Below, Adam Bernstein's obituary from yesterday's Washington Post.

Above and below, videos of the über-diva.
....................

Yma Sumac, 86; Postwar Sensation Had Unique Voice

Yma Sumac, a Peruvian folk entertainer with an astonishing vocal range who surged to fame in the 1950s with an "Incan princess" mystique that captivated millions of record-buyers in search of exotic sounds, died of cancer Nov. 1 at an assisted living facility in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles.

She was believed to be 86, according to personal assistant Damon Devine, who said he had seen the birth certificate.

Nearly every biographical aspect of Ms. Sumac's life was long in dispute, including her age, her town of birth and her ancestral claims that on her mother's side she was a descendant of the last Incan emperor, Atahualpa.

Fueled by an intensive publicity machine, the rumors grew so thick at one point that she was jokingly rumored to be a "nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn" who had merely reversed her name, Amy Camus.

Ms. Sumac (pronounced EEE-maw SUE-mack) thrived during a postwar period of American music when the exotic was hip and the composer Eden Ahbez ("Nature Boy") was briefly in vogue.

Los Angeles Times music critic Don Heckman once called Ms. Sumac "a living, breathing, Technicolor musical fantasy — a kaleidoscopic illusion of MGM exotica come to life in an era of practicality."

Onstage and off, Ms. Sumac adopted a regal poise and stretched back her raven hair to make her haughty cheekbones even more pronounced. She was fond of flamboyant clothing often laden with gold and silver jewelry, and she spoke of her musical influences among jungle animals.

"At night in my bedroom I hear the whoo-whoo of the little birds and I hear the dogs barking very sad," she told People magazine. "That's what I put in my records. I don't bark bow-wow, but I bark whoo, and I sing like the birdies."

As an interpreter of Andean folk-influenced songs, her voice sailed, growled, roared and yelped effortlessly across four octaves — from bass to soprano to coloratura soprano. She was adept at mimicking animal calls, from toucans to jaguars, and one never knew where she would dot melody with quick, piercing high-D notes.

"She's either got a whistle in her throat or three nightingales up her sleeve," said a bassist with whom she recorded early in her career.

Composer Virgil Thomson found her voice "impeccable" and recommended her for "the great houses of opera."

Ms. Sumac extended her heyday through the late 1950s with albums for Capitol Records, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

After headlining in Las Vegas and touring internationally, Ms. Sumac drifted into obscurity by the 1970s. Her older recordings popped up on film soundtracks, ensuring that her sound, if not her name, remained in the popular consciousness.

Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavárri del Castillo was born Sept. 13, 1922, possibly in the Andean community of Ichocán. Ms. Sumac said she was self-taught and developed great discipline in breathing technique.

She caught the attention of Moisés Vivanco, a musicologist and composer from Lima, and they married in 1942. She joined his 46-member troupe of Indian singers and dancers, became a presence on South American radio and began recording folk music under the name Imma Sumack.

In 1946, Ms. Sumac and her husband started a folk trio that mostly played on the Borscht Belt circuit and the back room of a Greenwich Village delicatessen. Her breakthrough was a 1950 engagement at the Hollywood Bowl, which attracted record and film executives.

Her subsequent album, "Voice of the Xtabay" (1950), sold more than 500,000 copies. (The "Xtabay" of the album title was fabricated as an Incan word.)

Other albums followed, including "Mambo!" (1954), with fiery arrangements by Billy May, and "Fuego del Ande" (1959). Many of the songs were composed by her husband and based on Andean folk themes, even if purists found them less than authentic.

She played an Arab princess in a short-lived Broadway musical "Flahooley" (1951) and appeared in the Hollywood films "Secret of the Incas" (1954) with Charlton Heston and "Omar Khayyam" (1957) with Cornel Wilde.

By the early 1960s, her popularity in the United States was waning, but she made a triumphant tour of the Soviet Union in 1961 — Nikita Khrushchev reputedly was a fan — and cultivated a small but devoted following in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

A comeback album of rock music, "Miracles" (1971), had a limited release, and her appearance on David Letterman's late-night show in 1987 was greeted by sarcasm by the host, who asked "Who is this woman?" after her heartfelt rendition of one of her earliest hits, "Ataypura."

Periodic concerts and the 2005 release "Queen of Exotica," a massive anthology of her work, kept her most-fervent fans happy and renewed her cult appeal. The magic-comedy team Penn & Teller used her music to score their stage routines.

To some music writers, she was an inspiration to punk and rock performers. "All the big stars came to see Yma Sumac," Ms. Sumac told Newsday in 1989. "What is the name of that one, I think Madonna?"

Ms. Sumac's personal life was troubled at times. Her marriage to Vivanco ended in divorce in 1957 after it was revealed that he had fathered twins with his wife's former secretary. She later told a reporter that Vivanco was "cuckoo," adding, "All men is cuckoo."

Survivors include a son from her marriage, Charlie, and three sisters....................

R.I.P.

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Her "Houses of Worship" column in the September 19, 2008 Wall Street Journal was an eye-opener.

Long story short: "The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?"

"The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did."

Here's the piece.

Look Who's Irrational Now

"You can't be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god," comedian and atheist Bill Maher said earlier this year on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien."

On the "Saturday Night Live" season debut last week, homeschooling families were portrayed as fundamentalists with bad haircuts who fear biology. Actor Matt Damon recently disparaged Sarah Palin by referring to a transparently fake email that claimed she believed that dinosaurs were Satan's lizards. And according to prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, traditional religious belief is "dangerously irrational." From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith — it's what the empirical data tell us.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.

Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn't. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.

We can't even count on self-described atheists to be strict rationalists. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's monumental "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" that was issued in June, 21% of self-proclaimed atheists believe in either a personal God or an impersonal force. Ten percent of atheists pray at least weekly and 12% believe in heaven.

On Oct. 3, Mr. Maher debuts "Religulous," his documentary that attacks religious belief. He talks to Hasidic scholars, Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, creationists, and even Rael — prophet of the Raelians — before telling viewers: "The plain fact is religion must die for man to live."

But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman — a quintuple bypass survivor — to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."

Owners of TiVo video recorders will see, in TiVo’s various onscreen menus, links to buy products like CDs, DVDs and books that guests are promoting on talk shows like “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Daily Show.”

That much is unrolling today. As for the future...

In the months ahead, TiVo plans to begin offering this feature to advertisers and programmers, so that the chance to buy products and have them delivered will be presented to viewers during commercials and even alongside product placements during live shows.

There was no mention of an option to opt-in to the ads.

In a completely unrelated announcement, I have two TiVo HDs for sale. [NYTimes]

It’s day two of our week of iPhone (related) giveaways. Yesterday we gave away a combination Beerbelly/Winerack to Jaxim who posted the answer to our New York trivia question (the picture was of the David Letterman stage door). So today we have a brand new - very easy - trivia question concerning one of the landmarks of New York City. First, here’s what you are playing for. It’s the Mophie Juice Pack which I reviewed a few weeks ago.
Mophie is an an extended battery pack for your iPhone. I use mine anytime I know I’ll be away from a power source for more than the 8 hours I typically get on a regular charge all the time. You can read my review here (Two word summary - THIS ROCKS). Click on through to the next page to take a look at today’s easy trivia question and place your guess. I will select one person at random (from everyone that leaves a correct answer) to win a free Mophie Power Juice (for the first generation iPhone).

… [visit site to read more]

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No word on when Yahoo TV will start adding shows to its online lineup, but I'm sure it will be in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, I suggest heading over to Hulu for a huge selection of shows that you can watch in their entirety, and yes — for free!

For many years, as long as I can remember, I've mused about how actors seem to fall into two categories: the few who really are different from the rest of us (they have talent) and the great majority who have nothing special to offer but were, for one reason or another, anointed and thereafter pointed at fame and fortune.

In the former category — real actors — I'd put Cate Blanchett (her stunning turn as Bob Dylan [above] in "I'm Not There" ought to silence any doubters — if there were any remaining), Tommy Lee Jones, Sean Connery, Ian Holm, Michael Caine, Robert DeNiro and Naomi Watts.

Among the latter group (civilians who somehow found themselves on magazine covers and whatnot, fleeing from paparazzi) you'd find Mel Gibson, Ashton Kutcher, Alec Baldwin, Leonardo diCaprio, Jude Law, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Kevin Spacey, John Cusack, Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Sharon Stone, Kevin Costner and Julia Roberts, among countless others.

What brought these musings from vague thoughts into words was Rob Walker's entry on Calvert DeForest in the 2007 edition of his annual compendium, "Where Were You?"

Excerpts follow.

Calvert DeForest

... Larry "Bud" Melman [below] had died.... Melman was absolutely critical to my experience with Letterman, and my experience with Letterman is critical to my life. I believe I was maybe 13 when I first saw the Letterman show, and however old I was, I am certain that it was the show's second week on the air. I was just blown away by it, I thought it was one of the funniest things ever. And Melman, doing bizarre "Toast on a Stick" spots and the like, was a key reason. I assumed he was not a professional performer, but now I'm not sure. The somewhat imprecise obit says: "Mr. DeForest's late-blossoming television career began with a New York University student film project called 'King of the Zs,' by future Letterman writers Stephen Winer and Karl Tiedemann, who brought him along when they joined the Late Night staff. At the time, Mr. DeForest was working as a file clerk at a drug rehabilitation center. He was picked up by a black limousine, given his stage name, and became the first image of 'Late Night With David Letterman,' before the opening credits on the debut episode."

I would like a better explanation of how he ended up in the student film. Was he an aspiring performer, or what? Because to me, one of the great insights of what Letterman did was turn non-professional performers into stars. Whether it was his writers, or stage hands, or merchants in the neighborhood, anybody could become a successful Late Night... regular. And in a way, every time a stage hand did a bit, it made a mockery of the entire process of show business. Or so it seems to me. Even Letterman's habit of getting people to host his show without any prior experience in such things, or without any warning (he's done this before) lines up, I think, with my theory that his show has always been a critique of shows like his.

Just so.

In a similar vein, newspapers and TV create news where none really exists simply because they have to fill space.

Something has to be the main headline even if nothing of significance happened, and thus "important" stories are brought into existence and given their gravitas — whether or not they really possess any — by dint of placement above the fold.

Sentence first, verdict afterwards, you might say.

Well, maybe you wouldn't — but I would.

Go ask Alice, she'll tell you how it is.

The surreal cartoonist, whose following rose to cult heights in her 1980s heyday before she crashed and burned in the 90s, has returned from oblivion with a new book entitled "What It Is" (above), in which she explains her method of making drawings and stories.

Here's Carol Kino's entertaining profile of this unique artist, as it appeared in yesterday's New York Times.

How to Think Like a Surreal Cartoonist

By celebrity standards the cartoonist Lynda Barry leads a reclusive existence. When she first developed a cult following in the 1980s, she cut a highly public figure, with frequent appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” and the like. But after the market for her work began shrinking in the late 1990s, she gradually withdrew, refusing to talk on the phone with reporters or her editors. Today she draws her 30-year-old weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” on a dairy farm just outside Footville, Wis., where she lives with her husband, Kevin Kawula, a prairie restoration expert. Since moving there six years ago, the couple have been relatively self-reliant, growing much of their own food and chopping their own wood for fuel.

Even though Ms. Barry has a new book coming out next week — “What It Is,” which explains her method of making drawings and stories — she isn’t always eager to emerge. “I can go three weeks without leaving, or driving my car,” she said in a recent interview.

But you would never guess that from Ms. Barry’s behavior on a recent weekend here. On a balmy spring day she stood at the front of a classroom, effusively greeting 25 strangers who had signed up for her two-day workshop, “Writing the Unthinkable,” which is also the basis for her new book. “I can’t believe you’re here and you look so 3-D!” she said, grinning toothily at them from beneath thick black glasses. “I was wondering about you all last night!”

On a table behind her she had laid out scores of scribbled 3-by-5 note cards, each of which held a nugget of information that she would relay over the next several hours (like “Don’t read it over” and “An image is a pull toy that pulls you”). On the blackboard was a chalk drawing of Marlys, the spunky pigtailed kid protagonist of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” the strip about growing up that made Ms. Barry a star of new-wave comics soon after it began running in alternative weeklies in 1978.

“Dang! I’m in Pittsburgh!” Marlys was saying in a word balloon. And Ms. Barry, who at 52 still has the habit of twisting her own curly red hair into Marlys-like pigtails, addressed her students in a similarly exclamation-mark-studded style. As they snapped open their three-ring binders, she said delightedly, “That’s the only sound I want at my funeral!”

Taking the workshop, which Ms. Barry teaches several times a year, is a bit like witnessing an endurance-performance piece. Aided by her assistant, Betty Bong (in reality, Kelly Hogan, a torch singer who lives in Chicago), Ms. Barry sings, tells jokes, acts out characters and even dances a creditably sensual hula, all while keeping up an apparently extemporaneous patter on subjects like brain science, her early boy-craziness, her admiration for Jimmy Carter and the joys of menopause.

But this is just camouflage for the workshop’s true purpose: to pass on an art-making method that Ms. Barry learned from Marilyn Frasca, her junior- and senior-year art teacher at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

It involves using a random word, like “cars” or “breasts,” to summon a memory in unexpected, filmic detail; writing about it by hand for a set time period (as she says, “Limitation creates structure!”); and then not reading it or talking about it for at least a week. Within the workshop it also involves positive feedback. As students read aloud, Ms. Barry kneels before them, head bowed, listening intently, and says: “Good! Good!” (“I was a kid who was never read to,” she explains.)

This is essentially the method that Ms. Barry has always used, not just for “Ernie Pook” but also her novels: “The Good Times Are Killing Me” from 1988, about biracial childhood friends, and “Cruddy” (1999), whose 16-year-old narrator recounts a long-ago murder rampage. She also deployed it for “One! Hundred! Demons!,” a soulful 2002 graphic memoir that she describes as “autobifictionalography.”

“What It Is,” which outlines the method in detail, could be considered a picture book for grown-ups. Using ink brush, pen and pencil drawings as well as collages and luminous watercolors, many of them on lined yellow legal paper, it explores deep philosophical questions like “What Is an Image?” (The answer, Ms. Barry says, is something “at the center of everything we call the arts.”) It also includes an activity book, instructions, assignments and several passages of purely autobiographical writing and drawing in which Ms. Barry recounts her own journey to making art.

As the book starts, we see her as a child, crouching as still as possible in a corner, waiting patiently for pictures in her bedroom to come to life. “We lived in a trailer then, and any pictures we had up were taped to the walls,” she writes. “Sometimes they fell. But this is not what I mean when I say they could move.”

Later we see her as a young adult, puzzling over the method as she learns it from Ms. Frasca. And later, on the farm with her husband, we see her battling depression and frowning as she struggles to quiet her inner editor’s voice and get back to making pictures and stories happen “in a way that didn’t involve thinking.” Meditations, stories and images float past in a random fashion, segueing between darkness and hope, or adulthood and childhood, the way they might in dreams or memory.

“I think of images as an immune system and a transit system,” she said; not only does working with them keep her emotions running smoothly, but it has also taken her to unexpected places. (As she told the class: “I am here in Pittsburgh because I drew a picture. And all of you are in this room because you saw this picture.”)

Clearly her ability to draw and tell stories was her ticket out of a difficult childhood. When she was 5, her family moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, where they at first lived with five Filipino families (Ms. Barry’s mother immigrated from the Philippines) in a house whose rooms were subdivided by bedsheets. Her father, a butcher, decamped a few years later, leaving Ms. Barry and her two younger brothers at the mercy of what she describes as an unhappy mother. (Ms. Barry said she has had no contact with either parent for more than 15 years, and “it’s been mutually joyful.”)

Although her more fictional work has always focused on children, she is not sure why. “I used to think it was easy to write about them because their world is small,” she said. “But it might be because writing about what’s happening with people my age, I’m too deeply in it.” (Surprisingly, her next novel is about a man in his 70s.)

Perhaps she has memorialized childhood because she didn’t have much of one herself. By 16 Ms. Barry was virtually independent, supporting herself by working nights and weekends as a hospital janitor. “I lived at home,” she said, “but that was it.” The experience gave her great exposure to people’s stories. “I don’t think it was good for me, necessarily, but I saw stuff, and I grew up really, really fast. And I wrote all this really sad janitorial poetry.”

With savings, a scholarship and work-study Ms. Barry made it to college, where she struck up a long friendship with a fellow student, Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.” In those days Mr. Groening was editor of the school newspaper, and she was a reporter. As a self-described hippie, “I used to love to torment him because he looked really straight,” she said.

“I always kind of mixed up drawings and words,” she said, “but college is where I definitely started to do cartoons, and it was mainly for Matt.”

In secret she began to concoct odd drawings and zany letters to the editor, which she submitted anonymously. Mr. Groening, who knew it was her all along, called her bluff and published the lot. “I had a policy of running all letters to the editor, and Lynda took advantage of it,” he said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.

“She was very, very funny,” he said. “It seemed obvious that creative self-expression was going to be her life.”

It was a happy accident that Ms. Barry graduated just as alternative weeklies were springing up around the country and searching, as she put it, “for oddball comics.” She soon became one of a small elite, her strip appearing with Mr. Groening’s “Life in Hell” alongside the work of Jules Feiffer. At its peak in the mid-1990s her strip appeared in 75 papers. She also published books and collections, and in 1991 her theatrical version of “The Good Times Are Killing Me” had an Off Broadway run.

But her career took a nose dive as alternative weeklies fell victim to corporate acquisitions and mergers in the 1990s. “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” now appears in only six papers, and the bulk of her books are out of print. These days, Ms. Barry said, her most reliable source of income is eBay, where she sells original artwork, and MySpace, where she markets her workshops.

She hit a low point in 2002, she said, right after the publication of “One! Hundred! Demons!,” when her longtime publisher, Sasquatch Books in Washington, rejected an early proposal for “What It Is” and declined to publish more new work. “It was like an ax in the forehead,” she said. But today her career seems on the verge of resurgence. In early 2006 Drawn & Quarterly, a small comics publisher in Montreal, approached her with a surprise offer to reprint her old work and collect all the Ernie Pook strips. Ms. Barry leapt at the opportunity and proffered her new book.

The plan is to publish one Ernie Pook collection a year, starting this fall. In early 2009 another new book, “The Nearsighted Monkey,” on which she is working with her husband, will be issued.

To Ms. Barry her career trajectory still seems somewhat unbelievable. “The fact that anybody knows what I do and likes it feels surreal to me,” she said. “It feels like the Make-a-Wish Foundation.”

Here's a link to a slide show narrated by Ms. Barry about how she does what she does.