Dave Shiflett: News

Mad Men: Booze, Babes And A New Don Draper

By Dave Shiflett
July 00 (Bloomberg) – Don Draper, the ultra-dapper advertising whiz in “Mad Men,” comes out in the show’s fourth season premier: out of his cocoon, that is.
Draper (Jon Hamm) is forced to start strutting his stuff after a one-legged reporter (maimed in Korea) brands him a “handsome cipher” in the series opener, which airs on AMC July 25 at 10 p.m. New York time.
His big mistake was shying away from the question “Who is Don Draper?” by saying he’s from the Midwest, where it’s “not polite to talk about yourself.”
“My job is to write ads,” he tells his colleagues at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, the somewhat long-named firm with a short client list: 71 percent of billing is to Lucky Strike. “Who gives a crap what I say?”
Yet passive is poison. The piece hurts the agency’s reputation so it’s time for the star to go high-profile. To no surprise he eventually rises to the occasion.
All told, Draper is pretty grumpy these days. It’s splitsville with icy wife Betty (January Jones), he’s living alone and getting most of his nourishment from cigarettes and booze. I’m reminded of the contemporary tee-shirt slogan: The Liver is Evil and Must Be Punished. And throw in the lungs for good measure.
He still enjoys the ladies, especially those with a good right cross. During one session he demands a good slapping. After receiving one blow he demands “Harder!”
Hey Don – is that also a Midwest value?
The regulars are back, including perpetually horny boss Roger (John Slattery), who speaks of “stuffing” a woman at Thanksgiving and waxes enthusiastic about chicken Kiev emitting hot streams of butter when probed.
Chief weasel Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) is as brown nosed as ever, telling the boss the competition can’t keep up “because you don’t work there.” He and colleague Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) cook up a scheme on behalf of a ham company: it involves a couple of nagging women, a scuffle, a story in the Daily News and the brainstorm slogan of Peggy’s life: “Our hams are worth fighting for!”
As in seasons past, readers are reminded that despite endless self-congratulation about their creative brilliance these people are selling hams and cigarettes.
Don’t tell Don that. He takes his craft very seriously, especially when clients give him the thumbs down. In one story line he tries to convince executives from a bathing suit firm that it’s time to get a little edgier with their sales pitch, though they insist they’re “not playing the gutter.”
When they reject what is, by today’s standards, a fairly tame teaser, he goes ballistic and sends them packing. In no time he’s doing a sit-down with The Wall Street Journal (martinis close at hand) revealing his new, dynamic self.
The show, as always, is fast-paced so the few slow spots don’t last long. There’s good dialogue and 1960s period touches including coats and ties at Thanksgiving dinner (as opposed to current-day gym sweats) plus Don’s discussion with a young date about the death of a civil rights worker.
“Is that what it takes to change things,” the babe chirps before telling him she plays wenches, courtesans a harem girls on the New York stage.
It seems certain the humble Don Draper is forever dead. Now he’s on a very modern mission: Promote Thyself. They didn’t have Oprah back then, though who’ll be surprised if he doesn’t wrangle himself a slot on the Ed Sullivan Show.

By Dave Shiflett
The lives of celebrity musicians are a bookseller’s dream, especially when there’s plenty of sex, detox, and perhaps a spin at talking in tongues before expiring in hideous delirium – hopefully with cameras rolling.
Stevie Wonder and Van Morrison, the subjects of two new books, are a little light on the lurid but have produced substantial bodies of work, especially Wonder. Both are also still with us and both books hold out hope they have more good music up their somewhat frayed sleeves.
Mark Ribowsky’s “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered; The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder” (Wiley, 352 pages, $27.95) bills itself as the first biography of the Motown wunderkind (Wonder turns 60 May 13), who has racked up 26 Grammys and 34 top ten hits in a career spanning nearly a half-century.
Wonder’s life, to be sure, has its intriguing aspects. Born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1950, his lost his eyesight hours after birth and there is some dispute over his exact birth name; Ribowsky writes that the name on his incubator may have been Steveland Morris, though other accounts say he was born Steveland Judkins, which was later changed to Morris. There was also a booze-guzzling father who doubled as his mother’s pimp and a later trip to a faith healer in hopes of bringing his eyes back to life.
His ears, however, were always top notch. He played the bongos before he could walk and was a prodigy on another front as well, taking his first sexual tumble as early as age 8 (a talent that seems to have never deserted him, as Ribowsky reminds us throughout the book).
While there are also plenty of details about Wonder’s hardscrabble upbringing and latter troubles, including a residual sadness and a near-fatal encounter with a logging truck on a North Carolina highway, the emphasis is on his music.
It’s not always a pretty picture.
Wonder inked his first Motown contract at age 11, signing the document with an “X .” His virtuosity as a harmonica player, infectious stage presence and eventually a long string of hits won him many fans, including Ribowsky, who writes that Wonder is “dripping in genius” (page 2) and “he is more than cool. He is real.”
There’s no doubting his contribution to the American popular music songbook, from early hits such as “Fingertips (Part 2)” (1963), “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” (1965) and “For Once in My Life” (1968) to stunning albums including “Talking Book” (1972) and “Songs in the Key of Life” (1976), the latter, in Ribowsky’s view, representing Wonder’s creative peak.
Ribowsky’s reverence does not always extend to Wonder’s musical associates, and his book will re-enforce many negative stereotypes about the music business.
Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, comes across as the Tyrannosaurus Rex of music industry weasels. The contracts he offered musicians, Ribowsky writes, “could be the definition of chattel.”
The proceeds from a million selling record went almost entirely into Gordy’s deep pockets: the artist would get $20,000 while Gordy would take $730,000 plus whatever expenses he wanted to tack on, Ribowsky writes. No wonder Marvin Gaye to referred to Gordy’s company as the “Gestapo.” Gordy also claims to have come up with the name “Stevie Wonder,” though Ribowsky suggests an origin lower down the corporate roster.
Gordy was not the only one to exploit Wonder, and he certainly treated him with more respect than other musical colleagues, including the Rolling Stones, who used Wonder as an opening act during their 1972 tour supporting “Exile on Main Street” (the Stones had opened for Wonder on one of his 1965 tours).
He was usually paid no more than $1,000 per show, Mr. Ribowsky writes, and after dividing the loot with his band he “would end up poorer than when he began.” Keith Richard called him a “c---“ and the Stones “hated the overheated reaction he got” and “found it tough to follow him.” In retaliation “they took steps to undercut him” including keeping his name off the marquee for most performances.”
Van Morrison, to be sure, has not enjoyed Stevie Wonder’s marquee success, though his “Brown Eyed Girl” may have been played at more frat houses than “Louie Louie.” He too has attracted fiercely loyal listeners, none more so perhaps than Greil Marcus, whose deeply considered views are presented in “When That Rough God Goes Riding; Listening to Van Morrison” (Public Affairs, 208 pages, $24.95).
Mr. Marcus provides a few details of Morrison’s life, including that his mother became a Jehovah’s Witness while his father remained a table-pounding atheist, which may shed some light on the spiritual nature of much of his work.
The brief book, however, is almost entirely about the music, about which Mr. Marcus can wax quite ecstatic, especially when discussing Mr. Morrison’s masterwork, “Astral Weeks,” which was recorded in New York in 1968.
He characterizes the album as “forty-six minutes in which possibilities of the medium – of rock ‘n’ roll, of pop music, of what you might call music that could be played on the radio as if it were both timeless and news – were realized, when you went out to the limits of what this form could do.” He says he’s played the album more than any record he owns.
Thankfully, the book is not an exercise in extended treacle-ladling. Mr. Marcus slices up his subject pretty well, both personally and artistically. Morrison, he writes, “is a bad-tempered, self-contradictory individual “ who has made a great deal of lame music, including “the endless stream of dull and tired albums through the 1980s and ‘90s” whose titles, he adds, read like “warning labels,” including “No Guru,” “No Method,” “No Teacher” and “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart.”
Elsewhere, he calls his cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman” is “an affront” both “to the song if not the songwriter” and in a notable negative superlative writes that the recording of “Friday’s Child” includes what “might be the worst instrumental break in the history of the form.”

Yet neither author insists their subjects are washed up. Mr. Marcus says that Morrison’s “Behind the Ritual” (2008) is a turn toward the better while Ribowsky, quoting Wonder from a 2004 interview, holds out hope that he’s not a spent force:
“For me to say I’ve reached my peak is to say that God is through using me for what he has given me the opportunity to do. And I just don’t believe that.”
Let’s hope he’s right – this sad world can always use another good song. We can hope the worst fate to befall either will be a steady gig at a minor Vegas resort.

(Bloomberg)— When tap water burns, it’s probably time to admit there’s a problem.
Yet not everyone agrees, which is one of the more disturbing messages of “Gasland,” a uniquely unsettling but entertaining HBO documentary about pollution caused by the expanding search for “clean” natural gas within the United States.
The film, which airs June 21 at 9 p.m. New York time, is the work of Josh Fox, who may go down in history as the Paul Revere of fracking – short for hydraulic fracturing, the process by which natural gas is extracted.
He tells a profoundly alarming story yet does not come across as a mouth-breathing alarmist. Instead, he’s funny and passionate though, to be sure, no fan of Dick Cheney. The film won the 2010 Documentary Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Fox became suspicious when energy companies began offering large amounts of money for natural gas drilling rights to residents of the Delaware River Basin, where he lives.
He could have enjoyed a signing bonus of around $100,000, he says, but a 24-state road trip to see what he’d get in return for his money confirmed his original decision: no sale.
Fox traces the problem to the Cheney-backed Energy Policy Act of 2005, which exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act and other environmental regulations.
This unleashed a massive gas grope, according to the film. There are now some 450,000 gas wells in 34 states. Fracking fluids, which help release gas deposits trapped in rocks, contain neurotoxins and carcinogens. Trillions of gallons of contaminated water, he estimates, have been produced by the process and largely left to seep back into the earth, or evaporate.
Fox heads west, where he finds a new type of firewater.
In rural Colorado several residents turn on their kitchen sinks and light the water afire. The roaring flames make you wonder if they might be able to fuel their cars with their gas-contaminated tap water. In other drilling areas in Colorado and Wyoming residents complain of persistent headaches, loss of smell and taste and having to buy their drinking water from Wal Mart.
Fox manages to maintain his sense of humor. During a trip through the Jonah Gas Fields in Wyoming he exits his car (wearing a gas mask) and plays “This Land is Your Land” on his banjo, a poignant choice since he’s on public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management that’s been leased out for exploration.
Perhaps the most memorable disaster area is DISH, Texas (RICK – TOWN NAME IS SPELLED IN ALL CAPS), where the air is not only thick with neurotoxins and carcinogens but perhaps flammable as well. Mayor Calvin Tillman muses, darkly, that “some guy is going to be cooking his hamburger one day and blow up the town.”
The film shifts back to the Marcellus Shale Field, which stretches from the Catskills of New York to West Virginia and is called the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” This area is also the country’s largest unfiltered watershed, supplying 16.5 million people, including residents of New York, with drinking water.
In a gotcha moment, John Hanger, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, downplays pollution dangers yet when Fox offers him a drink of water from Dimock, PA, where animals have begun losing their hair he declines.
In Congress, Fox finds lobbyists and energy executives trying to derail a bill that would regulate some of the chemicals used in fracking. Sen. Dan Boren, D-Oklahoma, accuses critics of “searching for a problem that does not exist.”
This will come as news to residents of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where gas well explosions on June 3 and 7 did immense damage; in Pennsylvania toxic chemicals spewed into the air for sixteen hours. Pennsylvania has halted construction of 70 wells pending environmental review.
Meanwhile, maybe Rep. Boren would like a slug of that high-octane tap water. It might change his perspective.

Furious Love
By Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger
Harper, 512 pages, $27.99


By Dave Shiflett
In the grand tradition of marriage Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton hold a special place. Not only did they get hitched twice – the second time in Africa with a couple of hippos in attendance – but their stormy relationship gave full employment to legions of journalists, paparazzi , moralists and distillers.
Sam Kashner, an editor at Vanity Fair and Nancy Schoenberger, who teaches at The College of William and Mary, provide an entertaining and thorough blow-by-blow that reminds us that matrimony’s not always holy.
They met in 1953. He was 28, she was 21, and he was deeply smitten (she would later say she initially thought he was full of himself). Yet their paths would not cross again for another nine years, at which time she was on her third marriage (widowed once) and he was hitched to his long-suffering Sybil. Love, perhaps aided by significant lust, took its course and their blossoming romance became known as Le Scandale.
While celebrity parasites were in deep clover the Vatican’s Osservatore della Domenica ran a letter citing Taylor’s “erotic vagrancy.” In the same spirit Rep. Iris Faircloth Blitch of Georgia wanted the two denied re-entry into the U.S. “on the grounds of undesirability.” The fun ended when Burton and Taylor married in March 1964, tying the knot in Montreal under the auspices of a Unitarian minister.
The Burtons had several talents, including acting (she called Burton a “great actor “ and “the Frank Sinatra of Shakespeare” while dismissing herself as a mere “broad”) plus fighting and drinking.
They were world-class lushes; Kashner and Schoenburger chronicle numerous bouts, including a session during which Burton downed 23 shots of tequila, washed down by a couple of beers. He was just warming up. He would eventually drink three bottles of vodka a day, which among other things rewarded him with a persistent hand tremor. Amazingly, drink never caused him to put on weight nor did it dull his memory.
Not so with Taylor, who could drink Burton under the table, the authors tell us, but who also experienced significant weight fluctuations. In a memorable put-down a director told Taylor it “looks like you’ve got bags of dead mice under your arms.” She eventually augmented alcohol with various drugs, including seconal, which Burton would use to steady himself during attempts to stop drinking (he also substituted Valium for booze).
The book includes looks at life on the sets of many of their movies, including “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” and the less-ambitious “Bluebeard,” were Liz reportedly smacked a co-star for putting too much sex in her love scene with Burton.
There’s no shortage of other saucy anecdotes, including Burton’s reported trysts with Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud (Burton later told Dick Cavett homosexuality “didn’t take).” There’s also reporting on Taylor’s bleeding hemorrhoids, which can almost make you forget about those beautiful eyes.
Far more interesting are tales of life among the A-listers, none more riveting than a drunken melee during which Rachel Roberts abused husband Rex Harrison “sexually, morally, physically and in every other way,” Burton later wrote. As something of a grand finale she dropped to the floor and “masturbated her dog.” Guest Tennessee Williams, a decided non-prude, asked to leave.
“Let’s face it,” Taylor once observed. “A lot of my life has lacked dignity.”
The couple tried to keep up with a changing Hollywood in which films such as “Midnight Cowboy” overtook epics such as “Anthony and Cleopatra” and politics shifted as well. During one party Jane Fonda chatted them up about Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers and came “away with a donation of $6,000.” To silence grousing about the conspicuous consumption at one particularly lavish blow-out, Burton wrote a check for $45,000 and gave it to UNICEF.
The fabled marriage lasted only nine years, after which both would graze in many pastures. Taylor hooked up with a used car salesmen and later an advertising executive while Burton played a wider field, including an apparent tumble with an 18-year-old waitress identified as “The former Miss Pepsi of Butte County” by the local paper.
Yet true love, or something, brought them back together for a remarriage ceremony in Botswana in October 1975, performed by an official from a local tribe. Yet the second time around lasted only ten months. Burton would later marry model Suzy Hunt, which lasted five years, while Liz’s later conquests would include John Warner, whom she helped elect to the U.S. Senate.
Burton died in 1984 at age 58 from a cerebral hemorrhage. Readers are likely to be left with a residual sadness. “All my life, I think that I have been secretly ashamed of being an actor,” he once observed, and he seems like yet another man who didn’t really like his job, drank too much, and died lonely.
Taylor, to be sure, went on to many great things, including her fabled friendship to the late Michael Jackson. As mutual friends often observed, she was by far the tougher of the two.

(Bloomberg)— A new film about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton could have been subtitled “Bambi and Humper.”
“The Special Relationship,” which debuts on HBO May 29 at 9 p.m. New York time, follows the political and personal alliances between the two leaders and their wives, which eventually cooled considerably.
Michael Sheen stars as Blair and looks so much like the former prime minister you move between his portrayal and archived press footage without a blink. His big eyes, upturned nose, and chirpy idealism explain why he was known as Bambi, at least in his early days.
Dennis Quaid passes for Clinton though the former president’s trademark bulbous nose is AWOL. He is full of Clintonian bombast, dissembling and political smarts, reminding us that they didn’t call him Slick Willie for nothing.
The film is the third installment in screenwriter Peter Morgan’s Blair trilogy, and focuses on the debt he owned the American president whose politics, if not peccadilloes, he closely shared.
The writing is tight and the pace is just about perfect. If you’re a political junkie, or simply like watching politicians on the make – in every sense of the word – you’re in for a good couple of hours.
Clinton spotted a winner in Blair early on and took him under his wing. “We think that the smart money is on you,” he tells Blair during a White House visit designed to enhance Blair’s electoral chances. After Blair’s victory, Clinton waxes profound about the possibility of advancing their “center-left” policies: “We’re on the right side of history,” he insists. “It’s a slam dunk.”
Then along comes Monica, looking like a somewhat beefy tart in familiar footage, which brings Hillary Clinton to center stage.
Hope Davis, who looks like Hillary on a very good day, portrays a first lady surprised and hurt by the intern revelations. “How do you know this girl?” she asks Clinton, who looks like a cornered possum.
“I talked to her a few times,” Clinton gamely bluffs. “You know me, I offered to help. Just trying to be nice.”
Suddenly we’re back in the good old days, with Hillary going into battle mode and declaring war on the “vast right wing conspiracy” while Kenneth Starr snoops around for stained dresses and forked tongues.
“I did not have improper relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” we hear in one of politics’ true Golden Oldies.
The Blairs were somewhat scandalized by the revelations, according to the film, especially Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory), who shuffles their children away from the telly when a news broadcast mentions the president’s wayward member.
There are some very funny scenes, including a discussion during a flight to Washington about the nature of sin. One of Blair’s assistants says Clinton’s “rapid response” team has found a passage in Ecclesiastes suggesting the sexual act now known as “the Lewinsky” is not actually adulterous.
Cherie Blair isn’t buying it, though when later asked by Tony if she would dump him if he got caught philandering, she provides a pragmatic response: “No, but I’d make your life hell.”
It’s wasn’t Monica but Slobodan Milosevic that drove the biggest wedge between Clinton and Blair. Blair believed ground troops were the proper response to the Yugoslav leader’s predations in Kosovo, while Clinton was wary: “That dog won’t hunt,” he explains in proper Arkansan.
Blair held to his guns, arguing passionately for intervention in a Chicago speech that inspired the press to dub him King Tony -- and Clinton to drub him as a blowhard. “What kind of king begs others to do his fighting for him?” he sneers.
The kiss-off is delivered during a visit to Blair’s country estate as George W. Bush, aided by the Supreme Court, is granted his electoral victory. Clinton, during a late-night refrigerator raid, says he doesn’t know if his old colleague is a center-left politician any more, “or if you ever were.” He also warns him about Cheney/Bush. “Be careful, these guys, they play rough.”
By now, however, Blair is a seasoned pol ready to cut his own deals with any devil he chooses. Bill shouldn’t take it hard. After all, Tony learned from a master.

There's something sadly endearing about a newsmagazine celebrating itself these days, when you'd need to roll up at least a couple of its featherweight copies to effectively swat an average-size fly.

"Time: The Illustrated History of the World's Most Influential Magazine" often has the tone of a man at a bar, or perhaps on his deathbed, insisting that he once steered the planet through the stars. Or still does! The book "meticulously documents how Time mirrored and shaped events, and shows, once again, that we not only mark history, we make it too." That's managing editor Richard Stengel in the preface, where he also claims that "the twentieth century—and now the twenty-first—would not be the same without Time."

Early on we encounter founder Henry Luce's prospectus—"now considered a historical document"—asserting that Time would be less interested in "how much it includes between its covers" than in "how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers." Even readers whose minds have remained i mpervious to the magazine's often gaseous prose are likely to relish many of the book's 600 or so captivating photographs and illustrations, starting with Pope John Paul II praying at the Western Wall in 2000.

We see plenty of Kennedys in full dental glory; a fetching 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor; a "Thriller"-era Warhol cover portrait of Michael Jackson; and a bevy of wartime photos, from a stirring aerial shot of the D-Day beachhead to the indelible Vietnam War image of the South Vietnamese national police chief executing a suspected Vietcong guerrilla. The epic photograph of the lone Tiananmen Square protester staring down a tank column can still take your breath away.

The book includes paeans to its "Man of the Year" feature and some of its trend-catching covers, including "Is God Dead?" (1966) followed in 1972 with "The Occult Revival: Satan Returns." The top 10 best-selling issues remind us that mayhem and death definitely move product. The 9/11 attacks hold the top two slots, and deceased celebrities Princess Diana and John Lennon make the list. No quips here about the death of Time someday making the magazine's own cover, even if this book does have the size and heft of a small tombstone. After all, that other newsmagazine is the one that's up for sale.

—Dave Shiflett
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

By Dave Shiflett
Ric Burns’s “Into the Deep: America, Whaling and The World,” airing on PBS May 10 at 9 p.m., is a stunning rebuke to all of us who chose to read “Moby Dick” in the Cliff Notes edition.
Burns, best known for his work on “The Civil War” and “New York: A Documentary Film,” tells the amazing and horrifying story of the Essex, an American ship that was rammed and sunk by an 85-foot sperm whale some 3000 miles off the coast of South America in 1820.
That incident would inform Herman Melville’s masterwork, which many an undergraduate has found to be rough sailing.
The two-hour film is also a deeply interesting look at the American whaling industry, which became the engine of American economic expansion in the mid-1800s, according to the film.
While early colonial “drift” whalers settled for stranded or beached whales the big breakthrough came around 1712 when a Nantucket-based crew was blown out to sea in a storm and encountered a sperm whale, which being whalers they killed and butchered.
To the crew’s amazement, and many a sperm whale’s eventual demise, the mammal’s head contained hundreds of gallons of oil that was “clear as vodka,” according to the show, until it oxidized and clouded.
That oil became the “heart-blood of American commerce” according to author Nathaniel Philbrick. In its heyday in the 1840s, 70,000 people made their living from whaling, including 20,000 seamen who departed American ports on voyages that could last three to four years.
Burns never wanders far from the raw danger, violence and exhilaration of whaling. It was not an occupation for the faint of heart, or stomach.
The action began when a sailor in the crow’s nest saw a whale exhale and shouted “thar she blows,” which sent the crew in pursuit in oar-powered boats. The whales produced an “awful stench” when they breathed which was nothing compared to what they emitted when harpooned and their lungs were lanced.
Whalers were often drenched in blood and grime as the whales vomited squid in their death throes, after which the carcass, which could weigh up to 85 tons, had to be towed back to the ship where its blubber was stripped away and cooked down to oil.
That’s when all went smoothly.
The tale of the Essex, woven through the film, is recreated in stunning and sometimes nauseating detail. The doomed ship left Nantucket on August 12, 1819. After rounding Cape Horn in Jan. 1820 the crew learned the whaling was slow in the close-in waters and so headed into the vast Pacific, where a gruesome fate awaited.
On Nov. 20, 3000 miles off the South American coast, the ship was rammed by a whale roughly its own size. It soon capsized, sending 20 survivors into three small boats. Three got off on a nearby deserted island but the rest decided to head for South America, fearing other islands would be inhabited by hungry cannibals.
In an ordeal that makes Captain Bligh’s post-mutiny excursion seem like a pond cruise, the seamen traveled 4,000 miles over the course of three months in a moveable feast of horrific proportions; rescuers eventually found only five men adrift, some of whom were sucking the bones of their deceased mates.
Melville came across the story in 1841 when fellow seaman William Henry Chase gave him a copy of his father’s narrative of the catastrophe. “Moby Dick” was published in 1851.
In an interesting twist, the film says, the book sank Melville’s literary career, largely because the public’s imagination had shifted to the westward expansion and Gold Rush. Melville fell into obscurity and died in 1891 after a career as a customs inspector in lower Manhattan.
Whaling was a shadow of its former self by then, its death blow delivered in 1859 when oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, which the film says created a “flood of cheap kerosene.”
The search for oil thus shifted from the heads of whales to the bowels of the earth, where it remains a messy enterprise.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – The 2008 economic meltdown might be traced, in part, to an ancient section of the brain we “share” with lizards.
So says “Mind Over Money,” a PBS special airing April 27 at 8 p.m. New York time. While most shows about economics have all the excitement of a morphine drip, this one is captivating.
According to the show, this “ancient part of the brain evolved so long ago we share it with many creatures, including lizards.” It is “triggered by some of the deepest and most primal human needs,” including the acquisition of food, sex and – yes – money.
Brian Knutson, a professor at Stanford University, explains that money “activates these circuits and does so very powerfully” which could explain frenzied economic activity such as speculative bubbles. So, perhaps the inner reptile’s a culprit in our current woes.
The show pits “rationalist” economists who believe humans almost always act in their own best interest against “behaviorists,” who believe emotions can profoundly affect economic behavior, sometimes for the worst.
The rationalist viewpoint is most vividly championed at the University of Chicago, which is unmatched in the number of graduates who have won Nobel prizes in economics. The show includes interviews with finance professor John Cochrane and professor of economics Gary Becker, who argue that people almost always operate in their own economic self-interest, which keep markets stable and efficient. Regulation should therefore be held to a minimum.
Behaviorists including Yale professor Robert Shiller, who warned during the housing boom that the nation was in the grips of an “irrational mania,” aren’t buying it. They believe emotion can play a powerful and destabilizing role that can be ameliorated by regulation – which in effect puts the lizard on a leash.
The show includes several experiments that suggest the behaviorists may be onto something. In one, participants are asked to bid on a $20 bill, which ends up going for $28.
Why would the bidders engage in behavior clearly contrary to their own self interest? The frenzied desire to win drives up the price, then bidders end up trying to lose the least, the show says. “People have played this game for quite high stakes” says Chicago professor Richard Thaler. (You also have to wonder how rational it is to allow yourself to be filmed bidding $28 for a $20 bill.)
Another experiment found that people who had seen a “sad” movie were willing to pay four times more for a water bottle ($10) than a group who had not seen the movie. Jennifer Lerner, a Harvard professor specializing in social psychology, says the “sad” subjects didn’t realize the movie had affected them, which indicates economic behavior may be driven by factors we are unaware of.
Becker and Cochrane counter that people act differently in labs than in the real world. Yet the real world offers stunning examples of emotions taking over, according to the show.
During the recent meltdown irrationality became “the order of the day” but that was nothing compared to the tulip panic of the 1630s, where the value of a single bulb could match that of a house. Almost half the money in the Dutch economy may have been tied up in the tulip trade, the show says. On Feb. 1, 1637 the most expensive bulb failed to sell, causing a panic and collapse that may have taken as long as a generation to recover from.
The rationalists insist that panic is not necessarily irrational. In some situations, Cochrane argues, the “rational decision is to run like heck in the other direction.”
Proving, if nothing else, that finance isn’t always a sedentary occupation.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – The characters in David Simon’s new series pack a different sort of heat than the gang-bangers from Baltimore (“The Wire”) or soldiers invading Iraq (“Generation Kill”).
In “Treme,” which debuts on HBO April 11 at 10 p.m. New York time, the weapon of choice is the trombone or trumpet. Nobody gets it between the eyes in the premier of the New-Orleans based series, though many get their ears massaged.
The ten-part series, co-created and produced by Eric Overmyer, commences three months after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 and is set in Treme, a neighborhood near the French Quarter where some believe jazz was born.
Jazz is very much alive and kicking in the premier, which starts out with musicians haggling over money – a process predating jazz by several eons. Once they get underway we see the hurricane did no harm to the spirit of city residents, who dance on car tops as the parade winds past abandoned appliances and devastated houses.
The series follows the lives of several residents who are trying to make life work in the wake of the flooding, including Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), a trombone player with a big sound and an empty wallet. Every cab ride involves a haggle, though when he cuts lose his horn can part the clouds.
Ex-wife LaDonna Batiste-Williams (Khandi Alexander) owns a bar where she dispenses beer and urges Antoine to go visit their kids, who have been relocated to Baton Rouge. She’s also searching for brother Daymo, who disappeared during the storm. Her chief ally is Toni Bernette (Melissa Leo), a tenacious civil rights attorney who’s married to one of the series’ two major blowhards.
Husband Creighton (John Goodman) is an English professor fond of trumpeting his belief that the flooding was a man made disaster decades in the making. He’s a big guy who clearly never met a sausage or crawfish he didn’t eat. No wonder he takes offense when a British journalist, interviewing him on camera, opines that New Orleans food is provincial. Creighton responds by calling him a “limey vulture” and throws his microphone in a canal.
He’s much more endearing than Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) a DJ and sometime musician who is self-consciously hip to a terminal degree. You may find yourself wishing a gang-banger from “The Wire” would make a cameo appearance and whack him. No luck there, though there is a cameo by Elvis Costello, who visits a club to listen to music.
Viewers will likely find themselves quickly rooting for most of the characters, perhaps especially Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters), an older musician who’s also a Mardi Gras Indian chief. He’s lost everything, but when he dons his ceremonial feathers we know we’re in the presence of an authentic Phoenix.
Rounding out the cast is Lambreaux’s son Delmond (Rob Brown), a rising trumpeter who’s blowing licks at the Blue Note in Manhattan when we meet him. Series babe is Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens), a chef with a philosophical bent who proclaims “It’s oyster season -- how bad can life be?” For some reason she’s a sometime girlfriend of McAlary’s. Maybe she’ll wise up and feed him a few bad ones.
Some viewers may find this a salty-tongued bunch and temperance types will quickly note that whoever holds the Budweiser concession in Treme must be a billionaire. It’s the rare hand that isn’t wrapped around a Bud, and the sipping sometimes commences just after hopping out of bed in the morning.
Yet all told, this is an affirmation of human tenacity and perseverance in the wake of disaster. The premier ends on a perfect note. Antoine has snared a last minute funeral gig. “Forty to the graveyard,” he says, and another $40 back. “Play for that money boys,” he says as they break into “A Little Closer Walk With Thee.” As they saunter past the graves you half expect the departed to leap up and join the procession.
Simon has another hit on his hands, without hit men.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) -- If you’re wondering where Richard Nixon resides these days, he’s in heaven – at least according to Chris Murray, a highly-respected autistic artist whose inspirational story is told in “Dad’s In Heaven With Nixon,” which airs on Showtime April 6 at 8:30 p.m. New York time.
The documentary, which was written, produced and directed by Chris’s brother Tom, is basically a home movie about a deeply troubled family. Chris, whose autism is blamed on a lack of oxygen during birth, is in many ways the luckiest member of the Murray clan.
The film starts at Southampton, where the family spent summers since early in the twentieth century. Archived film shows the days when the island was largely potato fields and traversed by horse-drawn carriages. Kids boxed, plays tennis on grass courts, and swam in the sea.
Though the Murrays were privileged they were also haunted by bi-polar disorder.
Thomas E. Murray, Tom and Chris’s great-grandfather, was a brilliant inventor with nearly 500 patents and is credited with helping Thomas Edison electrify American homes. Yet his son, John, who sported a large moustache and a larger appetite for alcohol, suffered from “melancholia” and died of drink-related problems the day before his 38th birthday.
He is now thought to have suffered from bi-polar disorder, as did his son, Thomas Murray II, Tom and Chris’s father and a successful stockbroker, who was consumed by a rage he refused to seek treatment for and which scarred the lives of his family.
Chris’s life, which on the surface would seem the bleakest, is actually the bright spot, though it didn’t start out that way. His mother, Janice Murray, who bears a resemblance to Nancy Reagan, says she woke up prior to Chris’s birth in 1960 and knew “this was going to be very different.”
During birth, she says, Chris “got stuck” and suffered oxygen deprivation, which turned the whites of his eyes scarlet red. He didn’t walk until 16 months old or talk until he was four. Doctors told the family not to expect much from him and urged that he be institutionalized.
Yet Janice saw promise. “I felt that something could be reached,” she says.
Not so for her husband, who was “incapable of any real intimacy. He could not bear it.” The marriage ended in 1976.
The film is largely made up of interviews with family members and clips from home movies. It drags a bit at times though the story line, a combination of dissolution and triumph, will keep most viewers tuned in.
Thomas Murray II, who eventually sold his seat on the stock exchange for a record low amount, according to the film, suffered severe economic downturns and in August 1979 drowned while swimming off Southampton, aged 52.
Speculation as to his celestial status is the topic of a completely endearing interview with Chris, who talks in an urgent, hoarse whisper.
He insists his father is in heaven with Richard Nixon, whom he fully detested while on earth. Better yet, the newfound pals probably spend some of their spare time playing poker. You have to wonder if the former president parks a few cards up his sleeves just for old time’s sake.
The film also takes an upbeat turn as it focuses on Chris’s blossoming as an artist. His colorful paintings of New York City scenes and skylines eventually drew attention from, among others, Gloria Vanderbilt, who supplied a taped interview in which she calls the work “really arresting and very original.”
Collector Tom Isenberg, in an on-camera interview, says the paintings are “luscious” and that Chris is a “great” artist.
Tom suggests his brother may have achieved a happiness that often eludes the rest of us. His story will likely put a smile on your face, as does the thought of Nixon scowling and shuffling among the cherubim.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – You know you’re watching an intense war film when being machine-gunned is an act of mercy, as it is for many Japanese soldiers in “The Pacific,” a 10-part HBO miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Gary Goetzman.
Better a bullet than to roast to death, which is the alternative after U.S. troops open up with flamethrowers and create screaming human torches, as seen several times during the immensely powerful series, which debuts March 14 at 9 p.m. New York time.
“The Pacific” follows the lives of three Marines - Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda)— who served during World War II. The film is partly based on Leckie’s “Helmet for My Pillow” and Sledge’s “With the Old Breed.”
The opener introduces Leckie, Basilone and Sledge, who were motivated by Pearl Harbor to join up for what some hoped would be a year-long war. Everyone seems to smoke, including Sledge’s father, a doctor who chomps on a pipe as he monitors his son’s heart murmur, which keeps Sledge out of the war initially, though he signs up and hits the beaches a few episodes in.
These were pre-hug times, with fathers and sons parting ways with handshakes, and there’s no question where the Almighty stands. One officer ends a pep talk by proclaiming the Americans will “sail across God’s vast ocean where we will meet our enemy and kill them all.”
You don’t have to wait long for combat. While the Marine landing at Guadalcanal was unopposed, the Japanese were waiting in the jungles for the sun to go down. These were the days before the routine use of night-vision equipment yet flares, tracer bullets and muzzle fire illuminate a ferocious slaughter. The sun rises on a vast plain of bodies -- proof the Japanese believed dying in combat was a sacred honor.
Comparisons to “Band Of Brothers,” the 2001 Hanks/Spielberg/Goetzman series set in the European theater, are inevitable. “The Pacific,” for my money, is more gripping, perhaps because much of the combat is set in the jungle, where there seems to be a sniper behind every palm tree, and because the degree of slaughter is astounding.
In some combat sequences the body count makes a Schwarzenegger film look like a gathering of Quakers. In one scene, piles of Japanese corpses have to be pulled down to provide a clear field of fire.
Filmed mostly in Australia, the series also focuses on other horrors of war: bowel disorders, running sores, low rations (with a bloody Japanese skull decorating one mess area), and mental strain and collapse, a theme that picks up steam as the series moves on.
There are a few love angles – Leckie hooks up with a comely Australian woman (Claire Van Der Boom) and there’s an ill-fated romance late in the series – while Basilone, who has been awarded the Medal of Honor, goes home for a time to sell war bonds. His reception at one rally illustrates the jarring disconnect between a soldier’s grim experiences and the gung-ho attitude of the folks back home.
The grimness depicted in the battle scenes never lets up as the action shifts to Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Some of the footage is almost unbearable to watch. Even wounded soldiers are raked with gunfire as litter bearers try to carry them out of harm’s way. It is difficult to imagine a more intense viewing experience.
The mental toll of war seems harshest on Sledge, a mild-mannered southerner who was warned in the opener by his father, who treated veterans of World War I, of what might lie ahead. Soldiers often “had their souls torn out” he warns, and when Sledge finally comes marching home he is a deeply haunted man.
Many films claim to be epic. This series, which airs Sunday nights through May 16, delivers.

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By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Dolley Madison really was a cupcake.
She also was crucial in second husband James Madison’s political success, brought style and decorum to the festering mud hole of Washington, D.C. and created the role of First Lady, according to “Dolley Madison,” which airs on PBS March 1 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Eve Best plays Madison -- a raven-haired, red-cheeked babe with a soft southern accent and a dramatically heaving bosom. Yet she’s no whining southern belle and could easily deck Scarlett O’Hara while sipping a cup of tea.
Her family moved from Virginia to Philadelphia in the 1780s after her father, in accordance with his Quaker religion, freed his slaves. His new life was disastrous, including what appeared to be shady business dealings and struggles with alcohol.
Dolley’s first marriage was similarly cursed: Her husband and youngest child died in the city’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic, leaving her with one son, Payne, whose profligacy would plague her throughout her life and even after her death.
The immensely enjoyable 90-minute docudrama also stars Jefferson Mays as James Madison, who was shy, sickly, short and allegedly fond of dirty jokes. He was 17 years Dolley’s senior, and when they married she was apparently some time in feeling the earth move, signing a wedding day letter “Now Mrs. Madison, alas.”
Yet a panel of authors and historians, including Cokie Roberts, Richard Norton Smith and Catherine Allgor makes clear she and Madison developed a deep and abiding love, though one that was challenged from without and within.
When the Madisons arrived in Washington the town was swampy bog. Cokie Roberts, looking eternally 50ish, says a mosquito infested creek that ran along the main street had been grandly named “The Tiber” and Congress often resembled the Roman senate in total upheaval. Canings and dueling were common.
Dolley, whose desire to placate may have been the result of living in an alcoholic home, opened up the executive mansion for weekly parties called “squeezes” where opposing politicians sipped port and wagged relatively civil tongues.
She sent plenty of tongues wagging with her fondness for bright clothes and large feathered bonnets. Then there was that heaving bosom. Newspapers and political opponents accused her of being “overly” sexed and romantically involved with a phalanx of congressmen.
She could care less, saying of one diatribe: “It was as good as a play.”
The film credits her as being the “first” First Lady. Besides her high profile parties and behind the scenes politicking she was the first presidential wife to embrace a charitable cause – an orphanage to which she donated money and a cow. She also played a major role in keeping Washington the capital after the British burned it during the War of 1812. While a growing congressional consensus wanted to move the capital to Philadelphia she set out on a lobbying crusade, largely conducted at dinner parties, that helped turn the tide.
The film also focuses on her long, losing battle with Payne, a heavy drinker and gambler whose sole expertise was draining the family’s accounts.
Though the retired president and first lady owned a vast Virginia estate complete with 100 slaves, all that would slowly disappear, with Payne siphoning off a good portion. After Madison’s death Dolley was forced to sell all the property, including the slaves.
In a heart-rending scene, a slave begs Dolley to sell the slaves to neighbors so families would not be ripped apart. “Think my dear mistress what our sorrow must be.” She fell into abject poverty; one former slave, who had bought his freedom felt obliged to bring her food when he visited to keep her from starving.
Her final years were better, though bittersweet. Congress bought some of her husband’s papers which gave her some cash, and she moved back to Washington in the 1840s.
She died in 1849 at age 81 and was celebrated with a massive public funeral. Yet her wishes to be buried beside her husband could not be met for ten years, thanks to Payne, whose debts continued draining the estate. He died two years after his mother.
While not as well known as Abigail Adams or Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison was a remarkable woman – another historic figure worth a mini-series.

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By Dave Shiflett
Many television shows aspire to path-breaking status, but “La-La Land,” which has been airing on Showtime since late January, has actually delivered.
This has been one of the dumbest shows ever. If you haven’t tuned in, the last chance is Feb. 28 at 11 p.m. New York time. Shows like this don’t come along all that often. The finale may be worth a look if only for historic purposes.
Marc Wootton, the comic sensation from the UK, stars as three characters trying to make it in Los Angeles. It’s billed as a cross between a comedy and documentary; Wootton’s characters interacted with people who are allegedly “completely real and utterly unaware they are talking to an actor.”
That’s been a bit hard to believe. After all, Wootton, in his several guises, has always been shadowed by a camera crew. In any event, the “real people” have been at least as funny as the star and supposedly haven’t been reading from a script.
The three alter-egos are Gary Garner, an annoying actor on the make; Shirley Ghostman, an annoying psychic on the make; and Brendan Allen, a profoundly stupid wannabe documentary filmmaker whose jokes are every bit as lame as Gary’s and Shirley’s. If there’s genius at work here, it’s that Wootton created three characters who are impossible to like.
Gary, who favors a lime green shirt and sports a greasy porcupine haircut, does have the virtue of being a loyal son to his departed mother, a porn star who never made it to Tinseltown, at least under her own steam. He brought her ashes along to scatter, though his inane banter makes you wish someone would torch him.
Shirley is a prissy moron who dresses like Captain Kangaroo and whose funniest gag is belching, while Brendan is a thoroughgoing dope. All three characters are the equivalent of a bad leper joke.
On a positive note, the show has had one discrete charm: It is so dumb you might find yourself tuning back in to see if it could get any dumber.
The final episode includes segments that rival the preceding slop, which included a scene in which Shirley fell into a trance in a private investigator’s office and wet himself. At the time, I found myself wishing the PI would drive a stake through his heart. Then there was Brendan’s trip to Malibu State Park where he hoped to film a pre-mediated rock-climbing disaster. The worst part of that episode was that Bigfoot didn’t come out of the forest and eat him.
The closer includes an exorcism involving the spirits of Colonel Saunders and Princess Diana. All told, it confirms the suspicion that just when you thought inanity has reached its peak, another summit rises in the distance.
The series was less like entertainment and more like water-boarding. To end on a positive note, Sunday night’s episode may be far from grand, but it is the finale.

By Dave Shiflett

Elvis wasn’t nothing but a horndog.
That’s the word from country music journalist Alanna Nash, who has produced a blow-by-blow and sometimes lurid account of the King’s sex life (“Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him” (!T – Harper Collins, 704 pages, $27.99). Another book, by Presley friend and subaltern George Klein ( “Elvis, My Best Man; Radio Days, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nights, and My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley;” Crown, 320 pages, $25), makes something of the same point, though in a vastly more understated way.
Elvis, who would have been 75 last week, was blessed with golden pipes – though Nash is primarily interested in the one south of his beltline. It seems no thrust or parry goes unrecorded in this massive book, based in part on interviews with former flames – all of whom, if laid end to end, would likely have circled Vegas a few dozen times.
Nash, hailed as the first journalist to see Elvis in his casket and who has also written about Jessica Savitch, Dolly Parton, Col. Tom Parker and other luminaries, provides enough detail to gag all but the most intense fans, including an anatomical description of the king’s mighty staff, its given name (Little Elvis) and accounts of early arousals and latter peccadilloes, including a fondness for 14-year-old girls and lesbian sex, including simulated versions featuring his young wife Priscilla, whose legendary status as a virgin bride is also given intense scrutiny. We even learn that inanimate objects could get Elvis’s motor running: he would sometimes become aroused, Nash informs us, “when his pants rubbed him just so” (90 ).
There are no doubt readers, and perhaps lots of them, who will pant while absorbing this information. For those who wonder if reading Nash’s book represents a prolonged act of voyeurism, she argues that Elvis’s famed pelvis was a culture-shaking machine and that he was “the most important star of all time.” (74).
Yet the book can be numbing – the flames’ names change but the game remains the same – though thankfully Nash comes up for air from time to time to revisit Elvis’s tough upbringing and some of the interesting people he met along the way, including his rapacious manager, Col. Tom Parker, a Dutchman without a passport or excessive scruples. Prior to hooking up with Elvis, Nash writes, he ran several scams, including selling foot-long hot dogs that were meat on the tips with slaw in between.
Yet the main thrust is sex and intimacy. “How could Elvis Presley, one of the most sexual and romantic icons of his time, never have enjoyed a long-lasting, meaningful relationship with a woman?” (Intro, xvii) Nash wonders. She blames an overly-close relationship with mother Gladys – no woman could compete with Ma – enduring grief over the death, during birth, of his twin, and, eventually, a debilitating drug habit.
Whatever the reasons, Elvis definitely makes Tiger look like a monk, though not all his women came away satisfied, especially when the King restrained himself to “heavy petting,” which he apparently did with some regularity.
“I thought he was supposed to be the king of the sack!’ Natalie Wood railed after an encounter at the Beverly Wilshire. “But he doesn’t want to screw me.” (182). Wood also wondered aloud if Elvis and members of his entourage were gay, though Nash insists otherwise. “Elvis was not homosexual,” she states, explaining somewhat cryptically that his “testosterone levels, coupled with his grounding in the importance of the southern male, never tempted him to act out sexually with another man.” (24).
George Klein, who knew Elvis from childhood, provides an alternate view of why his pal and later benefactor bedded so many women: He simply could. In his much thinner and breezier book (written with help from Chuck Crisafulli), Klein explains that one of his jobs was to procure babes for the boss, which did not constitute heavy lifting. Even early in Presley’s career, Klein writes, women would scratch at the walls of his house and beg to be let in. He was simply letting nature take its course.
Klein’s is more interesting for his insider’s view of how Elvis was ill-served by his managers, especially Parker, who didn’t care that Presley’s films were often most notable for their mediocre songs and lame scripts. So long as the money flowed, Parker was pleased. While it’s impossible to kick this colonel too often, Klein’s book will likely to be overshadowed by Nash’s, despite its chirpy blurb from Priscilla: “You told your story with class, mister. Elvis would be proud.”
Priscilla, both authors agree, was the love of his life (Ann- Margret ran a close second). She had lots going for her: She was 14 when they met (he was 24) and appeared to make a serious go at pleasing her husband after their 1967 Vegas marriage, including co-starring in videotaped performances of simulated sex with a woman hairdresser. Despite such efforts he would not be converted to monogamy. Their divorce became final in 1973.
Presley had other passions, including drugs, not all of which were acquired by prescription. He’d smoke pot on occasion, Klein and Nash write, and even dropped acid. But he could be very strange without the help of psychedelics.
Raised in the Pentecostal tradition and later developing an interest in Eastern religions, Elvis had his own “road to Damascus” experience, according to Nash, though it happened during a drive through Arizona, where he looked up in the sky and suddenly proclaimed: “What the hell is Joseph Stalin doing in that cloud?” 407. Elvis, in a highly excited state, surrendered his “ego” to God, at which point Stalin turned into Jesus. An arresting topic for a hymn, though none was forthcoming.
Nash provides a gruesome telling of his terrible decline, which included an increasingly ravaging drug habit and disorder of the bowels. He also took to wearing hideous jumpsuits and capes that could make him look like a cream-puff done up as a superhero. On his final night, she writes, he apparently fell off the toilet and nearly bit his tongue off before expiring, age 42.
Yet his charms are still very much with us. Nash reports that in 2009, Elvis raked in $55 million, putting him in fourth place on Forbes magazine's "Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list" -- an amount that is "more than many of the music industry's most popular living acts command." The King may be dead, but his mojo is still working overtime.

The Bag Lady Papers
The Priceless Experience of Losing It All
A True Story

By Alexandra Penney
Voice, 216 pages, $23.99

Alexandra Penney got burned by Bernie Maddoff, losing her life’s savings to the Pope of Ponzi, which triggered fears she might become a bag lady – a fear that has also struck Gloria Steinem Lily Tomlin, Shirley MacLaine “and many other accomplished, well-off women.” Ms. Penney, best known as the former editor of Self magazine and author of “How To Make Love To A Man” didn’t bottom out in the traditional sense, though she does write that she Googled the Hemlock Society seeking a “painless way to die” after learning her nest egg had gone belly-up. The better angels of her world were quick to the rescue. Tina Brown immediately asked her to write a blog (with assistance) for The Daily Beast, she knocked off a piece for the Sunday Times of London and there was also a book offer. Friends bearing $200-a-bottle champagne also softened the fall, which included trying to unload properties in Florida and the Hamptons. The unfolding economic meltdown was even worse for others: One couple she knew faced the prospect of leaving New York to move back to Pittsburg – the equal, it appears, of relocating under a bridge. While many readers might pray to fall into such circumstances, Ms. Penney’s pain seems real enough, especially as she recalls her upbringing as a privileged child with distant parents. She writes with an plainspoken if dramatic voice about gaining a deeper sense of life and that while having money was great, losing it taught her “it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” She can even live without Botox these days and has learned the joys of bartering, serving pizza to dinner guests, and if nothing else can claim to be party to a major display of irony. In 1999 her beloved former psychiatrist, whom she calls “my mother and my father,” mentioned the Madoff fund – closed at the time, “but I think I know a way that I can get you in.” :Membership’s privileges aren’t all they’re cracked up to be either, though one assumes Ms. Penney’s phone will soon ring (if it hasn’t already) with an offer that will set the manna flowing once again.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – There’s a major player missing from Tracey Ullman’s season opener of “State of the Union”: Barack Obama.
Ullman, who wore out a pair of books kicking former President George W. Bush, takes a pass on the new prez in her third season debut, which airs on Showtime Jan. 25 at 10:30 p.m. New York time.
You’d think getting a Nobel Peace Prize while escalating a war should be good for at least a laugh or two.
Bernie Madoff, however, gets pasted, as does his wife, Ruth, (played by Ullman) who has been downsized to a small apartment on the outskirts of Harlem, complete with a bare radiator and lots of street noise.
That’s paradise compared to Bernie’s new digs. Cut to a correctional facility in North Carolina, where the pope of ponzi shares a narrow bunk with a burly black inmate who clearly has not taken a vow of chastity.
It gets worse. Madoff is also blamed for 911, swine flu, and his likeness is included in a Holocaust museum.
Sorta makes you wonder if Bernie might have stolen some of Tracey’s dough here in the real world.
The half-hour show is a bit uneven. Some gags are top-drawer, others fall flat. Ullman is at her best in a terrific send-up of the political chattering class.
The skit unfolds in Rachel Maddow’s make-up room, where Ullman plays Maddow, Arianna Huffington – “I haven’t stopped talking since ‘Morning Joe’” – Meghan McCain, and Rep. Barney Frank. Her Huffington imitation is especially tight: She looks like Huff, yaps like Huff, and reminds some of us why we always reach for the clicker when Huffington appears on screen.
There’s also a whack at city slickers who pay big bucks for brushed denim jeans that make it appear they’ve been out digging ditches, putting up houses for Habitat for Humanity, or pack industrial-strength marriage tackle – a new wrinkle on the old codpiece gag. Ullman also brings back her hybrid car, which gets 900 miles a gallon and is so small you could probably drive it with a three wood.
For my money, the funniest segment features a woman who suffers from severe internet addiction. She’s monitoring a cyst with an ultrasound app and may post a pic on her Facebook page -- so weird and gross it’s easy to believe it’s really happened.
After an intervention by friends and family the patient goes off to a detox facility in Arizona and falls back in love with the pre-digital world. “I want to read books with pages again,” she said. “I don’t want to scroll through life any more.”
There’s a message here: America is hooked on addiction and intervention programs. For every American, the show concludes, there’s a staff of four professionals ready to help us regain our footing.
All told, the debut is an enjoyable enough half-hour. The second installment in the weekly series is more of a challenge. A story line in which author and famed widow Candy Spelling hires an assistant to wipe up during trips to the toilet is cringe material, though there’s some redemption in a skit about a couple matched up by a Jewish dating service. Things go okay until the dude admits he’s not Jewish at all but instead a lapsed Presbyterian.
“How did you infiltrate the data base?” Ullman screeches. “Call the Mossad!”
One assumes the Mossad is down in North Carolina, slipping razor blades into Bernie’s grits.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Maybe Igor Stravinsky should be named patron saint of hip-hop.
His dictum -- “A good composer does not imitate, he steals” -- has found much resonance among hip-hoppers and their artistic descendents, according to “Copyright Criminals,” a fascinating special airing on PBS Jan. 19 at 10 p.m. New York time.
An expanding “remix culture,” many members of which probably haven’t heard of Igor, is creating a massive body of work by snatching bits and pieces of earlier compositions and creating sonic pastiches. They speak of “borrowing,” “re-interpretation” and performing feats of musical “archaeology.”
Copyright holders have a less exalted view: they call this practice a form of theft, which is making some lawyers feel very groovy.
Things are definitely hopping on this front of the intellectual property war.
The documentary, produced by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, takes us back to the early days of hip-hop. Even viewers (myself included) who consider hip-hop a form of aural dentistry may develop an appreciation for the process of building these compositions.
There’s more to this stuff than meets the ear, especially the frantic and sometimes acrobatic use of the turntable, which is considered a musical instrument.
The show features a who’s who including Public Enemy’s Chuck D, producer Hank Shocklee, DJ Qbert (the world’s greatest DJ, according to aficionados), and Long Island hip-hoppers De La Soul. Also appearing are historian Jeff Chang, producer El-P, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky the Subliminal Kid) and members of Eclectic Method, London-based creators of music/film “mash ups” that may remind some viewers of those warnings about the brown acid.
There’s copious scorn for the samplers. Steve Albini, a recording engineer who has worked with Nirvana, Jimmy Page and Roger Plant, says samplers “should be embarrassed for behaving this way.” Their process, he explains, is to take “someone else’s life’s work and put your name on it.”
Indeed, you have to assume they’d make some righteous noise if you slipped by and “shared” their car without permission.
Yet there is praise from the pharaoh of funk, George Clinton, who himself looks like a result of sampling, with orange hair, blazing wardrobe, and a wearily beatific look. Samplers, he says, make “the noise sound good” and they also revived his career, according to the film.
The most compelling figure is Clyde Stubblefield, once a member of James Brown’s band and thought to be the most sampled drummer in the world. His signature beats in Brown’s “Cold Sweat” have shown up in countless compositions.
Stubblefield, who taps on his steering wheel with drumsticks while driving, seems flattered, though flattery doesn’t pay the bills. “I haven’t got a penny for it yet.”
Worse, he says he’s never gotten any credit on the samplers’ CDs.
Others have fared better. Lawsuits have benefited lawyers and created a new industry: sampling clearance. But scrutiny also spawned a new game: manipulating samples so much it’s impossible to prosecute. Stubblefield says sometimes he can’t tell if a beat that sounds suspiciously like his work really is.
It’s easy to tell who’s having the fun here, including a band called Little Roger and the Goosebumps, whose send-up of “Stairway to Heaven” – “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” – drew an immediate lawsuit from Led Zeppelin’s lawyers.
It also seems likely that no amount of legal action is going to silence the practice. Samplers assert a grand tradition, including blues music, which has always used “borrowed” melodies, and Andy Warhol’s photos of soup cans. Plus, they have Igor on their side.
So far as they’re concerned, case closed.



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By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Louisa May Alcott was a cougar?
Well, maybe sorta, once.
So we learn in “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women,’” which airs on PBS Dec. 28 at 9 p.m. New York time. The widely-unknown life of the legendarily upright American author includes a few other surprises, at least for readers who assume Alcott went through life without a racy thought or perhaps even a belch.
Billed as the “first film biography” of the author of “Little Women” (1868) and other tales of moral rectitude, the show stars Elizabeth Marvel as LMA and Jane Alexander in a smaller role as her first biographer, Ednah Dow Cheney, who glorified Alcott as “the children’s friend.”
Yet the film, utilizing latter scholarly revelations, says Alcott wrote a prodigious amount of pulp fiction under the pen name A.M. Barnard that featured drug addicts, cross dressers and killers. It also turns out she was not always a big fan of the juvenile fiction for which she is so well known.
Marvel plays a wry, attractive and engaging Alcott who often addresses the camera with pithy sayings taken from her own writings or firsthand accounts of conversations.
She was no desperate housewife -- “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she quips -- though she enjoyed a short-term relationship with younger Polish lad, according to the film. “We had a fine time for a fortnight,” Alcott observes, though whether or not they ascended to the hayloft is not known.
More interesting, to me at least, is her relationship with her father, Bronson Alcott, a transcendentalist pal of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He is portrayed with massive sideburns and propensities for dramatic melancholy and letting the womenfolk do most of the heavy lifting.
After a harrowing stint at the utopian Fruitlands community the family moved dozens of times, including into one of the worst slums in Boston. Dad could talk up a storm but put few beans in the pot, which forced Louisa May to work as a seamstress, laundress, teacher, and wood-splitter: a “true Cinderella” as she puts it.
She developed suicidal thoughts though would eventually find her way as a writer. She delivers a line that should have put a permanent wince on her father’s face: “Though an Alcott I can support myself,” especially when “Little Women” and its sequels, including “Good Wives” (1869) and “Little Men”(1871) set the cash registers ringing.
Yet her better-known works did not thrill her, at least artistically. “I don’t enjoy writing moral pap for the young,” she notes, but “do it because it pays well.”
The world’s hack writers may have found a new heroine.
Director Nancy Porter and writer Harriet Reisen also show Alcott as sharing her father’s commitment to progressive causes (other than full female employment), for which she made greater sacrifice.
“I was an abolitionist at age of three,” she says and during the Civil War worked at a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. There she contracted typhoid fever, which was treated with a drug called calomel, which contains mercury. She believed mercury permanently undermined her health, though the film speculates that she may have suffered from bi-polar disorder and lupus.
She comes across as very modern, and like many writers knew the art of self-medication, favoring opium and hashish, though she also took in a niece and cared for her father, who was eventually struck down, according to the film, while working on a sonnet about immortality.
He died March 4, 1888 and she died two days later, possibly after suffering a stroke.
One assumes her estate picked up both sets of funeral expenses, and that this film will resurrect interest in a writer who is yet another person we thought we knew, but really didn’t.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Santa better watch his back in Juarez, and Phoenix, too.
That’s the news from “Explorer: Narco State,” a blood-soaked National Geographic special airing Dec. 13 at 8 p.m. New York time.
If you’re already tired of holiday cheer this show may be the cure. It’s brimming with corpses and other indications we’re a long way from winning the drug war.
Host Lisa Ling opens the show in Phoenix, which has the second highest kidnapping/home invasion rate in the world (behind Mexico City) with roughly one person swiped every day. Much of the crime is related to the drug industry.
A young man has gone missing and a suspect is in hand, though officials from the local Home Invasion and Kidnapping Enforcement Task Force (HIKE team) have no idea where the victim may have been stashed.
One answer seems to present itself as the alleged perp, a massive, shirtless man with a billowing belly, is walked to the police car: Maybe he ate his victim.
The perpetually lithe Ling follows the investigation throughout the hour-long show while also breaking away to Juarez, where over 1800 people were killed last year, earning it the moniker “Baghdad on the border.”
“Iraq and Afghanistan certainly generate more news coverage,” says Ling, “but make no mistake about it … we are fighting a war right here at home, on our own border” that, she says in her ever-cool monotone, has “no end in sight.”
This war, she adds, isn’t about “beliefs” such as virgins in heaven and converting the infidels. It’s about drugs, guns and money. The drugs flow north into the insatiable U.S. drug market and the money and guns flow south.
You could definitely mistake Juarez for a war zone. The Mexican army roams the streets in armored personnel carriers though it is sometimes out-gunned by the narco-troops, who deploy military-grade weapons including M-60 machine guns and aren’t above using hand-grenades against enemies of their enterprise.
The killing has spun off a few growth industries, including a booming business for folk songs celebrating the killings, which are broadcast while the blood is still flowing. Business is also brisk for local photojournalist Jose Luis Gonzales, who might shoot as many as ten corpses a day.
We see plenty of examples of his work, which often features people blasted in cars, with gaping mouths and significant holes in their heads. Those who lie on sidewalks and in gutters remind us that humans carry lots of blood that can ooze long distances.
In perhaps the most captivating segment Ling interviews some of the whack talent – a “sicario” (hit man) named “Manuel” who comes off as something of a sensitive soul. He tells of starting out small in Los Angeles and eventually receiving quasi-military training, then recalls his first hit, a throat-slicing operation.
“I felt like it wasn’t me doing it,” he says, as if slightly traumatized. He also admits losing count of the number of people he has killed while insisting he doesn’t “mean to sound cruel.”
Maybe he should find himself a support group.
The only semi-chirpy news comes from Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican ambassador to the U.S., who says that despite all the bodies the military truly is stabilizing the border and helping rebuild a civilian police force that had experienced “penetration” by the druggies.
What’s beyond dispute is that bodies will continue to stack up. Journalist Charles Bowden, the embodiment of a world-weary scribe, says that in response to Juárez’s 1800 murders last year “maybe there were 20 or 30 arrests. Not convictions, arrests. You kill and walk. Nothing happens. You can kill with absolute impunity.”
There are some survivors. At show’s end the alleged kidnap victim is reported to have surfaced, alive, on a Mexican farm, which is far preferable to surfacing in Juarez.

By Dave Shiflett
Just in time for the holiday spending binge, PBS shines a bright light on the credit card monster.
“The Card Game,” which airs Nov. 24 at 9 p.m. New York time, may make you want to strangle a banker or two -- an easier target than the ultimate problem: our national enthusiasm to buy now, pay later.
Americans use cards for about 100,000 transactions a minute, the show says, and while individuals bear responsibility for profligate spending, credit card companies have made it easy to go deep in the hole.
Host Lowell Bergman gets the ball rolling by interviewing former Providian Financial CEO Shailesh Mehta, a pioneer of “stealth pricing” and other creative strategies that earned his company around $1 billion a year.
Mehta is a suave guy who lives in a slightly miniaturized copy of the White House. He illustrates how easy it is to put yourself in debtors prison.
Mehta opens a card offer from Bank of America boasting a zero percent introductory APR. He notes an asterisk and when reading the small print discovers “my APR is 11.9, 15.9 or 19.9” Bottom line: “I have no idea which one I am going to get when they approve me.”
Many card holders, the show says, are also unaware of various fees that can turn that little piece of plastic into a truly toxic asset.
Credit card debt played a role in the economic meltdown, says consumer advocate Martin Eakes.
“We are focused on the current economic crisis as primarily a foreclosure and mortgage crisis,” he says, “when the sub-prime lending was really taking off, it was largely a mortgage product to refinance credit card debt.” Robert McKinley, CEO of CardWeb.com, adds that consumers refinanced their homes to pay off their credit cards, then “they would go out and charge them back up again.”
What, we worry?
In another dose of bad news, McKinley notes that debit cards “can be under certain circumstances even more expensive that credit cards.”
The chief trap is overdraft protection, which isn’t always free. A consumer named Josette Wermuth explains that a stalled deposit meant she couldn’t cover a $7 pizza purchase. The bank covered it for her, but charged a $33 fee, which the show says is the equivalent of an annual interest rate of over 24,000 percent.
Some lenders also process larger charges first, even if they occurred later in the month, which can empty an account and create numerous overdraft charges (or opportunities, if you’re doing the lending.)
So who’s going to save us from all this?
While Congress passed reforms in May limiting the practice of arbitrarily changing interest rates, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren says the reforms are “a modest step” and that the industry “instantly set to work on how they could run around them.”
Warren and the Obama administration are putting their chips behind a new Consumer Finance Protection agency, which would have regulatory powers across the lending world, including payday lenders, whose storefronts outnumber Starbucks two-to-one, according to the show.
Yet several big dogs have lined up against the plan, including Sen. Richard Shelby, who calls it a “radical departure from the way we have regulated.” A truly radical step – limiting the amount of interest than can charged -- is a dead letter, the show indicates.
No matter what reforms are devised, Mehta agrees that the industry will find a way around them. Bankers, he says, have a mindset of “tell me the rules, and then I'll outsmart you all.” He also adds that the ultimate problem lies elsewhere:
“Lending money to people is never a difficult exercise. Okay?”
All of which leaves us with the cold fact that the most effective reform is a pair of scissors.