reaction, because most Americans probably feel such a reflex.

Ironically, that was exactly what Juan Williams was trying to explore in first admitting his emotions. This is because seconds after his emotional confession, Williams returned to reason when responding to O’Reilly’s claim that “Muslims attacked us on 9/11,” by saying, “Wait, hold on because if you say, wait, Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don’t say first and foremost we’ve got a problem with Christians. That’s crazy.” (See full transcript here.)

“I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith,” Williams wrote in a statement released by Fox News. This was

Lauren Appelwick

The morning of June 9th, I and about 500 NYC elementary school students gathered at the Apollo theater to dance, gawk at rap music icons, and…learn about healthy eating. Hip Hop HEALS (Healthy Eating and Living in Schools) is a program that seeks to teach young people the rules for healthy living, ways to prevent heart disease and strokes, and curb the incidences of childhood obesity.

The showcase featured rap stars Doug E. Fresh, Kool Moe Dee, Artie Green, Chuck D (via video), Grandmaster Caz, Easy A.D., DJ Webstar and New York State first lady Michelle Paterson, among a number of student performers.

“You’re giving energy and you’re getting it back,” said Doug E. Fresh. “We wanna use hip hop as a positive tool to influence and enlighten.”

To the beats of Snoop Dogg, for instance, students were encouraged

If it’s deep fried and greasy
Drop it like it’s hot, drop it like it’s hot, drop it like it’s hot
If it’s high in calories
Drop it like it’s hot, drop it like it’s hot, drop it like it’s hot
If it’s rotting out your teeth
Drop it like it’s hot, drop it like it’s hot, drop it like it’s hot

“We believe it’s the music and cartoons that really are the heart and soul of the program,” said Stroke Diaries author and Harlem Hospital’s “Hip Hop Doc” Olajide Williams, MD.

Dr. Williams is the founder and director of the Hip Hop Public Education Center, which has also partnered with the National Stroke Association to develop the Hip Hop Stroke program. In a video, Williams says, “When I first saw the program that they had developed, I was very excited, I thought, ‘This has terrific potential.’ There was only one thing missing: in the program they had developed, there was no hip hop.”

So the Hip Hop Doc teamed up with Doug E. Fresh to produce a series of cartoons to further the mission. Each video features a rap song. Stroke Ain’t No Joke, <

This evening, another snow storm is coming our way here in New Jersey. We appear to be located on the border between "major" and "crippling" snowfall, if our local forecast is to be believed. It will be a classic Nor'easter, with the snowstorm that's currently in Chicago joining forces with the storm tracking across the south, so that we'll end up with a very strong snowstorm that includes some blizzard conditions (which requires visibility of 1/4 mile or less and winds in excess of 30 m.p.h. for a period of 3 hours or more, as it turns out).

What is more appropriate on a day like today than a poem about a blizzard by one of New Jersey's native sons?

Blizzard
by William Carlos Williams

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down —
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes —
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there —
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

The poem is written in free verse. Given his use of the word "anger" and his time period extending to 60 years, I have to note that Williams was not restricting himself to writing about a snowstorm, but is also speaking about the accumulation of a life, and he compares looking back at his footsteps in the snow to looking back at the course of his life.

Radio listeners in the UK have selected Hedwig's Theme by John Williams as the all time favorite in a new poll of children's classics for station Classic FM. The PA reports the iconic main theme song for the Harry Potter films was the winner,"with youngsters choosing it ahead of other movie scores such as Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean and E.T. But more traditional classical tunes by P... Read the rest of this post

The Los Angeles Times Hero Complex Blog recently spoke with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince soundtrack composer Nicholas Hooper, who spoke about his role and influence in creating the music for the sixth film.  Having worked with film director David Yates on various other projects over the past nineteen years, Mr. Hooper discusses the process of putting his own stamp on the score for the... Read the rest of this post

Richard Dawkins is the bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He’s also a pre-eminent scientist, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and is a fellow of New College, Oxford. Called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by the media, he is one of the most famous advocates of Darwinian evolution. His most recent book is The Oxford Guide to Modern Science Writing, a collection of the best science writing in the last century.

This is the third in a series of podcasts we’re running from an interview with Dawkins. You’ve heard him speak about Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, and Watson & Crick, the men who discovered the shape of DNA. Now, Dawkins tells us a bit more about his new book and reflects on the men who influenced his own theories.

Transcript after the jump.

DORIAN DEVINS: Welcome Richard Dawkins. You have a book out, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, which you have edited. And you personally selected all the writings that are in this?

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes, I selected them in collaboration with the OUP editor Latha Menon. We’ve worked together before; we worked together on my own collection of writings, which is called A Devil’s Chaplain. And so we worked well together, and we chose them together.

DEVINS: And how many different scientists are represented in this book?

DAWKINS: I haven’t counted.

DEVINS: It extends back to-the earliest writing is…

DAWKINS: Go back to the sort of Eddington-gene sort of time, I can’t remember what date they are, but sort of early part of the twentieth century. The decision was not to go back to the nineteenth century, that would have been a nice thing to do but it would have opened up a whole new vista which I didn’t feel like taking on.

DEVINS: And it would have necessitated your eliminating some of these people, I suspect. So, I see you have George Williams in here.

DAWKINS: George Williams was a very important influence in modern evolutionary theory. In 1966, he wrote a really seminal book called Adaptation and Natural Selection, which once and for all destroyed the theory of group selection, which was a very important thing to do at that time. And he substituted the view of evolution which I later christened the theory of the selfish gene. Williams didn’t use that phrase, but in effect the selfish gene was a new way of putting the theory that Williams had put forward in the 1960s. Oddly enough, I didn’t get it from Williams, I got it from Hamilton. Bill Hamilton, W. D. Hamilton, who’s also in the book and a very wonderful, eccentric character who I deeply loved and who died, tragically, not that long ago (about oh, well, actually maybe seven or eight years ago now). And Hamilton and Williams, I think, could be seen as the founding fathers of the selfish gene theory.

DEVINS: And what part did Hamilton bring in?

DAWKINS: Well Hamilton invented what Maynard Smith actually called kin selection; the idea that animals behave altruistically towards kin because they share genes. And in a way, you could say that everybody knew that about offspring, everybody knew about parental care, but what Hamilton showed was that the same principle as parental care works for brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, etc.

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There are reports online today stating that legendary composer John Williams would like to return to the Harry Potter films, and hopes to provide the score for the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. These reports stem... Read the rest of this post

Today I share the blogging with my son, Evan, age nine, who earlier today wrote an update of our time in the deep south (see below). Evan's comments will be in a bigger font. We just arrived in Bryan, Texas a moment ago, so I don't have much to say about Texas yet except that it is big and dark and rainy. [Oh, I just realized that as I type this, it is techincally by 41st birthday! :-) ]

EVAN: Ok, so yesterday we left Atlanta (we got up at 7:00) and did a 2 and a half hour drive to Alabama, and all Of a sudden, we see this sign that said: ENTERING ALABAMA CENTRAL TIME ZONE . What?! We shouted. Then the clock that before said 9:49 (which was when we were supposed to arrive) went down to 8:49. We could have slept an hour later! Well, at least we get to relive the past hour, said my dad. On the road we made up a game. The game was, if you saw a water tower and shouted torre de agua (that’s Spanish) first, then you would get a point. At the end of the trip, whoever had the most points, won. To me, the driving wasn’t very long, but that’s probably because I was waching tv.

MARK: I love the south. It's green and lush, and the people are friendly and the weather has been beautiful. I also love that it has a chain of grocery stores called Piggly Wiggly. Whevenver we see one, we Hugheses are all about the Piggly Wiggly! I took this picture through the windsheild of our car on our way to Birmingham, AL:


Oh yes, Piggly. I will follow...

One thing I do miss about Massachusetts, though, is the availability of Starbucks. In fact, I've been on a daily quest to find one anywhere near where we go. On the way to Birmingham I found one! I was so pleased, I took a picture of my grande Gazebo blend.



Evan: We went to the Alabama welcome center and my dad and me got Hank Williams posters. Hank Williams is like an Elvis to country music. My dad was very happy. I was happy too, except I had never heard of Hank Williams before this. But I'm sure he must be pretty good.

Mark: Because of the unexpected time-change (what? did we miss a memo or something?), we arrived in Birmingham earlier than planned, which allowed us time to look around. Since Birmingham metal-working played a big role in the city's history, they have a huge statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the fire and forge.



EVAN: Later, we had lunch with Hester Bass the author of So Many Houses, and her family (father Clayton, kids Anderson and Miranda) in Birmingham. We ate at a Cracker Barrell, a southern place I'd never eaten before. It was good. My mom and dad ate southern food. I ate grilled cheese. It was good. Hester gave us copies of her book, which was very nice of her.

Mark: In addition to being the author of the early reader So Many Houses, Hester is also the author of a soon-to-be released picture book biography of American artist, Walter Inglis Anderson, to be illustrated by the acclaimed E. B. Lewis and published by Candlewick Press. Hester and her family were amazingly kind to drive all the way down to Huntsville to meet with us. It's lovely to meet such wonderful people when you're far from home. Many thanks to the 'Bama Basses, our new friends!

   

EVAN: Next, we had dinner with the Campbell family In Jackson, Mississippi. I played with three boys named Graem, Nathan and Douglas. They had a big snail called a wolf snail. I let it crawl up my arm. It was so cool!

Mark: Sarah is the author and photographer of an upcoming picture book about wolf snails, snails that eat other snails -- an amazing creature I'd never heard of before. Her photographs are absolutely beautiful and her book will be published in the Spring. Although we were total strangers, Sarah and Richard and their boys fed us and treated us like family. We had a wonderful Mississippi evening which we will never forget -- complete with fireworks set off by neighbors. Thanks you, Campbells, our other new friends in the south!




This morning (actually, yesterday morning now) we stopped by at Lemuria Books in Jackson, a cool independent bookstore with a relaxing atmosphere. Here we are with a very nice bookseller named Ciel. 



Lots of traffic problems on the way through Louisianna to Bryan, TX, so it took us much longer than it should have. Still, we're here safe, sound, and happy. Soon I'll actually go to bed. 

A big, Texas good night to y'all. 
-- Mark

Earlier this month The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a new interview with composer John Williams where he discussed his involvement with scoring the music for the Harry Potter films. Asked why he was unable to score the music for... Read the rest of this post