Dave Shiflett: News

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.

Smash-Up Reveals Corporate Evil, Murder

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— Sometimes it pays to take the bus.
That’s one interpretation of “Collision,” a deeply captivating drama airing on PBS Sunday night at 9 p.m. New York time.
The story, written by Anthony Horowitz and Michael A. Walker, unfolds from a pile-up on England’s A12, in which two people are killed and several others injured. On the inanimate side, a Mercedes, BMW and Volvo go toes-up, along with a couple of junkers.
The larger story, however, is that you never know who you might bump into on the highway. In this case, the dead and wounded include a piano teacher with a mysterious fetish, a desperate smuggler, a guy who might have bumped off his mother-in-law, a middle-aged rich guy with a roving eye, a nervous whistle-blower, and a couple of stoners being chased for speeding.
A representative cross-section of humanity, no doubt.
Detective Inspector John Tolin (Douglas Henshall), himself a haunted obsessive, is brought in to find out why the wreck occurred. He’s teamed with Senior Investigating Officer Ann Stallwood (Kate Ashfield), with whom he had an affair that ended badly. When these two are together there’s no need to run the air conditioner. They radiate permafrost.
Yet Tolin has a warm nose for rot, which serves him well. The deeper he looks into the mayhem, the murkier it gets – and the deeper we’re drawn in.
There’s a decidedly realistic air about the production. Tolin works out of narrow office with cheap wood paneling and one wall painted a sickly yellow. Like many real-life inspectors he’s none too flashy; indeed, it looks like he might comb his hair with a pork chop.
Stallwood, meantime, is a bowling-alley blonde who’s not going to make you forget the babes who conduct most cinematic investigations. But she’s a solid type and one can’t help but wonder if she’s going to eventually warm toward Tolin, who lost his wife in an accident that also crippled his daughter.
Fear not: there is one true babe -- Alice Jackson (Lenora Crichlow), who unfortunately is one of the deceased, though she looks good even post-mortem. Her father alleges she and boyfriend Gareth Clay (Anwar Lynch) were singled out for chase because they were black. It turns out they were roaring along at 83 miles per hour and engaged in another illegal activity as well.
Yet they are, by comparison, the innocent ones. The body count rises as the investigation proceeds, and Tolin begins unearthing signs of international corporate evil and perhaps murder. Several questions are left to be resolved in film’s conclusion, which airs Nov. 22.
Among them: Why didn’t Danny Rampton (Dean Lennox Kelly), a smuggler who abandoned his vehicle after the crash, at least tip police as to the nature of his cargo?
Why did Karen Donnelly (Claire Rushbrook), who made copies of her boss’s computer files to give to a journalist, check herself out of the hospital after the wreck, and who were those people following her in the black Mercedes?
Why did Brian Edwards (Phil Davis), who was taking a drive with his mother-in-law (Sylvia Syms), say she didn’t have on a seatbelt when she really did – and were her head wounds really the result of the wreck?
Why is Richard Reeves (Paul McGann), a wealthy middle-aged developer, chasing a twenty-something waitress? Okay, we know the answer to that one, though we’ll have to wait and see if his lust is in vain. And what exactly is piano teacher Sidney Norris’s (David Bamber) fetish?
Viewers weary of blood and guts will find little here to offend them. These cars crash without exploding in flames and the few corpses don’t look nearly as bad as some people you might bump into while walking the streets.
The first night ends with another body rolling out of the wreckage, though we’re not positive he’s without pulse, or how he ties into the larger picture. Another reason to catch the second act.
Meantime, keep your eyes on the road.

(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) Does hemp get horny?
It appears so, and some marijuana plants may pine away for humans, according to “The Botany of Desire,” a fascinating film airing on PBS Oct 28 at 8 p.m. New York time.
The film takes a “plant’s eye” view of the relationship between humans and marijuana, tulips, apples, and potatoes. While we might think we’re in the command position, author/host Michael Pollan makes a good case these allegedly passive partners have seduced us into doing their bidding by appealing to our desires for intoxication, beauty, sweetness and control.
“They’ve been using us,” he says and by show’s end you’re likely to agree.
Apples originated in Central Asia, and in the beginning there were thousands of types, though most were very bitter. Sweetness, says Pollan, was their ticket out of the forest.
Bears ate the sweetest and excreted their seeds in ever-expanding horizons. Humans eventually took a bite and were hooked, exporting apples down the Silk Road to Europe and later America, where they found an evangelist in the person of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.
The Appleseed saga underscores the love-hate nature of these relationships, Pollan explains. It wasn’t long before Americans started using apples to make hard cider, the go-to drink for children and presidents alike. John Adams started his day with a couple of belts and by the 1830s chronic cider intoxication had become a national menace.
Suddenly, apples were seen as evil, but it was too late. They had used humans to get out in the world and left them with a hangover.
Pretty smart for an allegedly dumb piece of fruit.
Tulips, which also originated in Central Asia, seduced humans by gratifying our desire for beauty. Like Helen of Troy they drove some people entirely nuts.
During the “tulip mania” of the 1630s Dutch investors paid the equivalent of a contemporary Manhattan townhouse -- which Pollan values at $10-$15 million -- for a single bulb.
Like all investment bubbles this one finally burst, unleashing a wave of tulip hatred symbolized by a mad professor who roamed the streets with a stick, beating the scapegoats to shreds. Yet the love of tulips, and other flowers, is very much with us today, symbolized by the Aalsmeer Flower Market, housed in a building bigger than 200 football fields.
The section on marijuana reminds us that plants with intoxicating qualities will always find suitors, even though the relationship can land them in prison.
It wasn’t always that way. In the 19th century Americans legally used cannabis to combat labor pain, asthma, and rheumatism. Eventually the war on drugs drove growers indoors, where they created a strain of pot with a mind of its own. One planter, whose identity is withheld, says that when his partner is gone for a few days, “the plants know it” and they “don’t do as well.” Even weeds get the blues, it seems.
Like humans, they can experience a romantic rising of the sap. When male plants are removed from the growing area ”sexually frustrated” female plants excrete large amounts of resin, apparently in the hope of attracting male spores.
The final segment features potatoes, first cultivated in the Andes 8000 years ago. They seduce men by giving them control over hunger, though this can be illusory.
The Irish developed a dependency on one type of potato – the Lumper – which was wiped out by an air-borne blight in 1845. One in eight citizens died as a result.
We are creating a similar “monoculture,” the film warns, because of our French fry infatuation. Americans consume 7.5 billion pounds a year, many of which are produced from the Russet Burbank. The film stresses the importance of diversifying the crop and the health benefits of organic farming.
Pollan is a thoughtful and engaging host, often reminding us that plants really don’t have minds or agendas. It just seems that way.
There’s little doubt who’ll have the last laugh. One reasonably assumes tulips will be dancing in the sun long after the human race has converted itself to fertilizer.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – New York’s Garment District is being buried in a cheap Chinese suit.
That’s the word from “Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags,” which airs on HBO Oct. 19 at 9 p.m. New York time.
The garment industry was New York’s biggest employer in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the documentary. Today, most of those jobs have gone overseas, many of them to China.
The schmatta (Yiddish for “rag”) trade is very ragged indeed.
Yet the 90-minute film is fairly lively, considering it’s basically a long obit for the industry, whose fate is told in this statistic: In 1965, 95% of American clothing was made in the United States. Now, only 5% is made here.
The show begins with a look back at District’s origins. It was basically an Italian/Jewish endeavor, says Joe Raico, a fabric cutter and union official with 43 years in the trade. He’s taking a buyout because things have gotten so bad, though in the beginning they were even worse.
Lisa Nussbaum tells the story of distant cousin Sadie Nussbaum, who shared a Lower East Side apartment with 11 people. Conditions were “horrendous,” she says: no heat or running water plus long tedious days at very low wages.
Director Marc Levin illustrates the era with a still photo of children playing beside a horse lying dead in the street. This isn’t the only corpse we see.
Sadie Nussbaum was among 146 women killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A photo of victims’ bodies lined up for identification is heart-rending and finds a modern counterpart near the end of the film.
The Triangle fire outraged New Yorkers. Some 100,000 marched in the funeral procession while 400,000 lined the streets. The fire helped spark the modern American labor movement, whose early leaders, including Sidney Hillman, would eventually wield great power in New York and Washington.
In its heyday the district was vibrant and raucous, its sidewalks full of fast moving dress racks and its offices full of cigar-smokers and hot-tempered bosses. “I was a screamer,” admits Irving Rousso, who owned sportswear giant Russ Togs.
Other featured insiders include Fern Mallis, creator of Fashion Week; designers Isaac Mizrahi and Anna Sui; Julius Stern, first president of Donna Karan Inc., and Sigrid Olsen, whose company was bought in 1999 by Liz Claiborne Inc., who shut it down in 2008 and laid off all its workers, including Olsen.
The industry’s decline is blamed on automation, deregulation and “free-trade agreements” championed by Republicans and Democrats. We see Bill Clinton hailing NAFTA as a boon though one U.S. worker has a different take: “How do I compete with someone who makes five dollars a week?”
If workers were getting the shaft, designers such as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Halston became gods, according to Stan Herman, famous as the “People’s Designer” and a five-decade fixture in the industry. Nancy Reagan is hailed as a worshipper in chief.
Levin gives the beautiful people plenty of face time but never turns his back on the people who actually make the clothes. He revisits the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, in which Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee accused her of using sweatshop labor to produce her clothing line.
“How dare you,” she sputters during a televised rant, though she changed her tune after sweatshop conditions were publicized. This segment features footage of exhausted children asleep at their sewing machines and a chicken that’s even skinnier than a Ralph Lauren model.
The film ends with a look back at a 2000 fire at a Bangladesh garment factory that killed over 50 workers, an eerie replay of the Triangle fire. Kernaghan predicts other casualties as outsourcing expands: “Wait till the thirty to forty million white collar jobs start going offshore.”

By DAVE SHIFLETT
Ralph Stanley, the hillbilly (his term) musician best known for his 2002 Grammy-winning rendition of "O Death" in the Coen brothers movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?," may be 82 years old and play songs nearly as ancient as the southwest Virginia hills where he was born (and still lives). But after all these years his tongue is still sharp, as he shows in "Man of Constant Sorrow," a memoir that may send some cowboy hats spinning along Nashville's Music Row. Dr. Stanley, as he likes to be known—the doctorate is honorary, from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn.—dispenses a few lashes along with his rollicking account of 60 years as a banjo-picking bluegrass performer, though none will do lasting harm.

Born in Dickenson County, Va., on Feb. 25, 1927, Dr. Stanley came up hard. He describes a Christmas when all he got was an orange and a handful of rock candy. In 1939, his father bolted for a younger woman and "never even said goodbye."

Career options were as stark as his home life, basically limited to working in the coal and timber industries. "If you didn't go digging you'd be out logging," he writes. "They'd get you one way or the other." Death lurked in the mines. "I had asthma and figured I'd smother down there." Music seemed a safer option, though as it turned out the trade also had a pretty high body count.

He and his older brother, Carter, took up music together, with Ralph playing a used banjo and Carter learning how to play a $3.45 guitar from Montgomery Ward. Thus began a partnership that would last for 20 years. The Stanley Brothers performed in local lumber camps and wherever else they could land work. They took off for a few years while both young men served in the military—Ralph enlisted two weeks after graduating from high school in 1945, World War II already over. When the brothers reunited onstage, they got a break when a Norton, Va., radio station gave them a daily show, sponsored by Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

The life of a traveling musician is hardly glamorous in Dr. Stanley's telling. He writes (with help from Eddie Dean) of occupational hazards such as knifings, shootings, surly club employees and low-paying gigs. Another hazard, encountered in the 1950s: a fellow named Presley.

"Elvis just about starved us out," Dr. Stanley says, recalling how country-music records and performance opportunities plummeted with the advent of Presley and rock music. "We got used to eating a lot of Vienna sausages."

Yet the biggest scourge was liquor. Alcoholism killed Carter Stanley at age 41. He died in 1966, hemorrhaging so badly on the way to the hospital "that when they opened the back door of the ambulance, there was blood running out onto the ground." While not making excuses, he mourns that his brother died "a poor man" who "never did give up on the dream that finally done him in."

More ravages of alcohol among Dr. Stanley's bandmates: Singer Roy Lee Centers was pistol-whipped and shot to death after a booze-fueled argument, and another singer, Keith Whitley, died of alcohol poisoning at age 34. Makes the Grateful Dead sound like a junior-varsity outfit.

For all that, the author has mixed views about distilled spirits. "Now some might say the gospel and liquor don't go together," he writes, "but they can work fine if you know the proper amounts." He insists that while he was behind the wheel on long nighttime drives, singing hymns while slowly sipping Jack Daniels helped keep him awake "and probably saved us from many a car wreck." Sage advice perhaps, though likely to get him on the MADD watch list.

He takes a few jabs at Nashville, reminding us that Music City has turned its back on legends such as George Jones. The "younger crowd would rather us old-timers go under the wheels of our tour buses and be done with it." The good doctor could have cut a lot deeper without fear of being charged with malpractice.

On the sunny side, the success of the "O Brother" movie soundtrack, which producer T-Bone Burnett heavily stocked with mountain music, strikes Dr. Stanley "as proof people are craving our type of country music, and when they get a chance to hear it, they can't hardly get enough of it."

Dr. Stanley has other passions. He ran for clerk of court and commissioner of revenue in Dickenson County a few years ago, but says his efforts were undone by party shenanigans. He's proud of his membership in the Masons, whose ranks, he notes, have included Harry Truman and Colonel Sanders. And, after a lifetime of singing hymns, he got himself baptized at age 73.

But first and foremost, Dr. Stanley is a traveling musician, still logging 100,000 miles a year with his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys. If he burns a few bridges with this book, there's little doubt that he knows a back road or two that will take him safely home.

—Mr. Shiflett is a writer and musician in Virginia who posts his original music at Daveshiflett.com

By Dave Shiflett

Steinway pianos, very much at home among black ties and tails, happen to hail from a decidedly blue-collar neighborhood.
“Note by Note,” which aired on PBS Sept. 14 and is available from filmmaker Ben Niles, follows the creation of Steinway concert grand L1037 from its humble origins in a Queens factory to the Steinway & Sons showroom at 109 West 57th Street, staging area for the world’s great concert halls.
The fascinating film starts on a snowy December day as craftsmen force begin assembling the piano’s wooden frame. While L1037’s destiny will likely include Mozart and perhaps dancing waifs, its birth features huffing, puffing and grunting from guys who tend to be beefy, tattooed and sport pictures of Jerry Garcia and Harley Davidsons on their workshop walls.
They bang away with hammers and chisels, sometimes pulling pegs out of an old Maxwell House can, other times knocking the piano into shape with the help of substantial power tools. The efforts of 450 craftsmen go into a Steinway, along with 12,000 parts. Tiring work, to be sure, punctuated by breaks during which the workers play guitars, cards, or go outside in the rain for a smoke.
Director/producer Ben Niles includes testimonials to Steinway’s greatness from pianists Lang Lang, Hélène Grimaud, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Harry Connick Jr., Hank Jones, Marcus Roberts, Kenny Barron and Bill Charlap.
“A good piano,” says Lang, “is like a good actor” with “several personalities.” Jazz great Jones explains that some “resonate more than others” though that is only “apparent to some people.” Tin ears, we assume, can make due with a Yamaha.
The film follows Aimard’s search for a “monster” to play at an upcoming Carnegie Hall performance. If Steinways had feelings most of them probably wouldn’t like picky Pierre, who has a hard time finding the beast of his dreams.
The show doesn’t go into prices, though we glimpse one price tag a bit north of $103,000. One worker, outfitted in a football jersey, admits that “nobody I know could afford one.”
We also get a look at sale day at the Steinway showroom. A saleswoman plays a magnificent passage for a woman and child, inspiring the little tickler to take a shot at “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” One senses there’s a Porshe awaiting her on her 16th birthday.
There are a few amusing asides. Connick tells of his “heavy handed” technique while Lang provides an animated explanation of what drew him to the piano: hearing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies on Tom and Jerry cartoons.
A child-rearing tip, perhaps.
Aimard finally finds his piano, which has just come off a truck and is ice cold. He sits down to test her out, reminding us that when some people tickle a Steinway they get much more than a giggle.
“Ahhh!” he exclaims after detonating an aural explosion. His monster has been located.
It takes around a year to complete a concert grand, and the final product is a source of great pride to employees, one of whom compares the process to the creation of a swan.
At show’s end we see L1037 getting its finishing touches from a worker whose job is to “even out the tone.” When it’s “easy to play and easy on the ears, then you know you’ve got a piano,” he explains.
The swan – painted jet black -- is moved to the Steinway store, where Helene Grimaud beams it “spoke to me immediately.” We assume L1037 will be speaking to audiences long after we, the humble viewers, have departed for the great concert hall in the sky, which we assume will be home to a truly sublime Steinway.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— It takes some nerve to name a new television series “Bored To Death” – just as it would be to name a new CD “Very Lame Stuff.”
The title might quickly become the project’s epitaph.
HBO’s new Sunday night series isn’t boring a bit. Nor, to be sure is it profound, riveting or likely to change your life. It’s an amusing half-hour that may be around a while.
Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman) is a struggling 30-something Brooklyn writer whose girlfriend Suzanne (Olivia Thirlby) flies the coop for standard reasons: he’s been spending too much time with his vino and weed.
One senses Jonathan might have also yacked her to distraction: he talks so much you’d suspect he enhances his pot with a dusting of amphetamine.
He’s thin as a pipe cleaner with a tongue that rarely rests. He also seems to say whatever pops into his head. Early on he tells a pair of furniture haulers that he’s surprised to see “Jewish movers” undertaking “such muscle-oriented work.”
After a suitable glare, one of the movers asks Jonathan if he’s “just another self-hating New York Jew” to which he responds: “Yes I am.”
Yet that seems an overly harsh self-appraisal. Jonathan may be a bit of a schlub at times yet he’s also likable, sympathetic, and in his own way, inspirational. Writers in the viewing audience may especially identify with the poor hack.
While Jonathan can talk up a storm he’s at a total loss for words when it comes to finishing his second novel. Like many with this affliction he seeks solace in writer fluid – a cup of wine – and also dips into Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely.”
Suddenly, inspiration strikes. Jonathan places an ad on Craigslist offering his services as an “unlicensed” private detective. He soon snags his first client, a woman whose sister has disappeared. Being a PI, it appears, is an excellent way to meet the ladies, at least in television land.
The show plays on several detective novel mainstays. Jonathan, playing the tough guy at a bar, takes a big slug of whiskey, which goes down like a shot of lye. He plies sources with cash and wears a trench coat, yet he is not half as salty as many PIs, even reprimanding a hotel clerk for dropping F-bombs.
Viewers who prefer their love on the rocks will find the show deeply pleasing. There’s not an intact relationship anywhere in New York, it seems. Jonathan’s friend Ray Hueston, (Zach Galifianakis), a comic book illustrator, is spending far too much time in the ranks of the celibate for his own comfort. He’s down to the point of getting weepy.
Then there’s George Christopher (Ted Danson), Jonathan’s silver-haired magazine editor boss who’s got his own pot and vino regimen, plus a Viagra prescription. Despite those enhancements he’s bored with life and complains of “death by a thousand dull conversations.” You could almost feel sorry for him if he weren’t so oily and vain.
Jonathan eventually gets his girl, who to no surprise has romance troubles of her own: her meth-head boyfriend is trying out a romantic twist on the Stockholm syndrome. No telling here if the ploy works, though the show ends with Jonathan taking a call from another damsel in distress.
All he needs to do now is figure out how to charge his clients by the word.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) “Man Men” enters its third session billed as the “sexiest” show on television.
The season premier, which airs August 16 at 10 p.m. New York time, may inspire viewers to break a few erotic sweats, while others may be reminded that sex isn’t all moonlight and roses.
Near the start, for instance, a rustic lass warns her incipient bed mate that if she gets “in trouble” she’s going to slice off his pride “and boil it in hog fat.”
Shivver me timbers. Talk about performance anxiety.
For the most part, however, all remains swell, or at least swollen, among the staff of the Manhattan-based Sterling Cooper advertising agency. Without revealing too much of the story line, at one point creative director and gigolo-in-chief Donald Draper (Jon Hamm), dapper as ever, works his mojo with a foxy blonde airline stewardess (the show is set in the 1960s) while colleague Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt) jumps the bones of a hotel guy sent up to fix the air conditioner.
Something for everyone, it seems, and thankfully no further mention of hog fat.
Yet in our world of Internet sex-on-demand, where you can watch blondes take on an entire planeloads of creative directors, or hogs for that matter, this stuff seems fairly tame.
Thankfully, the “Mad Men” has other strengths, especially its portrayal of human weasels. That and good writing explain the show’s Emmys and Golden Globe awards, and the opener suggests there may be more in the offing.
Prime weasel remains Peter Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser, who simultaneously triggers the gag and slap responses.
The premier finds him in a full snit. Sterling Cooper, now owned by a British firm, is trying out a few new management schemes, including putting Campbell and fellow weasel Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) into a competitive arrangement that, with any luck, will result in a double homicide.
Meanwhile, life at the 1960s-era agency goes on as usual. These were the days before anyone took the Surgeon General seriously and every living thing except the potted plants smokes cigarettes. The endless booze flow indicates the company motto is “It must be 10 a.m. somewhere.” This crowd clearly agrees the liver is evil and must be punished.
The secretarial pool, led by office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) operates behind a phalanx of pointed bras while members of the mostly male creative team leave few hairs ungreased as they go about devising jingles for the company’s client list, which includes Chevron, Dunkin Donuts, Warner Brothers, Bethlehem Steel, Lucky Strike and Platex.
Draper, who considers himself something of a genius, puts his formidable talents to creating a new ad campaign for London Fog. To no surprise, it includes a female flasher. Back then that was pushing the envelope. These days, it might earn a promotion to the mail room.
The pace goes a bit flat here and there, though creator/producer/director Matthew Weiner continues to squeeze good lines out of his writing staff. My favorite comes at the end, when Draper, reconciling with wife Betty (January Jones) while perhaps thinking about the steamy stew, confesses “I don’t sleep well when I’m not here.”
It is hard not to notice that despite all the sex, booze and professional glory the mad men seem to be sad men. Smiles are rare with this crew. A nice atmospheric touch suggests at least part of the answer.
In one office, against there wall, we see a glass-sided ant farm. As metaphors go, a pretty good one.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – In the pantheon of political survivors, Marion Barry is king of kings.
Neither a stint in federal prison, drug and alcohol addiction, world-class womanizing, IRS troubles nor even a gunshot wound can keep him out of office.
The four-time Washington, D.C. mayor’s storied career is the subject of an engrossing HBO documentary, “The Nine Lives of Marion Barry,” which airs August 10 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Even his detractors, who are legion, may soften their views by film’s end. Barry, 73, is a whisper of his former self, and if nothing else he played the political scoundrel to the hilt and did some good, especially early in his career.
Born to a Mississippi sharecropper and his teenage wife, Barry would become an Eagle Scout and a standout student, eventually pursuing a doctorate in chemistry. Yet civil rights became his passion. He joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and came to D.C. in the mid-1960s when it was run by white southern congressmen and surly cops.
They met their match in Barry who was, Jesse Jackson says in an interview, a “militant” and “a rabble rouser.” Yet he also co-founded Pride Inc., which found jobs for thousands of desperate city residents, including many hustlers, ex-cons and drug addicts.
After home rule came in 1974, allowing residents to elect local officials, Barry won a seat on the city council. The job had its ups and downs, including a March 1977 takeover of District buildings by Muslim militants who shot Barry as he exited an elevator. That dramatic event, the film indicates, added a heroic glow and may have helped him win his first term as mayor in 1978.
His first two terms were the glory days. A building boom was accompanied by increasing opportunities for blacks; journalist Harry Jaffe says Barry “had the potential to become Martin Luther King’s successor” though his flaws would eventually take center stage.
The film includes interviews with Barry, political colleagues, journalists, and constituents, though none are as compelling as his late wife Effi Barry, who endured tribulations nearly beyond belief.
“Power is a very seductive mistress,” she notes, and power was not his only one.
Barry’s personal life became an international sensation, including an investigation for cocaine use, sexual shenanigans in a strip bar, and finally his arrest in Jan. 1990 after being filmed smoking crack in a Washington hotel room with a former girlfriend.
It was there that Barry uttered his most famous words – “bitch set me up” – and the surveillance tape, a lengthy segment of which is shown, lends credence to his assertion.
The trial was too much for the long-suffering Mrs. Barry, who left him shortly thereafter (she died in 2007). Barry spent six months behind bars, though that was a mere speed bump. He won a seat on the city council in 1992 and was re-elected mayor in 1994.
His secret to winning, the film indicates, is in playing to his strong suit: Barry bills himself a “role model for those who fell down.” As he told one audience: “We are living in an imperfect world where people expect us to be perfect.”
His constituents clearly sympathize. “Everybody has a Marion Barry in their family,” one supporter insists, though that may be a bit of an overstatement.
His talents and troubles have followed him into his senior years, as have his true believers. He won a seat on city council in 2004; in 2005 he pleaded guilty to tax charges. A mandatory drug test found traces of cocaine, but no matter. He was re-elected to city council in 2008 in a landslide.
By film’s end, it’s clear that if Washington is ever hit by a meteor, when the dust clears there will be at least two life forms still standing: the cockroaches and Marion Barry.

Yes Men Say No To Milton Friedman, Dow, Big Oil

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)—If you like Milton Friedman, you’re gonna hate Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, aka The Yes Men.
Their crusade against the “free market cult” championed by the late Nobel Laureate is chronicled in “The Yes Men Fix The World,” which airs on HBO July 27 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Often posing as spokesmen for “corporations we don’t like,” the world-infamous pranksters target Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, and Halliburton in high-profile spoofs that sometimes have a serious effect on the bottom line.
All in the name of truth, justice, and renewable energy.
The first segment, to my mind the most compelling, illustrates their modus operandi. The Yes Men create a fake website for Dow in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, which occurred Dec. 3, 1984. Since Dow had bought Union Carbide, which operated the Bhopal facility, they assume at least one media outlet would come looking for a company representative.
They were right. The BBC invited them in for an interview at their Paris office and got lots more news than expected.
Bichlbaum, posing as Dow spokesman Jude Finisterra, announced the company was not only going to finally clean up the disaster site but also distribute billions of dollars among survivors.
Suddenly the BREAKING NEWS banner appears, though the hoax was discovered soon after airing and apologies were quickly issued, with the BBC saying the “interview was inaccurate and part of an elaborate deception.”
Au contraire, the Yes Men argue. The interview was actually “an honest representation of what Dow should be doing.” The marketplace had a different view. The company lost over $2 billion in 23 minutes, the film says.
Viewers who share the view that the “free market cult puts everyone else at risk” and that if “we let the free market cult keep running the world, there wouldn’t be a world left to fix” will love this film.
If your teeth are set to grinding by declarations such as “big oil” is “destroying the planet” and don’t agree that Milton Freidman is a “guru of greed” who unleashed a plague of evil free-market marauders, you’ll likely think these guys have rocks in their heads.
Yet it’s hard not to agree that both possess a considerable set of stones, and that they sure know how to liven up a conference.
They sabotage several, including an energy conference where they present Exxon Mobil’s revolutionary new renewable energy resource – Vivoleum – to be made from the victims of global warming. They pass around samples in candle form; when lit they smell like burning flesh. The stink was short-lived as conference officials sent them packing, with malice.
They did a bit better passing themselves off as Halliburton reps introducing the SurvivaBall, a very expensive inflatable suit that protects executives and other well-heeled consumers from most forms of natural and man-made disasters. While some of the audience is simply amused others seem to take an interest in the garb.
The show has many amusing moments but drags in parts. Like many evangelicals the duo seems a bit smug at times, and contradictory. Sure, big oil is making lots of money selling fuel, especially to guys like the Yes Men, whose jetting about between Paris, India, the U.K. and North America leaves a carbon footprint any oil baron would envy.
That said, you’ve got to admire a couple of guys who produced 100,000 bogus copies of the New York Times that was distributed in Manhattan on Nov. 12, 2008, announcing that the war in Iraq was over, the Patriot Act repealed, a free university system established, the oil industry nationalized, a “maximum wage” law passed, and the devil issued a summons: “Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge.” If you’re gonna dream, dream big.
Yet both seem to sense that despite their efforts, Friedman and Company continue to hold a strong hand. After one conference prank, they say of the audience: “Instead of freaking out they just took our business cards.”


Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

By Dave Shiflett

Now that the world’s most notorious moonwalker is dead and buried (without his drug-ridden brain, London’s Mirror reported), attention shifts back to the original moonwalkers, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (with Michael Collins circling overhead), just in time for the 40th anniversary of their historic stroll on the Sea of Tranquility.
Not since the walk up Calvary (which followed a reported stroll on the Sea of Galilee) has an ambulation attracted such attention, though the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 lunar walk benefited from a much larger support staff, budget, and audience – at least 600 million people watched Armstrong take his “giant leap for Mankind.”
Four decades on, the sheer magnitude of the mission is still stunning, inspiring a handful of books that also remind us how much the world has changed since the Eagle lunar module touched down at 3:20 p.m. CST that summer Sunday..
Craig Nelson’s “Rocket Men” (Viking, 404 pages, $27.95) is a broad and often entertaining account. Based on 23,000 pages of NASA oral histories, interviews and other documentation, it is also a fact-junkie’s dream, starting with its opening description of getting the Apollo-tipped Saturn V rocket from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch site.
The 129 million cubic foot building had doors 45 stories high and a 10,000-ton air conditioner without which, Mr. Nelson writes, clouds would form inside the building and create rain. The “crawler” that lugged the 363-foot rocket five miles to the pad (at 1 mile per hour) was the world’s largest land vehicle, weighing in at 6 million pounds, while Apollo-Saturn V weighed just under 6.5 million pounds, had 6 million parts, and represented the combined effort of 400,000 people and 12,000 corporations.
This ship had some serious mojo: At takeoff, its engines consumed 10,000 pounds of fuel per second and to break free of Earth’s gravity it hit 24,182 miles per hour, “over ten times faster than the bullet of a Winchester .270.” In the carbon footprint competition, Apollo was a true Sasquatch.
Mr. Nelson, who has written books on the Doolittle raid and Thomas Paine, provides plenty of historical perspective, noting that while President John F. Kennedy, who announced the mission to put a man on the moon May 25, 1961, may not have been a full-blown “space cadet” he worried deeply about falling behind the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson, sounding a bit like an anchor on the Weather Channel, lit a fire under those fears. “Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson thundered. “From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause droughts and floods, to change the tides and raise the level of the sea, divert the Gulf stream and change the temperature climates to frigid.”
The project had other fathers, including Wernher von Braun, whose former boss, Adolf Hitler, employed him to use his technical savvy to incinerate Britons, as noted by Kennedy speechwriter Mort Sahl. During World War II, Sahl cracked, von Braun “aimed at the stars, but often hit London,” though he apparently changed his ways after coming to the U.S., joining the Church of the Nazarene after a religious conversion and even reciting the Lord’s Prayer at Apollo 11’s liftoff – before turning to a colleague and saying, “You give me ten billion dollars and ten years, and I’ll have a man on Mars.”
Mr. Nelson pens an often-gripping narrative of the roughly 240,000-mile (each way) flight, along the way answering several questions likely to pop up in landlubber minds. Claustrophobia? He quotes astronaut Frank Borman: “Here on Earth usually, when you’re trapped in something, what’s good is on the outside. In a spacecraft, what’s good is on the inside and what’s outside is death.”
Regarding the “facilities” issue, we’re reminded that incredible feats of science are often undertaken by men wearing diapers, at least part of the time, though in space even the most mundane matters take on a magical air. After explaining that discarded liquids freeze in a “a shower of glistening ice crystals” Mr. Nelson quotes an unnamed astronaut who said the most beautiful thing he saw during his space travels was a “urine dump at sunset.”
We also learn that no matter how far you travel from Earth you can’t escape the nags. Aldrin celebrated a brief Communion after touching down on the Moon, though he had to keep it secret so as not to further enflame Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who filed a lawsuit after astronauts on Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis. Then there’s the news media, which sometimes seemed dead-set on proving that journalism isn’t exactly rocket science.
While Armstrong wowed the world with his “one small step” comments, Walter Cronkite marked the event with, “Phew! Wow, boy! Man on the Moon!” and also asked an official why it took Armstrong so long to back down the ladder. Because, he was told, Armstrong “doesn’t have eyes in his rear end.”
Then there were countless questions about how the astronauts “felt,” -- which, as Michael Collins explained, was a case of barking up the wrong tree: “It’s not within our ken to share emotions or utter extraneous information.” Armstrong made the same point after being asked what it felt like to walk on the moon: “Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.”
Some astronauts do stretch a bit further, as noted in “Voices from the Moon” (Viking Studio, 200 pages, $29,05), though even the most extraneous keep their feet close to the ground, even while on the moon. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean recalls how he was astounded to look up from the lunar surface and see the Earth -- “I’m really here,” he thought – before quickly scolding himself: “I’ve got to quit doing this…because when I’m doing this I’m not looking for rocks.”
What goes up must come down, and after their return Armstrong, and especially Aldrin, hit some very low points (Collins enjoyed relative tranquility, joining the State Department and later becoming first director of the National Air and Space Museum). While gazing at the moon may inspire romance, walking on it seems to have the opposite effect.
Armstrong moved to a dairy farm in Ohio, where he was a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. His wife left him, Mr. Collins writes, and he later had a heart attack.
Aldrin had double the marriage trouble, plus some, which he chronicles in “Magnificent Desolation” (Harmony Books, 326 pages, $27), a breezy read indicating that Aldrin has adapted quite well to our age’s penchant for self-revelation. .
“What does a man do for an encore after walking on the moon?” he asks early on, and for him the answer was: Crash. They didn’t call him Buzz for nothing back then: He had an ongoing wrestling match with alcohol and depression, sometimes rising from bed primarily to down a bottle of Scotch or Jack Daniel’s. He even went to work for a Cadillac dealership.
Yet Aldrin eventually broke free from booze’s orbit, giving it up in Oct. 1978 and later marrying the love of his life, a platinum blonde named Lois Driggs, on Valentine’s Day 1988. These days his passion is putting civilians into space, and the nation’s musicians will be heartened to learn that Aldrin prefers songwriters to journalists because, he believes, they have larger audiences.
In an introduction to another 40th anniversary commemorative book, “One Small Step (Murray Books, 162 pages, NO PRICE ON BOOK ), Aldrin leaves us with another insight into how much life has changed since Eagle landed.
After writing that a combined effort of the U.S. and EU countries may send the next astronauts to the Moon, Aldrin adds “there is no motivation for Russia because they would be 40 years late and they seem more interested in selling tickets to the Moon for $100m” -- recalling the time, not so long ago, when the Bear was officially a non-profit entity.

NY Singer’s Comeback An Inspirational Hit

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – If you’re looking for a mega-dose of inspiration, Jason Crigler may be your man.
Crigler, a New York guitarist and singer, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during an August 4, 2004 performance in Manhattan. His unbelievable recovery is chronicled in “Life. Support. Music,” which airs on PBS July 7 a 10 p.m. New York time.
When it comes to comebacks, Crigler gives Lazarus a run for his money.
Calamity struck early in the gig. Bandmates recall that Crigler, then 34, suddenly looked confused and rushed from the stage to wife Monica, who was two months pregnant.
“I need help, I need help,” he said.
They went outside, where he gently lay down on the sidewalk. Being whisked away in an ambulance, he recalls, “is the last thing I remember for a year and a half.”
Jason had little brain function when he got to the hospital, and doctors offered little hope of him regaining even basic abilities. Over the next several months muscles deteriorated and the fingers that once danced along his guitar neck curled into a tight knot.
Filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar, a friend of Crigler’s, interviewed family, musical colleagues and doctors during the recovery, and also includes video shot during therapy sessions at Boston’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, where Crigler transferred after six months in acute care.
The videos are shocking and heartrending:
Crigler’s mouth is wide open and his eyes bulge, as if he had just been speared in the back. I found myself thinking: If I’m ever that far gone, let me go. His doctors offered little hope.
"Scientifically, he wasn't there," says Dr. Christopher Carter, who treated Crigler.
To his family, however, Crigler was anything but a Nowhere Man. Instead of placing him in a nursing home they moved him to a Boston residence and provided round-the-clock care and stimulation.
Slowly the old Jason began to re-emerge.
Wife Monica, who is remarkably unsentimental, says the smallest advances “were miraculous.” She adds that she came to “see the beauty in sadness and hardship,” though she states she is “not trying to romanticize” the situation.
Perhaps the biggest miracle was when Crigler started playing the guitar, initially picking out a small progression of notes, which he repeated incessantly. An old saying came to mind: There’s no curing a guitar player.
While Jason Crigler is not a household name, he has shared the stage with John Cale, Linda Thompson, Marshall Crenshaw, Rufus Wainwright and Norah Jones, who in an interview says his loss created “a big hole in the community.”
Crigler’s comeback came in increments – a cameo song at a friend’s gig, then a set, and finally, on his 36th birthday, a full show at a favorite Manhattan venue, The Living Room.
“I think I’m okay,” Crigler says as he tunes up. The audience couldn’t have been happier if John, George, Paul and Ringo had materialized on stage.
“Something exceptional and quite indescribable occurred,” Metzgar says, and it’s impossible not to be astounded watching Crigler play and sing, considering the dismal wreck of a man we recall from the therapy videos.
His family believes he’s 90 percent recovered, though his sense of humor couldn’t get much better. In a bit of stage bantering, Crigler calls the stroke “quite an experience” during which he met doctors who told him he would never walk or play the guitar.
“Luckily, I proved them all wrong.”

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – If you think someone’s watching you, you may not necessarily need medication.
So suggests fabled civil rights lawyer Martin Garbus in “Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech,” which airs on HBO June 29 at 9 p.m. New York Time.
Garbus, most famous for defending neo-Nazi marchers in Skokie, Illinois and serving as a lawyer in the Pentagon Papers case, warns that Americans face growing threats from a government with unparalleled snooping powers, compliant courts and fellow citizens with axes to grind.
The 75-minute show, hosted by Garbus’s daughter, filmmaker Liz Garbus, begins with a paean to the First Amendment, which Garbus, now gray and soft-spoken, calls the “cornerstone of democracy” and a “miracle.”
The miracle, he says, isn’t universally revered, especially in wartime, when dissidents are likely to pay a price for speaking their mind.
One segment takes up the case of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, fired in 2007 after an investigation found him guilty of academic misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication.
Garbus says Churchill’s real sin was an inflammatory post-911 essay which argued that the attacks at least partially payback for U.S. policies, a case of “chickens coming home to roost,” as Churchill says in an interview. That analysis picked up steam in 2009, when Churchill won an unlawful termination lawsuit.
The show features other luminaries including former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, attorney Floyd Abrams, Columbia University professor Eric Foner, Appeals Court judge the Hon. Richard Posner, along with activists Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, both of whom vociferously opposed Debbie Almontaser, a Lebanese-American named to head the Khalil Gibran International Academy, an Arabic-English public school in New York.
Almontaser was accused of harboring terrorist sympathies before the school ever opened, a charge picked up by sympathetic journalists at the late New York Sun and the New York Post. The show indicates she was the victim of hysteria-driven smear job, though Garbus says there was no libel. Free speech, we are reminded, can have unpleasant consequences.
That was also a lesson learned by Chase Harper, a California high school student suspended for wearing a t-shirt bearing a Bible verse condemning homosexuality during a school gay awareness day. Though no students complained, he was sent to the vice-principal’s office, where he says he was told, “If your faith is offensive, you have to leave it in the car.”
“Are we in the United States?” Harper asks.
Well, yes. The show makes clear that protecting freedom of speech has been a struggle since the get-go, tapping into HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries to hear Adams and Thomas Jefferson debating the merits, and drawbacks, of untrammeled tongues.
Garbus recalls the late 1970s uproar in Skokie. Many Jews, he said, believed the ACLU shouldn’t take up the case, and when it did he was the target of advanced vitriol. All told, he says, it was a “horrendous experience” though certainly a sacrifice worth making.
The future should offer plenty of opportunities for First Amendment lawyers, the show indicates.
Government is using the war on terror as an excuse to curb dissent and snoop on Americans who have not been accused of any crime. At the 2004 Republican convention in New York City, marchers could hardly get to chanting before they were rounded up and arrested, according to the show, which says there were 1801 arrests compared to 688 arrests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Government surveillance, Garbus warns, is more pervasive than ever before, thanks to technological advances and a compliant court system.
Perhaps most disturbing is apparent public support for curbing speech. According to the show, before 911 20 percent of Americans believed freedom of speech “goes to too far.” After the attacks, the number rose to 50 percent.
The apparent message to Lady Liberty: Muzzle up, Buttercup.

Get Me a Nurse – Hey, Make That a Double: TV

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – There’s a nurse shortage in the real world but in TV land two are hanging their shingles in June. The prognosis for both shows enjoying healthy life-spans is excellent.
“Nurse Jackie,” which debuts June 8 on Showtime at 10:30 p.m. New York time, stars Edie Falco, formerly Mrs. Tony Soprano, as Jackie Peyton. She works in the emergency room at All Saints Hospital in Manhattan and is as edgy as a box of razor blades. She’s also an addict, a wife and the mother of two kids.
“Hawthorne,” which airs June 16 on TNT at 9 p.m. New York time, stars Jada Pinkett Smith, currently Mrs. Will Smith, as Christina Hawthorne, a much straighter arrow who oversees the nursing staff at Richmond Trinity Hospital in Virginia. Her husband resides in an urn, courtesy of cancer, though she talks to him on a regular basis.
Both women are strong, passionate and have limitless dedication to their patients, unlike some of the doctors they have to contend with. Both are saintly, in their own ways, though Jackie’s more my type of saint.
Falco definitely moves out of Tony Soprano’s large shadow in this “dark comedy,” which starts out with the Jackie lying flat on her back while reciting the opening lines to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She’s in a deep funk because she’s just about out of pain pills. She has a bad back and needs additional drugs to help her through 80-hour workweeks.
Many viewers are likely to fall hard for her when she tells a young associate, “I don’t do chatty. I like quiet. Quiet and mean – those are my people.”
Doctors, on the other hand, can be definite health hazards. A bike messenger comes in with a broken leg. Jackie suspects a deeper injury as well but the arrogant young buck on call, Dr. Fitch Cooper (Peter Facinelli) is sure he knows better.
“Knock! Knock!” he chirps to the patient. “Who’s there?” the injured man responds, which convinces the doc that all’s well. In the next scene, the messenger is Nirvana-bound, inspiring Jackie to observe, loudly: “I have seen hundreds of you jerk offs blow through these doors.”
The scene that may capture her spirit best of all features an employee of the Libyan ambassador, who has had his ear sliced off in a dispute with a hooker, whom he has grievously assaulted. Yet he won’t be prosecuted because of his status.
Jackie knows just what the doctor should order. She clasps the excised ear in a pair of hemostats, hisses “F--- you!” into it, then flushes it down the toilet.
That’s the way the world is supposed to work.
Doc-botch is also a theme in “Hawthorne,” which is billed as a dramatic series. In the opener a bitchy doctor has ordered an injection for a patient. Nurse Ray Stein (David Julian Hirsh), phones her to warn that the dosage is wrong, for which he receives a tongue lashing. The patient, a twice-deployed veteran, barely survives, though the doctor is unrepentant. One hopes someone drops a house, or perhaps ambulance, on her in a future episode.
While Jackie’s salty and weary Christina is deeply earnest and a knockout. Her staff includes several other babes, including a buxom brunette with a prosthetic leg and a blonde who, in one scene, conducts a strategic laying on of hands that could raise many corpses from the dead.
Both shows feature plenty of the sorts of crazies who visit hospitals, including a 16-year-old stoner who launches roman candles from his buttocks and a psycho who chases his wife into the emergency room with a butcher knife.
Viewers looking for a role model will prefer Christina while the jaded will prefer Jackie, who nonetheless takes time from her hellish schedule to contemplate the virtues of sainthood. She’s clearly not ready to don the hair shirt.
Her credo, repeated a couple of times, comes from Saint Augustine: “Make me good God, but not yet.” Both shows are good from the get-go, unless you happen to be a doctor.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Not everyone believes the world is spinning out of control.
Alex Jones, an Austin, Texas radio talk show host, is dead sure that what many of us mistake for economic and political chaos is actually the handiwork of a group of elitists moving ever closer to world domination.
His strange yet engrossing story is the subject of “New World Order,” a documentary airing on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) May 26 at 6:45 p.m. New York Time.
At first glance Jones resembles Christopher Hitchens, though when he starts talking you’ll likely notice a profound difference.
Jones and a committed band of fellow travelers believe 911 was “an inside job” orchestrated to sow panic and reliance on an increasingly repressive government. They believe JFK was killed by “the military industrial complex” and that Halliburton is constructing a gulag of concentration camps capable of holding 50 million Americans.
At the controls are members of the Bilderberg Group, whose members include Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and dozens more bigs from the worlds of politics, finance, and media.
So far as Jones and company are concerned, the Bilderbergers’ wingtips conceal cloven hooves and they expend much time and effort stalking and filming the supposed puppet-masters (who are also said to control both major U.S. political parties and the “mainstream media”).
Ambitious claims, but any measure, and while few viewers are likely to be converted they may be amazed and sometimes amused by the 83-minute film.
Some of the most interesting segments feature the faithful taking their gospel to the streets.
Jones plays his bullhorn like a Stradivarius and he and his mates attract plenty of attention when insisting the Trade Center towers were brought down by planted explosives.
New Yorkers are a hard sell, however, with one barking “get the f*** out of my country.” Geraldo Rivera is a bit more subtle: when Jones and his cadre heckle him and a couple of Fox blondes as they broadcast live, Geraldo slyly flips them off. A group of sidewalk strollers in New Orleans listens more tolerantly, perhaps because most are nursing beers.
The film doesn’t attempt to debunk the conspiracy theories and includes sympathetic treatment of some enthusiasts, including a young man who was driven to the movement by his opposition to the Iraq War and his is belief that the media does not give ample coverage to the mayhem. This segment includes horrifying night-vision footage of the machine-gunning of three apparent infiltrators; the bursts reduce their bodies to small piles of rubble.
Filmmakers Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel also show Jones’s playful side as he sings along with a Jerry Reed song and delivers amusing analysis at the Washington Monument, which he calls a “giant power talisman” that elitists believe channels dark power into their evil, conspiring souls.
Yet when his microphone goes on, Jones can display an unsettling ferocity and there is highly developed paranoia on display as well. One activist explains that the red and blue dots on some mailboxes (generally believed to have been put there by mail or newspaper carriers) are actually government markings to indicate status on a hit list.
Red dots mean “they take you out immediately and shoot you in head” while blue dots mean you are sent off to the Halliburton concentration camps, which makes standard issue Bush/Cheney hatred seem like a schoolgirl crush.
Near the end, Jones rejects the idea that conspiracy theorists embrace their all-encompassing beliefs so they will feel that at least someone or something is in control. They believe they’re really on to something. Many viewers will likely retain their view that the world continues to fly by the seat of its well-worn pants, thank goodness.
And no, I am not now nor have ever been a Bilderberger.


(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

Dave Shiflett
May 11 (Bloomberg) -- For Bernie Madoff, mum was the word.
The Pope of Ponzi demanded anonymity as a cost of doing
business, according to “The Madoff Affair,” an illuminating
one-hour special airing tomorrow on PBS at 9 p.m. New York time.
Sandra Manzke, a hedge-fund manager whose former company
Tremont Group Holdings Inc. invested billions of dollars with
Madoff, said she promised not to use his name in her prospectus
because “that was his trading model, the black box that he
used.”
That black box doubled as a black hole, into which
disappeared an estimated $65 billion, along with the reputation
of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose bumbling gets a
full airing.
Correspondent Martin Smith traces the story back to the
1960s, when Madoff opened an investment advisory firm fronted by
two accountants, including Michael Bienes, who sings like a
canary. It’s not a pretty tune.
“What made you think he could return 20 percent?” Smith
asks.
“I don’t know,” Bienes responds. “How does an airplane fly?
I don’t ask.”
Sounding like a chump out of central casting, he also moans
that Madoff “owned us. We were always captive to him.”

Unlicensed Securities

Bienes isn’t the only fool in this story. The SEC comes
across as supernaturally clueless.
Madoff’s firm eventually attracted over 3,000 clients and
in the early 1990s was investigated for selling unlicensed
securities. As Smith points out in an interview with former SEC
Chairman Harvey Pitt, this was hardly a minor infraction on
Madoff’s part: Anyone with more than 15 clients was supposed to
be registered.
“He had 3,200,” Smith points out.
“Thirty-two hundred seems to me more than 15,” Pitt
concedes. Get the man a cookie.
Yet Madoff was simply required to close down and pay
investors $400 million -- a minor inconvenience, since by that
time his market-making business “was handling 9 percent of all
the trades on the New York Stock Exchange” the show says.
The SEC never paid serious attention to Madoff. Not so
investors.
With the help of Walter Noel Jr. and his Fairfield
Greenwich Group, Madoff went global, attracting A-listers such
as Prince Michael of Yugoslavia; Philippe Junot, former husband
of Princess Caroline of Monaco; and French aristocrat Thierry
Magon de la Villehuchet .

Batting Average

Not everyone was fooled. Boston risk analyst Frank Casey
became suspicious after de la Villehuchet told him Madoff made
money in both bear and bull markets. Colleague Harry Markopolos
analyzed Madoff’s returns, Casey says, and determined “a
baseball player would have to be hitting .925 for 10 years in a
row” to rival his success.
Markopolos sent the SEC several memos warning something
was amiss, to no effect. Pitt admits “it is not clear why the
SEC was unable to conclude that he was conducting the Ponzi
scheme we now know he was conducting.”
Congressman Gary Ackerman, a Democrat who represents parts
of Long Island and Queens, New York, accused the SEC of gross
incompetence during a Feb. 4, 2009 meeting with agency
officials.
In the show’s most memorable clip, Ackerman roars that
Markopolos “led you to this pile of dung that is ... Bernie
Madoff and stuck your nose in it, and you couldn’t figure it
out?”

Madoff Sentencing

So who really bagged Madoff, who confessed last December
that his business was “one big lie”?
Former investor Burt Ross says “the only reason that this
ended was because, at one given point in time, the economy did
so badly that people wanted -- needed -- to get money out of
Madoff’s investments.” That demand outstripped Madoff’s money
supply and the game was up.
Madoff, who pleaded guilty to all charges against him in
March, faces a prison sentence of as many as 150 years when he
is sentenced on June 16. De la Villehuchet, who may have lost
$1.4 billion in clients funds he invested with Madoff, won’t be
there to see it. He committed suicide in December.

(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Some of us have a crazy aunt in the attic. Jackie Kennedy had a deeply eccentric one in the Hamptons.
Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, known as “Big Edie,” and daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”) were every bit as strange as Jackie was sleek, at least as portrayed in “Grey Gardens,” which premiers on HBO April 18 at 8 p.m. New York time.
All three shared a similar fate: Their lives were not what they had hoped for.
The film builds on a 1973 documentary about the odd couple, who lived in a dilapidated 28-room mansion in East Hampton, N.Y. The documentary made cult heroes of both women.
This film, which stars Jessica Lange as “Big Edie” and Drew Barrymore as “Little Edie,” will likely be seen as high points in both careers.
Using the making of the documentary as a central plot line, the film covers 40 years to tell how the mother and daughter went from riches to rags, starting in 1936 when Little Edie is about to come out as a debutante in New York.
This was a strategic ploy. “You’ll never get a man to propose to you if you don’t have a debut,” Big Edie advises. Little Edie’s has other dreams. She wants a stage career and flees her party, only to be run down by mom, who feeds her a pair of whoppers:
“You can have your cake and eat it too in this life,” she promises. “Get married and you can do whatever you want.”
As the film progresses, we watch the cake disappear, along with Big Edie’s husband and Little Edie’s lover and hopes for fame.
Mom’s marriage was no advertisement for marital bliss. While husband Phelan (Ken Howard) practiced law in New York (and practiced love with his secretary), she stayed home with her glib accompanist, George “Gould” Strong (Malcolm Gets), who eventually bolted.
Little Edie’s flame, former secretary of the Interior Julius “Cap” Krug (Daniel Baldwin), dumped her to protect his marriage. At her moment of crisis mom convinced her to come home to Grey Gardens, where neither found any time whatsoever for housework.
Indeed, as former President Kennedy might have put it, they did squalor with “great vigor.” The house filled with trash, raccoons, cats and the critters’ various byproducts. If excretia were gold, the Beales would have made the Rockefellers look like paupers.
In the early 1970s the health department moved in; media reports brought the former first lady into the picture. Her visit is one of the film’s most captivating moments.
Jackie (Jeanne Tripplehorn) rolls up in a chauffeured Lincoln, totally composed until she enters the house. Suddenly she’s in gag city. “That cat is going to the bathroom right in back of your portrait,” she tells Big Edie, who takes it in stride.
They repair to the gardens, where Little Edie tells Jackie she had dated Joseph Kennedy and, had history taken a different turn, could have ended up first lady. “I wish it had been you, Edie. I really do,” a world-weary Jackie responds. It’s hard not to sympathize, especially when Edie follows up with: “Is it true that Jack Kennedy gave you gonorrhea?” Jackie saw to it that the house was brought up to code.
Both women put in brilliant performances, with Lange’s character undergoing the greatest changes. She starts out a saucy babe and ends a gray, sagging crone who cooks sausages on a hot plate parked on her bedside table.
Director/writer Michael Sucsy’s script shows mother and daughter caught in a cycle of hostility and sympathy. When Little Edie says mom won’t like the upcoming documentary because it will tell the “truth about how you’ve held me back all these years,” mom shoots back: “If you’re stuck Edie it’s only with yourself.”
Moments later, mom says “I should have let you stay in New York” to which daughter responds, “I could have gone any time.”
Little Edie did depart, but not until after her mother died in 1977. She fulfilled her dream of performing in cabarets (though to bad reviews) before her death in 2002.
She was never the star she hoped to be, though her view of the 1973 documentary could be applied to this glittering portrayal of her life: “If you don’t win 90 prizes for this movie I’ll be very surprised.”


(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)


To contact the writer of this story:
Dave Shiflett at dshifl@aol.com.