Amy Holmes

Amy Holmes (1973- ) is CNN’s most beautiful talking head, putting a pretty black face to the Republican party line. She started with CNN in 2007. She has also been on Fox News, “Real Time with Bill Maher”, “The View” and BET. She would like to become the next Charlie Rose

She has beautiful eyes I could look at forever! I probably only hear half of what she says!

It is not just me, either: Rosie O’Donnell says she is “very pretty”.

On CNN she talks like a Republican, being careful to savage Barack Obama. But on “The View” she told us she is an independent who is for abortion.

She was born in Africa in Zambia to a black man and a white American mother. Her parents broke up when she was three and her mother came back with her to America, where she grew up in Seattle.

Like Michelle Obama she went to Princeton University, but unlike her she felt at home there. She studied economics. She says it helped her to learn how to think. In those days she was a Democrat, did not eat meat, worked for animal rights and voted for Bill Clinton.

After Princeton she went to work in the music industry in Seattle, but missed the East Coast. She wanted to move to New York, but wound up in Washington, DC where a friend of hers lived. That was in October 1995.

There she started reading right-wing magazines like the National Review, which she read at Starbucks hiding it inside a copy of the left-wing New Republic. One thing led to another and she wound up working for Arianna Huffington.

After only two months in Washington her picture was in the Washington Post as a young new face of the black right-wing! That brought her to the attention of television producers. In time that got her on MSNBC, Fox News and BET.

From 1996 to 1998 she worked for the Independent Women’s Forum, a right-wing think tank.

From 1999 to 2001 she wrote a monthly column for USA Today. She has also written for the Washington Post and the National Review – the magazine she used to hide at Starbucks!

In 2002 she had her own show on BET, “Lead Story”.

From 2003 to 2006 she was a speech writer for Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee. She told him she was for abortion and not against same-sex marriage, but he hired her anyway.

Some say her right-wing views are not heart-felt but just a way to get on television.

Her Republicanism seems more white and north-eastern than black: she is more like Giuliani, say, than Alan Keyes or Condoleezza Rice, whose Republicanism has a strong moral element.

She has a long history of dating the Jewish people, as she puts it. She does not seem to be Jewish herself: she celebrates Christmas. Not that that necessarily proves anything.

Some of the men she has dated were much older than her: Mickey Kaus and Lloyd Grove are both old enough to be her father.

See also:

• Amy Holmes, Let’s Be Friends – from the Black Snob. Funny and some good pictures too.
• political left and right
• Republican
• Democrat
• Washington, DC
• Michelle Obama
• Barack Obama
• Jews

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Quincy Jones

Quincy Jones (1933- ) is an American music producer. He is best known as the producer of “Thriller” (1982) by Michael Jackson. He has worked with everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Frank Sinatra to Tupac Shakur and won at least 25 Grammys. He is the founder of Vibe magazine. “We Are the World” (1985), a song to raise money to help feed Ethiopia, is something he pulled together.

He is talented, fearless and tireless. When he wants to do something he goes for it and gives it everything he has got. He is cool and modest rather than full of himself.

When he was young his two heroes were Charlie Parker and Pablo Picasso. Jones noticed how Parker listened to all kinds of music, not just jazz. He also took note that he died of drugs at 34. Quite unlike Picasso who painted into his 90s.

Jones grew up in Seattle. By 15 he was so good at playing the trumpet that he started playing with jazz bands. In time he would play with such greats as Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton and Ray Charles.

But better than playing an instrument he wanted to write music as an arranger and composer. The orchestra, he said, was his true instrument. Even at age 13 he sent Count Basie his arrangements.

In 1964 he produced his first hit, the pop song “It’s My Party” by Leslie Gore. Some in the jazz world saw this as a sell out. Jones said,

The underlying motivation for any artist, be it Stravinsky or Miles Davis, is to make the kind of music they want and still have everyone buy it.

In 1974, barely into his 40s, he started bleeding in his brain. But just when people thought he was about to die, on his hospital bed he gave them the finger.

Having almost died, he began to see the leaves on the trees and people’s eyes. He said, “Before that, I was doing a lot of things that I didn’t care to do. Now, I just do exactly what I love.”

That was pretty much true. In the late 1970s he was writing music for film and television. But then he found himself working on the music for “The Wiz”. He did not like it, but later he was glad he did it: it was how he got to work with Michael Jackson. “Off the Wall” (1979) sold 8 million copies, “Thriller” sold 25 million, the most ever.

His dream:

My lifetime project, though, involves putting this whole Afro-American thing together into a single, cohesive musical expression. I’ve been working on it for 20 years, and I may need another 20 to get through. It’s a symphony, it’s an opera, it’s a minstrel review and a big band bash. I don’t know what it is, except there it is, keeping me up, invading my dreams.

His albums “Back on the Block” (1991) and “Q’s Jook Joint” (1995) both have that view of black music.

He has married four times and in the 1990s lived with Nastassja Kinski. Work, not home, was the one constant in his life.

See also:

• Michael Jackson
• The Wiz
• Stanley Kubrick

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