Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political commentator, social justice activist and anarcho-syndicalist advocate. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics,” Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 100 books. In 1967, Chomsky entered public consciousness through his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and came to be associated with the New Left. He was arrested multiple times for his anti-war activism. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal public activism, including opposition to the Iraq War and support for the Occupy movement. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberal capitalism and mainstream news media. He was born December 7, 1928.
Sojourner Truth (born Isabella “Bell” Baumfree) was an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, in 1828 she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?” During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves. She died on November 26, 1883 at the age of 86.
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, illustrator, film director and children’s book author. She became famous worldwide because of her critically acclaimed autobiographical graphic novels, Persepolis and Persepolis 2. The series describes her childhood in Iran, during and after the Islamic Revolution, and her adolescence in Europe. Satrapi and comic artist Vincent Paronnaud co-directed an animated adaptation, also called Persepolis (2007). Satrapi was born on November 22, 1969.
Tori Amos is an American singer-songwriter, pianist and composer. She is a classically trained musician and has a mezzo-soprano vocal range. Amos won a full scholarship to the Peabody Institute at age five and was expelled at age 11. She originally served as the lead singer of short-lived 1980s pop group Y Kant Tori Read before achieving her breakthrough as a solo artist in the early 1990s. Amos has since become one of the world’s most prominent female singer-songwriters and has received eight Grammy nominations. Early in her solo career, she was one of the few alternative rock performers to use a piano as her primary instrument. Amos has sold more than 12 million albums worldwide. She was born on August 22, 1963.
Polly Jean Harvey, known as PJ Harvey, is an English musician and singer-songwriter. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments. Harvey began her career in 1988 when she joined local band Automatic Dlamini. In 1991, she formed an eponymous trio and released two studio albums, Dry (1992) and Rid of Me (1993) before the trio disbanded. As a solo artist Harvey has released six studio albums, including To Bring You My Love (1995), Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) and Let England Shake (2011). She began recording her ninth studio album earlier this year. Harvey was born on October 9, 1969.
Maya Lin is an American designer and artist who is known for her work in sculpture and landscape art. She first came to fame at the age of 21 as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington, D.C. Her minimalist design aroused controversy but has become very popular with the public over the years. Lin is one of just 13 “groundbreaking Americans” featured in Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, a children’s book by United States President Barack Obama. She was born on October 5, 1959.
Note: After checking the list of people featured in Obama’s children’s book, I realized that Maya Lin is character #13 of 13, thus completing my Of Thee I Sing 8-bit series. Mission accomplished.
Faheem Najm, better known by his stage name T-Pain, is an American singer, songwriter, rapper, record producer and actor. His discography includes Rappa Ternt Sanga (2005), Epiphany (2007) and Thr33 Ringz (2008). T-Pain has earned two Grammy Awards alongside artists Kanye West and Jamie Foxx. T-Pain is the founder of the record label Nappy Boy Entertainment, established in 2005. He is known for using and popularizing the Auto-Tune pitch shift effect. From 2006 to 2010, T-Pain was featured on more than 50 chart-topping singles, including Flo Rida’s “Low” and The Lonely Island’s “I’m on a Boat.” T-Pain was born on September 30, 1985.
Brigitte Bardot is a French former actress, singer and fashion model. She was one of the best known sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s and was widely referred to by her initials. During her career in show business, she starred in 47 films, performed in several musical shows and recorded over 60 songs. Bardot started her acting career in 1952 and became world-famous in 1957 with the controversial film And God Created Woman. She later starred in the 1963 film Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard. French photographer Sam Lévin was instrumental in creating Bardot’s image, particularly with The Towel Session shoot in 1959. Bardot caught the attention of French intellectuals and was the subject of a famous essay, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome by Simone de Beauvoir. Bardot retired from the entertainment industry in 1973. After her retirement, she established herself as an animal rights activist. During the 1990s, she generated controversy by criticizing immigration and Islam in France and has been fined five times for inciting racial hatred. Bardot was born on September 28, 1934.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known) and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair. He was born on September 24, 1896 and died on December 21, 1940.
Banksy is a pseudonymous English graffiti artist, political activist, film director and painter. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humor with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls and bridges of cities throughout the world. Banksy’s work grew out of the Bristol underground scene. Observers have noted that his style is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris. Banksy’s first film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, billed as “the world’s first street art disaster movie,” made its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In August 2015, Banksy opened Dismaland, a theme park-styled art installation in the UK that is scheduled to run until September 27, 2015.
Jack Vigliatura was the vocalist for For Squirrels, a Florida-based alternative rock band. The band was founded in 1992 by Vigliatura and two childhood friends who had gone off to college together at the University of Florida. Their single “Mighty K.C.” was a minor radio hit, but the band is perhaps most remembered for the tragic touring van accident and claimed the lives of founding members Vigliatura and bassist Bill White, along with tour manager Tim Bender. On the way home from a show in New York, the band’s tour van blew a tire and overturned on Interstate 95 in Georgia. The accident happened less than a month before the release of Example (1995), right as the band was on the cusp of national recognition. After recovering from serious injuries, the two surviving members changed the band’s name to Subrosa and ultimately disbanded in 2001. Vigliatura was born on December 20, 1973 and died on September 8, 1995 at age 21.
It’s been exactly 20 years since the tragic tour van accident. As a high school student just a few years younger than the band members, I remember hearing about the accident on the radio while flipping through CDs at a local music store. You just never know what’s going to happen in life. To get a sense of what the band was like, watch the live performance (and Vigliatura’s mid-song emotional breakdown) of an early version of “Mighty K.C.” in Miami Beach on May 27, 1994. The song is about Kurt Cobain and the many suicides by fans following his death (which went under-reported by the media for fear of escalation). I love this song so much but it always hurts to listen to, especially considering that the lyrics seem to foreshadow the death of Vigliatura and the band the following year. You should also listen to my favorite track “Disenchanted” (and their full album), if you haven’t. ♥ “Into the great unknown / Things are gonna change in our favor.”
Jane Addams was a pioneering American social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women’s suffrage and world peace. In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She campaigned for better social conditions and led investigations into child welfare, local public health and education. She introduced the idea of the settlement house to the United States, co-founding Hull House in 1889. In 1920, she co-founded the ACLU. In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the U.S. Addams was born on September 6, 1860 and died on May 21, 1935.
Doug Martsch is an American singer and musician. He is best known for his distinctive vocals and guitar-playing style in the band Built to Spill. Martsch’s first band was Farm Days in the early 1980s. His second band was Treepeople, with whom he released three albums and two EPs. He has been the lead singer and guitarist of Built to Spill since 1992. Built to Spill has released released eight full-length albums, including this year’s Untethered Moon (2015). Martsch was born in Twin Falls, Idaho in September 1969.
Robert Diggs, better known by his stage names RZA and Bobby Digital, is an American music producer, multi-instrumentalist, author, rapper, actor, director, composer and screenwriter. A prominent figure in hip-hop, RZA is a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan and its de facto leader. He is a cousin of GZA and late band-mate Ol’ Dirty Bastard. RZA has produced almost all of Wu-Tang Clan’s albums as well as many Wu-Tang solo and affiliate projects. In addition to the Wu-Tang Clan and his solo releases, RZA was also a founding member of the horrorcore hip-hop group Gravediggaz where he used the name the RZArector. He has acted in numerous movies and TV series, including Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) and American Gangster (2007). He has also written, arranged and/or produced music for more than 40 film soundtracks. RZA directed, co-wrote and starred in The Man with the Iron Fists (2012). He was born on July 5, 1969.
Gary Grice, better known by his stage names GZA and the Genius, is an American rapper and songwriter. A founding member of the hip-hop group, the Wu-Tang Clan, GZA is known as the group’s “spiritual head,” being both the oldest and the first within the group to receive a record deal. He has appeared on his fellow Clan members’ solo projects, and has maintained a successful solo career since the release of his critically acclaimed solo album Liquid Swords (1995). An analysis of GZA’s lyrics found that he has the second-largest vocabulary in hip-hop music, behind Aesop Rock. GZA was born on August 22, 1966.
Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1969, in a critical moment of the Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton’s team’s work prevented an abort of landing on the moon. She was 32 years old when the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon while running her code. She designed software robust enough to handle buffer overflows and cycle-stealing, which was instrumental in the success of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Hamilton is also credited with coining the term “software engineering.” In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language, based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. Hamilton was born on August 17, 1936.
Teren Delvon Jones, better known as Del the Funky Homosapien, is an American underground hip-hop artist from Oakland, California. In 1991, with the help of his cousin Ice Cube, Del released his first solo album, I Wish My Brother George Was Here, at the age of 18. In 2000, Del released his fourth solo album, Both Sides of the Brain, as well as the rap space-opera Deltron 3030, which was a collaborative work with artists Dan the Automator and Kid Koala. Del also collaborated with virtual trip-hop group Gorillaz on two songs on their debut album, including the hit “Clint Eastwood.” Since 2008, Del has released seven albums, including last year’s free LP Iller Than Most (2014). He was born on August 12, 1972.
Margaretha MacLeod, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a Frisian exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy and executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for Germany during World War I. The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale. Her life inspired multiple films, including Mata Hari (1931) starring Greta Garbo, which further popularized the Mata Hari legend. Mata Hari was born on August 7, 1876 and died on October 15, 1917.
Elliott Smith was an American singer-songwriter and musician. His primary instrument was the guitar, though he was also proficient with piano, clarinet, bass guitar, drums and harmonica. Smith lived much of his adult life in Portland, Oregon, and began his solo career in 1994. He rose to mainstream prominence when his song “Miss Misery“—included in the soundtrack for the film Good Will Hunting (1997)—was nominated for an Oscar in 1998. Smith suffered from depression, alcoholism and drug dependence, and these topics often appear in his lyrics. At age 34, he died in Los Angeles from two stab wounds to the chest, likely self-inflicted. At the time of his death, he was working on his sixth studio album, From a Basement on the Hill, which was posthumously completed and released in 2004. Smith was born on August 6, 1969 and died on October 21, 2003.
My wife Heidi, a native Oregonian, is a big Elliott Smith fan. I also have a great appreciation for his music, but I think she loves him more. My favorite Smith song is “Needle in the Hay.” In unrelated news, yesterday our daughter Ramona turned two years old. We had a little family pizza party, with vegetarian pizza and two candles stuck into homemade strawberry shortcake (though we substituted chocolate brownie mini flax muffins for the shortcake). It was the best.
Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter, singer and one of the pivotal and most influential figures in jazz music. Coming to prominence in the 1920s, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance. With his instantly recognizable gravelly voice, Armstrong was an influential singer, perhaps most famous for “What a Wonderful World.” Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong’s influence extends well beyond jazz music. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers whose skin color was secondary to his music in an America that was severely racially divided. An active musician for over 50 years, he recorded numerous albums, including two with Ella Fitzgerald. Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901 and died on July 6, 1971.
Note: Interestingly, Louis Armstrong has a major tennis stadium named in his honor. Louis Armstrong Stadium, located in New York City’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park, is one of the U.S. Open venues. Armstrong lived nearby until his death. This year’s U.S. Open begins on August 31.
Jack Vigliatura – No. 915
Jack Vigliatura was the vocalist for For Squirrels, a Florida-based alternative rock band. The band was founded in 1992 by Vigliatura and two childhood friends who had gone off to college together at the University of Florida. Their single “Mighty K.C.” was a minor radio hit, but the band is perhaps most remembered for the tragic touring van accident and claimed the lives of founding members Vigliatura and bassist Bill White, along with tour manager Tim Bender. On the way home from a show in New York, the band’s tour van blew a tire and overturned on Interstate 95 in Georgia. The accident happened less than a month before the release of Example (1995), right as the band was on the cusp of national recognition. After recovering from serious injuries, the two surviving members changed the band’s name to Subrosa and ultimately disbanded in 2001. Vigliatura was born on December 20, 1973 and died on September 8, 1995 at age 21.
It’s been exactly 20 years since the tragic tour van accident. As a high school student just a few years younger than the band members, I remember hearing about the accident on the radio while flipping through CDs at a local music store. You just never know what’s going to happen in life. To get a sense of what the band was like, watch the live performance (and Vigliatura’s mid-song emotional breakdown) of an early version of “Mighty K.C.” in Miami Beach on May 27, 1994. The song is about Kurt Cobain and the many suicides by fans following his death (which went under-reported by the media for fear of escalation). I love this song so much but it always hurts to listen to, especially considering that the lyrics seem to foreshadow the death of Vigliatura and the band the following year. You should also listen to my favorite track “Disenchanted” (and their full album), if you haven’t. ♥ “Into the great unknown / Things are gonna change in our favor.”