tag:daveshiflett.com,2005:/blogs/news?p=12News2022-09-02T09:43:47-04:00Dave Shiflettfalsetag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/70517242022-09-02T09:43:47-04:002024-03-21T05:12:38-04:00Wall Street Journal Review: Peter Shapiro's 'The Music Never Stops' <p>‘The Music Never Stops’ Review: It’s Always Show Time </p>
<p>Peter Shapiro watched U2’s frontman eat a salad with his bare hands and Bill Murray sweep up backstage after a Grateful Dead show. </p>
<p> By Dave Shiflett </p>
<p>Sept. 1, 2022 6:12 pm ET </p>
<p> The reopening of America’s concert halls sparks unsolicited memories. My own include my first Grateful Dead show—on Sept. 11, 1973, in Williamsburg, Va. Tickets ran from $4 to $6, and social distancing was a trip too weird to contemplate. Also in the audience at that show, it turns out, was a teenage Bruce Hornsby, the nimble pianist who would later perform some 100 concerts with the Grateful Dead, including a string of 50th-anniversary performances in July 2015 billed as the band’s “farewell.” </p>
<p>In “The Music Never Stops,” we learn that Peter Shapiro was the promotional mastermind behind those 2015 performances. He mentions that general-admission tickets for the Dead’s farewell tour peaked at $199.50. (At the time Billboard reported that, on the secondary market, some were going for a nifty $116,000.) The tickets sold briskly despite the absence of legendary bandleader Jerry Garcia, who had died in 1995. Devoted fans attributed the appearance of a rainbow at one performance to Garcia’s postmortem machinations, while others credited Mr. Shapiro, though he assures us that conjuring rainbows isn’t in his skill set. </p>
<p>But he does take pride in having promoted 10,000 (and counting) performances by acts as varied as the Disco Biscuits, Jono Manson (of Joey Miserable and the Worms), U2, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Bob Dylan and several surviving Grateful Dead members. For his memoir, he focuses on 50 of these events, offering an entertaining and often amusing look into the music business and a portrait of his own busy, entrepreneurial life. </p>
<p>Mr. Shapiro developed his promotional chops following his 1997 purchase of Wetlands Preserve, a New York City music venue that doubled as a political activism center. It could also do a fair imitation of a money pit: One lightly attended show featuring former Jefferson Airplane vocalist Marty Balin lost Mr. Shapiro, he says, “ten percent of my bank account.” He rallied and showed a knack for improvising that echoed the experimentation of his favorite musicians. One of his innovations combined live music with bowling; another paired the work of celebrity chefs, including Anthony Bourdain, with acts such as the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. His annual Lockn’ Festival in rural Virginia remains a warm home for bands dedicated to keeping alive the San Francisco vibe despite the sometimes discordant accompaniment of gathering years. </p>
<p>Mr. Shapiro (with assistance from co-author Dean Budnick) comes across as a mellow fellow with a story to charm even those who might prefer Wayne Newton to crooners with more psychedelic predilections. Alongside the famous and semi-famous, his world is populated by bands named Jiggle the Handle, the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade and Pigeons Playing Ping Pong. Acts of nearly supernatural kindness are also fairly common, as when Mr. Shapiro bought tequila shots for 600 customers to celebrate the opening of a concert series. He arranged a benefit show for a regular customer who had suffered cosmic-level bad luck: He “was asleep in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, when an errant taxi crashed into his room and ran him over.” </p>
<p>Along the way Mr. Shapiro has watched U2 frontman and international publicity hound Bono eat a salad with his bare hands and Bill Murray sweep up backstage after a Dead farewell show. In the guest book at his Capitol Theatre (in Port Chester, N.Y.), he finds a new way of posing the “does size matter?” question: “I think Brian Wilson’s signature was the smallest while Bob Dylan’s was the largest—make of that whatever you will.” Those given to pondering what musicians think about while performing may find illumination in guitarist Bob Weir’s post-gig comment: “Did you see the University of Georgia flag out there? Nice flag.” </p>
<p>While Mr. Shapiro often swims in heterodox currents, he has a deeply traditional streak. “Getting married helped me to toe the line,” he writes, “and what really helped was being a parent.” He goes out of his way to be an involved father—sometimes way out of the way. He mentions working Friday and Saturday in London, flying to Las Vegas Saturday night and departing Sunday midnight on the red-eye to New York to ensure that he arrives in time to drive his children to school on Monday morning. </p>
<p>His business ethic might also serve as a guide to evolving entrepreneurs. “There’s a quote I really like: ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’ ” Similarly, “You can do it fast and cheap, but it won’t be good. You can do it fast and good, but it won’t be cheap.” He illustrates a part of this maxim with a vignette about booking former Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant for a midnight-club appearance. After handing Mr. Plant a paper bag containing $50,000, he said he’d give him an additional $50,000 when he played the show. Mr. Plant’s response: “Is there any paperwork?” “Nope.” Mission accomplished. Mr. Shapiro cites the noted folk philosopher B.B. King: “If you really want something, you bring cash.” </p>
<p>Some of the advice may strike a sour note. “The decision to return home after college had enabled me to avoid paying living expenses and keep my options open. I encourage interns to do the same, whenever possible.” Should his own children move into his basement for an extended bout of post-graduate chilling, perhaps he’ll rethink that position. </p>
<p>For now, Mr. Shapiro keeps on trucking. After doctors discovered a potential widowmaker heart attack waiting in his wings, he throttled back on booze and steaks. But his talent for innovation is undimmed, including hopes of teaming up with legendary Vegas crooner Wayne Newton, known to perform in a tuxedo and eat his salads with a fork. </p>
<p> Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. </p>
<p>Appeared in the September 2, 2022, print edition as 'It’s Always Show Time'. </p>
<p> </p>Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/69906602022-06-09T20:07:54-04:002023-12-10T14:34:26-05:00Wall Street Journal Reviews <p> </p>
<p>‘Funny Business’ Review: How Great Thou, Art </p>
<p>Art Buchwald wrote a thrice-weekly column on D.C. absurdities. He’d bang it out in an hour, run the jokes by an assistant and then head to Sans Souci. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>By Dave Shiflett </p>
<p>June 9, 2022 6:08 pm ET </p>
<p> </p>
<p>The world is thick with commentators who are indistinguishable, in their pretensions to glamour and wisdom, from the political knaves that inspire their furious discourse. The late and legendary Art Buchwald (1925-2007), the subject of Michael Hill’s admiring biography, “Funny Business,” was cut from a different cloth. Short and a bit of a pudge, he primarily wrote satirical newspaper columns. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, though he parked seven or eight cigars there most days. His praises are well worth singing. </p>
<p>Mr. Hill, a historical researcher who has worked with a wide range of luminaries, including John McCain, Walter Mondale and Ken Burns, begins with Buchwald’s recollection of his rough start. “Soon after I was born, my mother was confined to a mental institution, where she remained for thirty-five years. With my three sisters, I was placed in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York, and then boarded out with foster parents . . . in eight different kinds of homes with God knows how many strangers.” His father too was mostly a stranger. </p>
<p>Yet Buchwald had big dreams. He joined the Marines at 17, seeing action in the Marshall Islands during World War II, then used the GI Bill at the University of Southern California and for a study program that took him to Paris. “I wanted to stuff myself with baguettes and snails, fill my pillow with rejection slips, and find a French girl named Mimi who believed that I was the greatest writer in the world.” </p>
<p>A job would be necessary to finance this vision, and readers experiencing a stall in their professional life may find inspiration in Buchwald’s job-seeking technique. Though he was without contacts or credentials and could hardly write a lick, he approached an editor at the International Herald Tribune with a column idea. The initial response had an air of finality: “Get the hell out of here!” Unbowed, Buchwald waited for the nay-sayer to go on vacation, then told his stand-in that the initial meeting had gone swimmingly. “Paris After Dark” was launched. From such humble beginnings Buchwald’s later columns would eventually be syndicated to 550 papers in 100 countries. </p>
<p> Paris, Mr. Hill writes, was Oz for Buchwald. His star rose, and he made lots of A-list friends and admirers, including Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, James Thurber, P.G. Wodehouse, Peter Ustinov, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. He married, adopted three children and eventually followed a new dream: moving in 1962 to Washington, D.C., a land of fat satirical targets. </p>
<p>Buchwald sweated little blood while writing his thrice-weekly column. He typically knocked off the 600-word pieces in less than an hour, ran the jokes by an assistant, then headed to Sans Souci, where he might rub feedbags with the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. He enjoyed friendships with a vast array of rainmakers, including several Kennedys. </p>
<p>Was he too much an insider to afflict the powerful? Buchwald didn’t think so. “I’ve always been against the establishment, whatever it is, and I think most humorists should be against the establishment, whoever is in power.” His willingness to ruffle at least some official feathers was affirmed six years after his death, when it was disclosed that the National Security Agency had been ordered to conduct secret surveillance of Buchwald in the 1960s, due to columns ridiculing LBJ’s Vietnam policies. </p>
<p>How funny was Buchwald? More than a few readers, encountering his columns in the Washington Post in the 1980s and 1990s, might say: not enough. Or perhaps readers found them increasingly lame and tame. But Christopher Buckley calls him “the funniest human being on earth” in a glowing introduction, and while some Buchwald quotations presented by Mr. Hill may seem a bit flat, he could pull off a good line. “Frankly, I did so poorly in science I still don’t know how to make a hydrogen bomb,” he admitted in artful self-deprecation, though he did better in the humanities: “You can’t learn from history, unless you rewrite it.” In an imaginary letter to Soviet chieftain Mikhail Gorbachev about a treaty to dismantle nuclear missiles, he asked: “Where are you going to bury the warheads? If you haven’t decided yet, may I put in a good word for Cleveland?” </p>
<p>Mr. Hill tells us that Buchwald harvested plenty of bucks, both from his column (and column collections) and from the lecture circuit. By the late 1970s, his annual salary was around $2 million in today’s dollars. He also won a Pulitzer, penned a Broadway play (panned in Washington) and successfully sued Paramount for swiping his and a co-writer’s movie idea that became Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America” (1988). </p>
<p>There was a dark lining to his golden cloud, including hospitalization for depression and the collapse of his marriage. In 2003, Mr. Hill writes, Buchwald told his readers that the Herald Tribune, “the paper that had been part of his life for nearly fifty-three years, would no longer run his column.” </p>
<p>Two years later, when he was 79, vascular distress forced the amputation of his lower right leg. Yet his sense of humor didn’t desert him. Death came on Jan. 17, 2007, preceded by a request that his ashes “be spilled over every Trump building in New York”—a complimentary fairy dusting of sorts. A friend planning a hospital visit received, also free of charge, an aphorism for the ages: “Dying is easy. Parking is impossible.” </p>
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<p>Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. </p>
<p>Appeared in the June 10, 2022, print edition as 'How Great Thou, Art'.</p>
<p>Appreciation: P.J. O’Rourke, 1947-2022 </p>
<p>THE CONSERVATIVE SATIRIST KEPT HIS SHARP WIT AT THE READY TO PUNCTURE POLITICAL FOLLY—BUT HIS GENEROUS VISION OF HIS FELLOW AMERICANS BETRAYED A BIG HEART. </p>
<p>P.J. O’ROURKE IN 2007. </p>
<p>PHOTO: MICHAEL BUCKNER/GETTY IMAGES </p>
<p>By Dave Shiflett </p>
<p>Feb. 18, 2022 11:28 am ET </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>The world seems ragged these days—roiled by viruses, inflation, rampaging woke folk, omnipresent smartphone zombies and a ruling class that makes romantic types pine for the good old guillotine. The good news is that history has provided sages who have beheld the grim and gruesome and have somehow come through with a smile—or at least a smirk—on their faces. Among them is P.J. O’Rourke, who died this week at the age of 74. He now belongs to the ages—which are no doubt happy to have him. </p>
<p>O’Rourke didn’t have an easy childhood. “My own family was poor when I was a kid,” he once recalled, “though I didn’t know it. I just thought we were broke. . . . What we managed to escape in 1966 in Squareville, Ohio, was not poverty. We had that. What we managed to escape was help.” </p>
<p>He went on to prosper in a major way, writing for National Lampoon, Car & Driver, the American Spectator, Playboy and (especially) Rolling Stone. He wrote roughly 20 books, including “Modern Manners” (1983), “Republican Party Reptile” (1987), “Parliament of Whores” (1991), “Eat the Rich” (1998) and “Peace Kills” (2004). </p>
<p>New readers will want to start with “Thrown Under the Omnibus” (2015), a delightful collection of his work and a constant reminder that O’Rourke was a high deacon in the Church of Mirth with a talent for upsetting all the right people. He happily provided tips on how to drive while drugged and possum-eyed drunk while engaging a female companion—one of the many valuable insights found in “Republican Party Reptile,” which assured right-leaners that they need not be bound by the rules they might have picked up in the Revival Tent. </p>
<p> “Parliament of Whores” aptly described Congress as a place where non-cinematic Mr. Smiths don’t stand a chance. “How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?” he wonders. O’Rourke’s commendable cynicism enlightened a multitude of readers, including a young Greg Gutfeld: “He could step back and see the big picture: that the back-and-forth between political parties was simply a time-consuming activity while both sides made money off the rest of us. . . . He reminded us that none of these people we saw in politics or on TV were very smart. You aren’t the idiot; they are.” </p>
<p>O’Rourke wrote some unforgettable magazine pieces. One of the most striking, which appeared in Harper’s in 1982, followed his infiltration of a “peace” cruise down the Volga River. (He had seen the adventure advertised in the Nation magazine.) These were the good old days, at the run-up to the reign of KGB thug Yuri Andropov, who was too modest to pose shirtless but whose Soviet Gulag, by some estimates, would house five million guests. O’Rourke considered socialism “a violation of the American principle that you shouldn’t stick your nose in other people’s business except to make a buck” and didn’t feel much at home with his fellow travelers either. </p>
<p>One peacenik, he reported, radiated “not the kind of ugliness that’s an accident of birth but the kind that is the result of years of ill temper, pique, and petty malice. These had given a rattish, shrewish, leaf-nosed-bat quality to her face.” His investigative skills uncovered another telling datum: His shipmates “were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” </p>
<p>O’Rourke reported from more than 40 countries over the course of his career and was often horrified by what he found. Many of his foreign-correspondent dispatches—often from war zones but not always—are found in “Holidays in Hell” (1988), “Give War a Chance” (1992) and “Peace Kills” (2004). He covered the invasion of Iraq, where his traveling companion, Atlantic editor Michael Kelly, was killed in an accident during the assault on the Baghdad airport. His eye was ever sharp: Kuwait City is “Houston without beer,” while suicide bombers in Afghanistan, a guide tells him, usually attack at morning because “it’s a hot country and the explosive vests are thick and heavy.” </p>
<p>Yet he also found signs of progress during his travels. In Albania, post-communist entrepreneurs raised their game to awe-inspiring levels: “The National Commercial Bank in the city of Gjirokaster was robbed with a tank.” </p>
<p>But it was mostly the American scene that captured his interest. He loved nothing more than tying a deserving politician to his bumper and taking him for a spin. He also closely identified with ordinary Americans. “We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them together, and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars.” </p>
<p>He was proudly (or perhaps defiantly) conservative, even declaring the Almighty a Republican, though this didn’t mean all Republicans were worthy of adoration. So appalled was he by Donald Trump that he announced his intention to vote for Hillary Clinton. </p>
<p>O’Rourke was also a friend and mentor to young writers trying to make their way. Hannah Long, now an editor at HarperCollins, came under his wing while writing an early-career article for American Consequences, an online publication that he edited. “I was hovering on the threshold between the academic and the ‘real’ world,” she says, “and it felt magical to step across it with his blessing.” </p>
<p>He gave his blessing to other deserving entities, advising us to “wield a heavy hand at the bar” and even describing the resonating pleasure of drinking a cocktail made of cobra blood during a visit to China. None of which likely endeared him to the Surgeon General. </p>
<p>P.J. O’Rourke seemed prepared for that contingency. “Jesus said ‘love your enemies.’ He didn’t say not to have any.” </p>
<p>—Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>REVIEW: WHERE THE DEER AND THE ANTELOPE PLAY </p>
<p>By Nick Offerman </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Nick Offerman is a man of many talents: actor, woodworker, author, comedian and full-tilt moralizer when the wrong sort of American crosses his path, which seems to happen on a regular basis. </p>
<p>In “Where the Deer and Antelope Play,” Mr. Offerman—best known as libertarian heartthrob Ron Swanson on the sitcom “Parks and Recreation”—wanders meadow, mountain, glacier and sheep farm in search of Mother Nature’s solace. He finds inspiration in the wisdom of contemporary nature scribe Wendell Berry and in the writings of the 19th-century conservationist John Muir, who, we are reminded, once penned a paean to the river gods: “The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.” </p>
<p>Yet there is trouble in paradise, starting with a host of roadside pro-Jesus billboards in Montana that leave Mr. Offerman feeling “assaulted.” Additional ghouls await in Glacier National Park, where a crowd of chatty hikers “called to mind all of the ill-mannered people I’ve encountered hither and yon who absolutely give Americans a reputation for being loud, rude, and stupid.” He is haunted by other Americans, albeit dead ones, who acquired the parkland from Native Americans the old-fashioned way: at gunpoint. </p>
<p>Some readers may detect a slight whiff of smugness, and as the pages turn (there are more than 300 of them) they may soon conclude that Mr. Offerman can be far more political than pastoral. He vigorously lashes the infidels, including Brett Kavanaugh, Kit Carson, the country singer Lee Greenwood, Donald Trump and Trump’s red-capped followers. No one detonates his dander quicker than Trumpsters, including a small band of them he encounters displaying DT flags in the wilds of Arizona: “No matter what those people were telling themselves about their stance and their values, for those of us opposed to that candidate and what has slavishly become his party, their flag was little different from a Klan hood.” He is not much kinder to people generally espousing “conservative” politics, defined as “a polite term for discriminatory culture.” It seems a large portion of the U.S. population sets his teeth to grinding. </p>
<p> Yet at other times he’s a font of nondenominational wisdom. He suggests “woodshop and welding and baking and sewing and so forth should be taught in our public schools as imperative parts of the curriculum of life.” He would like to see us all learn to seek “acceptable levels of risk” as Covid recedes in order to “reclaim our individual powers.” Additionally, “it would do our society a world of good were we made to participate in a hunt,” to better understand the relationship between ourselves and our food. In the same spirit, he writes: “If we were all made to participate in the raising and subsequent butchering of a farm animal, it would quickly foment a massive shift in our national agricultural policies,” toward less wasteful and healthier food production. </p>
<p> HE HAS OTHER FOOD-RELATED INSIGHTS. “FREE RANGE” MEANS THAT PRICIER CHICKENS HAVE ACCESS TO “A LITTLE DOOR OUT OF WHICH THE HENS MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT EVEN ROAM”—EXACTLY AS SOME OF US SUSPECTED. FACTORY-FARM MEAT AND POULTRY, HE SAYS, CONTAIN A FRIGHTFUL AMOUNT OF FECAL MATTER, WHICH MIGHT INSPIRE SOME READERS TO CALL FOR MORE REGULATION WHILE OTHERS—RON SWANSON LIBERTARIANS PERHAPS—MIGHT TACKLE THE PROBLEM BY CALLING FOR MORE KETCHUP. </p>
<p>Not that all Mr. Offerman’s lashes fall on the backs of political adversaries. He engages in gentle self-flagellation, confessing to white privilege and even calling himself a “racist” due to environmental factors: “We exist in a world, a framework, that was constructed by, and for the benefit of, white people.” More than once he calls himself “ignorant,” perhaps affirming that self-effacement can be the sincerest (and subtlest) form of flattery. </p>
<p>Mr. Offerman’s more pointed observations may inspire personal reflections. His bashing of Trump supporters, for me, brought to mind my aged mother (93), a Trump voter who spent many years teaching in predominantly black public schools, to the great benefit of her charges. No Klan hat for her. One assumes that if Mr. Offerman could claim similar real-world efforts on behalf of the dispossessed he would have shared every heroic moment of them. </p>
<p>In the spirit of seasonal generosity, we can surely agree with Mr. Offerman that we live in a contentious world. Even John Muir and John James Audubon are in the woke doghouse, and it can’t be long before Mother Nature is also brought up on charges, perhaps for allowing the evolution of Republicans. A book without a bit of socially conscious moral flashing, condescension, smugness and the denunciation of sinners would feel out of step. It might even be totally ignored. </p>
<p>Luckily, Mr. Offerman leaves us with a few literary memories, like this one: “When you have no electricity and it’s night in the desert, look up. Holy Gila monster, the Milky Way was like a vast, psychedelic puddle of sparkling galactic vomit, to make a figure of speech.” Yet his suggested rewrite of the chorus to “God Bless the U.S.A.”—changing it to “I’m proud to be a white straight American”—is both clunky and forgetful of the fact that most people have a hard time reading when they’re rolling their eyes. </p>
<p>Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. </p>
<p> </p>
<p> BOOKSHELF </p>
<p>‘The Deadline Effect’ Review: Countdown to Zero Hour </p>
<p> BY DAVE SHIFLETT </p>
<p>July 29, 2021 6:19 pm ET </p>
<p>Those who reside in the rustic belt often marvel when squirrels, possums and other quadrupeds wait until cars are right on them before commencing a mad dash across the road. Miscalculations result in an unpleasantly memorable squash, perhaps followed by the driver’s gratitude for being positioned higher up the Great Chain of Being. </p>
<p>Yet humans are also known to wait until the last minute to tackle whatever task is at hand. While miscalculations rarely reduce us to roadkill, they can have negative consequences. The good news, according to Christopher Cox in “The Deadline Effect,” is that we can make deadlines work for us instead of the other way around. </p>
<p>Mr. Cox, a longtime editor and writer, explains that the deadline was “originally the line on a printing press beyond which no type could be set”; during the Civil War, the “dead-line” was a boundary surrounding the stockade, “outside of which any prisoner would be shot.” Like nooses, deadlines can concentrate the mind. The problem is that, “as soon as you set a deadline, work tends to get delayed until right before time expires.” Rushed work can be shoddy; rushed deals can be ruinous. </p>
<p>One solution is the simple lie. An editor can issue a July deadline when October is the real drop-dead date. This strategy might even improve the final product, at least according to Viennese writer Karl Kraus (quoted by Mr. Cox): “A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.” </p>
<p> A better solution, Mr. Cox advises, is to set a “soft deadline with teeth.” These often amount to a rigorous rehearsal or dry run in advance of a hard deadline. The Jean-Georges restaurant group was in the process of opening two new restaurants in New York when Mr. Cox visited. “We make sure that we test, we test, we test, and test again,” chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten explained, a regimen that includes “mock services” that replicate opening night. The process, Mr. Cox writes, has “the virtues of the deadline effect (focus, urgency, cooperation) with none of the vices (rashness, desperation, incompleteness).” </p>
<p>He finds soft deadlines deployed at Telluride ski mountain in Colorado, where opening the slopes as early as Thanksgiving ensures perfect staff performance by the time the ski hordes arrive at Christmas. At the Public Theater in Manhattan, dress rehearsals and helpful revisions to book and music take the sting out of opening night. This is nothing new. Changes to the original “Hello, Dolly!” (starring Carol Channing) were so substantial that a hidden crew member prompted forgetful actors from within an onstage barrel as rehearsals progressed. </p>
<p>Mr. Cox includes a discussion of the fine art of procrastination, without which deadlines might not be necessary. Once denounced from the pulpit (“Procrastination: or, The Sin and Folly of Depending on Future Time” was one popular sermon), this perennial predilection is now considered an example of “hyperbolic discounting.” This means, Mr. Cox explains, that “we exaggeratedly (hyperbolically) underestimate (discount) the value of future gains and losses. Thus the satisfaction of finishing a project (a future reward) stands no chance against the fun of playing hooky for a day.” Hooky’s not cheap. H&R Block found that procrastinating Americans overpay income taxes by $473 million a year. </p>
<p>Mr. Cox’s travels take him to bucolic Smith River, Calif., where four small farms produce almost the entire 10 million or so Easter lilies sold annually in the U.S. and Canada. Managers work back from the Easter deadline (which varies from year to year), following a schedule that ensures there will be lilies alongside the holiday lamb. Similarly, an Airbus plant in Mobile, Ala., relies on “backward” scheduling—essentially, deadlines in stages—to crank out a new A320 every six days. </p>
<p>Mr. Cox has a wry touch—young workers at Telluride “looked simultaneously wholesome and grungy, like the black sheep in a Mormon family”—and a good eye for detail. Jetliner lavatories and galleys are known among designers as “monuments.” Lilies were “discovered” (for Westerners) by the 18th-century Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg, who was allowed to wander around Japan (then closed to foreigners) after showing a talent for treating syphilis. Everything in Jean-Georges restaurants, down to the amount of olive oil in a salad, is measured to the gram—a virtue in a chef though perhaps a vice in a bartender. </p>
<p>Mr. Cox finds uplift while visiting the Air Force’s 621st Contingency Response Wing, whose emergency procedures are constantly fine-tuned and animated by a sense of shared purpose “graver than happiness but deeply positive.” There’s also a reminder that meeting deadlines doesn’t ensure survival. “If Home Depot or Walmart decided that an Easter lily was going to sell for eight dollars instead of ten dollars,” he writes, “there was little the farmers could do about it.” The lower-price decrees of big-box retailers, one manager says, could eventually “put us out of business.” </p>
<p>Mr. Cox sums up his book in seven words: “Set a deadline, the earlier the better.” Valuable advice, no doubt. Many readers will also appreciate learning that they’ve been suffering from “hyperbolic discounting” all these years, when they had simply assumed they were mere slackers. </p>
<p>Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. </p>
<p>BOOK REVIEW: Willie Nelson's Letters To America </p>
<p>Willie Nelson needed something to do during the lockdown, so he decided to write some letters—to the Almighty, to friends living and dead, to his younger self, even to the Covid virus. The result, as collected in “Willie Nelson’s Letters to America,” is a mix of mash notes, fond memories, a hill country homily or two, and some world-class examples of filler material, including this gem, one of a series of gag-worthy jokes, lifted from Reader’s Digest: “It was raining cats and dogs!” “How could you tell?” “I stepped in a poodle!” </p>
<p>A crack of that caliber would earn most books a trip to the fire pit, but Mr. Nelson’s fans won’t mind. They’ll also enjoy his retellings of fabled events from his life, including mistakenly mailing a bill for a girlfriend’s maternity services to his then-wife; asking a nephew to pull his car into a burning garage in order to collect the insurance money; and creating hits like “Crazy,” “On The Road Again” and the epic “Red Headed Stranger.” What fans and other readers will cherish most is the tone of the project, alternately raucous, reverent and bittersweet. </p>
<p>Mr. Nelson, now 88, has traveled a long and interesting road. His journey didn’t start out in first-class. He and sister Bobbie—the recipient of perhaps his most heartfelt letter—were initially raised by grandparents. “After my granddaddy died,” he recalls, “times were even tougher. For Thanksgiving dinner one year, we split a can of soup!” He felt flush when he began making $8 a night playing in a polka band; his musical income was eventually augmented by gigs trimming trees (for 80 cents an hour) and selling Bibles and encyclopedias. </p>
<p>His blossoming songwriting talent was not accompanied by a similar escalation in business smarts. “I sold my songs Family Bible and Night Life—lock, stock, and writing credits—for $50 and $150, respectively,” he writes. He thanks crooning cowboy Faron Young for refusing to buy his early hit “Hello Walls” for $500. “He said I was crazy and instead loaned me $500.” Young’s recording of the song hit the top of the charts. “My first royalty check was $25,000!” The hits kept coming, including “Night Life,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Mr. Record Man,” “Crazy,” “I Gotta Get Drunk” and “The Party’s Over.” His secret to songwriting success: “Keep it simple, stupid.” </p>
<p>Several letters go to friends and associates who helped him along the way, including event producer Gino McCoslin, a genius-level hustler. When Mr. Nelson confronted him about selling twice as many tickets as there was capacity at a Dallas venue, he responded: “Hell, the airlines do it all the time.” McCoslin was also known to put a sign on the exit indicating that it was the door to the restroom. “People would go out of the venue by mistake, then he’d charge ’em to get back in.” If he’d been born later, McCoslin might have made an excellent vice president for fee development at Ticketmaster. </p>
<p>Guitars weren’t the only instruments popular in the rough-and-tumble Texas music world. “Fort Worth was like the Wild West. When you played a gig, most of the guys in the band were packing heat, and so were most of the audience.” Mr. Nelson knew plenty of hot licks and could also deploy lead with the best of them, once participating in a shootout with a daughter’s unruly husband to help restore domestic tranquility. He relates this information with all due modesty. </p>
<p>The years have mellowed him, a process enhanced by a strategic switch from whiskey to marijuana. “You saved me, and we both know it,” he writes, or perhaps gushes, in a missive to marijuana. He has also maintained a passion for politics. He writes plugs for family farmers— “factory farms are a sickness and you, our family farmers, are the cure”—and for the Equal Rights Amendment and says we should get rid of the Electoral College. In a letter to Will Rogers about climate change, he writes: “We know what’s causing it, and we’ve had a good idea on how to stop it for a couple of decades but basically haven’t done one goddamn thing. Any advice?” Should Rogers respond that millions of miles in a tour bus might contribute to the problem, his advice would likely go unheeded. Mr. Nelson tells us he’s itching to get back on the road. But he does promise not to preach from the stage. “Because of music’s ability to heal and unite us, my audiences don’t hear me talk politics at my shows. We’ve struck a bargain and have come together to share in the music and the love and the good things that come from it.” </p>
<p>Like most people who have been alive for nearly 90 years, Mr. Nelson is on intimate terms with life and death. His remembrances of departed pals are heartfelt and often humorous. Singer Jerry Jeff Walker “told me once that the only difference between him and Hank Williams was that Hank went backstage to throw up!” The late Roger Miller is remembered for stellar quips, “like when that cop pulled you over and said, ‘Can I see your license?’ And you replied, ‘Can I see your gun?’ ” Another day, while “we gazed at the incredible clouds in the sky, you said, ‘Just think what God could’ve done if he had money.’ ” </p>
<p>He anticipates his own setting sun. “I used to fake a heart attack and fall down on the floor,” he writes, quoting one of his lyrics. “But even I don’t think that’s funny anymore.” Eternity is on his mind, and perhaps to no surprise he has his bases covered. “I’m a Baptist or a Buddhist. Considering my footwear, maybe I’m just a Bootist.” He’s clearly not allergic to tradition. In a letter to his children he preaches a sermon that has held up well across the ages: “It all starts with the Golden Rule—with treating others as you’d like to be treated.” </p>
<p>His harshest letter is addressed to Covid, though the flailing is a somewhat tempered one. “You’ve opened our eyes to the reality that our enemies are not other nations or religions we don’t understand or even other cultures. You’re the reminder that manufacturing weapons of mass destruction doesn’t guarantee our safety.” He also includes a message appropriate to this holiday weekend. “I love this great nation,” he says in a letter to America, “imperfections and all. I truly hope we can find a way to all come together to talk about our differences and find the right paths to maintain and improve its greatness for generations to come.” </p>
<p>Mr. Nelson has been generously sprinkled with the fairy dust of American greatness and success. Even the tree company that paid him 80 cents an hour later shelled out $100,000 for a command performance. He takes it all in stride and counsels perseverance to those impatient for glory. “The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese”—words worthy of the greatest of sages. </p>
<p>TRAVEL BOOK ROUNDUP -- WALL STREET JOURNAL </p>
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<p>By Dave Shiflett </p>
<p>May 26, 2021 11:00 am ET </p>
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<p>As our wondrous herd lurches toward immunity, many Americans have traded their masks for traveling shoes. The book industry is right in step, offering a slew of titles showing the way to destinations great and small and offering innovative ways to get there. </p>
<p>Jeralyn Gerba and Pavia Rosati offer a comprehensive guidebook in “Travel North America (And Avoid Being a Tourist)” (Hardie Grant, 283 pages, $29.99). It begins with the dizzying observation that we live on a “furiously spinning globe” beset by potential apocalypses. No worries. Healing can be fostered if the wandering class behaves more like “travelers” than “tourists,” the latter notorious for staying in “hotels owned by large corporations” and for drinking too much bottled water. Travelers “avoid big cruise ships,” hold haggling to a minimum, and bunk in places like A Room at the Beach in Bridgehampton, N.Y., a bungalow once owned by Martha Stewart that, for all its glories, might vaporize what remains of a stimulus check far faster than Motel 6. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Readers hoping to undo the damage inflicted by Grubhub pizza sherpas can follow the authors’ directions to the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail or burn excess blubber by trekking to high-country huts in Colorado. Those suffering from post-pandemic stress can seek healing context at Winslow, Ariz., where Mother Nature dropped a meteor some 50,000 years ago, devastating neighborhood life forms but leaving behind a crater that makes an awesome selfie backdrop. A similar reminder that our era has not been singled out for rough treatment is found at the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, where many a prehistoric beast met a gooey end, their agonies detailed in a pleasant museum that made the authors’ list. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Travelers whose artistic sensibilities were not satisfied by the work of Joe Exotic and other lockdown luminaries will find welcome relief in “101 Art Destinations in the U.S.” (Rizzoli Electa, 271 pages, $14.98). Veteran scribe Owen Phillips covers museums famous and remote, cave drawings, and even funk superstar George Clinton’s “Mothership”—an iconic spaceship-shaped stage prop—at Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Along the way Mr. Phillips supplies interesting asides. Money guy Nelson Rockefeller, as we know, made great contributions to several collections at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; the connection between art and commerce is also on display at the nearby Carlyle Hotel, which swapped accommodations for murals by artist Ludwig Bemelmans, famous for his Madeline books. In Boston, the art of art theft is acknowledged at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose Dutch Room displays the frames from which thieves posing as police officers sliced two Rembrandts and a Vermeer during a 1990 heist. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mr. Phillips reminds us that art raises spirits—and hackles. The Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama, which depicts Pickett’s charge, may strike some as a cautionary tale about the dangers of joining the infantry. Other observers, he writes, criticize it “for showing valor on both sides with no judgment or sign of the underlying causes for the war”—a message that might require an additional cyclorama or two. A more creative protest met Pablo Picasso’s untitled five-story steel portrait at Chicago’s Daley Plaza, unveiled in 1967. A science-fiction writer erected a giant pickle on the site to pan the piece in advance. Piling on, journalist Mike Royko wrote of the Picasso that “its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and the weak. And of every building inspector who took a wad from a slum owner.” In Richmond, Va., where most Confederate statuary has been removed, visitors to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts can still pose beside a full-figure statue of Caligula, the controversial Roman statesman. </p>
<p>Those seeking to end their bout of house arrest with a longer and perhaps stranger trip will find kindred spirits in Ben and Roxy Dawson, authors of “The Falcon Guide to Van Life” (Falcon Guides, 223 pages, $24.95). The authors note that “discontent is on the rise in the sedentary lives of twenty-first-century Americans.” They have a cure: Make like a turtle—hit the road and take your accommodations along for the ride. </p>
<p>The authors tell us that they’ve been living in a van since 2017 and discovering nomadic bliss: “rock climb in the morning, float a river that evening, have a drink by the fire at the end of the day.” Their book is rich with information about vans both humble and sumptuous; the strategies for finding free campsites; and the best websites for scoring regional work. Practical advice abounds. “When in a pinch, don’t underestimate a water bottle with a hole poked in the top to use as a makeshift shower.” On-board toilets, meanwhile—given the tight quarters—can “make for some awkward mornings if one of us had to use the bathroom while the other was making breakfast.” One solution: “Carry a large shovel. The ease of digging a hole with a larger shovel relieves some stress of going in nature.” This is the innovative spirit that drove prairie schooners across the frontier. </p>
<p>The authors even offer a strategy for overcoming unreliable gasoline supplies. Diesel-powered vans can be converted to run on the vegetable oil that restaurants dispose of after cleaning their deep-fat fryers. As of now, the ransomware bandits have overlooked this fuel source. </p>
<p>Yet another threat to placid travel must be noted, one every bit as annoying as bears, mosquitoes and quicksand pits. The culprit, Amber Share writes in “Subpar Parks” (Plume, 205 pages, $22), is fellow humans suffering from what might be called the Yelp virus. </p>
<p>Ms. Share’s amusing indictment of the “least impressed visitors” to America’s most sublime sites is based on reviews, many from online sources, of the 400-plus parks, monuments and other areas managed by the National Park Service. One critic panned the Delicate Arch in Utah’s Arches National Park for looking “nothing like the license plate.’ ” In a similar spirit, a reviewer found the 6-million-acre Denali Alaskan wilderness a “barren wasteland of tundra” despite, as Ms. Share notes, its 2,000 “species of plants, grizzly bears, wolves, moose, caribou”—not to mention, at 20,310 feet, the highest peak in North America. Another Yelper type complained that at Yosemite “trees block view and there are too many gray rocks,” while another dismissed the Grand Canyon as “a very, very large hole.” The Statue of Liberty, an inspiration to countless wanderers, is merely “a big green statue and that’s it.” </p>
<p>One hates to dampen the spirit of our Great Reopening, but as of now there’s no vaccine for what ails these individuals. </p>
<p>—Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>REVIEW OF AND IN THE END </p>
<p>‘And in the End’ Review: Band on the Run </p>
<p>The Beatles’ final year was silly, crazy and chaotic, but the music they made then is still with us—as are tales of the Fab Four. </p>
<p>The Beatles circa 1969. </p>
<p>PHOTO: JRC /THE HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO </p>
<p>By Dave Shiflett </p>
<p>Aug. 20, 2020 7:28 pm ET </p>
<p>Among the horrors that beset some aging boomers is the harrowing suspicion that there is more music in Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto than in the entire Beatles catalog. But of course not everyone feels that way. Existing for around eight years and gone for 50, the Beatles and their signature hits are still very much with us. If the Fab Four didn’t roll over Beethoven in the composing competition, they certainly overshadowed him in mass popularity. And they continue to inspire a kind of pop anthropology, in which their life and times are chronicled in detail and mined for cultural insights. </p>
<p>In “And in the End,” the Scottish journalist Ken McNab focuses engagingly, and insightfully, on the band’s final year, starting with an account of its performance on Jan. 30, 1969, atop the roof of Apple headquarters in London. (Apple, we should remember, was a record label, not a computer cult.) The band hadn’t played publicly since an August 1966 gig at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Lots had happened in the intervening years: landmark albums, drugs, divorce, the death of manager Brian Epstein and the arrival of Yoko Ono.John Lennon complained that the band “had become Paul McCartney’s sidemen,” Mr. McNab says, a view seconded by George Harrison: “You’d have to do 59 of Paul’s songs before he’d even listen to one of yours.” Ringo Starr had tried to keep the peace while acting in Peter Sellers’s “The Magic Christian.” </p>
<p>The lads were at one another’s throats—and the wolf was at their door. Upwards of £20,000 was disappearing every week, Mr. McNab says, and nobody knew where it was going. Bankruptcy loomed. Lennon, who would later imagine a world with no possessions, worried about spending his senior years playing gigs for anyone who would listen. When he said the band didn’t have “half the money people think we have,” the comment crossed the ocean and aroused the dorsal fin of noted music shark Allen Klein. Like Yoko, Klein is something of a satanic figure to many Beatles fans. But he adds a dramatic surge to Mr. McNab’s narrative. </p>
<p>PHOTO: WSJ </p>
<p>AND IN THE END </p>
<p>By Ken McNab <br>Thomas Dunne, 311 pages, $28.99 </p>
<p>Klein had made a name for himself managing the Rolling Stones and other top acts. He deeply desired the Beatles, but his reputation was reptilian. Among his most notable scams was to siphon off most of the Rolling Stones’ U.S. profits. Mick Jagger warned the Beatles against hiring him, and Paul didn’t trust him, but the others liked Klein, who gets a fairly light lashing from Mr. McNab. Klein cut costs and decimated the Apple deadwood, but he would later sue the band (which would also sue him) and be accused of skimming money from the Bangladesh charity concert. His toxic side may have had early origins. Mr. McNab tells us that Klein’s father had put him in an orphanage at an early age, which perhaps also sharpened his ambition and wits. In any case, Klein got the band a significantly better recording contract. They had two projects in the pipeline as the curtain was falling: the albums that became “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be.” </p>
<p>Mr. McNab is a fan of the band, though not an uncritical one. He dings Lennon for being “high on idealism, low on reality” but also reminds us that the Beatles were uniquely talented and very hard working. “You Never Give Me Your Money” required 36 takes. “Because” had 23 takes of the backing track; producer-arranger George Martin also wrote nine harmony parts for the song. Amazingly, Harrison’s “Something” (which Frank Sinatra called “the greatest love song of the past 50 years”) was initially dissed by Martin, who dismissed it as “lightweight and derivative,” Mr. McNab writes. </p>
<p>Talent was evident in other forms, including self-promotion. After a post-nuptial hang with Salvador Dalí in Paris, John and Yoko made their way to Amsterdam to promote world peace, arriving in a white Rolls-Royce and taking up residence at the Hilton. Lennon was playing a new tune, “Give Peace a Chance,” which wasn’t entirely impressive. “What did it matter if it read like garbage?” Mr. McNab writes of the lyrics. “What really counted was the message.” He credits Lennon with playing a decisive role in ending the Vietnam War—an accomplishment the Nobel committee overlooked. His claim that rumors of Paul’s death became the “biggest and fastest circulating sensation since the 1963 assassination of JFK” also seems ambitious. </p>
<p>Mr. McNab leaves no doubt that Lennon engineered episodes of genius-level dissolution. Beethoven had hearing issues, Tchaikovsky was often a nervous wreck, and Schumann ended up in an asylum. But none, so far as we know, descended into “bagism,” a phenomenon in which Lennon climbed into a bag and whistled the “Blue Danube Waltz,” creating a vibe he referred to as “total communication.” </p>
<p>On April 10, 1970, Paul announced that he was done. The end had arrived before any band members had reached age 30. Bittersweet years followed, including acrimonious legal action. Lennon was murdered on Dec. 8, 1980, three weeks after the release of his “Double Fantasy” album. Harrison made good music and did good deeds until his death from lung cancer in 2001. Paul’s solo career showcased prolonged musical and showbiz prowess: His 2012 “Kisses on the Bottom” album was released on Starbucks’ record label and included “My Valentine,” which channeled Tony Bennett. Ringo maintained a talent for not appearing to take himself too seriously. Mr. McNab’s portrait of the band in its twilight neatly conveys the hazards of fame and the enduring value of youth, talent and a touch of madness. </p>
<p>As for Yoko, she re-captured the spotlight during the 2016 election cycle over rumors that she had once been romantically involved with Hillary Clinton, which was not enough to get the former secretary of state elected. Ailing but socially concerned, Yoko has lately been involved in creating anti-virus face masks. May her karma be pleasantly instant. </p>
<p>Mr. Shiflett posts his music and writing at Daveshiflett.com.</p>Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/63422332020-06-04T14:17:38-04:002024-02-17T17:14:05-05:00Wall Street Journal review of 'Why We Drive' by Matthew Crawford<p>The coronavirus has parked multitudes on their sofas, where many have gone half-mad reading rants from advanced-studies graduates of the University of Twitter. Matthew Crawford’s “Why We Drive” is the perfect antidote. </p>
<p>Mr. Crawford, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia and the author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (2009) and other works of social philosophy, has written a thoughtful, entertaining and substantive work about the joys of driving—and about the attempts by various scolds to relegate that joy, and similar expressions of independence, to the junkyard of history. </p>
<p>Driving, Mr. Crawford explains, can be a daring undertaking that provides the pleasures of “being actively and skillfully with a reality that pushes back against us”—sometimes harshly. Driving is a “domain of skill, freedom, and individual responsibility.” To drive “is to exercise one’s skill at being free.” Or, as an earlier philosopher might have put it: I drive, therefore I am. </p>
<p>Mr. Crawford is not spouting theory—he is a practitioner. During one 12- month stretch his motorcycle driving passion resulted in four emergency-room pit stops. He has caused police jaws to drop as he passed through radar traps just slightly below the speed of light. Yet real road danger, he says, comes courtesy of the two-headed monster created by technological progress and safety neurosis. This is a monster with teeth. </p>
<p>Highway deaths, he writes, rose at their fastest rate in 50 years between 2013 and 2015. Why? Because “cars became boring to drive. . . . I mean really boring. . . . Driving a modern car is a bit like returning to the womb.” Drivers are increasingly insulated from the road; self-braking devices, navigation screens, cruise control and similar gizmos result in less attentive drivers. Smartphones, which promised to keep “boredom at bay,” keep eyes off the road, to disastrous effect. </p>
<p>Meanwhile safety monitors keep their pitiless vigil. Their purpose, Mr. Crawford suggests, is less risk reduction than good old-fashioned pillage. In 2016, he says, “the District of Columbia took in $107.2 million from its photo radar traffic enforcement cameras.” The cameras were strategically placed in intersections heavily used by commuters from Virginia and Maryland and harvested what amounted to “free money,” in Mr. Crawford’s analysis. Chicago raked in $600 million from red-light cameras, augmenting the take by shortening yellow-light duration, a move that itself caused a jump in rear-end crashes and injuries. In the same spirit, lowering speed limits to unrealistic levels means more manna for localities and for insurance companies, which, after certain traffic violations, can extract higher premiums for years. </p>
<p>The chapter titles in “Why We Drive” reveal an instinctive skepticism and pleasant pugnaciousness: “The Diminishing Returns of Idiot-Proofing as a Design Principle,” “Automation as Moral Reeducation,” “ ‘Reckless Driving’: Rules, Reasonableness, and the Flavor of Authority.” Among much else, he takes up old cars (he’s their friend); road rage (a rejection of egalitarianism that is aided by tinted windows); and the DMV (visiting which offers a “civic education in submission to a type of authority that relies on unintelligibility to insulate itself”). </p>
<p>He can be evangelical at times, as when attempting to convince a rural Virginia judge that motorcycling 30 mph or so over the speed limit shouldn’t necessarily be considered reckless. When you’re “riding a bike you are not texting, not looking at your navigation screen, not fussing with the kids in the backseat,” he explained during a court appearance. Plus, you have “a lot of skin in the game”—since you’ll leave lots of it on the road if you crash. His argument didn’t find much traction with the judge but was a noble effort. </p>
<p>Mr. Crawford is at his best rattling the smug beliefs of “bicycle moralists, electric scooter gliders-about, and carbon teatotalers,” not to mention safety nags, whose mission in life is to pour their enlightened sugar into renegade gas tanks. While he recognizes that people who invoke safety “enjoy a nearly non-rebuttable presumption of public spiritedness,” he thinks that an abundance of caution diminishes us. A fixation on risk reduction, he explains, “tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities.” In contrast to the U.S., Germany—which has no speed limit on some roads—“treats citizens like adults. This is a bracing concept.” </p>
<p>Mr. Crawford, who admires the adage “Every Man Dies. Not Every Man Lives," visits pockets of resistance, including a demolition derby animated by a love of mayhem for its own sake; it recalls, he says, an “Iron Maiden concert, circa 1983.” At a “Hare Scramble” motorcycle race, women ride like demons and berate their men to "man up. ” In France, 60% of automated radar devices had been disabled as of January 2019, likely the work of the Yellow Vest movement. </p>
<p>Yet the resistance is not winning. “Qualities once prized, such as spiritedness and a capacity for independent judgment, are starting to appear dysfunctional.” A Kant quotation (the author quotes only the finest) sums up the enlightened view of resisters: “We look with profound contempt upon the way in which savages cling to their lawless freedom.” </p>
<p>Silicon Valley will take it from here. Its plan is fairly simple: “removing us from the driver’s seat.” Some will benefit more than others, Mr. Crawford says. Rides in self-driving cars “will remain cheap only until the buses and trains disappear. Then the laws of monopoly pricing will take effect.” Surveillance capitalism, meanwhile, will empty passenger pockets with nearly supernatural virtuosity, “nudging” us to buy stuff by sending self-driving cars toward the types of businesses that show up in our digital conversations. “It seems likely there will be real time auctions to determine the route your Google car takes,” Mr. Crawford explains, “so you can be offered empowering choices along the way.” Suddenly, being parked on the sofa doesn’t seem so bad. </p>
<p>Mr. Shiflett’s writing and original music are posted at Daveshiflett.com</p>Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226972019-07-11T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T13:51:10-05:00WSJ review of Homeplace
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<span style="margin:0px; padding:0px; border:0px; outline:0px; font-weight:inherit; font-style:italic; vertical-align:baseline; background:transparent; line-height:22px">By</span>
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July 11, 2019 6:50 pm ET</div>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Among the collateral calamities of our era’s descent into health obsession is the decline of the traditional honky-tonk. The heart skips a beat in fond remembrance of these roadside establishments, which dispensed—enthusiastically and in good conscience—pork rinds and pickled pig’s feet. (Knuckle sandwiches were also available, gratis.) They were smokier than Krakatoa and sold libations that, if ingested accidentally by a contemporary booze snob, might cause him to jump off a bridge to escape everlasting shame.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">For many, such places are poison. For John Lingan, they are sublime. Mr. Lingan, whose writing has appeared in the New York Times magazine and other venues, spent four years researching and writing “Homeplace,” a tribute to the Troubadour Bar & Lounge near Berkeley Springs, W.Va.—the “only twang-and-sawdust roadhouse left in the Virginias.” He finds dignity and even heroism in the lives of those in its orbit and reminds us, on every page, that the times are always a-changing, though often not for the better.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">The star of this show is the late owner of the Troubadour, Jim McCoy, who achieved small-town glory as a country-music DJ and front man for Joltin’ Jim and the Melody Playboys in the late 1940s and early 1950s before making his way to Nashville, Tenn., and hanging out with A-listers like Elvis and Marty Robbins. He also helped procure drugs for Johnny Cash.</p>
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<span class="wsj-article-caption-content" style="margin:0px; padding:0px; border:0px; outline:0px; vertical-align:baseline; background:transparent">Closing time at the Troubadour Bar & Lounge near Berkeley Springs, W. Va.</span> <span class="article__inset__image__caption__credit wsj-article-credit" style="margin:0px; padding:0px; border:0px; outline:0px; vertical-align:baseline; background:transparent; text-transform:uppercase"><span class="wsj-article-credit-tag" style="margin:0px; padding:0px; border:0px; outline:0px; vertical-align:baseline; background:transparent">PHOTO:</span>MATTHEW YAKE</span>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Despite those accomplishments, McCoy’s hopes for stardom tanked when plans for a breakthrough album collapsed. By the time he hit his mid-30s he had seven children, two ex-wives and no steady job. Creating the Troubadour—along with a small recording studio and a convenience store—kept his head above water.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Co-starring in “Homeplace,” briefly, is Patsy Cline, who, according to Mr. Lingan, illustrates the social divide in the broader Appalachian region where the Troubadour is situated. She stopped by McCoy’s radio show in 1948—she was 16—and captivated him with an a capella version of “San Antonio Rose.” Mr. Lingan characterizes her voice as “bell-clear and sorrowful even as a child,” adding that she came by her sorrow honestly. Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in 1932, Cline moved constantly in her childhood, had an abusive father, and lived on the wrong side of the tracks when she and her mother settled in Winchester, Va., where she learned heartbreak and alienation from a “rigid social hierarchy” that, according to Mr. Lingan, responded to her music with “unconcealed contempt.” On the bright side, she was able to monetize her heartbreak, belting country-music hits including “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces” before dying in a plane crash in 1963, at age 30.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">While Mr. Lingan could have subtitled his book “Life is Tough, Then You Croak,” he writes of several positive developments in this neck of the woods, including a growing acceptance of sexual and ethnic minorities and the blossoming of unexpected business ventures, including an International Water Tasting festival. But he is at his most passionate when depicting the “constant collision” between the past and modernity and between the powerful and those who are displaced by economic and cultural shifts.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">He wields a joyful hatchet when taking the high and mighty down a notch. Harry Flood Byrd (1887-1966), a Virginia governor and U.S. senator, was fine when it came to infrastructure and anti-lynching legislation; but nothing, in Mr. Lingan’s view, can erase the shame of his support for Massive Resistance, a late 1950s anti-school-desegregation protest that closed public schools in Virginia’s Prince Edward County for a year. (Byrd’s lawyer-father might have made an excellent Troubadour patron: He once returned from a court recess so drunk that he “began arguing for the other side.”) The area’s “first families” get similar treatment from Mr. Lingan: They became “slumlords” and speculators who drove longtime residents off their ancestral lands.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Yet there were shelters from these storms, including the Troubadour, where Budweisers, Beatitudes and loud country music could mingle in its vinyl booths beneath customer Polaroids illuminated by permanent Christmas lights. Mr. Lingan’s rollicking descriptions of honky-tonk nights are so booze-soaked that a reader might wonder about the safety of driving after reading such passages.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Yet the Troubadour was not immune to change. New smoking laws made it off-limits to children, which stunted their growth, according to Mr. Lingan. “The Troubadour could provide a pre-adolescent with a window into the full range of human feeling, smells and humor,” he writes. “It could mark a person’s values for life.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">McCoy also wound down, though not without putting up a fight. When his doctor attempted to set him on the straight and narrow, “he turned me onto whiskey,” the doctor says. Yet there was no outrunning the setting sun. McCoy died in 2016 at the age of 87, leaving behind directions for a funeral that included Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” and a personal beatitude or two, including: “I like being old. It has set me free.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Mr Lingan doesn’t recommend McCoy for sainthood but admires him for “trying to make a life in a world where the good old days are gone. What could be more purely American?” He also writes that McCoy once opened a 1-800 service called the Heavenly Hotline, an effort that, one hopes, didn’t go unnoticed when the chief barkeep of the great honky-tonk in the sky calculated his final tab.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com.</em></p>
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Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226962019-04-22T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T12:21:29-05:00Wall Street Journal Review: The Last Job
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<span style="margin:0px; padding:0px; border:0px; outline:0px; font-weight:inherit; font-style:italic; vertical-align:baseline; background:transparent; line-height:22px">By</span>
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April 18, 2019 7:25 p.m. ET</div>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">The prospect of death separates the terminally ambitious members of our species into two distinct groups: those who compose a bucket list of offbeat things to do before they croak and those who decide to attempt one final grand feat, a last hurrah. Bucketeers climb mountains and visit the Taj Mahal. Last-hurrah types try their hand at writing a symphony or building a school in some far-flung place—or, if their life-long occupation has been in the larceny trade, uniting a few fellow felons to pull off a really big heist.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">In “The Last Job,” Dan Bilefsky takes up the 2015 Hatton Garden Safe Deposit heist, an operation at the heart of London’s jewelry district that netted about $20 million in gold, gems and cash. The theft was stunning not only for the size of the take but for the crew that did the thieving: a collection of geezers whose lust for loot was matched by age-related maladies such as heart disease, diabetes and a tendency to fall asleep on the job. Theirs is a somewhat inspiring story, unless your money happened to end up in their grasping old mitts.</p>
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<h4 style="margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 6px 0px 6px 1px; border-width: 1px 0px; border-top-style: solid; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: #000000; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: #000000; border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 400; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Retina; line-height: 18px; text-transform: uppercase;">THE LAST JOB</h4>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 20px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">By Dan Bilefsky <br><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Norton, 284 pages, $26.95</em></p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">The perpetrators, who called themselves “The Firm,” had long careers as thieves, with impressive incarceration résumés. Brian Reader, the mastermind and 76 at the time of the crime, began his career at age 11 by stealing a can of fruit. He spent years in the jug and suffered from migraines blamed on falling from a roof during a robbery. He was selling used cars in his driveway when he decided it was time for some legacy looting.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Danny Jones, 60, was a lifelong lock-picker and burglar, as well as an exercise fanatic and eccentric. He sometimes slept in his mother-in-law’s dressing gown—plus a fez—and believed he could communicate with dogs. Less flamboyant were Kenny Collins, 74, an old jailmate of Reader’s whose criminal bona fides included breaking into a shoe shop early in his career (a source of professional ridicule), and Terry Perkins, 67, a serious diabetic with his own lengthy rap sheet and a fondness for Margaret Thatcher.Carl Wood, 58, was a second-tier participant, joined by several ancillaries and a mysterious man named Basil who knew how to disable alarm systems.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Mr. Bilefsky, a New York Times reporter who came across the story during a stint at the paper’s London bureau, maintains a generous attitude toward the perps, who were part of a “nearly extinct generation of old-school professional thieves”; they “abhorred violence” and did prison time “without complaint.” He gives them good marks for planning, too, starting with the strike date: Easter weekend, which even the most devoted followers of Mammon consider a good excuse for knocking off a few extra days. The target was legendary. Hatton Garden had served as a setting in Ian Fleming’s Bond novel “Diamonds Are Forever” and Dickens’s “Oliver Twist.” While the Safe Deposit building wasn’t quite Fort Knox, its basement vault was protected by 20 inches of reinforced-concrete walls. Many of the local jewelry stores considered it a safe haven—surely not susceptible to forced entry by elderly eels.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Yet if the planning was solid, the execution was sketchy. Reader rode a bus to the job (his pass would later be traced), while Collins drove his white Mercedes, apparently unconcerned that London is teeming with surveillance cameras. Collins was also somewhat slack as a lookout man, going out for fish and chips and eventually nodding off. When a ramming tool fell apart and forced the thieves to exit the job site to buy a new one, Reader and Wood—apparently suffering from stamina deficit disorder—went home.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">“It is almost as if these guys have been locked up and then transported by a time machine to modern times to perform this crime,” a local expert told Mr. Bilefsky, who calls the caper an analogue crime performed in a digital age. Yet the re-tooled rogues did complete the mission—a work of artistry, by their lights, rivaling the Sistine ceiling.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Not everyone was impressed. Scotland Yard’s Paul Johnson, who grew up watching “Hill Street Blues” and who had a lot of experience nabbing jewel thieves, was put in charge of the case. Unlike the Firm, the lawmen operated on the sunny side of the digital divide. Surveillance video revealed the Mercedes, and soon listening devices were recording the perps performing another amazing feat: hanging themselves with their own tongues.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Mr. Bilefsky spices his well-told tale with snippets from the surveillance transcripts: countless F-bombs and petty sniping, often against a backdrop of thunderous music (Neil Diamond was a favorite). Within two months of the robbery, the cops pounced.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">The wind-down was bittersweet. New-found celebrity balmed the sting of incarceration—tabloids tagged the crew the Bad Grandpas—yet the evidence against the core four was so overwhelming that all pleaded guilty in March 2016 and got seven years.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">So what do old guys do in prison? One of the ancillaries whiled away the hours arguing with Islamic radicals (using Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” as a foundational text). The sentence of Perkins, the diabetic, was commuted by the Grim Reaper on Feb. 4, 2018. Reader was visited by the stroke fairy, survived and was released in July 2018.</p>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Other indignities had to be endured, few greater than a trio of tomato-magnet movies based on the crime (one, “King of Thieves,” starring Michael Caine). Mr. Bilefsky suggests that Brian Reader’s “mastermind” status was well-deserved. More than half the loot from the heist is still unaccounted for. One assumes that Reader has never sold another used car, and if he decides he’d like to visit the Taj Mahal, he’ll fly first class.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 27px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent;">Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com.</em></p>
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<p class="printheadline" style="margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; background: transparent; font-family: Exchange; line-height: 22px; overflow-wrap: break-word; color: #333333;">Appeared in the April 19, 2019, print edition as 'Once More Into the Vault.'</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226952019-02-07T19:00:00-05:002024-03-21T05:12:38-04:00Wall Street Journal article: Virginia's Confederacy of Dunces
<p>Virginia’s Confederacy of Dunces
How can we continue looking down on Arkansas and Mississippi with this sort of stuff going on?
Feb. 7, 2019 6:53 p.m. ET
When word leaked that Gov. Ralph Northam was in hot water over a medical-school photo, some Virginians smiled knowingly. We’ve seen pictures of med-school friends posing with cadavers they’d hung with monikers like “Bessie,” “Big Boy,” and “Wee Willie, ” as circumstances dictated. Then came the jarring news of Mr. Northam’s costume mishap and moonwalking incidents, which instantly converted him into a political untouchable deserted by everyone but his shadow. Abe Lincoln probably had more friends in Richmond when he visited in 1865, just before the South went under new management.
Mr. Northam now appears determined to hold on to his job, and though he’s picking up some support, Richmond remains aghast. The Commonwealth of Virginia, after all, prides itself on being the mother of presidents (eight so far) and a place of profound political decorum. But suddenly we’re living in Dogpatch.
Not only were citizens initially left to ponder whether their governor was the guy in the hood or the guy in blackface (at least until Mr. Northam reversed course and insisted he was neither). A few days later Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who would accede should the governor depart, faced assertions of an old sexual assault, whose public airing he suggested was the work of Mr. Northam. That suspicion was redirected toward Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a potential rival to Mr. Fairfax in the 2021 race for governor. Not to be outdone, Attorney General Mark Herring announced Wednesday he that had performed a rapper imitation wearing “brown makeup” when he was 19. On Thursday Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr., a Republican, was identified as managing editor of the Virginia Military Institute’s 1968 yearbook, which included blackface photos. The way things are going, we’ll soon discover contemporaneous sketches of Patrick Henry and George Washington in drag.
Adding to the din are Republicans who sense cosmic payback over Northam campaign ads that accused his GOP opponent, Ed Gillespie, of racism, plus other critics who insist the governor clings to his job because his pediatric practice was damaged by comments about abortion and infanticide that were more in the spirit of Herod than Hippocrates.
These are indeed dark days. How can we continue looking down on Arkansas and Mississippi with this sort of stuff going on? Yet Virginians are comforted that our dunces are not the only ones in this confederacy. Those calling for Mr. Northam’s head include Sen. Cory Booker, who admits to a youthful sexual encounter that would qualify as assault under today’s campus standards; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, widely criticized for appropriating a Native American identity; and Sen. Kamala Harris, who doesn’t seem to mind rubbing shoulders with controversial pols in the cause of career advancement. Her early patron (and romantic interest) Willie Brown was, among other things, an enthusiastic supporter of cult leader Jim Jones, who went on to lead the largest murder-suicide in modern history.
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We can even sympathize with Mr. Northam (and perhaps Mr. Herring) as they wonder if an indiscretion in young adulthood will erase everything that came after—which in the governor’s case includes the expansion of Medicaid, restoration of voting rights for felons and support for the removal of Confederate monuments. This supposed racist also attends an integrated church with a black pastor—perhaps the perfect place to ask that age-old question: “Why me, Lord?” The clear answer is politics. His party seems happy to throw him to the wolves in exchange for greater credibility in attacking President Trump, a Satan figure to people who tend not to believe in the supernatural. Sorry, Ralph, but don’t take it personally.
Best of all, Mr. Northam’s story reminds us that many people change for the better. Here in the Bible belt we recall Saul of Tarsus, who went from persecuting Christians to becoming the primary expositor of Christianity. Lincoln, by modern standards a thoroughgoing racist, played an incalculable role in racial advancement. Lyndon B. Johnson used the N-word nearly as often as a typical American teenager uses the F one, but pushed through crucial civil-rights and voting-rights legislation.
Former Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia didn’t pose as a Klansman; he was a Klansman—an “exalted cyclops”—who repudiated his past and served honorably. “Senator Byrd reflects the transformative power of this nation,” NAACP chief Benjamin Todd Jealous wrote after Byrd died in 2010. “Senator Byrd went from being an active member of the KKK to a being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal legislation that advanced the civil rights and liberties of our country.”
Romantic types may also recall another redemption story—Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” in which Jean Valjean, a reformed petty criminal who brings prosperity to a town and saves a child from unending misery, is pursued relentlessly by Inspector Javert, a fanatical lawman who cannot forgive ancient transgressions. Mr. Northam may be no Valjean, but we are certainly lousy with Javerts these days.
This storm will eventually pass. Until then the beleaguered may seek context and comfort from ancient scribes, including Richmonder Edgar Allan Poe, who observed in an 1844 letter: “Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.” Amen to that. We may also amend an old adage to reflect modern realities: “Don’t eat the brown acid” is hereby updated to “Don’t wear the brown makeup.”
Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at www.Daveshiflett.com
Appeared in the February 8, 2019, print edition.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226942018-11-20T19:00:00-05:002023-12-10T12:01:14-05:00Wall Street Journal Review: Grateful and Thanks a Thousand
<p>By
Dave Shiflett
Nov. 20, 2018 6:52 p.m. ET
If turkeys have souls (it’s the season for generous speculation), one might expect that, in the spirit of the times, a flock of transcendent Toms will soon storm the gates of heaven to demand an end to their species-ist Thanksgiving sorrows. They might have a case, but the holiday itself will surely retain heaven’s blessing. As two new books make abundantly clear, giving thanks pays big dividends—soulful and otherwise—at least for humans.
Theologian Diana Butler Bass and non-theist A.J. Jacobs sing from the same hymnal on this point. Gratitude is good. It results in better sleep, increased generosity and confidence, and decreased depression, anxiety and boozing. It’s like a chill pill, with no prescription needed.
Yet not all gratitude is equal. Ms. Bass, who writes from a Christian perspective in “Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks,” notes that gratitude often comes with a string of reciprocity attached. Your back has been scratched, for which you are thankful, but now you must return the favor. This arrangement, she explains, has been used by the powerful throughout history to maintain their position atop the great slag heap. One might add that friends, business associates, spouses and other intimates can deploy the quid pro quo on an hourly basis.
The more mature form of gratitude, Ms. Bass explains, recognizes that life is a wondrous gift, the appreciation for which is best expressed by practicing the Golden Rule, stressing giving over getting; as in playing the piano, the harder you work, the greater the results. Ms. Bass is not peddling theory, she assures us. Practicing gratitude has helped her overcome the agonies of job loss and divorce—as well as, she says, the singular horrors of the Trump presidency. Besides leaving Ms. Bass’s preferred candidate chilling (for now) in the dustbin of history, Mr. Trump’s ascendancy left Ms. Bass deep in the dumps. She had to “remind myself to breathe,” she writes, yet by forcing herself to acknowledge life’s many blessings she regained her footing, discovering along the way that “gratitude, like interest, compounds.”
Her recovery was aided by the communal affirmation of shared beliefs during the massive anti-Trump march in Washington after the election, where she and several clerical colleagues donned pink hats and carried signs proclaiming the traditional Beatitudes along with a few “special updated” ones, including “Blessed are the uninsured / Blessed are the immigrants / Blessed are the LGBTQ,” all of which had a profound effect on her: “The day before, I had cried because I was afraid and sad. But on this day I cried because of blessings. For the first time in two months, I felt grateful.”
Some readers may find Ms. Bass less than grateful for the cornucopia that she dismisses as “consumer Thanksgiving.” She believes the holiday has “become an orgy of ‘I’ll get mine’ ” in which “often someone dies in the struggle for a must-have toy or cheap smart phone.” It appears that her condemnation of the Black Friday ritual overlooks the “special updated” proverb stating that into every vital human endeavor, including shopping, a little collateral damage must sometimes fall. No one is perfect, of course, and her generous spirit and positive message will make her book a welcome visitor on many nightstands.
The same is true for Mr. Jacobs’s slim and less introspective volume, “Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey.” An “agnostic, verging on atheist” whose earlier books include “The Year of Living Biblically” (2007), he sets out to practice what modern-day sage and Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast preaches: “Happiness does not lead to gratitude. Gratitude leads to happiness.” Mr. Jacobs’s mission is to thank everyone responsible for providing his morning cup of coffee.
Coffee, he reminds us, is no bit player in human affairs. More than two billion cups are drunk every day. The industry employs 125 million people, including the workers at his local coffee shop, who are the first to receive his thanks. From there he tracks down and thanks the makers of coffee cup lids—small but impressive feats of engineering—and of the cardboard sleeves that keep us from burning our fingers (and perhaps launching a lawsuit). The sleeves, he explains, were known as zarfs in the ancient world; the modern version was invented in Portland, Ore., in 1992 by a struggling couple who sold their Java Jackets from their car trunk and would later see them included in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit called “Humble Masterpieces.”
Soon enough Mr. Jacobs feels a grateful glow, yet realizes the impossibility of thanking everyone tangentially responsible for his morning Joe. He holds his hosannas to 1,000 contributors—truck drivers, farmers, logo artists, warehouse workers, even the chief executive of Exxon, whose company supplies fuel to bean transporters (he chides the CEO for climate change, though mildly). Along the way he shares many coffee-related facts. Beethoven’s morning cup was made with exactly 64 beans, while Balzac downed 50 cups a day. In a hat tip to Big Brother, he notes that, before government inspection, coffee merchants used fillers, including baked horse liver, burnt rags, brick dust and a widely uncelebrated delicacy known as “monkey nuts.”
Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Bass have written pleasant odes to interdependency, reminding us that much of our happiness relies on people we don’t know. That’s not music to the ears the autonomous souls who believe they reside at the center of the universe but is a blessed alternative to the monsoon of seasonal dreck that threatens to drown us all.
Mr. Shiflett’s writing and a new song collection, “Seven Dollar Beer and Other Calamities,” are posted at www.daveshiflett.com.
Appeared in the November 21, 2018, print edition as 'Their Cups Runneth Over.'</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226932018-09-28T20:00:00-04:002022-12-12T07:01:24-05:00WSJ review of 'Country Music USA' and 'Country Music'
<p>By
Dave Shiflett
Sept. 27, 2018 5:49 p.m. ET
Given the choice between hearing a country-music crooner or a cat in a blender, many Americans might give us reason to fear for the fate of the cat. Others consider country the music that red-state deplorables listen to, even if it’s hardly restricted to hayseeds, malevolent or otherwise. Even Beyoncé sings a little country.
Beyoncé is a little late to the hayride, as we are reminded by the 50th-anniversary edition of Bill C. Malone’s “Country Music USA.” Mr. Malone, a musician and a professor emeritus at Tulane, traces country’s origins to songs brought over by colonials—the fiddler Thomas Jefferson described an instrument called the “banjar” in 1781—and follows the music through its many variations and mutations to the present day.
Country music, Mr. Malone writes, is a “vigorous hybrid” based on a foundation mostly Southern, rural, Protestant and working class. Early audiences flocked to tent repertory or “Toby” shows, where the price of admission (often paid with eggs and other rural currency) bought an afternoon of music and other distractions, including magic shows and trained bears.
Two later advances greatly expanded the music’s reach. During a seven-year stretch in the 1920s, Mr. Malone notes, annual radio sales jumped more than 10-fold, while some estimates reported a radio in every third home, more than a few dialed into country stations. The other boost to country came from Ralph Peer (1892-1960), an energetic Missouri native who “first presented country music to the American public.” Peer didn’t pick, but his efforts as a talent scout, recording engineer and pioneering music publisher surely made him grin—and fairly rich.
Mr. Malone, who seems to have profiled everyone ever associated with country music, questions the “authenticity” of some latter-day artists. Country, he writes, “has been inundated by musicians whose sounds suggest neither regional, rustic nor blue-collar nativity, but are instead rooted in the homogenizing and mass-consumption-oriented media establishment.” For this anniversary edition, he brings in scholar Tracey E.W. Laird to add a final chapter addressing modern country’s “meaning, identity and relationship with its multiple audiences.”
Ms. Laird sings a more academic tune than Mr. Malone, at one point explaining that branding—as crucial for country stars as it is for cars and candy bars—“operates according to multidimensional relationships of signs and meanings, not corresponding object to object, but with shifting points of connection, nearly always in flux.” That observation may leave many banjo players scratching their heads, but she has a “big tent” approach and is as comfortable with the Dixie Chicks and Beyoncé—whose twang-inspired efforts rankle purists—as with Hank Williams.
Jocelyn R. Neal ponders some of the same questions in “Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History,” a textbook that covers much of the same biographical ground that Mr. Malone does (though not in as much detail), augmented with a wagonload of analysis. Some fans might find the interpretations a bit thick, especially a series of “listening guides” that deconstruct classic songs. The opening line to “Rocky Top” (“Wish that I was on old Rocky Top”) is said to describe “an anti-modernist nostalgia,” while the appearance of “two strangers” in a later verse presents “cultural stereotypes that will become part of bluegrass’ reputation”—i.e., “backwoods people who are closed to outsiders, who live beyond the reach of both law and civilization.”
Yet Ms. Neal illuminates other points in perfect pitch. In a discussion of the country bona fides of hit-maker Shania Twain, Ms. Neal quotes a critic who called her the “highest-paid lap dancer in Nashville”—not only offering deep insight but also reminding us that country music has come a long way since Jefferson’s “banjar.”
—Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and journalism at www.Daveshiflett.com.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226922018-09-27T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T11:43:42-05:00WSJ Review of Jeff Pearlman's 'Football For A Buck'
<p>The new NFL season has commenced with the usual hoopla, though some fans are finding new things to do on Sunday afternoon. Their disaffection isn’t just about kneeling, which is as easy to ignore as other celebrity pose-striking. The game seems flat, perhaps due to efforts to remove risk with new rules and more penalty flags. Watching a game can set the teeth to grinding, especially when advertising time-outs seem longer than the first half of “Gone With the Wind.” Meanwhile, ticket, beer and parking prices make stadium-goers wonder if they could have saved money by opting for a weekend in Paris.
So pro football is ripe for revolution. Luckily, Jeff Pearlman’s “Football for a Buck” offers a blueprint for change, based on the United States Football League, which played three semi-glorious seasons starting in 1983. The book will also please readers who sip bad ink about Donald Trump as if it were the finest wine.
Mr. Pearlman, whose earlier books include one on the Dallas Cowboys, traces the league’s origins to David Dixon, a New Orleans art dealer who in 1961 dreamed of an NFL expansion team for his hometown. His vision slowly evolved into the USFL, which promised grand innovations: a spring-summer season, regional talent in team lineups, two-point conversion opportunities and a low operating budget.
Tryouts were open to the public, Mr. Pearlman tells us, and attracted plumbers, cab drivers and fish-tank cleaners—plus a few fellows with less conventional skill sets. One hopeful was out on a work-release program following an armed-robbery conviction, while another had recently finished a term for manslaughter. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the USFL presented, in the words of one of its former players, “the most violent football ever played by mankind”—featuring a dozen teams (later expanding to 18) with names including the Bandits, Gunslingers and Maulers.
There was also athleticism. The Houston Gamblers, looking to hire speedy receivers, auditioned a candidate who had never played a down of football, according to Mr. Pearlman, but who had “recently raced a horse on the television show That’s Incredible . . . and won.” The league launched several pro legends, including Herschel Walker, Doug Flutie, Steve Young and Jim Kelly, all of whom were budget busters. There was a massive gap between “grunt” players—who earned an average of $36,000—and the marquee players like Mr. Walker, who got a $1 million signing bonus and $1.2 million a year, along with that stake in an oil well.
On the bright side, the players weren’t expected to be role models. Many did drugs; some smoked cigarettes on the sidelines and even in the huddle. A lineman named Greg Fields responded to being cut by the Los Angeles Express with death threats; management hired Liberace’s bodyguard to keep an eye on him. The executive suite included its own set of rogues. George Allen, the Washington Redskins legend who coached USFL teams in Chicago and Arizona, had an opposing team’s practice sessions illicitly filmed—to great success. “We knew every play they were running,” an assistant coach later marveled.
Mr. Pearlman, who drew on roughly 400 interviews for the book, clearly loves the league, but a few of its owners inspire a deep antipathy, including J. William Oldenburg, chairman of a mortgage banking company and owner of the Los Angeles Express, and Donald Trump, real-estate heir and owner of the New Jersey Generals.
Mr. Oldenburg was a “volatile, erratic, simple, and clinically insane man,” Mr. Pearlman writes. If he had a virtue, it was his dislike of his New Jersey counterpart. “Donald Trump,” Mr. Oldenburg said, “can get all the press he wants, but when it comes to business, he can’t carry my socks.” As it happened, he also fancied himself a virtuoso at deal making, in one instance buying a property for $800,000 and selling it to a savings and loan under his own control for $55 million. When his financial fraud was discovered, he was history.
Mr. Trump, 37 when he entered the picture, is the alpha skunk in this drama, presented by Mr. Pearlman as a lying, preening, no-class schmoe who hoped to merge the USFL with the NFL in order to fulfill his dream of owning an NFL franchise. He was able to talk fellow owners into switching to a fall season, creating nose-to-nose competition between the leagues that shook fan support but, Mr. Trump assumed, would make a merger more likely. He also spearheaded an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL that, if victorious, would provide a cash infusion to keep his dream alive.
While Mr. Trump’s forceful personality worked wonders with fellow owners, the jury in the 1986 civil trial didn’t fully succumb to his charms. While it agreed that the NFL had created a monopoly, it awarded Mr. Trump and company $1 in damages. The struggling league (which Mr. Trump dismissed as “small potatoes”) soon collapsed, though Mr. Trump would eventually win a national franchise unforeseen at that time—a victory that Mr. Pearlman considers a nightmare of rare and enduring proportions. As for the idea of an alternate league, it still has appeal. “The USFL wasn’t as good as the NFL,” says Jairo Penaranda, a running back for the Memphis Showboats. “But it was 10,000 times more fun”—and lots cheaper than Paris.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226912018-09-06T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T12:19:25-05:00Wall Street Journal review of Jorma Kaukonen's 'Been So Long'
<p>Sept. 7, 2018 5:08 p.m. ET
Jorma Kaukonen isn’t quite so famous as some of his musical peers, a group that includes Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and Jimi Hendrix. Yet unlike those eminences and many others, Mr. Kaukonen—a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist best known for his work with Jefferson Airplane—has hung around. Still touring as he approaches 80, he has now written an engaging memoir that will interest even those who wouldn’t know Hot Tuna (his current band) from a can of sardines. “Been So Long” is a survivor’s tale, well told and sprinkled with a bit of 1960s fairy dust.
Mr. Kaukonen was born under a wandering star, seeing the wider world early on during deployments to the Philippines and Pakistan with his diplomatic-corps father. In Washington, D.C., he started learning traditional “porch-picking” tunes like “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy” and “Worried Man Blues” in the mid-1950s; he also studied under classical guitarist Sophocles Papas, who taught him, among other things, the virtue of regularly tuning his instrument. Soon enough he was playing local clubs with friend Jack Casady (assisted by fake IDs) and reveling in the fact that he had found what became a lifelong passion. “Music,” he writes, “seemed to me to be the reward for being alive.”
BEEN SO LONG: MY LIFE IN MUSIC
By Jorma Kaukonen
St. Martin’s, 354 pages, $29.99
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From an early age he was an interesting mix of tradition and innovation—an enthusiastic participant in his high-school Junior ROTC program and supporter of Ike over Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 election but also a free spirit fully adaptable to 1960s California, where he moved to attend Jesuit-run Santa Clara University and found an evolving youth and music culture that might have sent the ROTC brass scurrying for their foxholes. There he played coffee-house gigs with Janis Joplin before heading north to San Francisco and joining the Airplane (Mr. Casady came from D.C. to play bass). He was on his way, and while he would share stages at Woodstock, Monterey and Altamont with Hendrix, the Who, Otis Redding and the Rolling Stones, his journey would also take him to places he didn’t suspect were on the itinerary.
To the horror of ghosts everywhere, Mr. Kaukonen has written his own book and scribbles pretty well for a guitar player. His prose is friendly, direct and wryly humorous. “Musicians,” he notes, “complain about two things—having a gig, and not having a gig.” He also recalls that not everyone was awed by the Airplane. An early critic wrote that the band had “all the delicacy and finesse of a mule team knocking down a picket fence.”
But what do critics know? The band scored significant hits, including “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” a psychedelic heist of the “Alice in Wonderland” story featuring Mr. Kaukonen’s haunting guitar line and an exhortation to “feed your head.” That latter advice, which had nothing to do with traditional foodstuffs, drew the scorn of the political class and other adult types, but the music definitely fed the young band’s bank account, allowing the purchase of creature comforts, including a communal mansion across the street from Golden Gate Park, deep in the heart of Hippieland.
Fans of that era will find many delights in Mr. Kaukonen’s recollections, some of which challenge the idea that hippie eminences were all about peace, love and tofu. He writes of one day being overtaken by a withering stench and racing to the mansion’s kitchen, where he found LSD magnate Owsley Stanley roasting various cow parts. Stanley, Mr. Kaukonen explains, ate only meat, insisting that “vegetables are what food eats.” Mr. Kaukonen also throws some cold Kool-Aid on the notion that San Francisco musicians shared the lifestyle of their fans—flowers in the hair, dirt on the feet and very little dough in the pockets. “My colleagues and I were not hippies; we were also affluent and most of our problems were upper-class, first world ones.”
Those problems arrived in force a bit down the road. Initially Mr. Kaukonen, like many a young buck enjoying fame and a growing fortune, made a mission of avoiding the twin terrors of sobriety and monogamy. He was pretty good at it. “It’s funny to think that my life could have been so completely ruled by mood-altering substances,” he writes, “but at the time it would never have occurred to me that there might be another way to live.” He wasn’t alone, of course. He recalls bumping into Jerry Garcia one day as the Grateful Dead guitarist smoked a significant “gob” of heroin. “I’ve got it under control,” he assured Mr. Kaukonen. Both would join the sizable horde that eventually discovered that the White Rabbit and other Pied Pipers of bliss eventually had to be paid.
Monogamy took a similar beating, despite Mr. Kaukonen’s somewhat traditional view of marriage. “No woman of mine is going to have to work,” he announced after marrying his first wife (before his musical ascent), and while there was mutual infidelity the couple stuck together through good times and bad, and there were plenty of the latter. Mr. Kaukonen describes a state of near-terminal matrimony, with hospital visits to close head wounds and an incident in which the missus tried to stab him in the back with a broken bottle while he was erecting a Christmas tree. Matrimonial mayhem, he adds, was something of a family tradition. His parents maintained a stormy relationship for some 60 years. Mr. Kaukonen called it quits after 20, packing up his van one day and driving away.
Another tradition, in rock memoirs at least, is the rehab section—which often leaves readers feeling that they’ve just been involved in a hit-and-run sympathy grope. Mr. Kaukonen mercifully spares readers from excessive detail. “There is no need for a drunkalogue here,” he writes. “There is nothing new in my story.” He provides a basic overview: In the mid-1990s he decided it was time to head in for repairs. “Jorma,” a counselor told him, “you’re going to have to change everything but your name!”
He was definitely treading new ground. Sobriety and monogamy were now the highest ideals, pursued with passion if not perfection. A son born outside his second marriage likely heated things up on the home front, but his second wife, Vanessa, hung with him and played a central part in creating the Fur Peace Ranch in rural Ohio, where musicians pay $1,500 for a weekend of instruction by Mr. Kaukonen and his musical pals, along with gourmet eats from a kitchen overseen by Mrs. Kaukonen. Along the way, the couple adopted a child and the old buck grew wiser: “If life is designed to humble us in the face of time, there is joy in that humility.” All told, a pretty nice second act.
Mr. Kaukonen, whose impressive body of work includes a dozen solo albums, sings a deeply domestic tune these days. “You think playing Woodstock was an adventure?” he asks near the book’s end. “Think about homeschooling your kid.” But his star still wanders. Now 77, he and Mr. Casady tour constantly. He has also pursued a deeper connection with his family’s ancestral Judaism and continues to entertain views that his ROTC instructors might admire. He recalls watching a New Mexico sunset when Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” came on the radio. “Corny? Maybe. Extremely moving? You bet.”
Somewhere, one suspects, a rabbit grinds its teeth.
.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226902018-04-05T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T11:50:57-05:00Weekly Standard article on Ancestor Worship
<p>Worship Thy Ancestor
. . . from a distance.
2:00 AM, Apr 06, 2018 | By Dave Shiflett
You can get arrested for spanking an unruly tot these days, but flogging the immortal bejesus out of once-revered ancestors can pay significant dividends. Pounding the Founders and other historic villains not only affirms one's purity and moral superiority but can help achieve social dominance over those who fail to recognize your excellence of spirit. On top of that it can make you feel really good and distract attention from your own shortcomings. What more could you ask for? If I knew the tricks of the app trade I'd create FounderPound on the double and start shopping for a nice island getaway.
Yet there's an overlooked aspect to this phenomenon. We assume our ancestors would be hurt by modern-day criticisms. We assume they would want their names to grace our rubber chicken dinners and dormitories. We are certain they would want their monuments to forever grace our town squares. But perhaps, as we shall see, a little humility is in order. Perhaps our forebears would no more want our praise than they would covet a bite from a rattlesnake.
In the spirit of context, it's worth remembering that flailing the dead finds enthusiasts in every generation, though the purge seems to have picked up steam lately. Last week came word that a statue of President William McKinley, the unrepentant colonialist, is being targeted for removal from the city square of Arcata, Calif. In New Orleans, mayor Mitch Landrieu heroically removed a host of Confederate monuments and lived to write a book about it (In The Shadow of Statues). His critics, to no surprise, insist he was primarily interested in cleansing his own spotty reputation. Meanwhile, in Virginia, the state's Democratic party changed the name of its annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner to the somewhat clunkier Blue Commonwealth Gala because both men owned slaves. (Jackson is also notorious for his Indian policies.) The lashing of Jefferson and Jackson was something of an expansion of the Old Dominion's version of the purification ritual, in which most fury is directed at Robert E. Lee and his co-conspirators. In the fullness of time it's likely Captain John Smith and Pocahontas spouse John Rolfe will be arraigned and prosecuted, along with almost everyone else in a position of authority prior to 1964 or so.
Traditionalists are of course horrified and defend their heroes along familiar lines. America was born into a world brimming with slavery. Belief in black inferiority was nigh on universal. "Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race," said one appraisal of African Americans: "idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience." That passage was lifted not from the pages of a Richmond newspaper but from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1797). The finest minds agreed, including philosopher David Hume, who likened a black Jamaican who had gained a reputation for intelligence to a parrot, "who speaks a few words plainly." Even John Locke, Mr. "Inalienable Rights of Man," defended slavery and invested in the Royal Africa Company, Great Britain's pre-eminent slaving enterprise. And here in Dixie, defenders of the Cause never tire of quoting Abraham Lincoln, whose views would be very much at home in the skull of a Grand Kleagle:
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
Yet traditionalists should recognize that the conventional wisdom defense isn't going to get anyone off the hook. And they really should consider the possibility that our forebears wouldn't want the praise of modern Americans. While we often invoke them, the reverence wouldn't likely be mutual. In fact, if a time-traveling group of them suddenly appeared and seized power, most of us might end up with slit nostrils or seriously stretched necks. They'd be way harder on us than some of us are on them.
Consider, for example, the likely response to the modern phenomenon of ubiquitous swearing. Not all that long ago (as the time flies) swearing earned a public whipping, while children who cursed their parents could be executed. Scolds, nags, slanderers, and gossips faced a multiplicity of corrective devices, among them the brank (or "gossip's bridle"), a cage that covered the head and deployed an iron spike into the mouth to suppress the wayward tongue.
While it is pleasant enough for some to imagine Bill Maher and his entertainment industry colleagues being branked, a huge percentage of Facebook and other social media slaves (no shortage of traditionalists in those ranks) could expect the same treatment. Other idle-minded chatterbugs would be rewarded with a trip to the dunking stool or pillory, a stand-up version of the stocks that offered the option of nailing the visitor's ears to the headpiece. The attending official might further enhance the experience by slitting the offender's nostrils.
There's no doubting that it would be nice if our compatriots didn't cuss so much. But who wants their F-bombing, deity-damning children cured of their affliction by having their heads nailed to the pillory with a railroad spike?
The tongue wouldn't be the only organ to attract scrutiny. As in the good old days, fornicators could expect a whipping while single mothers would face fines and banishment; those who couldn't pay might be sold into servitude. Gays, meantime, should head for the border—at a gallop. According to scholar Louis Crompton, "it appears that in 1776 male homosexuals in the original 13 colonies were universally subject to the death penalty." Youthful sexual adventuring would be similarly risky, at least if the experience of Thomas Granger, of the Plymouth Grangers, is any guide. The lusty teenager was detected having sex "with a mare, a cow, two goats, divers sheep, two calves, and a turkey," according to expert testimony. For his efforts—which were clearly considerable he was hanged. The animals were also executed.
This isn't to suggest our American forebears were uniquely cruel. Consider the sentence meted out in 1725 to one Charles Hayon, as reported by Paul Tabori in his immortal work, The Natural Science of Stupidity. Hayon was "sentenced to be laid with his face down, nude, upon a wooden grille and be dragged in such a state through the streets of the commune of Chaussée." His crime? He had killed himself.
These days, of course, we cross the oceans to fight people with similar policies. And on the bright side, we can reasonably assume our visiting forebears would quickly conclude that we are beyond saving. Simply whipping the people who skip church would take every available hand. What would they make of our abortion rate? (Abortion prior to the fourth month or so of pregnancy was legal in early colonial times, though outlawed starting early in the 19th century.) Ditto for the national debt, man buns, warnings on stepladders, and a million other facts of modern life. After a few days they'd vamoose, no doubt leaving behind an indictment of a somewhat tendentious nature:
You are all the most worthless of generations. You have everything humanity has dreamed of and prayed for. You have all the food and drink imaginable; your doctors can outfit you with new hearts, hips, and wedding tackle; you have mosquito-free bedrooms, parasite-free intestines, a short workweek, and marvels you call air conditioning, smartphones, and automobiles. Yet how do you spend your time? Watching The View. Eating until you are fat as pigs. Telling people thousands of miles away about your hemorrhoids. Making entertainments in which the Indians are the good guys! Your men marry men, your women marry women, and parents often don't marry each other. Your bartenders charge seven dollars for a beer but won't let you smoke. You pay five dollars for a cup of coffee but expect music to be free (they wouldn't actually say this, but one can dream). You kill more children in the womb than the death toll in your latest world war, and those you don't snuff are saddled with a staggering debt. So where do you get off looking down on us? Goodbye, good riddance, and while you're at it—go to Hell!
And off they'd go.
It's also worth considering the possibility that our descendants might fully embrace our forebears' indictment, adding whatever other shortcomings offend their sensibilities and standards. In fact, we should probably count on it. Which is why the wisest among us will try to live in the moment while keeping in mind the advice of the pleasantly acerbic James Anthony Froude: "Each age would do better if it studied its own faults and endeavored to mend them instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage."
Dave Shiflett posts his writing and original music at www.Daveshiflett.com</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226892018-03-18T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T12:24:35-05:00Weekly Standard article on the NRA
<p>Skunk vs. Skunk
The defense of the Second Amendment goes down-market.
2:40 AM, MAR 16, 2018 | By DAVE SHIFLETT
If someone invented a television “raver filter” there would no doubt be national jubilation—until we realized that blocking the ravers would leave very little to watch. Everyone raves these days: sports announcers, politicians, airline executives, celebrities, cartoon characters, weather forecasters, dog trainers, and of course the growing army of what were once called “talking heads”—whose noggins have all gone nuclear in the Age of Trump.
Add to the raver list the current flock of flacks deployed by the National Rifle Association. While former NRA president Charlton Heston could be a bit dramatic (declaring that Second Amendment foes would have to pry his musket from his “cold dead hands”), you expected as much from the man who played Moses, survived a seriously contested Roman chariot race, and bravely championed his species on the Planet of the Apes. Besides that, he’s weak tea compared with his successors.
A little disclosure may be in order. As a native Southerner I of course keep a few shooting irons around the house. Nothing capable of bringing down a jetliner, to be sure, but enough to seriously harass a low-flying Gulfstream (we could bring down a Cessna with our cutlery). I have no problems with AR-15s—or Kalashnikovs—or with requiring purchasers to jump through a few more hoops. I don’t give money to the NRA, one reason being that every mass shooting seems to be followed by a fundraising call, the apparent formula being: “Lots of people just got shot so send us some money.” Nor do I believe the NRA is as powerful as its enemies—and, for that matter, its own PR material—assert. Politicians love money but they love votes more; those who supposedly “line up” with the NRA are voting the way their constituents want them to vote.
All that said, defending the Second Amendment can be a noble calling, and as such it would seem reasonable for the NRA to present gun owners and advocates as calm, self-possessed, and thoughtful individuals. Among other things, that would distinguish them from many of their rabid critics. Yet it appears the new strategy is to out-rave the competition. Grant Stinchfield, for example, a man with a firm jaw and demeanor to match, stars in an advocacy video (at NRA TV) that begins with him watching a few anti-gun snippets on a television, then destroying the tube with a sledgehammer. Appliance smashing, to be sure, has some entertainment value, yet the idea that Stinchfield—and the NRA—might be every bit as rabid as the people who say guns should be melted down and repurposed as personhole covers easily comes to mind.
In similar spirit Colion Noir, an African American with good pistol skills and a sharp wit, starts his video pleasantly enough, but soon insists that “the mainstream media love mass shootings” and have “a vested interest in the perpetuation of mass tragedy.” This doesn’t sound all that different, in tone and temperament, from claims that the NRA and its congressional allies don’t care if schoolchildren are massacred so long as AR-15s are easily available and the NRA cash keeps flowing.
Neither of these gents is a match for Dana Loesch, a striking brunette who will appeal to friendly viewers as something of a Delphic oracle, while opponents may consider her an incarnation of Helga, She Wolf of the SS. At this year’s CPAC conference Loesch, the NRA’s premier spokesperson, paced the stage like a human flamethrower on black stiletto heels, proclaiming that the media “love mass shootings” and that “crying white mothers are ratings gold”—in contrast to the Chicago mothers of black homicide victims, who are largely ignored. The audience lapped it up, perhaps overlooking the fact that the simultaneous killing of a dozen or two people will always overshadow a death toll reached incrementally.
Loesch is bright, knowledgeable about her subject (she’s brimming with details about FBI and local law enforcement screwups that may have allowed mass killers the freedom to act), and seems much at home in the lion’s den. She appeared at a town hall after the recent Florida school massacre, where (according to her) some audience members insisted she be burned alive. But she often sounds as if she has a brazier full of hot pokers just off-camera, in case anyone needs a little help fully accepting some of her message’s finer points. Consider a plug she did prior to starting a new talk show.
So to every lying member of the media, to every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents, to the politicians who would rather watch America burn than lose one ounce of their own personal power, to the late-night hosts who think their opinions are the only opinions that matter, to the Joy-Ann Reids, the Morning Joes, the Mikas, to those who stain honest reporting with partisanship, to those who bring bias and propaganda to CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Listen up! Your time is running out. The clock starts now.
One wonders if Joe and Mika, who seem easily spooked, have ordered Willie Geist to poison test the morning coffee. Maybe Willie will one day let us know. Meantime, even a casual observer is likely to wonder if Loesch has a side gig writing for the White House or vice versa. Not only does her anti-media message sound like it just flew from the president’s lips. She’s also Big Orange’s loyal wingman: “We are witnesses to the most ruthless attack on a president and the people who voted for him and the free system that allowed it to happen in American history,” she says in one NRA spot. “We’ve had enough of the lies, the sanctimony, the arrogance, the hatred, the pettiness, the fake news. . . . We are done with your agenda to undermine voters’ will and individual liberty in America.”
We live in shrill times, and maybe it’s necessary to shriek a bit in order to be heard. And for all we know Loesch is not so much defending the Second Amendment as laying the foundation for a run at higher office. A victory would not be surprising. Plenty of voters would no doubt rather watch her strut her stuff than watch Nancy Pelosi chew her cud.
At the same time, Loesch and her colleagues are neutralizing the argument that their opponents are uniquely sanctimonious, shrill, crazed, and fearful. What a fat target to surrender: They not only fear guns (according to the standard indictment) but also the sun, salt, alcohol, diet soda, and a million other things. These are the fiends who came up with words like “bombogenesis” to spook old people who are just trying to watch the weather. Why cast all this aside? While there may be genius at work here, on the surface this looks like bad asset management.
While most Americans, it’s safe to say, head to the can when gun debaters appear on their TV screens, the conflict does illuminate a phenomenon worth keeping an eye on: the belief that the Constitution was written for a population far different from ours and needs “fixing.” Gun control advocates insist the Founders never envisioned modern weaponry when the Second Amendment was written. Opponents respond that the Founders never envisioned 12-year-olds downloading pornography on their cell phones or a hyperviolent entertainment culture that allegedly inspires nihilism and a desire to commit mass murder. Ergo, if the Second Amendment goes in for a trim, so should the First.
Invoking the Founders, of course, is a shaky proposition. If that honored assembly suddenly reappeared and took power, many of us would likely wind up in prison or dangling from the end of a rope. The only thing left on television would be the fishing shows. Perhaps a different consensus should be encouraged: The best (and safest) way to honor the Founders is to let anyone attempting to rewrite their Constitution have it with both barrels.
What does the future hold? We’ve all got our private crystal balls. Mine indicates the “assault weapon” debate will become moot after the crazies learn to make bombs that will overshadow the 1927 school bombing in Bath Township, Mich, that killed 44 people. Once hundreds of people are killed in single attacks, shooting a few dozen will be no big shakes and may even brand the perpetrator a loser. Not a happy viewpoint to be sure, yet history teaches that you can’t be too grim in this world.
Yet we can also dream—perhaps envisioning a time when the NRA leavens its bile by publicizing the stories of a far chiller breed of gun rights advocate. I nominate Keith Richards, who used to carry a pistol to pacify belligerent drug dealers. A truly responsible and inspiring use of firearms! Fellow Rolling Stone member Ronnie Wood would make another nice cameo. Wood reports that after Richards threatened him with a derringer he responded by drawing his own weapon—a .44 Magnum, no less.
Imagine the possibilities:
Dana Loesch: Well, Keef, tell us why you think protecting the Second Amendment is important.
KR: I’ll do better than that, love. Pour us a few drinks and I’ll show you me pistol.
Just make sure nobody mentions Phil Spector.
Dave Shiflett posts his writing and original music at www.Daveshiflett.com</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226882017-09-19T20:00:00-04:002024-02-17T03:56:33-05:00WSJ Review of Dar Williams' 'What I Found in a Thousand Towns'
<p>It’s the rare musician who doesn’t, at some point, compose a tell-all memoir that recounts the rise to glory, descent into addiction, journey through paparazzi hell and, finally, the triumph of the comeback tour—all spiced with enough political observations to score gigs on cable shows.
Dar Williams, a singer-songwriter in the folk-introspective vein, has taken a road less traveled. She has written a book about grass-roots urban renewal. Her focus is not herself but ordinary schmoes who sweat, toil, dream and sometimes scheme to make their communities better places. “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” may not offer up the usual star-performer tales of scandal and excess, but it does remind us that walking on the wild side—which these days means taking a stroll outside one’s techno-bubble—is a trip worth taking.
Ms. Williams isn’t an urban expert by training. She attended Wesleyan College (Middletown, Conn.), which she describes as an “artsy” and “progressive” enclave where she “stage-managed a Balinese-dance love story” and performed in “Marat/Sade,” which required her and her fellow students to explore “the dynamics of power and insanity by dutifully losing our minds.” Outbreaks of profundity were apparently common: “You put your beautiful painting of a tree on the wall? We’re going to staple toast to the wall to challenge your hierarchical definition of art and self-expression.” Take that, Michelangelo.
Despite such diversions, Ms. Williams found time to polish her musical chops, which eventually took her to towns and cities that are rejuvenating themselves “one coffee shop, dog run and open-mike night at a time.” All share what she calls positive proximity, described as a “state of being where living side by side with other people is experienced as beneficial.” Put another way, positive proximity results when people work together for what they believe is the common good—our era’s version of the old barn raising, though the new barns might be a community center or garden, a soup kitchen or river walk.
Ms. Williams starts out in Beacon, N.Y., “a haven for every kind of freethinker, artistic or otherwise.” The late Pete Seeger lived nearby, and the positive vibe (and low rents) attracted city slickers and everyday artisans, coffee grinders, bar owners and shopkeepers, one of whom sold Ms. Williams the “perfect dress” to wear when she opened for a Simon & Garfunkel tribute show. If not exactly Eden, a close suburb thereof.
She finds a similar spirit in Lowell, Mass., Wilmington, Del., and Moab, Utah, a former uranium mining town whose positive proximity to two national parks (along with some excellent PR work) turned the town into a Mecca for outdoor enthusiasts after the uranium biz tanked. In Carrboro, N.C., a vibrant arts scene inspires, unifies and produces income, while the Finger Lakes district of New York is home to a tribe of entrepreneurs who are “pushing the edges of the envelope of the food economy, experimenting with kimchee, ice wine, ice cider, and cucumber popsicles.”
Those of us who prefer our cucumbers drowned in gin can nonetheless appreciate the creativity and the desire to make a buck in new and unusual ways. Yet there’s trouble in paradise, Ms. Williams feels, mostly in the form of gentrification. Developers and various one-percenters, who like the ambiance and real-estate bargains, buy up properties with their pocket change, which drives out lower-income residents and endangers the locality’s “soul.” In many places, Ms. Williams writes, “food servers can’t afford a place to live.” In essence, San Francisco on a micro scale.
A certain type of reader (who perhaps has had a bad kimchee experience) might say that Ms. Williams is herself a person of “privilege” who is giving a book-length shout-out to kindred spirits. They might wonder if her enthusiasm for those bustling coffee shops would be the same if the in-house radios were tuned to Rush Limbaugh rather than Terry Gross.
The good news is that “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” goes light on the politics. While Ms. Williams can’t resist a swipe at Wal-Mart and the Tea Party, there’s no mention of Donald Trump, perhaps an act of heroic self-denial. She also understands the privilege rap: “The expense of growing organic food and just the sheer snobbery that can go with it will easily deepen any chasm of negative proximity in a town, bringing up economic, philosophical and even generational differences as flags for division and distrust.” Still, the power of community can transcend these differences, she says, if residents will let “our curiosity and interests, and a little trust, lead us outside our doors and onto the village green.”
While many singer-songwriters follow the “two chords and a blizzard of words” formula, Ms. Williams largely avoids literary flatulence, though readers are required to weather an occasional blast of jargon: “A good bar,” she explains, “can be the best place to tie up the loose ends of small, social subsets that, in turn, allow people to draw from diverse social resources and discover material ones as well.”
But there’s no doubting Ms. Williams’s sincerity, or the idea that people who work together for positive ends have a better chance of dying with a smile on their faces than those suffering from terminal addiction to their devices. In addition, she appears to practice what she preaches. At book’s end she writes about using her upcoming birthday as an occasion for a fundraiser for the local Episcopal church, whose tepid furnace will put no one in mind of hellfire. One assumes that the kimchee will be sublime.
Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at Daveshiflett.com</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226872017-09-13T20:00:00-04:002022-04-26T18:05:44-04:00Wall Street Journal Article on Confederate Monuments
<p>Why Not Put Truth on a Pedestal?
Richmond, Va.
I’m a descendant of a soldier who served under Gen. Robert E. Lee and a resident of the Richmond metro area, where one can take very few paces without bumping into a reminder of the Confederate past. Yet I can’t work up much enthusiasm about Civil War monuments.
My lackadaisical attitude has nothing to do with race or heritage and is quite widespread. Most people are far too busy worrying about losing their house, finding a job, making payroll and wondering why their dog’s tongue is turning blue to spend much time contemplating statues of guys who lost a war 152 years ago.
The violence in Charlottesville last weekend is deeply distressing. In this neck of the woods it’s commonly held that thugs who run down people with cars should go to the crocodile pit (after a fair trial, of course). But it’s hard not to cringe over the way a growing list of American locales are responding to the rise of the dead confederates.
In Baltimore, four monuments were purged Tuesday night in a scene reminiscent of the nocturnal vamoose of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984. (By contrast, three of the statues were parked at a wastewater treatment plant.) You didn’t have to be a soldier, or even a rebel, to get the hook: A statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Marylander who wrote the Dred decision and served on the U.S. Supreme Court until his death in 1864, was hauled off, along with a statue dedicated to Confederate women. Lexington, Ky., plans its own official purge, while a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., was toppled Monday and kicked by protesters after it bit the dust.
Where will it stop? President Trump was widely mocked for saying Tuesday: “I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” He didn’t have to wait that long. The next day, a Chicago pastor demanded the removal of a Washington statue from a city park. Last October activists gathered outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History to demand the removal of a statue of “racist” Teddy Roosevelt. The Rough Rider still stands, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted Wednesday that “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the [City University] hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism.”
Is anyone in public life not freaking out about Confederate monuments?
Yes. Here in Richmond, once the Confederate capital, Mayor Levar Stoney is keeping his cool. He believes the rebel luminaries have important truths to teach our hysterical and miseducated era.
“Whether we like it or not, they are part of our history of this city, and removal would never wash away that stain,” the mayor, who is African-American, said recently. He advocates adding “context” signage to the monuments, which will “set the historical record straight”—a record based on “a false narrative etched in stone and bronze more than 100 years ago not only to lionize the architects and defenders of slavery, but to perpetuate the tyranny and terror of Jim Crow and reassert a new era of white supremacy.”
Mr. Stoney’s plan will not please the rabid right or their brawling partners on the left, who imagine Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis as rustic versions of Hitler, Himmler and Speer. But converting chaos into what Barack Obama might call “a teachable moment” will resonate with anyone who agrees that allowing street-fighting crazies to set public policy is a bad idea.
Context contractors will be in deep clover along Monument Avenue, where Stonewall Jackson (erected in 1919) is joined by Lee (1890), J.E.B. “Jeb” Stuart (1907), Davis (1907) and Matthew Fontaine Maury (1929)—plus Richmond native Arthur Ashe Jr. (1996). The tennis legend’s inclusion on the avenue was met with great criticism, in part because he appears to be beating a group of children over the head with his racket. Yet the Ashe placement might have been ahead of its time. “Integrating” the avenue by placing monuments to triumphant African-Americans among the defeated rebs could be highly educational.
Worthy candidates would include local heroes Maggie Walker, the first woman to charter a bank in the U.S., and dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson —both of whom are memorialized on a smaller scale elsewhere in the city. Martin Luther King Jr. might make a nice neighbor for Jeb Stuart, while Mr. Obama, who carried Virginia twice, could keep Stonewall Jackson in good company.
And how to answer Jefferson Davis, a vibrant bigot with a theological bent? He once said of blacks: “We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.”
Since we’re looking for truth, we couldn’t do better than a monument to abolitionist Sojourner Truth. To my mind her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech is more powerful than the Gettysburg Address: “Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? And I have borne 13 children—13 children!—and seen most all of ’em sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
Few will have any trouble deciding who the superior being truly was, or drawing wider conclusions. If Mayor Stoney’s plan helps keep the lid on, he might end up in the governor’s mansion. And funding should be no problem. Pitch it to Mr. Trump as an infrastructure project.
Mr. Shiflett posts his original music and writing at DaveShiflett.com.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226862016-09-26T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:33-05:00Weekly Standard article on Commercial Country Music: Lost In The Stars
<p>Lost in the Stars
Country awaits its (musical) messiah.
Oct 03, 2016 | By Dave Shiflett
Many an aging hack writer (ahem) regrets not having worked harder in math class, or in what was once called “shop," which would have equipped us for careers built on sturdier things than words. As the assignments dry up, we could, at the very least, make a few bucks selling wobbly bookcases and custom-made backscratchers (a buck extra for the left-handed model).
Yet a few of us have held out hope for another option: writing country music lyrics. We assumed that, even after decades of cranking out journalistic dreck by day, chased by brain-dissolving potions at night, we'd have enough wattage left over to dash off a few hits, or at least a couple of regional favorites. The good news is that a quick review of contemporary country strongly suggests our wattage will be ample. The bad news—well, we'll get to that later.
There's plenty of good country music being made—along with bluegrass and other rural-inspired genres—but what we're talking about here is commercial country, the stuff you hear on Clear Channel and other broadcast behemoths. It should be said that commercial country is usually sung by talented vocalists backed by incredibly good musicians. But almost every song is instantly forgettable—and that's the generous appraisal. To the late Merle Haggard, modern country was flat-out "crap." It sounded, to his learned ear, as if it were produced by "the same band [with] the same sound."
Put another way: There's plenty of opportunity for up-and-comers. And old, perhaps delusional, hacks.
There is definitely an abundance of what might be called negative inspiration; that is, songs that seem to have required little mental mojo, or even full consciousness, to write. Take, for instance, the mega-hit "Achy Breaky Heart," which is quite memorable in the way that one's first viewing of a roadside corpse tends to stick with you.
But don't tell my heart
My achy breaky heart
I just don't think he'd understand
And if you tell my heart
My achy breaky heart
He might blow up and kill this man
Billy Ray Cyrus, who made a hit of the song, is also famous for siring the pop star Miley Cyrus (born Destiny Hope Cyrus), recently seen serenading her audiences while wearing a prosthetic penis. But be assured: Billy Ray likely doesn't care if you despise his song and his daughter. "Achy Breaky" made him rich and famous. The only dark spot—for him, at least—is that his signature song is being regularly eclipsed by newer atrocities such as "Drunk on a Plane."
Stewardess is somethin' sexy
Leanin' pourin' Coke and whiskey
Told her about my condition
Got a little mile-high flight attention
While easily dismissed as aural dentistry, DoaP does contain an element of genius: Sex in an airborne loo is reasonably considered a step above taking a romantic tumble in an outhouse. Ergo, "Drunk on a Plane" pushes the envelope. Merle, to be sure, was not impressed by this type of song: "They're talking about screwing on a pickup tailgate and things of that nature. I don't find no substance. I don't find anything you can whistle, and nobody even attempts to write a melody."
On the bright side, the songwriters did know how to rhyme.
On my way home I'll bump this seat right up to first class
So I can drink that cheap champagne out of a real glass
And when we land I'll call her up and tell her "kiss my ass"
It might take a couple of double-wides to house all the artistic hairballs coughed up by Nashville songwriters, who are easily matched by writers from other popular genres. But every once in a while comes a song whose egregiousness is truly magisterial. Cowboy hats off, then, to "Red Solo Cup," made famous by Toby Keith.
Now a red solo cup is the best receptacle
For barbecues, tailgates, fairs and festivals
And you sir do not have a pair of testicles
If you prefer drinking from glass
A red solo cup is cheap and disposable
And in fourteen years they are decomposable
And unlike my home they are not foreclosable
Freddie Mac can kiss my ass woo
At this point, news stories featuring X-rays of skulls pierced by crowbars or railroad spikes suddenly come to mind. The spell holds as the song progresses.
Red solo cup you're more than just plastic
You're more than amazing you're more than fantastic
And believe me that I'm not the least bit sarcastic
When I look at you and say
Red solo cup, you're not just a cup (No, no, God, no)
You're my, you're my friend (Friend, friend, friend, life long)
Thank you for being my friend
In his defense, Toby Keith has been quoted as saying that this might be the dumbest song in existence, not adding whether it took one pickup truck, or two, to haul his earnings to the bank. None of which is to diminish admiration and appreciation for this or any of the aforementioned songs. After all, they give hacks hope that they, too, can have songwriting success. Some of the more delusional ones might even be inspired to pursue the hope engendered by Beverly Keel in her (Nashville) Tennessean column: "As the Bro Country movement begins to wane, people are anxiously awaiting an artist to appear with a fresh new sound to take country in a new direction."
Translation: The position of Country Music Messiah is open.
In this ecclesiastical spirit, I've put together (with suitable humility) a few tunes melding familiar themes—Mama, obesity, the Rapture—with contemporary developments.
Mama got fat, daddy got even,
He ran off and married a guy named Steven
Country music might not save my soul
Moving on a bit, the plot thickens.
Daddy got chopped, now he's a lady
Ran off to Texas with a girl named Sadie
Mama's head is spinning like a top
A good singer—perhaps, especially, one who is transitioning—might ride this tune (called "Roll Rapture") to the top of the charts. With similar reverence I submit "Seven-Dollar Beer," a piece of generational combat in the spirit of Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee."
Well we used to go out drinking
Had ourselves a lot of fun
Drinking Blues and cold Budweisers
Fifty cents for every one
And no one gave a rat's patootie
If your chicken was free range
Hell, if you worried about a chicken
People'd think that you were strange
Both demos are available—free, of course—at my website. Which brings us to some very sobering news. Of course, the subject is money and the reality check is provided by songwriting sensation Aloe Blacc. His giant hit "Wake Me Up!" (which he co-wrote and performed) "was the most streamed song in Spotify history and the 13th most played song on Pandora since its release in 2013," he informs us, "with more than 168 million streams in the US."
And yet, that yielded only $12,359 in Pandora domestic royalties— which were then split among three songwriters and our publishers. In return for co-writing a major hit song, I've earned less than $4,000 domestically from the largest digital music service.
The clear message: Dream big, including young people eyeing a future in the music biz. But think twice about cutting algebra class.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226852016-09-15T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T11:41:45-05:00Wall Street Journal Reviews of 'In Praise Of Profanity' and 'What The F'
<p>Sept. 16, 2016 2:32 p.m. ET
Cussing sure isn’t what it used to be. These days it seems nearly impossible to horrify, or impress, with a display of nuclear nomenclature. Even the pope has publicly dropped something of an F-bomb, which unleashed a fallout of yawns. It seems we’re all stevedores now.
Which is not necessarily a negative development, at least according to a pair of language experts whose books illuminate profanity’s pilgrimage from the gutter to the basilica.
With “In Praise of Profanity,” Michael Adams, an English professor at Indiana University, insists that we are living in a kind of golden age of profanity, so designated “because we can use profanity to satisfy multiple human and linguistic needs better now than at any previous time in history, without much constraint.” In “What the F,” Benjamin K. Bergen, who teaches cognitive science at the University of California, is similarly exuberant, calling his book a “coming-out party for the cognitive science of swearing.” One expects Lenny Bruce and George Carlin will be put up for sainthood any day now.
Who would be surprised? Words that once sent offenders to the pillory and introduced countless youngsters to the taste of soap now trip off the daintiest of tongues. In fact, deploying the soap cure may earn parents a visit from child protective services while a failure to cuss might be deemed “putting on airs.”
So how did we get here? Pretty quickly, writes Mr. Adams, who has “witnessed the devulgarization of most profanity during my lifetime.” Harper’s magazine, he notes, first used the F-word in 1968, though the New Yorker’s Harold Ross held longer to his standard of not publishing anything that would, according to one biographer, “bring a blush to the cheek of a 12-year-old girl.” New Yorker writer Renata Adler thought that by the 1960s the “strongest Anglo-Saxon words in the language were so common that their power was nearly gone.”
The shift (or obliteration) of standards was accomplished by endless envelope pushing, some of which seems quaint to our jaded ears. Older readers will recall the uproar over the early pop song “Louie, Louie,” which these days would probably pass muster as a Baptist wedding recessional. Mr. Adams implicitly celebrates Bluto Blutarsky and his frat brothers for their role in the great re-alignment. “Since Animal House,” he writes of the 1978 classic, “. . . we’re all a little vulgar.” And Bluto has been eclipsed by the likes of Tony Soprano, a full-throated Caruso of cursing.
Anyone wondering how language pros spend their working hours will find enlightenment in Mr. Adams’s study of “The Sopranos.” Through careful counting he has established that in 81% of the show’s episodes there was more than one profanity per minute, and in 22% there were at least 100 profanities. In the 85 monitored episodes there were 7,037 “profane instances.” These tallies amount to a loss for civility but a victory for the scriptwriters, who were clearly not penalized for unimaginative repetition.
Readers who fear that the professors might analyze the blood (or other fluids) out of their subject will find some confirmation of their concerns. In both books, words and deeds that formerly raised eyebrows soon begin to lower them to doze position, though Mr. Bergen does perk things up a bit by including photographs of people cussing in sign language. Who would have ever guessed that a properly coached thumb could be so expressive?
Mr. Bergen also includes interesting facts about organs other than those associated with the body’s exhaust or reproductive systems, especially the brain, which, he reports, consumes 20% of the body’s energy while only constituting 2% of its weight. Inequality, it seems, knows no boundaries. He writes that people who sustain brain damage that obliterates their ability for normal conversation often retain their ability to cuss, comforting us with the possibility that even after a stroke we might still spew properly spiced bile if not the Preamble to the Constitution.
Mr. Bergen’s investigation of the pope’s F-bomb (which occurred on March 2, 2014) will likely bring comfort to the faithful: He gives the pontiff a pass, attributing the incident to a mere slip of the tongue. In an address from the Vatican balcony, Pope Francis attempted the Italian word for “example” and ended up striking an inadvertent blue note. Most people, he notes, commit speech errors at a rate of one or two for every 1,000 words, which works out to one error for every 10 minutes of speech. And we all know how the pope can go on. It was only a matter of time.
Not that Mr. Bergen would have minded if His Holiness had purposely loosed a linguistic loogie. Both authors believe that profanity can be unparalleled in its expressive powers and even work physical wonders. Mr. Bergen writes that, while common civility would ideally tame slurring tongues, courts might one day attempt to apply a legal gag. In some places, of course, an ill-considered religious slur can earn you a starring role in an Internet beheading epic.
“Context is everything,” Mr. Adams writes, reasonably enough, though some readers may take exception to his view that we don’t cuss enough. “Women should swear more, and they might as well start swearing while they are girls, right alongside the boys.” Sharing a similar evangelical tone, Mr. Bergen says that “there’s no evidence” that profanity harms children and only inconclusive evidence that children who hear profanity are more likely to use it.
Harm is difficult to measure, and it is easy enough to sympathize with youngsters who deploy formerly taboo words to spice up an otherwise mundane existence (and perhaps rattle their parents). Yet he who rises from his flippin’ ( Andy Capp’s preferred version of the word) bed to eat his flippin’ breakfast before playing his flippin’ videogame till his flippin’ fingers fall off has still, at the end of the flippin’ day, not been up to much—except for sounding like a linguistic drone. Which, besides being mindless, may be a form of self-deception. Words meant to spice up reality might also conceal its fundament vacuousness.
There may also be something diminishing about fixating on words that, for the most part, describe entities and events found south of the beltline. While there are many variations—Mr. Adams says researchers have identified 1,740 words for sexual intercourse, 1,351 for the part of the male anatomy that the Brits call “wedding tackle,” 1,180 for the related female technology, and 540 for the activities that inspired the creation of the diaper and chamber pot—most people suffice with a few default obscenities.
Most parents would prefer that their children spout Shakespeare than sound as if they are perpetually stepping on a nail, just as they’d prefer that their children master the violin instead of the kazoo. Yet it’s also true that a world without salty language would be a tasteless porridge. Mr. Bergen reports, amazingly, that the Japanese language includes no swear words.
Perhaps profanity’s ascendancy will eventually bore people into finding new and more interesting ways to express themselves. For now, however, anyone hoping to escape the triumph of what was once called “gutter talk” should either lance his eardrums or consider relocating to Japan.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226842016-04-08T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:32-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of 'Redskins: Insult and Brand'
<p>April 8, 2016 2:45 p.m. ET
Lest Americans grow bored with immigration, terrorism, confiscatory taxation and other mainstays of campaign chatter, Bernie Sanders has dragged the hapless Washington Redskins into the circus, saying that their pigment-specific moniker is on the “wrong side of history.”
Many fans, not to mention team owner Dan Snyder, may feel the same way about Mr. Sanders, yet he is one of 50 senators who signed a letter demanding a Redskins name change. The senators, who always wag a civil tongue, join a dedicated tribe of activists who hope to persuade, or force, Mr. Snyder to relent. It’s enough to make one wonder whyDonald Trump hasn’t beat the anti-PC drums on this subject.
Those seeking a deeper understanding of the anti-Skins crusade will find a vibrant apostle in C. Richard King, a professor of comparative ethics at Washington State University who vastly prefers his ethics to those of the Redskins’ faithful. He’s all-pro on this matter, having written widely against the use of Indian mascots. This latest effort is illuminating, in a blowtorch sort of way.
Mr. King’s basic argument is straightforward. He considers the name “Redskins” a racial slur. He acknowledges that the name may have originated among American Indians themselves and had positive connotations, but he argues that it was a slur by the time team owner George Preston Marshall chose it in 1933 to replace the name “Braves” for his then Boston-based football team.
Mr. King quotes Frank Baum, the author of “The Wizard of Oz,” who wrote (in reference to Sitting Bull’s demise) that “the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.” He adds that the first Redskins coach, William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz, who identified as a Lakota Indian, may have been making a false claim about his lineage. (What is it about Boston and questionable assertions of Indian ancestry? If the Senate holds hearings on the issue, one hopes Sen. Warren will offer her unique insights.)
The Redskins faithful have another view, summed up by former Chicago Bears coachMike Ditka: “What’s all this stink over the Redskins name? It’s so much horse—. . . . It was said out of reverence, out of pride to the American Indian.” Mr. Snyder—and no doubt most team fans—feel the same way and would likely use the same scatological reference to characterize Mr. King’s insistence that their embrace of the name masks deeper, darker intuitions. Which is probably fine with Mr. King, who seems to enjoy a good scrap.
He brings a great deal of passion to the table, starting with the book’s dedication, which includes a hat tip to “haters” (presumably those who disagree with Mr. King). So strong is his dislike of the team name that he refuses to use it, except in the book’s title, preferring the clunky “Washington professional football team.” To utter a word like “Redskins,” he insists, “disappears Native Americans.” It calls “for the exclusion and extermination of the indigenous other.”
Fans of this type of writing (known in some quarters as raving) will find a rich feast in “Redskins: Insult and Brand,” which is regularly spiced with righteous invective and epically eccentric descriptions. Mr. King characterizes the football gridiron “as a kind of heterotopic space, a zone of frivolity and liminality made possible by imagined indigenous masculinity that empowered white male athletes and a white patriarchal public sphere more generally.” One can imagine Mr. Ditka looking up from such a passage and exclaiming: “Where’s this guy from—outer space?”
The passage illustrates another of Mr. King’s passions: clubbing the beneficiaries of “settler colonialism”—who, in pigment-talk, would be known as palefaces. Mr. King (whose jacket photo suggests his own membership in that tribe) writes of “unbearable whiteness” and “unacknowledged whiteness” and even their dull cousin “unremarkable whiteness.” He also sounds as if he’s not too keen on males. Those who defend the team name, he writes, reflect “the shape and significance of white masculinities in the wake of multiculturalism, feminism, and postindustrialization.”
In the academic world that sort of sentence may be the equivalent of an 80-yard field goal—into the wind. Yet readers who might otherwise be willing to consider the argument for a name change may eventually conclude that Mr. King sounds a lot like the headmaster at a re-education camp, one who perhaps types with one hand and sharpens a machete with the other. If he’s for something, there may be good reasons to take a generous look at the opposite side.
When it comes to culture-war subjects, most of us have become accustomed to a fair amount of hectoring. Mr. King does show flashes of genius in that regard, delivering his diatribes with startling intensity and an imaginative deployment of cultural-theory jargon. Even so, we might be forgiven for not getting too worked up about Indian mascots or, for that matter, teams whose names and logos exploit wild animals, pirates, giants or the vast inanimate heat.
We would find ourselves in good company. A 2003-04 Annenberg survey found that only 9% of Native Americans felt the Redskins name to be offensive. Mr. King concedes that later polls “have shown support for the team name among Native Americans.” It is worth remembering that a slur can lose its sting, just as the F-word—once the hydrogen bomb of obscenities—is now as common in everyday conversation as asking, “How’s your mother?” In fact, more common.
That doesn’t mean that the Redskins name won’t someday change. A new stadium deal might include a push for revision. New owners could insist on a new identity. A decline in merchandise sales might doom the tradition.
So it’s not too early to suggest replacements. One assumes that Mr. Trump would support the Washington Bloviators, while anti-Washington types might prefer the Satraps or (my choice) the Burons—a pleasing contraction of “bureaucrat” and “moron.” Meantime, several solid reasons not to support the team remain in play: high ticket and beer prices, traffic jams, and a very good chance, on any given Sunday, that you’ll see an alternate version of Little Big Horn, this time with the Indians getting the short end of the stick.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226832016-01-27T19:00:00-05:002022-02-05T14:51:59-05:00Wall Street Journal Review 'Of Beards and Men'
<p>The ancient Hebrews honored beards. Peter the Great taxed his shaggier subjects. Lincoln grew one to make his mug look more presidential.
By
Dave Shiflett
Jan. 27, 2016 6:57 p.m. ET <!--[if ! lte IE 8]-->
Those who are by nature contemplative, or who just have too much time on their hands, may occasionally ponder the reason why so many modern men shave their faces. As with most deeply philosophical questions, the obvious answer—because they want to—is probably insufficient.
A richer sense of the topic can be gleaned from “Of Beards and Men,” a surprisingly interesting study of mankind’s love-hate relationship with facial hair by Christopher Oldstone-Moore, who lectures on history at Wright State University. Those who choose to shave, or not to shave, are not simply opting for a look that pleases them, Mr. Oldstone-Moore writes. They are shaped by “seismic shifts dictated by deeper social forces that shape and reshape ideals of manliness.”
Remember that, fellas, the next time someone accuses you of being insensitive to seismic forces. Mr. Oldstone-Moore gives several indications that he aced Academic Jargon 101—“the language of facial hair is built on the contrast of shaved and unshaved”—but he also presents a pleasant survey of beard knowledge with a wry sense of humor, starting with a trip back to the dawn of humanity, when beards evolved “because our prehistoric female ancestors liked them.” A bushy mug was also a weapon to terrorize adversaries—a passive version of beating the chest and grunting loudly.
As civilization set in, whiskers became more than mere babe bait or predator repellant. Mr. Oldstone-Moore finds a divine mandate for beards in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. A bit later on, Greek dramatists mined the popular prejudice against clean-shaven men, who were considered effeminate if not outright degenerate.
But all things must pass, and beards were no exception. Their chief executioner was Alexander the Great, no slacker when it came to self-adoration. He believed that his shaved face presented “an otherworldly image of ageless perfection.” His look rocked antiquity and has, for the most part, dominated for the past 23 centuries.
Beards did not of course disappear, and our author identifies a few eras in which wearing whiskers was downright respectable, so much so that beards were sometimes grafted onto faces previously portrayed as hairless. Exhibit A is Jesus of Nazareth, “the most recognizable bearded man in Western civilization,” according to Mr. Oldstone-Moore, even though the Good Shepherd was initially portrayed with a face as bare as Justin Bieber’s. When church fathers eventually adopted “a positive view of facial hair as part of their assertion of a male-dominated gender order,” Jesus bearded up—and has remained that way up to our own time.
Still, it often seems as if the bearded should be recognized as a historically persecuted minority. The medieval era was fond of the razor, and the belief that “beardlessness was next to godliness” could inspire outright persecution. The University of Paris, Mr. Oldstone-Moore tells us, banned long-bearded men from lecture halls in 1533, and a few years later the city’s chief court outlawed beards on judges and advocates. In the same spirit the so-called Enlightenment preferred a shaved face and long wigs. Russian strongman Peter the Great proclaimed a near-jihad against his shaggier subjects, whom he considered an impediment to modernization, and even levied a beard tax.
Mr. Oldstone-Moore does not overlook the fact that beards have conferred benefits, even for women. Hatshepsut, the first female king of Egypt, deployed a fake beard that convinced compatriots that she was a man. Closer to our time, Josephine Clofullia, a 19th-century “freak show” sensation, boasted a beard “that shamed any man’s we have ever seen,” as a contemporary critic raved.
Mr. Oldstone-Moore honors other unshaved eminences, including Karl Marx, whose beard was thick enough to house a family of Bolsheviks, and Abraham Lincoln, who was inspired to fuzz up when 11-year-old Grace Bedell informed him that women with bearded spouses “would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be president.” Lincoln had another incentive to cover his mug, as reflected in his reply to Stephen Douglas’s charge that he was two-faced: “If I had another face do you think I would wear this one?”
Yet while beards were popular in Lincoln’s day, there were always critics, including the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In 1851, he wrote that beards “should be forbidden by the police. It is moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.” Just after the turn of the century the medical magazine Lancet reported that clean-shaven men were less likely to suffer from colds, and by 1915 the Los Angeles Police Department wouldn’t promote any man with a beard. A Chicago woman interviewed on the street declared: “I want a modern husband, not one reared in Noah’s ark.”
That censorious spirit has found its way to our era, Mr. Oldstone-Moore writes, reflected in a 1976 Supreme Court ruling (Kelly v. Johnson) holding that “Americans do not have a legal right to grow beards or moustaches as they choose” if their employer demands a clean face. And while several cultural icons have been bearded, including John Lennon—who heroically advised the world to “Stay in bed. Grow your hair. Bed peace. Hair peace.”—a bare face is the default look.
That could change. Beards are becoming somewhat more common these days—at least on entertainers, athletes and Civil War re-enactors—though Mr. Oldstone-Moore says that we will not have arrived at a true bearded age until “facial hair becomes desirable, or even acceptable, for soldiers, managers, and legislators.” In the meantime, he adds, scientific studies show that contemporary women prefer men with stubble, which signals the maturity and masculinity to grow a beard but allows the underlying pretty face (or otherwise) to shine through. The best of both worlds, it seems. One wonders what Schopenhauer would make of that.
Mr. Shiflett posts his writing and original music at www.Daveshiflett.com.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226822016-01-16T19:00:00-05:002022-02-05T14:52:42-05:00Boston Globe Article on Donald Trump's America
<p>By Dave Shiflett January 17, 2016
One year from now, perched atop the steps of the Capitol and overlooking a vast crowd of his fellow citizens on the National Mall, Donald J. Trump could be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
Indeed, we may already be counting down the weeks until Donald J. Trump moves into the White House. Make that The Trump White House. Along with Vice President Oprah Winfrey — “She really helped me with the babe vote,” the president-elect might note — Trump will bring his signature policies and a revolutionary tone shift to Washington, which he will try very hard not to call a hick town.
First off, in the spirit of disclosure, I coauthored Trump’s first campaign book, “The America We Deserve,” back in 2000. I found Trump to be funny, truly concerned about America’s future, and a guy who paid his bills on time. I also assume that if you asked him today who I am, he wouldn’t have a clue. As for this election, I vigorously support no candidate. In fact, for reasons explained below, I plan on going fishing on Nov. 8. End of disclosure.
In a similar vein, I’ll go ahead and stipulate that, for any number of reasons — poor showings in early primaries, withering press scrutiny, an unwillingness to write more checks from his own bank account — DT may not actually take the big prize. He may announce that he is, after all, Donald Trump and, “quite frankly, the presidency would be a definite step down.” Or his plane could crash.
Yet, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Trump rides a tsunami of hope, luck, bile, and disaffection into office, inspiring Whoopi Goldberg and others to keep their promise and flee the country. What would life be like for those of us left behind? What would Trump’s America be like? Let’s take a stroll.
The shock to the system would be profound and first noticeable by the words that tumble out of his mouth. It’s not unreasonable to expect he would become the first chief executive to use the F-word. And he’d deploy it judiciously, particularly while attacking ISIS and perhaps as soon as his inaugural address or later in a State of the Union, after which the cameras will pan the assembled Supreme Court justices, generals, and legislators left to wonder if it’s worse to applaud the sentiment or look unpatriotic by not doing so. At the National Prayer Breakfast, the president might use the word as part of an alliterative crescendo featuring pharaohs and Philistines — presenting the audience with a similar dilemma.
Before we get there, however, let’s also stipulate that even Trump’s detractors must agree that he has made this election cycle unusually entertaining. People may not like his demeanor, his pronouncements, or his hair — but the current political season would be a snoozefest without him. Who wakes up wondering what Marco Rubio, Jeb!, or Bernie Sanders will say today? Some of us check regularly to see whether Ted Cruz has grown a dorsal fin overnight, but for the most part, Trump is the draw.
And it’s increasingly easy to believe he’s got more of a chance of winning than the pro prognosticators gave him at the start of this campaign, which was zero. His Republican opposition is weak and uninspiring — a collection of hacks, nonstarters, and the butt end of a political dynasty. While the grand wise men of the Grand Old Party fear Trump may destroy the Republican Party, nine out of 10 medical examiners would rule it a suicide.
Meantime, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has her own set of problems. Over-qualified though she may be, she suffers from a terrible case of chronic charisma deficiency that looks worse in comparison with Trump. Their debates will be the political equivalent of a battle of the bands between Adele and Black Sabbath. Plus, there’s always the possibility of a last-minute indictment over her electronic mail.
Like Ronald Reagan and Thomas Pynchon used to say: “This is America.” Anything can happen. Maybe even President Trump.
In terms ofpolicy, Trump has run a campaign around the five core issues that every single American agrees are the most important — restricting Muslim and Mexican immigration, berating China, cutting taxes, reforming the Veterans Administration, and protecting the God-given right to own a bunker full of automatic weapons.
I loaned my crystal ball to my stock broker, but it seems safe to assume that his M&M immigration initiative — banning Muslims and deporting Mexicans — would command a great deal of public attention and discussion, especially when the streets filled with protestors. DT only likes adoring crowds, so this might undo him a bit, and perhaps inspire him to blink, or at least significantly modify his policies. At the same time, he’d also learn that presidents are not emperors or kings, and that he had less power than he imagined. His promise to put cop killers to death, for example, overlooked the fact that many states do not allow capital punishment.
Meantime, the Chinese will likely tell him where he can stick his plans to force them to close their sweatshops and plug their smokestacks. While his proposal for a flat tax will be music to many ears, it’s an old tune that might grate like disco for others. His promise to take families who bring in less than $50,000 per year off the tax rolls is similarly pleasing, especially if he can refrain from calling them “losers.” As for his Second Amendment initiatives — “I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools” on his first day in office, he promises — they may drive Michael Bloomberg to Xanax addiction. It goes without saying that making the VA more responsive will be universally welcomed.
But that’s to imbue Trump’s policies with a seriousness they don’t deserve. They are probably not central to his ascendancy — or his potential legacy.
After all, how many people go to ever-growing Trump rallies to hear him denounce the Chinese as “currency manipulators” or swoon when he calls for a 15 percent tax rate? Not many. They flock to Trump to hear him denounce losers.
Trump may be new to the political game, but he recognizes the deep resentment many Americans feel toward the elites — whether in politics, the media, the academy, or entertainment — who think it their duty to tell everyone else how to think. Trump feels their disdain. He empathizes with those who are weary of being labeled “haters” or “phobic” because they don’t toe the proper line, and who have had quite enough scolding about their diets, how much they drink or smoke, what they should think about the weather, and the evils perpetrated by their ancestors.
His supporters may agree with lefties that the system is rigged. But in their minds, the most notable beneficiary of it is Hillary Clinton, whose entry-level government jobs were US senator and secretary of state. It is a good thing that guillotines are not currently in fashion.
But DT surely is. Many of the besieged have sent up celestial petitions begging for a redeemer, or at least someone who will tell their oppressors to stuff it. The Universe has heard their entreaties and sent them Donald J. Trump. Put another way, we are seeing the political equivalent of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer trying to free themselves from the hectoring clutches of Aunt Polly.
Of course, even stalwart liberals such as Mel Brooks and Norman Lear have complained about political correctness. Meanwhile, anyone with a grievance against government policy, down to seat belt and bike helmet laws, probably sees a kindred spirit in Trump. His supporters’ views are hardened and his numbers increased when they are characterized as mentally unbalanced, chronically angry, uneducated rubes. And they like it when Trump throws around the word “stupid.” Taken together, Trump’s constituency is likely far larger than we realize.
Trump has no problem playing the role of a modern-day Bolivar — the people’s liberator — perhaps the first of that tribe to outfit his private jet with a Renoir. And should his policies bog down, he can rally the faithful by taking another shot at Polly and her prim confederates, using the word “schlong,” for instance.
President Trump’s freewheeling style would be reflected in his Cabinet: Puffy Combs (secretary of health and human services), Iron Mike Tyson (homeland security), and Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio (attorney general), perhaps causing D.C. royalty to flee over the wall into Mexico.
Social media, meantime, would see a definite change in focus. Who’s going to have time to worry about Cecil the Lion when Trump is advocating small-arms training in middle school? And imagine the response when he jokes that appointees to the Federal Reserve will face a swimsuit review. Talk about an audit. Elsewhere, the popularity of a new hairstyle called “The Don” will make us wax nostalgic for the mullet.
Most of it would be highly entertaining. But there would surely be tense times as well, especially when the new president goes toe-to-toe with Vladimir Putin. Trigger warning: a discussion of possible End Times to follow.
Despite his tough talk, Trump is a real estate guy who might have had to stare down carpet and concrete contractors but never a former KGB operative with experience as a carpet bomber. Will Trump, who has held out the possibility of nuking ISIS, feel it necessary to prove to Putin who has the bigger club? The tabloid headlines practically write themselves: “Goon Versus Loon.” Well, the worse that could happen would be nuclear incineration. Maybe we have it coming.
But let’s hope not. And to give Trump one last bit of credit, he and his competitors have made it fully respectable to choose another political option: joining the NOTA Party — None of the Above — and going fishing on Election Day.
That’s where I’ll be. Like many Americans, I don’t think we need another Clinton or Bush in the White House. But Trump isn’t the answer. His remarks about Senator John McCain’s war record ripped it with me. There’s a personal angle: My youngest son did two tours in the Middle East, and several other local boys answered the call. Some were hurt and will never be the same. For a guy like Trump, who never wore the uniform, to scoff at anyone’s military sacrifice makes him, in my opinion, ineligible for the job of commander-in-chief.
He even had the chutzpah to argue that he has worn the uniform — in military school — which he likened to real service. That’s like going to a toga party and announcing that you now know what it’s like to have served in Caesar’s legions. Whatever else you want to say about the man, he does keep us smiling.
I’ll be smiling while I’m drowning those worms. I’m expecting lots of company.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226812015-12-21T19:00:00-05:002022-02-05T14:53:34-05:00Wall Street Journal Article on Donald Trump
<p>As the writer of Donald Trump’s first “campaign book,” the slightly revered and lightly-quoted “The America We Deserve” (published in 2000), I have been asked by “many, many people” (to deploy a Trumpism) to offer my recollections of the man who would be king.
Some wonder what he’s like to work with. Others ask if he’s terminally bombastic or what the chances are he’ll get crossways with Vladimir Putin and incinerate the world.
The third question will have to be taken up by soothsayers and bookies. As for the first, we made a pretty good team. He needed words, I needed money, and together we explored what Trump would do if he became president. I have long considered it my first published work of fiction.
Yet the world has gotten very strange since then. In an ongoing shock to Main Street, Wall Street, Sesame Street and probably lots of people who believe in a benevolent deity, Trump has leveraged fear of Islamist mass murderers, concerns over a slack economy, and widespread disdain for the forces of cultural bullying into a forceful lunge for the presidency. He’s serious about the job, and lots of people are serious about him.
This is a vast change from 2000, when Trump (by my estimation) was simply another rich guy out on a lark. He was bombastic but out to make headlines, not history. He talked about toughness much in the same way candidate Barack Obama would later constantly jabber about hope. It was a short-lived dance through the spotlight, and plenty of fun.
Trump was in his early 50s when we teamed up to make, if not literature, at least a little noise and a few bucks. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Among other things he liked to brag about never drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, or even sipping coffee -- credentials that almost suggested a closeted Mormon.
But of course he also liked some of the other the finer things in life, especially if they wore high heels. A visitor to his Trump Tower office found himself surrounded by women who looked as if they’d been created in a laboratory. Trump, by contrast, was something of a manatee with a funny coif, but also living proof that while money might not buy you love or even ripped abs – so what?
He had a decent sense of humor and didn’t bore anyone by droning on about policy specifics. He had Roger Stone, the famed political trickster and fashion plate, to fill in those blanks. Trump could also be surprisingly humble, especially when discussing his parents and their longstanding marriage. He judged himself harshly for his own failed nuptials and was self-effacing when explaining that he wasn’t nearly as germaphobic as fellow plutocrat (RIP) Howard Hughes.
But he also had his passions. One was inspired by his uncle, John Trump, an MIT professor and “great man” who warned his nephew that terrorists with a suitcase bomb could turn Manhattan into “Hiroshima II.” Terrorist attacks on the homeland were approaching, DT predicted. This was prior to 911, so give him some points for prescience.
He was also a serious fan of diversity, inclusiveness and civility. Soon after sending in the first draft I was summoned to New York by Trump’s longtime assistance, Norma Foerderer (now deceased), who to this rustic hack was the epitome of the sophisticated New Yorker: bright, attractive, and possessed with a set of penetrating eyes that would have made a firearm redundant.
She had one message: the draft was too “strident” and would have to be toned down. So crucial was this demand that it could not be given over the phone. It was a long trip (from Virginia and back) for a meeting that lasted just a couple of minutes. Such was the importance making sure the boss wagged a civil literary tongue.
The book set that tone in the first pages. Trump denounced the murder of Matthew Shepherd, the harassment of Jews and all other “hate crimes.” He praised friends who had taught him about the “diversity of American culture” and “left me with little appetite for those who hate or preach intolerance.” Among those friends were Sammy Sosa, Puffy Combs, and Muhammad Ali – then as now perhaps the world’s best-known Muslim.
Fast forward to the present, where Ali recently found it necessary to send his old pal a remonstrance in the form of a press release entitled “Presidential Candidates Proposing to Ban Muslim Immigration to the United States” in which he denounced “those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda.” Ali didn’t mention Trump by name, and it appears Trump chose to ignore the Champ’s message.
Instead he rolls merrily along, like fortune’s child, bolstered by terrorist fear and political competitors variously seen as pathological liars, empty suits, the butt-ends of political dynasties and/or possible genetic collusions between a human, a weasel, and a snake. He’s also the default candidate for all who grown weary of culture cops and bureaucratic bullies. For a real estate guy, he seems to have the political game figured out pretty well.
But there’s also something of a tragic element to the rise of candidate Trump.
In what should be his finest hour, he acts as if he had been raised in a barn (as we rustics like to say). One wonders what Norma Foerderer would make of Trump’s barking-dog stridency. One hopes it would be majestically unprintable. What would his parents think of his habit of calling respectable, hard-working people “losers?” For someone who has been given so much in life, it’s an especially vile line of attack.
His remarks about Senator John McCain’s war record were almost supernaturally revolting. Here is a man who never wore the uniform (though he argues that going to military school was pretty much the same as being in the service, which is like me saying that going to a toga party is commensurate with membership in one of Caesar’s Roman Legions) sneering at McCain’s service. My youngest son did two tours in the Middle East and several of his friends also served; some were hurt and will never be the same. To hear Trump sneer at military sacrifice ripped it with me, as I’m sure it did with many military families.
Supporters might argue Trump’s bluster is the result of living in a world that is increasingly hysterical, whether about the climate, the proper nomenclature, or the threat of blood-drunk medievalists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. Detractors, meantime, sense deep insecurity, not a trait one hopes for in a leader, especially one with a nuclear capability.
Or it could be that despite all the advantages he’s enjoyed, the man prefers being a political shock jock to being a statesman. Whatever the explanation, it’s working, as Trump might put it, “very, very big time.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226802015-11-20T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:30-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of PJ O'Rourke's 'Thrown Under the Omnibus'
<p>By
DAVE SHIFLETT
Nov. 20, 2015
The world is short on laughs these days, unless you happen to be amused by Internet beheadings or the gales of political flatulence that keep the nation’s curtains constantly aflutter. Excellent timing, then, for the release of a thick collection of humorist P.J. O’Rourke’s work, culled from his 16 books by the author himself.
While Mr. O’Rourke prepared for writerly cringing as he made the selections—“How would you like to have the twaddle and blather you talked forty years ago preserved in detail, set down in black and white, and still extant someplace?”—his work holds up well. Some collegiate readers, to be sure, may howl about the lack of trigger warnings, perhaps not realizing that their screeching is music to Mr. O’Rourke’s ears.
A son of Ohio (and alumnus of Miami of Ohio), Mr. O’Rourke has had a full and illustrious career, including stints at National Lampoon, Car and Driver and Rolling Stone. He occupies a rare place among the laughing class: He has somehow avoided the orifice obsession that captivates many of its members; he identifies as Republican; and he is no mere thumb-sucker, having visited more than 40 countries to report on wars, regime changes, economic revolutions and the experience of drinking cocktails garnished with the poison sacs of cobras.
Some of the earlier pieces are reminders of how much times have changed since Mr. O’Rourke took up the pen, including a primer, from his 1987 masterwork “Republican Party Reptile,” on how to drive while drugged, possum-eyed drunk and within easy grope range of a feral female, an article that might get him arrested today. In the same spirit, he was an early opponent of the war on tobacco. “If someone asks you not to smoke, tell him you have no intention of living to be an embittered old person. But thank him for his concern.”
Of greater delight are his takedowns of the smug drones who insist they know The True Way. In 1982, Mr. O’Rourke infiltrated an entire boatload of such people who were engaged in the heroic work of taking a “peace” cruise down the Volga River. Our correspondent was truly a fish out of water. Among other things he considered socialism “a violation of the American principle that you shouldn’t stick your nose in other people’s business except to make a buck.” His fellow travelers, on the other hand, were fans of the Soviet state, then under the enlightened leadership of longtime KGB thug Yuri Andropov.Yet Mr. O’Rourke, exercising profound investigative skill, spotted the chink in their ideological armor. These “were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” Small details reveal large truths.
In another throwback moment, he describes one true believer on the cruise radiating “not the kind of ugliness that’s an accident of birth but the kind that is the result of years of ill temper, pique, and petty malice. These had given a rattish, shrewish, leaf-nosed-bat quality to her face.” Today this passage might be dismissed as hag-shaming, though less fevered minds might recognize it as an excellent example of literary portraiture.
As the years passed Mr. O’Rourke found his way to many conflicts, including the invasion of Iraq, where his traveling companion, Atlantic editor Michael Kelly, was killed in an accident during the assault on the Baghdad airport. His interviews with internees at Palestinian refugee camps may have permanently scotched any chances of a speaking gig for Aipac. “This is barbarism. I’ve covered a lot of rioting and civil disorder, and there is no excuse for this kind of civilian hammering by soldiers and police.”
When the jihadists flew into New York and Washington on 9/11, he covered the aftermath from the bar at the Palm restaurant in D.C., whose assistant manager told him: “Ten minutes after the Pentagon was hit, I was getting reservations” because his customers “just wanted to be with other people.” Which brings up one caution about Mr. O’Rourke’s work: If you’re early on in an attempt to regain sobriety, it might be best to leave this book on the shelf until your legs are fully under you, for Mr. O’Rourke is a friend of the grape—or, more precisely, of whiskey. “Yes, alcohol kills brain cells,” he writes, “but it’s very selective. It kills only the brain cells that contain good sense, shame, embarrassment, and restraint. Wield a heavy hand at the bar.” One senses that if you needed to find the best bartender in the expanding caliphate, Mr. O’Rourke could point you in the right direction. I found myself using a swizzle stick for a bookmark.
He is also passionate about his patriotism, as vividly expressed in his description of ordinary Americans: “We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them together, and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars.” This thumbnail sketch surely won’t please his fellow countrymen who look longingly at Europe’s high-speed trains and green initiatives and look down on American politicians for not having read Descartes or memorized Voltaire. Mr. O’Rourke can probably live with their contempt.
His conservatism was somewhat long in coming. Though he hails from a Republican background—his grandmother said that the difference between Republicans and Democrats was that “Democrats rent”—Mr. O’Rourke during his youthful years “was swept out to Marxist sea by a flood of sex. I was trying to impress cute beatnik girls. Then, one day, I found myself beached on the shore of jobs and responsibilities and I was a Republican again.” His hippie friends, he adds, had become parasitical. “They continued to be convinced that everything was going to be shared soon, so they hadn’t gotten jobs.”
While some of them may still be singing “White Rabbit,” Mr. O’Rourke would rather sing the praises of Adam Smith, whose views are foundational to his philosophy of “leave me alone” (after you buy his book). He writes that he became a full-blown conservative on Dec. 4, 1997, when his wife gave birth. “Suddenly I was an opponent of change.” He felt an urge to stand athwart history shouting, “Don’t swallow the refrigerator magnet!”
Mr. O’Rourke has gathered other fruits of aging, including a surprise appearance of cancer in his posterior and a doctor who hoped to put him on a lighter whiskey ration. He is also given to geezerly reflections on his boomer generation, whose exhaustion of “the supply of peculiar” forced the new generation to take extraordinary measures to outweird their parents, including paying serious money “to pierce their extremities and permanently ink their exposed flesh. That must have hurt. We apologize.”
Boomers, he lightly rhapsodizes, channel Lord Byron, “thinking noble thoughts somewhat thoughtlessly, and being high-minded in a mindless sort of way.” But while vain and self-adoring, they are not “greedy for power.” This claim may stun readers who are weary of Clintons, Bushes and boomer bureaucrats or who see the heaving demographic as the middle act in an eternal drama: The older generation wins the peace, their children grow fat and decadent, leaving the youngest generation in the chains of debt and serfdom—perhaps with some hideous tats.
Some boomers might also carp about the book’s squintworthy typeface, while the batface hordes will denounce it as a continuous microaggression. Mr. O’Rourke has a message for them, delivered with a theological flourish: “Jesus said ‘love your enemies.’ He didn’t say not to have any.”
—Mr. Shiflett posts his music and writing at www.Daveshiflett.com.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226792015-08-28T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:30-05:00Washington Post Review of Otis Redding Biography
<p>By Dave Shiflett August 28 at 12:03 PM
Otis Redding’s burst of fame was short but eventful. He shared the stage with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and drew the Beatles and other British pop royalty to his concerts. He wrote one song that immortalized Aretha Franklin and co-wrote another that immortalized himself.
Like Hendrix, Joplin and too many other young stars, Redding didn’t make it past his 20s. He was 26 when his Beechcraft H18 airplane crashed into a Wisconsin lake in 1967, months before “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” rose to the top of the charts. Redding would never know the extent of his influence or the scope of his critical acclaim.
Mark Ribowsky, who has published books on the Supremes, the Temptations and Stevie Wonder, has written a (mostly) flattering biography of Redding. He places Redding not only at the head of that roster but at the heart of 1960s American popular music. “Respect” (which he wrote and recorded in 1965), and “ Dock of the Bay,” (co-written with Steve Cropper in 1967) “might very well reveal everything there is to know about the nature and meaning of that decade,” Ribowsky says. Elsewhere he calls Redding “one of the top artists in music history.”Roll over Beethoven, indeed.
Some may argue that Ribowsky elevates Redding’s importance beyond what is warranted, but He nonetheless tells a fascinating tale of the artist and his musical era.
Redding did not seem destined for fame. Born in Dawson, Ga., on Sept. 9, 1941, he was raised by a no-nonsense mother and a preacher father. He never learned to read or write music. But he could sing well enough to win a local talent show 15 times in a row. Soon enough, he was performing at various joints around Macon, initially earning 25 cents a gig.
His recording ascendancy at the Stax label in Memphis began almost by accident. When a musical associate finished a February 1962 recording session 40 minutes early, Redding, who had driven the musicians to the studio, was asked if he’d like to sing. Two songs later, he had deeply impressed sidemen Steve Cropper and Booker T. Jones. “I’d never heard anything like that before,” Cropper told Ribowsky. He signed that day, joining a historic Stax roster that included Booker T and the M.G.’s, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, and Solomon Burke.
There’s plenty of literary love-bombing in the book, which includes interviews with Redding contemporaries and material from biographies, articles and documentaries. But there are also ample reminders that Redding was no angel. The book includes mention of complaints from band members about not being paid, reports of philandering and abuse.It also describes Redding’s participation in a 1964 shootout that parked some non-lethal buckshot in several participants, including Redding himself.
Ribowsky also takes some shots at the record industry — “one of the most venal and soulless entities ever known” — and delves deep into the competition between Stax and Motown Records. Motown’s sound was slicker while Stax’s was “blacker”and more spontaneous. “Motown does a lot of overdubbing,” Redding said, while at Stax “the rule is: whatever you feel, play it.” And so, Ribowsky writes, when Redding recorded “Satisfaction” his first order of business was to throw the lyric sheet to the floor. “I used a lot of words different than the Stones’ version,” he later said. “That’s because I made them up.”
He found a popular singing partner in Carla Thomas and scored another big hit with “Try a Little Tenderness” (covered by Bing Crosby in 1933).Perhaps his most famous performance came on June 17, 1967 at the Monterey Pop festival. Redding stood out from the Summer of Love crowd. No tie-dye for him: He bounded onto the stage in an “incandescent turquoise suit” looking “twelve or fourteen feet tall” as the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir recalled, and stole the show.
Redding’s biggest song, and his demise, were nearly simultaneous. On Dec. 7, 1967, he came to the studio with some song fragments. “It was in no way near complete,”Ribowsky writes, but after work on the melody and lyrics, including Cropper’s suggestion of a bridge taken from the Association’s “Windy” and Redding’s whistled improvisation at the end, they had a take of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” The early reviews weren’t great. “It didn’t impress me,” said Duck Dunn, the bassist who played on the session. “I thought it might even be detrimental.” Bad call, Duck. As Ribowsky notes, The song went on to be the “sixth most played song of the twentieth century.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226782015-08-26T20:00:00-04:002022-01-10T03:23:28-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of 'The Girl in the Spider's Web'
<p>Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series did no favors to the book-tour industry, selling scores of millions of copies despite the fact that Larsson died before his books were published. He made the fatal miscalculation of climbing seven flights of stairs, which apparently triggered a heart attack.
Larsson’s demise in 2004 at age 50—in Stockholm, where he lived—was followed by bickering over his money and legacy. As it turns out, his characters are getting on very well without him, thanks to Swedish journalist David Lagercrantz, who keeps the “Millennium” brand humming in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”
Mr. Lagercrantz has big shoes to fill. The first three Larsson books—“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2005), “The Girl Who Played With Fire” (2006) and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (2007)—sold 80 million copies world-wide, 24 million in the U.S. But Mr. Lagercrantz has more than met the challenge. Larsson’s brainchildren are in good hands and may have even come up a bit in the world.
Crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, a kind of alter ego for Larsson, is still at the center of the action, running Millennium magazine and, as he sees it, speaking truth to power. He is slightly older and creakier than he was at the end of the trilogy; still, he is holding his own, despite being under attack from social-media dolts who are appalled that he is not on Facebook and Twitter. He also finds himself at odds with a sleazy media executive named Ove Levin, whose company now owns a third of Millennium’s shares and who is pressuring the magazine to modify its content: “Surely it was not necessary for all the articles to be about financial irregularities, injustices and political scandals.” Levin would prefer more celebrity news—and more light material for the youth market.
Death by shareholder activism isn’t Blomkvist’s biggest problem, though. The major villains he faces in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” are the masterminds of a shady tech company, some computer- and pistol-savvy Russian thugs, and the eavesdroppers at the U.S. National Security Agency, the world’s unsolicited companion. For all these culprits, the tech is high and the motives are low: more money, more power. Some things never change.
A good deal of the novel’s drama revolves around solving the murder of Frans Balder, a computer genius who has come to have second thoughts about his work in artificial intelligence. He has also been a “lousy father” and has returned to Sweden from California to reunite with his 8-year-old autistic son, whose mother, with her drunken lout of a boyfriend, has created a toxic home environment for the child. Balder, we are told, wants “to start living, to no longer bury himself in quantum logarithms and source codes and paranoia.” He also has something important to tell Blomkvist—though the revelation is aborted when Balder meets his un-maker.
Mr. Lagercrantz dispatches Balder with a minimum of splatter, a show of restraint that is also evident in the book’s treatment of sex. Larsson, by contrast, favored blow-by-blow accounts. Otherwise, the narrative voice and prose style of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” are close to those of the trilogy: sturdy and reliable though not particularly stylish—a high-mileage Volvo that carries the reader along with efficiency.
Mr. Lagercrantz definitely shares Larsson’s love of Lisbeth Salander, the punkish, tatted waif and hacker whose chief talent is to remind us that revenge is a dish best served piping hot. He keeps her offstage for the opening chapters, but when the dragoness enters the story she speeds it up nicely, joining in various subplots aimed at thwarting the evils of the NSA and avenging Balder’s death.
Lisbeth is the franchise character, a damsel who imposes distress on all the right people and, while hardly vain, is pleasantly self-aware. When asked if she is insane, she replies, “Probably yes,” adding that she likely suffers from “empathy deficit disorder. Excessive violence. Something along those lines.”
But she has a good heart and excellent aim, and she works well with children, or at least with Balder’s autistic son, who helps her bring the villains to heel, if only temporarily. She’s also tough. When she takes a slug through the shoulder, there’s no national health care for her. Instead she swallows a few antibiotic pills and goes to the gym to box.
Lisbeth is joined by other characters who are unconventionally appealing. A highly accomplished hacker named Plague “was not a man who normally showered or changed his clothes much” and who “spent his whole life in front of the computer.” Others, we learn from background sketches, spent their youth indulging in various addictions or pursuing the delights of street crime. Most now live on fast food (one almost assumes that McDonald’s paid for product placement). But they are blazingly good with numbers.
As it unfolds, “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is very much a geek drama, though Mr. Lagercrantz makes sure that the innumerate will learn a few things, such as the fact that encryption algorithms “take advantage of the difficulties involved in prime number factorization. Prime numbers have become secrecy’s best friends.” Lisbeth and her hacker team are guided by the ancient observation that power corrupts, “especially power without control,” which brings them into conflict with Edwin Needham, top security man for the NSA. His world is turned upside down when he receives a mysterious message: “Those who spy on the people end up themselves being spied on by the people.”
Lesser villains come and go. Christians and monogamy are as popular as pancreatic cancer with this crowd. Evil hitman Jan Holster recites a condensed version of the Lord’s Prayer—“thy will be done, amen”—before ventilating innocent skulls.
But the novel’s overarching evil is greed. A Swedish security cop shudders “at the creeping realization that we live in a twisted world where everything, both big and small, is subject to surveillance, and where anything worth money will always be exploited.” This kind of pronouncement is very much in the Stieg Larsson spirit: The rich and powerful are different—they have more money and fewer scruples and need to be knocked into shape by righteous journalists and fearless waifs. When the curtain falls one senses that future exploitation is inevitable -- including the exploitation of Larsson's fictional characters -- leaving readers with the hope that Mr. Lagercrantz avoids the stairs.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226772015-08-06T20:00:00-04:002022-02-05T14:47:27-05:00Rolling Stone Piece on Ben Bullington and Darrell Scott
<p>Ben Bullington wrote songs while working as a country doctor in White Sulphur Springs, Montana (population: 939), often scribbling away in the early morning hours before work and during down times in the emergency room. He wrote lyrics on cards, boarding passes, propane receipts — anything at hand — and crafted melodies on his 1933 Martin D-18. He worked alone, but his obscurity was not destined to last.
Bullington had taken a crooked path to Montana. Born in Roanoke, Virginia, he attended Vanderbilt University and pursued a career in the oil exploration business. During a trip up the Amazon, he contracted a near-fatal illness and decided to become a doctor. He worked at an Indian reservation and in Alaska before settling in Montana, where he raised a family, produced five CDs and died from pancreatic cancer on November 18th, 2013, at age 58. It was his cancer diagnosis, which arrived one year before his death, that convinced Bullington to leave his work and spend as much time as possible making music.
His songs have taken on a life of their own. Highly descriptive meditations on small town life, love, death, war and even flies — which the doctor despised — they can carry a sharp bite, as in the opening line to "I’ve Got to Leave You Now," a song that predicted his own demise: "Too many men are worse than rodents." Perhaps not Clear Channel material.
But Bullington's work has attracted a devoted following, especially among Nashville's songwriting elite. Darrell Scott's recently released tribute album, 10: Songs By Ben Bullington, is performed with sparse guitar, banjo and piano accompaniment, echoing Bullington's solo performances at Elks Clubs and other small venues out west. "These are real, honest, literature-based pieces of art for art's sake," Scott says, adding that the songs are not marred by "a swing for the commercial fences. I felt I was being part of a beautiful piece of art and part of a beautiful gift that will outlive both of us."
Grammy winner Rodney Crowell says Bullington's songwriting sensibilities "were a hybrid blend of intelligence, innocence and wry observance" and "refreshingly free of what we came to know as 'the music business.' He reminded me that a good and true song needs no other purpose." Scott and Crowell were joined onstage by several Bullington fans at the album's Nashville CD release party in late May, including Bill Cowan, Bill Payne, Gretchen Peters, Tracy Nelson, Tommy Womack and Will Kimbrough. Earlier that day, Bullington's "Country Music I’m Talking to You," a scathing indictment of Music Row and country radio, was played on WSM — the voice of the Grand Old Opry.
There's a storybook quality to Bullington's ascendency, whose catalyst was an April 2007 Montana dinner party introduction to Joanne Gardner, a former Sony senior V.P. and refugee from Los Angeles' rat race. She was immediately captivated by his songs and embraced his DIY spirit.
"There was no machine, no label, no distribution," she says. "We kitchen-tabled the whole thing. He had champions all over." None were more dedicated than Gardner, though, who introduced Bullington to Scott, Crowell and other musical pals. She acted as his manager and, during his last year, often drove Bullington to gigs. "Sometimes he felt pretty good, and sometimes he rolled into a ball in the back seat," she remembers. He died at her house.
Mary Chapin Carpenter and Crowell have written songs about Bullington, and Crowell may do some post-mortem co-writing with help from the large collection of lyrical fragments he left behind. Meanwhile, Scott's 10 is Number 26 on the Americana radio play chart. All of which has the feel of an unlikely legend being born.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226762015-06-26T20:00:00-04:002022-04-04T21:03:30-04:00Wall Street Journal Review of Judd Apatow's 'Sick in the Head'
<p>Sit-Downs With Stand-Ups
By DAVE SHIFLETT
June 23, 2015 6:58 p.m. ET
Writer, producer and director Judd Apatow is probably best known for movies like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up” and “Anchorman,” any one of which, given their unbuttoned sexual humor, would earn him a ticket to the chopping block from any respectable caliphate or two thumbs down from most mothers superior. Yet there is more to Mr. Apatow than his pop-culture triumphs indicate. His collection of interviews with comedy’s top tier—including Mel Brooks, Steve Allen, Albert Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, Jimmy Fallon, Harold Ramis, Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr—reveals an intelligent man with a searching soul.
Born to a Jewish family (as were a large portion of his interviewees), Mr. Apatow was raised without religion, except for being constantly reminded by his parents that “life isn’t fair.” As he tells us in the introduction to “Sick in the Head,” this mantra “left a bit of a void in my life, and I looked to comedy—and the insights of comedians—to fill it.” He was a diligent and resourceful searcher from early on, using credentials from a high-school radio station to line up interviews with the likes of Steve Allen and Jerry Seinfeld, who were shocked to find that Mr. Apatow was a 15-year-old whose station had a broadcast power of 10 watts.
Yet the youthful Mr. Apatow was thoughtful, and his subjects responded in kind. Steve Allen complained about the canned laughter on “Laugh-In” and talked about Lenny Bruce, noting that “he was the first guy—first comedian, I should say—to speak the language of musicians, which is now common. Even squares now say ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ and ‘I dig.’ ” Back in 1983, Mr. Seinfeld told Mr. Apatow that his generation of comics didn’t “seem too daring as a group, if you compared us to say, the sixties or the fifties.” (What daring there is today is thwarted on college campuses by political correctness, Mr. Seinfeld noted in a recent podcast.)
The interviews in “Sick in the Head,” which mainly took place between 2009 and 2015, allow lots of room for Mr. Apatow’s views and thus feel more like free-ranging conversations, full of quips, occasional nuggets of wisdom and anecdotes. Albert Brooks admits to writing jokes for presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Eventually, he says, he was “so disenchanted with him” that he prayed for his defeat. He had a better time, he says, hanging out with rock star Keith Moon, despite his habit of tossing televisions out hotel windows, and with John Lennon, whom he calls “a frustrated comedian.”
Among the stand-out interviews is the one with Mel Brooks, who Mr. Apatow says may be responsible for five of the top 10 comic movies ever made. Despite Mel Brooks’s standing as a comic deity, he comes across as a regular guy who is unimpressed by having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. When you get older, he explains, “you’re more interested in your cholesterol.” He says that “Blazing Saddles” (1974) probably couldn’t get made today, because of the rabid vigilantism of the language police. “The N-word couldn’t be used as frequently and spiritlessly,” he says, even though the movie lampooned racial prejudice.
A few interviews are somewhat flat, including those with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (Mr. Apatow: “Your mom sounds wonderful.” Mr. Colbert: “She was a lovely lady.”) Others underscore the link between anguish and mirth suggested in the book’s title, including the one with Roseanne Barr, who says that she has had “severe mental illness my whole life.” When asked what hell is she replies, “This planet.”
More amusing is the discovery that comics who have made their names pushing the envelope can end up sounding as if they had been raised by nuns. Louis C.K., whose routines might make Blackbeard blush, sees the cellphone as possibly of satanic origin. “It’s a sickness,” he says of iPhone infatuation, and he promises that his daughter will be “the last one of her friends to get a smartphone.” He forces her friends to surrender theirs at his front door, as if they were submachine guns, and watches in horror as withdrawal symptoms set in. “They itch, they shake, they can’t listen to each other.”
Chris Rock, meanwhile, has no time for stripper jokes. “I have two daughters. That joke is never silly.” Musician Eddie Vedder (included because Mr. Apatow likes his music) denounces the Disney Channel in tones reminiscent of a Focus on the Family press release: “I challenge you to find a single character, if not just even a single line in a half-hour show, that has anything of value and that isn’t said with an attitude other than, you know, being snarky.”
Mr. Apatow rarely lets a conversation pass without bringing up religion, often discovering voids similar to his own. Albert Brooks, however, confesses that when his children resisted going to temple, he said: “Let me explain something to you: If Hitler came back, he’s not going to ask if you went to temple. You’re already on the train. So you might as well know who you are and why they’re going to take you.”
Mr. Seinfeld, in a second interview two decades after the first, tells Mr. Apatow that he practices Transcendental Meditation and that he used to post pictures from the Hubble telescope in the “Seinfeld” writing room to provide cosmic perspective. “It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.” Mr. Apatow replies that such vastness makes him feel insignificant and depressed. Yet he also expresses the hope that he may one day find traditional religious consolation, though it will require, he says, bringing his intellect to heel. “I plan on tricking myself into believing in religion one of these days,” he tells Sarah Silverman. “I’m going to pick a religion and then hypnotize myself.” All things are surely possible for a man who played a central role in Ron Burgundy’s immaculate conception.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226752015-05-22T20:00:00-04:002022-02-05T14:48:51-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of Willie Nelson's 'It's A Long Story'
<p>THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘Stardust’ Memories
Willie Nelson sometimes wonders: Did I really write these songs, or am I just a channel chosen by the Holy Spirit?
Dave Shiflett
May 22, 2015 3:38 p.m. ET
Music can be a hard life, as exemplified by the early departures of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Corbain and Amy Winehouse, all at age 27. Yet not every icon is doomed to a quick exit. Willie Nelson, at 82, is still playing 150 nights a year while occasionally denying Internet hoaxes that he too has gone toes-up. It’s enough to make you wonder what his secret is.
Willie—with whom the world is on a first-name basis—provides several hints in his candid, heartfelt memoir. “It’s a Long Story” will probably not be endorsed by the surgeon general, Sunday-school teachers or marriage counselors, but those of a traditional bent will be happy to learn that Jesus and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale are definitely in his backup band.
His enduring glory, we learn, did not originate in a stable relationship with his parents, who married when they were 16 and were divorced when he was 6 months old. Willie and his sister, Bobbie, ended up being raised in Abbott, Texas, by their grandparents Mama and Daddy Nelson. The Nelsons didn’t have much money but were rich with love—for each other, their grandchildren and the Baby Jesus. Willie got right with the Lord early on.
“I was a believer as a kid,” he writes, “just as I am a believer as a man. I’ve never doubted the genius of Christ’s moral message or the truth of the miracles he performed. I see his presence on earth and resurrection as perfect man as a moment that altered human history, guiding us in the direction of healing love.” He also took to heart Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel of “positive thinking.”
His faith, however, didn’t inspire exceptionally close adherence to the rule book. He mentions that his Methodist church preached that “straight is the gate” but that he “can’t remember being afraid of venturing beyond that straight gate.” His walk on the wild side was under way by the time he hit double digits. He was using his musical talents to charm the local ladies by age 10 and discovered another keen interest. “As a kid I’d sneak off and smoke anything that burned. Loved to smoke. Would even smoke strips of cedar bark.”
Willie (with able assistance from veteran music journalist David Ritz) presents his story in a plainspoken, conversational tone reminiscent of his singing voice. He makes it clear that his lasting success cannot be attributed to matrimony, unless you mean the serial kind. He first married at 19 (his firecracker wife was three years younger), with two other stormy marriages to follow (his current marriage is holding strong). He admits that he didn’t practice monogamy nearly as much as guitar and could be prodigiously careless in covering his tracks. In one case he made the mistake of having the hospital where a love child was delivered mail the bill to his home. His wife was not amused.
But there is no doubting his devotion to music. By 14 he was playing in a polka band and had worked up enough confidence to book idol Bob Wills for a gig that provided him with his lifelong work ethic. Watching Wills perform that night, Willie is “transfixed” and feels as if Wills is telling him: “The job is to play like your life depends on it. . . . The job is to give the people what the people want and what the people need.”
While he would eventually get rich—he now divides his time between Maui, a spread in Austin, Texas, and his tour bus—things were desperately tight early on. He made ends meet by operating a tree chipper, selling encyclopedias and tapping the resources of working wives. Money was so scarce that he once offered to sell the rights to several of his early songs, including “Crazy” and “Funny How Time Slips Away,” for $10 each. Fortunately his offer was refused, and those songs have since deeply feathered his nest.
Readers hoping to pick up songwriting tips may be dismayed to learn that Willie’s songs came to him “prepackaged.” Composition has been so easy that he sometimes wonders: “Did I really write these songs, or am I just a channel chosen by the Holy Spirit to express these feelings?” He later acknowledges less celestial assistance, including borrowing the opening note to “Crazy” from “I Gotta Have My Baby Back” by Floyd Tillman. “Good songwriters,” he explains, “realize that a little borrowing now and then is part of the process.” Attorneys take note.
Country-music fans will enjoy recollections of the times he spent with Bob Dylan,Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Ray Price and Johnny Cash. Willie’s relationship with Waylon was especially close and sometimes illuminated the mystical nature of popular music. As they prepared to sing a duet of Procul Harem’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Willie asked whether his friend knew “what these lyrics are about.” Jennings responded, “No f—in’ idea, hoss.” They sang it anyway, as have over 1,000 other acts who have covered the deeply obscure if not flat-out incoherent megahit. His own hits, he adds, have sometimes confounded music-industry “suits,” who predicted that such triumphs as “Stardust” wouldn’t sell. “Last time I looked,” Willie says of the latter, “it had sold five million copies.”
He revisits other glories, and setbacks, including six claustrophobic months playing Branson, Mo., and a serious tangle with the IRS, which informed him, in his late 50s, that he owed $32 million in back taxes. He also lost a long-troubled son. Yet his positive attitude has never deserted him, thanks in part to the Good Lord, Norman Vincent Peale and a herbal supplement that is to his public persona what booze was to Dean Martin’s.
Willie’s long-standing relationship with marijuana has been no casual affair. When one of his houses caught fire he rushed inside to rescue his stash. He has toked high and low, near and far, and even on the White House roof during the Carter administration with a friend in high places, leaving one to wonder if the peanut was the only plant dear to the president’s heart. “I owe marijuana a lot. As I write these words on the verge of age eighty-two, I think I can fairly make the claim that marijuana—in the place of booze, cocaine, and tobacco—has contributed to my longevity.” It may be worth mentioning that Willie is also an avid golfer.
He ends the book in church, where he waxes somewhat humble about his long success. “I sing okay, I play okay, and I know that I can write a good song, but I still feel like I’ve been given a whole lot more than I deserve.” His many adoring fans would likely add that he gave as good as he got.
—Mr. Shiflett posts his writing and original music at www.daveshiflett.com.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226742015-05-05T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:28-05:00Wall Street Journal: In Praise of the Teen Summer Job
<p>Among the signs of my advancing age is bafflement at hearing younger parents talk about what their teenagers are going to do over the summer. Some mention internships with documentary filmmakers. Others say that their offspring will spend the hot months building latrines in distant corners of the developing world. A few speak of expeditions to measure the disappearance of glaciers or a period of reflection at an ashram in Tamil Nadu.
What on Earth is an ashram? And when did teenagers start doing all these exotic things instead of working summer jobs?
I wish them well, of course, and hope that they build the finest latrines ever to grace the Guatemalan countryside. I should also acknowledge that I wish such opportunities had been available to me when I was growing up.
At the same time, there is value in recalling the grit and glory of traditional summer work, which has taught generations of teenagers important lessons about life, labor and even their place in the universe—which turned out to be nowhere as close to the center as we had imagined.
Most of these jobs were anything but glamorous. Newspaper delivery, for example, was the first rung on many an economic ladder. The paperboy (or girl) had to rise early, pull heavily laden wagons up and down dark streets, and later go door-to-door collecting money from customers. It was amazing how gruff some could be, especially if you had innocently thrown a morning post or two through a window.
Construction work was another staple of the summer circuit, and it taught the glories of digging holes, hauling bricks and watching a house or building slowly fill a hole in the landscape. These jobs also introduced many of us to the phenomenon known as workplace danger. Countless youngsters picked up their first work scars on a construction site.
So let’s leave behind, momentarily, the allure of ashrams, glaciers and humanitarian latrine work and travel back to the early 1970s. The British band Mungo Jerry had a hit with “In the Summertime,” which sang the praises of fishing, swimming and dining with the girl of your dreams: “If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal / If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.” My girlfriend was a doctor’s daughter, so I needed to make as much money as possible. Which led me to a gray cinder-block opportunity zone called Pitzer Transfer and Storage.
Pitzer was a combination warehouse and furniture-moving company located near the then-festering Roanoke River in Roanoke, Va. This sprawling edifice (long ago razed) incubated few if any plutocrats, but it was an excellent showcase of Darwinian endurance. Among the more memorable tasks was the unloading of 100-pound bags of salt and sugar from railroad boxcars. In the summer, the boxcars became ovens—an effect enhanced by the forklifts that darted in and out to remove the loaded pallets. Some ran on natural gas, but others belched deep blue smoke reminiscent of fighter planes that had taken a stream of tracer bullets through the gas tank.
All of which worked wonders for a youngster’s self-esteem. Not only were we lifting and stacking bags fairly close to our body weight (I tipped the scales at around 135), but we were inhaling and exhaling the near equivalent of a forest fire and remaining upright. We often celebrated by using our 10-minute breaks to smoke a cigarette. If the surgeon general had happened by, he might have stroked out.
Another valuable part of the experience for a middle-class white kid was getting to know people from different backgrounds. Several co-workers were black; all were blue-collar. A few constantly radiated bourbon fumes, while one somewhat odd fellow seemed to be addicted to boiled eggs. This was our first close encounter with the melting pot—our version, perhaps, of joining the military, which had introduced wartime generations to the demographic rainbow of America. The older workers didn’t take us young bucks very seriously, but if we paid attention, we could learn a few things from them, including something about the dignity of common labor.
While prospects for job advancement were slim to none, many of the full-timers (lifers, as we called them) took pride in a job well done. And while you didn’t run into many prima donnas in that warehouse, there were world-class good people whose enthusiasm for life was as great as any king’s. I will never forget the day our foreman’s grandson graduated from high school—a first for his family, as memory serves. You would have thought the lad had found the cure for cancer and the common cold too. The foreman’s name was Percy. I assume he’s dead by now.
Perhaps he amuses himself, in some celestial bower, with recollections of how terribly his summer boys sometimes did their jobs—especially when we were allowed (for unknown reasons) to operate the forklifts. Among my most vivid memories is sending a set of forks through the picture tube of a large console television, which produced a magnificent explosion. Oil drums, foodstuffs—all were lanced, often fatally. I shudder to think what I could have accomplished if texting while driving had been possible back then.
Inanimate objects weren’t the only entities to suffer. Humans also took their licks. One day, while moving furniture, we rolled an upright piano over a co-worker, a seasoned professional who immediately sprang up and kept working. This was impressive, and no doubt reflected a desire not to be fired, which in those days seemed to be a common response to injury. The injured were not victims. They were liabilities.
I personally experienced this phenomenon after I had an unpleasant encounter with an arc welder. It all happened very quickly. An older guy (probably not my boss, but we respected our elders back then, which turns out not to be a uniformly wise policy) told me to weld together a broken hatch of some kind. I had absolutely no experience but went at it with youthful exuberance. Later that evening, I became aware of a sensation resembling having sand poured into my eyes, which I treated with cucumber slices. “Flash burns,” the boss noted when I returned a few days later, just before giving me the boot. I should add, on his behalf, he didn’t follow that with, “And good riddance!”
But what’s a little eye-roasting compared with being crushed by a tractor? That teaching moment occurred the summer before my senior year, on my second day of a brand-new farm job. The boss, who seemed to believe that city-raised teenagers instinctively knew how to handle farm equipment, sent us up to a plateau to discard some rain-ruined hay. On the way back down the hill, we lost control of the tractor. In the resulting crash (which I have no recollection of), both lungs were punctured by my ribs and began taking on blood. One filled completely. The other was edging that way when I arrived at the hospital. Some of the emergency-room team thought I was a goner.
But one doctor (my girlfriend’s father) saw a dim spark of life and helped revive me, which (after I regained consciousness) taught me once again the value of perseverance. There were other lessons as well. I carried from the incident a memory of looking down and watching the revival process. Perhaps a delusion, but perhaps one of those “near-death” experiences that have launched many a literary career and a cult or two.
Disaster, of course, is a very good teacher, so long as you survive the course. No one values their own heartbeat more than the person who has nearly had his slip away. Besides that, a close brush with death teaches you to be a bit more careful. There was another lesson as well: The doctor’s daughter dumped me, a reminder of the fleeting nature of love.
Those were far different days. We didn’t consider suing the farm owner, while today the first response might be to phone a lawyer before summoning the ambulance. Indeed, if I had hooked up with the right counselor during those early working years, I might today be living in the Taj Mahal. And while I wouldn’t trade these experiences for a year in an ashram with Elizabeth Taylor (circa 1970, please), I wouldn’t want my grandchildren spending their summers inhaling exhaust fumes.
Sadly, one of the biggest challenges facing today’s teenage worker is finding a job at all. A recent report by J.P. Morgan Chase says that only 46% of young people who applied for summer-employment programs were enrolled in 2014. “In the 14 major U.S. cities surveyed,” a release about the report added, “local officials also project that tens of thousands of economically disadvantaged youths looking for jobs will not be able to find them during the upcoming summer months.”
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the labor-force participation rate—that is, the proportion of a given population that is working or looking for work—for all youth last July was “17.0 percentage points below the peak rate for that month in 1989.” And the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says that young workers “between 16 and 24 years of age constitute the demographic group that has experienced one of the most substantial declines in labor force participation”—though part of that change, this study noted, could be due to more youths spending summers on educational pursuits.
May the Force be with them, and may the older generation start doing as good a job supplying them with jobs as saddling them with debt. Meanwhile, today’s teens may find some comfort in knowing that plenty of free advice is floating around about how summer jobs are often the first step on the yellow brick road to success.
As a part-time musician and full-time geezer with delusions of musical grandeur, I am struck by how often this sort of story gets told by big-time performers of my generation. I got in touch with a few musicians who got rich and famous playing songs about White Rabbits and rocking ’n’ rolling all night but who earlier threw papers and cut grass. These days, they sing something of a different tune—one that might have set Dale Carnegie’s toes to tapping.
Gene Simmons, the bass player of the rock band Kiss (also famous for his anaconda-length tongue), was quick to respond to my query about his summer-job experiences. “I have done everything from delivering newspapers, scrubbing the fat off of a butcher’s block in a meat store, and being a secretary for hire,” he reported via email. Those were pre-Internet days, he added, when you had “roll up your sleeves and do it all yourself. You had to go to the newsstand. You had to buy your own newspaper. You had to look in the want ads columns. You had to pick up the phone and make your own appointment.”
But he didn’t have to travel far to find his blueprint for success. “The best life lesson and clarity of the capitalist business model I ever learned was from Junior Achievement,” he adds, referring to the youth-oriented program started in 1919 to teach financial literacy and entrepreneurship to students. “I would recommend young people do the same.”
Jorma Kaukonen, who grew up to play guitar for Jefferson Airplane (and now Hot Tuna), also delivered papers and learned to type his grandfather’s translations of Russian technical documents for the U.S. Department of Commerce, a skill he says still serves him well. The job also allowed him to dip his toe in the great melting pot. “I not only learned how to type,” he said, but “found myself surrounded by Russian émigrés. As a hot-rod-driving American kid, strangely enough, I found myself completely at home with these wonderful people from a different place and time—and also found them to be completely All-American.”
Like most other parents, he passed these values on to his children, including his son, who worked a food-prep job in a restaurant in the fancy Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown. “He called me when he got his first paycheck,” Mr. Kaukonen recalls. His son said, “I can’t believe how much they took out for taxes and Social Security”—to which Mr. Kaukonen recalls responding, “Welcome to my world!”
Mr. Kaukonen’s Jefferson Airplane bandmate Jack Casady, who also grew up in the D.C. area, remembers being a paper-delivering prodigy. “I started when I was 11 years old,” he said while waiting to play a recent gig in Florida. “On Sundays, I got up at 3 a.m. and delivered 400 papers.” He adds, “I made good money”—some of which he used to start the grass-cutting business that paid for his first musical instruments, including an amplifier kit he put together with help from his father.
“All of that taught me the thought process of setting your goal and then putting together the steps to reach that goal,” said Mr. Casady. “I learned that work was a means to independence and that if something you want is not available, you can make it yourself. There was no drudgery involved for me. Work was a means to freedom.”
His advice to young workers: Live and toil “with integrity,” and adopt a no-slacking attitude. “Luck and timing can make a big difference,” he said. “But Lord knows, prepare. If you prepare properly, you’re ready for luck and timing if they come your way.”
Besides sounding like candidates for higher office, including the presidency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, all three of these guys ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—a source of pride and inspiration for the nation’s former paper carriers. In addition, those of us who drove forklifts and flirted with rogue tractors salute them—and are happy to still be around to welcome the new summer season.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226732014-12-30T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:27-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of
<p>Among the many types of failure that life has to offer, literary failure ranks among the most devastating. It is sometimes even more painful than romantic rejection, which may simply be the result of mundane factors (crossed eyes, a small income). Literary failure, however, is a thing of the soul, made all the more toxic when it comes at the hands of that confederacy of Precious, Insular, Sanctimonious, Smug and often Young (work out the acronym for yourself) writing-program grads who seem to rule the literary roost.
Yet “The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure” offers a more nuanced view. Far less grim than its title would suggest, the dictionary implicitly argues that failure is often the best possible outcome, both for the reading public and for the writer whose obscurity may be a blessing. “We have no idea how many great works have been lost,” the dictionary explains, “yet we are aware of a number of bafflingly mediocre ones which have managed to survive and even get canonised.” To write is rarely divine; to fail always keeps you out of infamy’s grasp.
THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF LITERARY FAILURE
Edited by C.D. Rose
Melville House, 175 pages, $18.95
In this spirit the widely unheralded Aurelio Quattrochi “spent all of 1973 poring over a single word, and most of 1974 erasing it,” according to the dictionary, never finishing the book he was trying to write. Most readers, to be sure, will not have heard of Aurelio Quattrochi or any of the 51 other victims—or beneficiaries—of literary stillbirth whose biographies are collected in this thin volume. There’s a good reason: They are all fictional.
The dictionary originated as a website where short, invented biographies of writerly catastrophe were posted and usually, soon after, deleted. Mercifully, these were saved from oblivion by their author, C.D. Rose, who lists himself as the dictionary’s “editor.” Though the vignettes are fictional, most are entertaining and all could serve as warnings to anyone thinking of taking up the literary life.
Daniel Finnegan, for example, received a nice advance for his first novel, only to have his editors insist that he change the male protagonist to a washwoman, because “female migrant worker narratives are hot at the moment.” Then, after focus-group intervention, he was informed that the washerwoman should become a reality-show contestant and finally that his book should list a female as its author, though Finnegan was promised a mention in the acknowledgments.
Then there’s the sad tale of Casimir Adamowitz-Kastrowicki, a writer supposedly from the 19th century who asked a friend to destroy his manuscripts should he perish in war. He survived battle but was tardy in his return home, inspiring the friend to carry out his orders. The only silver lining was that the author was simultaneously killed by a runaway horse. In a similar vein of futility, Marta Kupka finally got around to writing her story late in life. “She wrote incessantly for three weeks, completing the long tale of her life, failing to see that not a single word of what she wrote actually made it onto the paper” because her typewriter ribbon had dried up.
Most of the entries in “The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure” run to only a few pages, giving aspiring writers something to read while waiting for their computers to boot up or their morning martinis to take effect. Though the book describes the travails of the writing class—including poets, who these days find themselves playing second fiddle to fortune-cookie scribes—it offers direct ridicule as well. The dictionary snarls at “ostentatious flâneurs who sit in cafes or coffee shops, flaunting their Macbooks or Moleskines.” It takes aim at “a young, eager aspirant from Ohio, fresh out of his MFA” program, who decides to write the longest novel ever written. Unfortunately, while “he knew how much he wanted to write, he had little idea precisely what he wanted to write.” On the other end of the spectrum, a writer hoping to cash in on the minimalist vogue—think of Raymond Carver and Donald Barthelme—submits a manuscript with the word “I” on its first and only page. Publishers and agents mistakenly assume that he has forgotten to send the rest.
Mr. Rose, touted as “the world’s preeminent expert on inexpert writers,” is an appealing crank. He describes practitioners of “experimental writing” as those who “willfully [abandon] punctuation or engage in wild flights of typographical fancy.” He offers up an experimental group called the Beasley Collective, which “wanted to take the ideological drive of the post-punk era and marry it to the sheer thrill of being in a band, but seeing as none of them could play instruments (not, it has to be said, a barrier that stopped many in that fertile time) decided to work in the literary sphere.” Their writing goes no further than an unread manifesto.
For all its ear-boxing “The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure” proclaims, near book’s end, that writing—even bad writing—is something of a heroic act. “The power of writing is one of the greatest things we have, whether it is read or not.” By writing, we leave a memorial of life: “I was there, I saw.” True, no doubt. But as the book’s mini-biographies attest: It is often better to let sleeping keyboards lie.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226722014-12-30T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:27-05:00Washington Post Review Of Jerry Lee Lewis Biography
<p>JERRY LEE LEWIS
His Own Story
By Rick Bragg Harper. 498 pp. $27.99
Is Jerry Lee Lewis hellbound? That question haunts the legendary rocker, who fears he may experience profoundly undesirable climate change in the next world thanks to his success in this one. “Can a man play rock-and-roll music and go to Heaven?” he asks. “That’s the question.”
Great balls of fire, indeed.
Lewis bared his soul, and many details of his admittedly non-seminarian lifestyle, to Rick Bragg, a fellow Southerner (from Possum Trot, Ala.) who has a Pulizer under his belt and formidable literary chops. Bragg’s thick and entertaining book indicates that Jerry Lee, like many of us, has cause to hope the Good Lord grades on a generous curve.
His first day on earth was indicative of what was to follow. Lewis was born Sept. 29, 1935, in Ferriday, La., as the attending doctor slept off a dose of pre-partum liquor served up by Lewis’s father, Elmo, who yanked his breached offspring into the world without apparent harm. “I come out jumpin,’ ” Lewis fondly recalls, “an’ I been jumpin’ ever since.”
He had jumped into fairly humble origins: Elmo did carpentry while mother Mamie picked cotton, but both recognized their son’s musical potential, certified when he picked out, at age 4, “Silent Night, Holy Night” on his Aunt Stella’s upright. He had a powerful will to succeed as a musician, which was not much encumbered by school, hitting a major speed bump when he failed the sixth grade. His resulting outrage led to his nearly strangling a teacher, which is where he got the enduring nickname “Killer.”
Bragg traces his early career though juke joints, dives and long stretches of late-night highway, plus a lengthy string of fistfights. But the path also led to Sun Records, where the now-legendary Sam Phillips recognized Lewis as “a born performer.” Suddenly he was rubbing shoulders with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and even Elvis Presley, whom he hoped to follow onto “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Sadly for Lewis, Sullivan wasn’t interested. “I don’t want any more of this Elvis junk,” he said, or perhaps snarled, yet Steve Allen invited Lewis onto his program on July 28, 1957, where he sang “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” while tossing his long blond hair, kicking his piano stool and altogether presenting himself as the wild man of rock. “That broke it all loose, that night,” Lewis told Bragg. The money began rolling in, but so did increased scrutiny of his personal life, reinforcing the view, popular among clerics and many parents of teenaged girls, that rock was the devil’s music.
Lewis’s reputation as satanic spawn was greatly enhanced by his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra — a third cousin, by his count, and his third wife (by some counts he has married six times, by another count, seven; he first married at 14). This brought out the scolds at home and abroad, and drastically reduced his audience. “I played for two old ladies one time in Kansas,” he recalled. “I told em, ‘Y’all don’t owe me nothin’ for this show.’ ”
Serial matrimony wasn’t his only bad habit, as Bragg reports in detail, though not with shaking finger. Like many in his trade, Lewis drank, ingested and injected a wide variety of substances — some supplied by the same doctor who kept Elvis lubed — which finally blossomed into addiction. He saw a few wives and children die, lost fortunes, and got into deep trouble with the IRS.
Most of which is fairly standard in rock biographies. Thankfully, Lewis’s is spiced by his recounting of the fall of another cousin — evangelical superstar Jimmy Swaggart, who learned to pound the Bible as profitably as Lewis pounded the piano, eventually owning a jet and running a Baton Rouge church that held 7,500 people — or donors, depending on how you count things up. Jimmy was fond of denouncing Jerry’s devilish trade, though he lost significant credibility after the 1988 revelation that he had paid to watch a prostitute perform lewd acts, which inspired his “I Have Sinned!” confession, during which Swaggart emitted enough sweat and tears to drown a hippo. Yet as Bragg also writes, the next time cops caught him with a prostitute, Swaggart revealed a powerful talent for adaptability: “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” he proclaimed.
Bragg tells the story well, though he may get a touch worshipful at times, as when designating Lewis’s “Live at the Star Club” as “one of the grittiest, most spectacularly genuine pieces of recorded music ever made.” But he’s in good company. John Lennon worshipped Lewis so much he once kissed his feet, which doesn’t seem to have impressed the great man, who later remarked, “I never did care for the Beatles all that much, to tell the truth.”
Bragg also praises the Internet, which he formerly considered a time-eating Cyclops, but which now blesses us with the opportunity to watch videos of Lewis pounding keyboards, kicking piano benches and sweating like a man with a terminal infection. All of which is tame compared with the beheadings, pyrotechnics, inflated pigs and other stage antics that were to follow in the world of rock and roll.
So while there’s a whole lot of quakin’ going on as Lewis contemplates eternity in the fiery lake (a concern, Bragg adds, that also had Elvis all shook up), here’s hoping the Chef has bigger fish to fr</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226712014-07-06T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:26-05:00Wall Street Journal Article: Life Lessons From Dad
<p>My father was born and died at home. Nearly 91 years separated those two days, as did a lifetime of significant experiences, including one Great Depression, one World War, one wife, three children, and one year at my house, where he, accompanied by my mother, went through hospice during his struggle with dementia.
Our family's experience was hardly unique. Around 5 million Americans suffer from dementia of some type (Alzheimer's disease is the most prominent) and up to half of Americans over the age of 85 are afflicted. As our population ages, tens of millions of Americans will be called on to care for stricken parents. Over 15 million nonprofessionals are estimated to provide Alzheimer's care alone.
What can families expect?
Like all extreme experiences, caring for Dad changed our lives. Dementia is a terrible disease that robs its victims of their memories, their good nature and much of their dignity. Children of suffering parents will see many things they wish they hadn't, and they may learn things about themselves that aren't always flattering.
But that's not the whole story. Even in the sadness of hopeless decline, my parents—members in good standing of the Greatest Generation—had a few things to teach their baby-boomer offspring about toughness, perseverance, quality of life and, especially, love. We were reminded, vividly, that we are often at our best when life is at its worst.
Ronald C. Shiflett—Ron to most everybody—was born June 17, 1923, in a row house in Richmond, Va. He rarely talked about his early years, though as he grew older Dad would recall his World War II experiences as a navigator on a Naval Air Corps troop transport, ferrying soldiers from San Francisco to Hawaii to Guam. "All that water," he'd say of the vast Pacific. He also told stories about seeing fighter ace Pappy Boyington throwing back drinks at the Top of the Mark bar in San Francisco. Those were among the last memories to leave him.
As a father, Dad was definitely old-school. He wore the pants in the family—and the belt. During the hirsute 1960s, he seemed to take special delight in hauling me to the barbershop, where my ambitious locks were shorn with extreme malice. But he also had a good sense of humor, took us hunting and camping and hardly ever missed a day of work (he started his career in a gas station). Along with Mom, a public-school teacher, he sent me, my sister and my brother through college.
He was remarkably healthy and didn't have a regular doctor until he was 85. Then his life, and ours, began a drastic change. Decline introduced itself in the form of delusions. One day Mom called from their home in Roanoke, Va., to say that she had found Dad standing down by the street, dressed in a suit. When asked what he was doing, he replied that he was waiting for the police to pick him up. Dad had come to believe he was guilty of various transgressions, which were all in his mind.
The dementia diagnosis came in April 2010, with physical ailments soon to follow. In May 2012, a bout of pneumonia kept him hospitalized for a week, and the dementia seemed to take over. The medical staff agreed that hospice—a program designed to provide comfort and support for patients with six months or less to live—was our best option.
After a quick huddle with family members, my wife and I said we would move Dad and Mom into our house, where Dad would receive hospice care. We had plenty of room—just under 3,000 square feet, including spare bedrooms (now that our sons had left) and a spare bathroom.
My wife works at a hospital and is gone much of the day, but I work from home. All of this would require some adjustments. I'd need to be available to help Dad go up and down stairs, but that didn't seem like too much. In any event, this wasn't going to be a long-term situation. We expected him to live another two or three months.
That was just over two years ago.
Lesson one from this adventure was that old folks, even when they're frail, can be very tough. Dad, though cadaverous and confused, definitely didn't get the memo that his end was near. Instead, he staged something of a comeback, part of which I attribute to "grub therapy"—a steady diet of everything that sends chills down the spine of the Surgeon General: lots of red meat, fried food (a crab cake a day keeps the Reaper away) and enough cookies to build a two-story chimney.
Meanwhile, Dad's mental distress was somewhat ameliorated by various medications. The hospice nurses and workers—who checked his vital signs and helped clean him (and were paid through Medicare)—were impressed by his resurgence.
But life was difficult.
Dad was almost always cold and became deeply sensitive to being touched. He couldn't shave or clean himself at any level. His mobility steadily declined, and his sense of humor faded. He couldn't be left alone for more than a minute before crying out, "What am I supposed to do?"
Dementia also destroyed his short-term memory, so he might ask the same question five times within a minute. If Mom went out for a few hours, he could easily ask 100 times when she would return. It was as if he were being dragged back into a state of infancy. My wife and I sometimes felt our once-spacious house had suddenly become very small.
All of which produced mixed feelings—sadness and exasperation, plus guilt for feeling exasperated, especially when considering everything Dad and Mom had done for us. Perhaps we suffered from Gratitude Deficit Disorder, if there is such a thing (if not, let's hope the medical and pharmaceutical industries get cracking on this issue). We kept stiff upper lips, but those lips often concealed grinding teeth, despite help from dedicated and sometimes angelic sitters, who came several times a week and were paid for by Mom. Without them, we might have been overwhelmed by Dad's constant need for attention.
Mom bore the brunt of Dad's decline with almost supernatural grace. During the early months she showered him daily, which from outside the bathroom could sound like a mugging in process. Dressing him wasn't much more peaceful. As Dad became increasingly bewildered, she patiently responded to his questions about the most basic elements of life, such as eating breakfast. Every morning Dad would look at his bowl of cereal and ask, "What am I supposed to do with this?" To which she would calmly reply, "You must eat it to keep up your strength." This was usually followed by an exhortation to drink his prune juice.
Which brings us to perhaps the most harrowing and widely feared aspect of caring for a stricken parent: poop—the palindrome that sends countless hearts palpitating, at least until you get a little experience under your belt. Everyone I've ever talked to about caring for parents has had a somewhat similar story.
One morning I heard Dad crying from the upstairs bathroom. There is no pleasant way to describe what I discovered: He was standing in his own excrement, which was scattered widely about. Cleaning up was no picnic, especially when attending to his soiled body, which puts one in frightfully close contact with the apparatus instrumental to your existence.
But, as in other sometimes sticky situations we encountered during Dad's stay, this one revealed a previously unrecognized talent for adapting on the spot. As Dad apologized for "the mess" (which he always did in these situations, right up to the end), I said, coolly and out of nowhere, "You're hanging in there." It became my go-to phrase whenever he became frustrated and saddened by his decline.
Dad had some good moments. He especially liked looking up at the blue sky from my brother's back porch and taking boat rides with my brother, and he warmed up when my sister came to visit. My mother's presence brought him peace. And while there was no mistaking where this was heading, I never heard him express any fear of death. He would, however, deliver stinging commentary on his status, usually as I helped him descend the stairs. As we neared the bottom step, he would often say, "This is no way to live."
To some younger members of the family, that was a self-evident truth. We, of course, are all about "quality of life," whose definition doesn't include living in diapers (which are euphemistically referred to as "briefs"). More than once I told my wife I never wanted to find myself in Dad's condition. "You know what to do," I instructed my youngest son, only partly in jest. "A pillow over the face at dawn."
My parent's perspective was quite different: Life, no matter how hopeless, is to be lived to the final breath. Even when it reached the point where Mom had to feed Dad, she would worry if he didn't eat what she thought was a sufficient amount. Dad, despite his grumbling, would try to exercise every day, even when he had to rely on his hated walker. His life had become a burden, but in their eyes that didn't diminish its value.
Dad had one last surprise up his sleeve—he "graduated" from hospice care. After a year with us, he no longer seemed to be at death's door: His vital signs were good, though climbing the stairs was still a supreme struggle. Mom found a nearby assisted-living facility where, soon after arrival, Dad was taken out of the hospice program after an evaluation determined that he might have more than six months to live.
And the hospice people were right. He held on for almost another full year.
Dad lived mostly in a large recliner during that last year, and eventually the hospice workers returned. His long-term memory deserted him; he could no longer recall, even with prompting, Pappy Boyington and the Top of the Mark in San Francisco. He did recognize family members and could manage a sentence or two about the weather, though after 10 months or so at their new home, his mental age, according to a hospice calculation, was that of a 4-year-old.
By then I think most family members had made the transition from thinking of death as an adversary to thinking of death as a liberator. This too raised some conflicting feelings: You hate to wish death on your father, but you also hate to see him suffer. Death was his only way out.
Mom was probably the last to make this mental transition, but a week or so before the end she said she thought it was time for him to go. He had begun refusing to eat or drink, which the hospice nurses said was a sign his body was shutting down. The last time we trekked to the bathroom, I held Dad by both hands and walked backward toward our target. His stride was about 3 inches. We didn't make it in time.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You're hanging in there."
Dad died two days later, in his bed, surrounded by family. As the day progressed, he turned waxen and slightly blue. His mouth was constantly agape as he struggled to breathe, and at the end we told Mom that she probably shouldn't look too closely. This was May 5, less than a month before their 66th wedding anniversary.
His service, which we held in my brother's side yard, was a nice antidote to the sting of death. The Rev. Robert Bluford, one of Dad's oldest friends and a bomber pilot during the war, read the standard Psalms to a crowd that was thin on churchgoers but stretched all the way from Richmond to San Francisco, where my oldest son watched the proceedings via Skype.
A friend sang "Over The Rainbow" (Dr. Bluford was in his early 20s when the song came out in 1939) and "My Beautiful Friend," which underscored one of the most important lessons we learned from this experience: Never take friends for granted. Among our most cherished memories are of friends who stood with us, whether by bringing over a meal, letting us use a second home to get away for a few days or simply asking how things were going.
A hospice nurse told me, early on, that lots of children won't move a stricken parent into their homes, opting instead for a facility such as a nursing home. How would I advise others who are facing this situation? For our family, bringing Dad home was the right thing to do. When he came out of the hospital, he was so weak and disoriented that putting him into an unfamiliar setting might have finished him off. I also think that caring for Dad made us better people.
As Dad's flame flickered, ours burned brighter. As his life faded, it brought our lives closer together. The challenge of caring for him also made us stronger. We hung in there. None of this was easy or pretty, and while it was happening, it was easy to wish that we were somewhere else. But if we hadn't done what we did, I know that we would regret that decision today.
To be sure, we had the room and the wherewithal to care for Dad. If he had been highly agitated or in acute pain, our decision might have been different. Judge not those who do not opt for home hospice.
Our family walked a hard road. We watched Dad get stripped to the bone by a pitiless disease. Today, our house echoes with memories of his struggle—echoes that are a sad but strangely beautiful part of our song of life.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226702014-05-23T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:26-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of 'Geronimo'
<p>Businessmen, athletes and politicians never tire of military allusions. They're forever blowing the competition out of the water, shelling the defensive secondary or exercising the nuclear option, perhaps following up by bouncing the rubble. Prisoners, of course, are never taken.
None of which is quite the equivalent of storming Omaha Beach, though it can add a touch of drama to ordinary life. A new book by college football coach Mike Leach sounds many of these martial themes, offering "leadership strategies" based on the life of Geronimo.
Mr. Leach couldn't have chosen a better brand than the Apache chief, born in 1829 in present-day Arizona. When soldiers, paintballers and boys who are allowed to play with toy guns (the few who are left) leap into battle, they do not cry "Napoleon!" "Hannibal!" or " Nathan Bedford Forrest!" When Navy SEALs set off to lower the boom on Osama bin Laden, they do not name their mission for Omar Bradley. In such circumstances, no other name than "Geronimo" will do.
Coach Leach (a big winner at Texas Tech and currently stationed at Washington State) is a solid admirer of Geronimo's, though he recognizes that some readers might be squeamish about how the chief made his living. "Now, let's get something straight out of the gate," he writes. "Apaches were raiders. 'Raiding' means stealing. Pillaging. Taking from others what you want or need." Piling on a bit, he unleashes the literary equivalent of a Stuka dive-bomb attack—the caps-lock key: "It was best NOT to get captured by Apaches."
That said, we're advised not to think of Geronimo as a ruthless Chief Exterminating Officer. As Mr. Leach sees it, whites moved into tribal lands around 1851 and began a hostile takeover that eventually destroyed the Apache people. What was Geronimo supposed to do, hang around the reservation playing bingo?
Mr. Leach highlights episodes from Geronimo's life as examples of various leadership qualities, such as discipline, fortitude and perseverance. During one raiding expedition into Mexico, for instance, the young warrior was bashed in the head with a rifle butt. Despite a severe concussion and skull fracture, he made the mountainous trek back to Arizona, an effort that Mr. Leach cites as a sampling of the chief's almost superhuman fortitude. He also sprinkles his pages with tips deduced from Geronimo's playbook. These tend to be prodigiously mundane: "Have a purpose in everything you do"; "avoid dealing with people who have proven to be treacherous and dishonest"; "if you sense a double cross while negotiating, don't make the deal."
Such insights may not trigger a lecture invitation from Harvard Business School, but Mr. Leach's narrative (with an assist from writer Buddy Levy ) tells the highly compelling story of a strong and resourceful people.
Consider how the Apaches hunted ducks. Step one: float empty gourds toward prey until ducks become accustomed to their presence. Step two: get in water, insert head into empty gourd and drift within arm's length. Step three: grab the unsuspecting entrées by their feet, pull them underwater for a quick drowning, then retire to the cooking fire. Live and learn, Duck Dynasty.
Apache physical prowess was astounding. Modern-day footballers, who will probably soon be penalized for glaring at the opposing quarterback, would have a hard time making Geronimo's warrior squad. Training started at an early age. "Teams of four stood across from each other in rock-slinging competitions," Mr. Leach explains. "It was like playing dodgeball with stones." Not everyone survived.
Coach Leach, who was stripped of his command at Texas Tech for an incident of alleged player abuse that would have baffled Geronimo, hails the Apaches as the ultimate hardbodies. While modern marathoners proudly post "26.2" stickers on their car bumpers—signifying that they've completed that standard marathon mileage—Apache men, women and children could make 45 miles a day with everything they owned in tow or on their backs. Even into his 60s, Geronimo—who was about 5-foot-8 and 170 pounds—could cover 95 miles in a 24-hour period.
These were not fun runs, of course. Geronimo and company were often in flight from armed troops, sometimes after breaking away from their reservation, where the land was lousy and the oversight humiliating. Geronimo's final breakout, which Mr. Leach counts as one of history's greatest evasive actions, drew the pursuit of one-fourth of the U.S. Army. Though the small band of Apaches was outnumbered 233-1, Geronimo was never captured, though he finally recognized that further resistance was futile and surrendered in September 1886.
But his game was far from over, as Mr. Leach writes in bittersweet homage to Geronimo's adaptability. Thanks to sympathetic press coverage, the Apache chief became a celebrity. Mr. Leach tells of a train ride that attracted flocks of admirers. "He'd rip buttons off his coat and sell them for a quarter," Mr. Leach writes, "then sew more on and sell those at the next stop. His hat went for five bucks." He eventually got into the live-Indian-performance business and rode in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade.
Geronimo also became a Sunday-school teacher in the Dutch Reformed Church, though he was later booted for "incessant gambling." He found other ways to occupy his time, marrying his ninth and final wife in 1907 at age 84. But he was never to find his ultimate peace—a return to his native lands—despite a direct plea to TR, who turned him down. He died of pneumonia in Oklahoma on Feb. 17, 1909, age 85. Even then, his war with the white man was not quite over.
In 2009, Mr. Leach says, Geronimo's great-grandson sued Yale's Skull & Bones Society to regain possession of the great chief's skull and other remains, which had allegedly been stolen from Yale in 1918 by grave robbers led by Bush family patriarch Prescott Bush. In a development that would probably not have surprised Geronimo, the suit was dismissed on technicalities.
Mr. Leach has written a fan's tribute to a man who, he writes, "personified a life-way of excellence." The realities of modern life may prevent a full application of Geronimo lessons. But many of us could learn a few things from the old chief and his people, starting with a general wariness of government promises and supervision. Some of us might also look upon those 26.2 stickers with a deeply adjusted sense of awe.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226692014-04-13T20:00:00-04:002021-06-28T11:07:31-04:00Wall Street Journal Article: Where Atheists Meet to Evangelize
<p>Look out unbelief—atheism is on a roll, or so proclaims American Atheists, whose annual convention kicks off Thursday in Salt Lake City. “This has been an excellent year for atheism,” says Dave Muscato, public-relations director for the diety-dissing group. “Between 2005 and 2012 there was a fivefold increase in the number of people who use the word atheist when asked to identify their religion.”
That’s still not a lot. While 20% of Americans profess no particular religious faith, according to the Pew Research Center, only 6% identify themselves as atheist or agnostic. Still, one hates to toss cold water on the affable Mr. Muscato, a musician, who says he went atheist five years ago after a stint playing Christian worship music (the kind of songs that, let’s face it, can make you pray they’ll stop).
But why Salt Lake City? “We haven’t had a convention there since 1981,” says Mr. Muscato. “A lot of Mormons who have become atheists call themselves ex-Mormon and part of our campaign is to get them to move away from ex-Mormon” and simply call themselves atheists, thus taking pride “in their non-belief.”
The keynote speaker for the four-day gathering will be Chris Kluwe, a former punter for the Minnesota Vikings, who says he was fired for advocating same-sex marriage. Mr. Kluwe, author of “Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities,” will be joined by speakers including Denise Stapley, winner of “Survivor: Philippines” and Iowa’s “only certified sex therapist” (according to convention publicity); Mark White, bassist from the Spin Doctors; and gay-rights activist Marsha Botzer.
Workshop topics will include starting your own atheist group, how to lobby politicians, and how to debate Christians and “other religious apologists.” The contact page at the American Atheists website states: “Please note: we are not interested in debating or being preached at,” which to some ears might sound a tad hypocritical and closed-minded, qualities often used to describe the organization’s adversaries.
There seems to be no lack of evangelical enthusiasm in the American Atheist flock, and with 94% of the U.S. population still either in the grips of God or just not sure about Him, the potential for conversions is vast. But organized atheism lags far behind Mormonism in evangelizing. Getting people to enter the godless fold (or abyss, depending on your perspective) appears to be a pretty tough sell.
Mr. Muscato says modern technology is a powerful ally. “Any 7-year-old with an iPhone can go to Wikipedia” to check out religious claims made by their parents, he explains. “They’re harder to indoctrinate”—at least until the kids realize that the words “infallible” and “Wikipedia” rarely appear in the same sentence.
Older seekers, and even reasonably skeptical bystanders, might easily be put off by the tone of American Atheists’ advertising around the country. “Celebrate Reality” one pre-convention billboard proclaims in Salt Lake City, echoing admonitions elsewhere: “Nobody Needs the Christ in Christmas” (Times Square); “Enjoy Life Now. There Is No Afterlife” (Jamesville, Wis.); “Relax, Hell does not exist. Heaven either. Enjoy your life” (San Diego). In other words: “Hey Rube—Wise Up!”
It is the rare philosophy that doesn’t consider itself superior to the alternatives, but suggesting that the uninitiated are delusional and feeble-minded might not be the wisest way to expand your brand. The absolutism underlying the atheist pitch also seems out of step with the spirit of our “tolerant” times. Even John Lennon, whose “Imagine” is something of a hymn to non-belief, led a heterodox spiritual life, including a fascination with the Rev. Billy Graham. Similarly, surveys by Barna Research in 2003 found that half of atheists believe in a soul and the possibility of life after death. Does that qualify as a heresy?
Greater minds will decide that question, and perhaps ponder whether Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Bible-verse reference on his official Facebook and Twitter accounts really promotes religion via “the machinery of the state,” as atheist activists contend.
Back in Salt Lake, Mormons may bristle at the godless gathering, but they have little reason to fear an atheist army descending. Mr. Muscato estimates that convention attendance will probably be south of 1,000—roughly the number of new members the Latter Day Saints sign up every day.
Mr. Shiflett posts his writing and original music at Daveshiflett.com.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226682013-12-20T19:00:00-05:002022-03-23T03:34:20-04:00Wall Street Journal Piece: O Come All Ye Grousers (full, unsanitized version)
<p>O Come All Ye Grousers
By Dave Shiflett
Thanksgiving is the season of the turkey. Christmas’s official bird should be the grouse.
As always, the run-up to Dec. 25 has unleashed a national moanfest. Crèches set some teeth to grinding, while others complain that the Baby Jesus is being treated like a leper. Almost everyone complains that the season is too “commercial,” though they’ll carp to high heaven if they don’t get everything they asked for.
There are too many calories, too much booze, plus all those family members you hope to see only at funerals, preferably in a horizontal position while holding a couple of orchids. Aesthetes are horrified by tacky lights, and environmentalists wail about the additional fossil fuels needed to fire them. Unbelievably, there is even complaining about one of the season’s most endearing spectacles – the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
Admittedly, Christmas has gotten to be unwieldy. Thanksgiving is now a mere speed bump on the road to yuletide. Christmas songs infiltrate radio playlists while there are still leaves on the trees, and tinsel and candy canes go up even before the Pilgrims get their annual nod. By mid-December the only reindeer some of us want to see is on a platter with a side order of rice.
But the larger fact is that contemporary Christmas offers something for everyone, from traditionalists to scoffers, enthusiasts to scolds (nearly 20 percent of Americans are not affiliated with any religion, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, though only 6 percent call themselves atheists or agnostics). If you don’t want to praise the Christian savior you can sing the praises of the other two members of the seasonal Trinity -- Santa Claus and Ebenezer Scrooge, both of whose affiliation is unknown. All three bring unique, helpful and evolving messages. Our cups runneth over. Let us consider a few of the ways.
First off, there’s Jesus, whose message of eternal hope and peace continues to illuminate the season. Yet he also can be considered apart from the religious claims that have consoled and inspired believers through the ages (and sent a few heads rolling too). The Christmas focus is an infant in the humblest of circumstances: a stable, which for the four-legged co-occupants doubled as a latrine. There’s tension in the back story as well: Has the earth ever known a more profound silence than just after Mary revealed to Joseph that she was with child, and that the only one passing this paternity test would be the Almighty? How does one prepare for such a moment?
At the very least, it’s a story that provides a profound lesson in trust and positive thinking, both of which are in short supply these days.
Life outside the manger was no carnival ride either. The ancient world was a very tough neighborhood. Routine infections could be fatal. The shadows were full of cutthroats while palaces brimmed with tyrants. Battlefield casualties could be stunning: Cannae (92,000), Arausio (84,000) and Carrhae (24,000); the siege of Jerusalem, later in the first century, would claim over 1,100,000 mostly Jewish lives, according to the historian Josephus, with an additional 97,000 captured and enslaved. Remember, this was before the advent of automatic weapons. And so when Herod commanded his goons to slaughter all the male children in Bethlehem with the hope of whacking the newborn king, he was very much in step with his times, during which collateral damage was considered a Virtue.
Despite these challenges, the Baby Jesus ended up doing pretty well. According to Pew, there are today 2.18 billion Christians, nearly a third of the world’s population, despite an inner circle that included Judas the snitch and no social media to speak of. All of which offers a valuable insight to our pampered youth, who think they’ve entered the Valley of Death when their Internet service is interrupted: Man does not live by Bandwidth alone. And while you’re at it, eat your peas.
On the secular side, Santa Claus -- aka Kris Kringle, Saint Nick, Father Christmas, and (in stricter households) the Son of Mammon – is a bit newer to the scene, though he does trace his roots to Saint Nicolas, the fourth century Greek bishop best known for giving dowries to three poor girls so they wouldn’t have to become prostitutes (reminding us that there’s nothing like a little seed money to keep you out of a tight spot). Other variations include Nazi Germany’s “solstice man,” modeled after the pagan god Odin, who urged mothers to buy swastika-shaped biscuits for their children.
These days, Santa has morphed again.
In the spirit of disclosure, I once had serious issues with Claus, whose impersonators began popping up in U.S. stores sometime around 1890. We know the drill; he invites children to sit on his lap and tell him what they smuggled down the chimney. Despite society’s best efforts to destroy rote learning the tykes recite well-rehearsed wish lists of obscenely expensive toys as Claus, often an unemployed actor or hefty friend of the store manager, leers at the parents, knowing that many of us got little more for Christmas than a stick horse and a few lousy tangerines.
While Claus remains the face of commercial Christmas he has become a far more sympathetic, and heroic, character. The reason is simple: he’s under attack by scolds – who, like the poor, we will apparently always have with us.
The primary complaint is that Claus is fat, as is his wife, whose spirit has never been broken by Jenny Craig. Indeed, perhaps the second most profound silence on earth would follow Santa suggesting to Mrs. Claus that she join Weight Watchers. There is no denying their immenseness. Boiled down to their tallow, the Clauses could light Manhattan for a long weekend.
Nor is their persecution any surprise. We live in a time when office-purchasing mayors tell us how big our sodas should be and what type of oil to fry our food in, while many schools send “parental notification letters” to the homes of chunky youth (in direct contradiction to anti-bullying programs and the war against “size shaming”). Claus, the patron saint of porkers, is a standing rebuke to these outrages. With every corpulent, unrepentant corpuscle Claus tells the Man to Stick It.
The favor is happily repaid. Then-U.S. Surgeon General Rear Adm. Steven K. Galson, teed off on Santa a few years back, proclaiming “It is really important that the people who kids look up to as role models are in good shape, eating well and getting exercise.” In the same spirit Australian heath expert Nathan Grills insisted that “Public health needs to be aware of what giant multinational capitalists realized long ago – that Santa sells, and sometimes he sells harmful products.” Mr. Grills added that in the U.S. Santa’s name recognition with children is just behind that of another demon: Ronald McDonald. Similarly, Roy Pickler, whose public health credentials include a stint as a contestant on “The Biggest Loser” and part time work as a Santa impersonator, pronounced that "The world is going to have to change their acceptance of what Santa looks like. Santa is a role model, and kids don't want to have a role model that's fat."
Not only is Claus an alleged threat to youthful waistlines. He’s blamed for mental and spiritual mayhem as well. In a 2012 Psychology Today essay entitled “Say Goodbye to the Santa Claus Lie” Dr. David Kyle Johnson argues that the “Santa Lie” risks damaging parental trustworthiness and increases “credulity and ill-motivated behavior.” He also notes an incident in which a child, when told that Santa doesn’t exist, turned atheist.
Men have gone to the stake for far less, and the indictment goes yet further. Claus smokes a pipe (contents unknown, though his continuous laughter raises suspicions) and drinks alcohol – brandy, by most accounts, and judging from the flush on his cheeks plenty of it. Tippling fictional icons, of course, are catnip to scolds: James Bond was recently flogged in the British journal BMJ for drinking at levels allegedly detrimental to his marksmanship and famed sexual prowess, the latter certainly startling news to one of Bond’s most vivacious and medically astute leading ladies – Dr. Holly Goodhead.
Most of us, of course, don’t mind well-intentioned advice to shed a few pounds, though unfortunately these admonitions often come from those joyless, hectoring types whose main purpose in life is to parade their own superiority and push other people around. If they weren’t ordering us up on the scales they’d be annoying us some other way. The situation is made worse when the messengers have legislative powers. Just as most of us want government to stay out our bedrooms it should stay out of our kitchens as well. Claus no doubt agrees, which is why he’ll likely end up on a Wanted poster any day now.
Which finally brings us to Ebenezer Scrooge, who is also experiencing a transformation, though one of a different kind.
Scrooge, of course, is best known for a late-life personality switch from tight-fisted taskmaster to doddering sugar daddy. The pre-sugar Scrooge has historically exemplified the qualities denounced in a sermon delivered earlier this year to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
“Our society is for better or worse grounded on individualism and this notion of personal freedom versus communal responsibility,” intoned the Rev. Fred L. Hammond, who posted the message on his blog. “This is manifested in a false illusion that the American Dream is attainable by all, if we do as Ebenezer Scrooge did and put our nose to the grindstone and grind away. What our contemporary society fails to see is that our capitalist mindset is a spirituality that is detrimental to living a full and abundant life.” This spirituality, the reverend also noted, rules the U.S. Congress and can be found hovering around Wal-Mart.
Yet there’s a vibrant revisionism afoot that insists Scrooge was actually a better man before he became victim to that dramatic drive-by spooking. A small but virile band of bloggers, analysts, and others who are not likely to be Unitarians hail the pre-conversion Scrooge as the “original one percenter.” Russell D. Longcore, for example, thinks Scrooge was spot-on when he denounced Christmas as “a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you.” These days, Longcore observes, Americans pay for Christmas with plastic while their savings rates “are near zero.”
Scrooge is also hailed as a job creator who paid clerk Bob Cratchit a reasonable wage. The revisionists, in fact, are hard on Cratchit, who they insist is not to be mistaken for Mr. Hustle.
“If Cratchit’s stagnating in the backwaters of Scrooge’s shop was due to his basically poor work skills,” wrote author and law school professor Butler Shaffer in a classic 2004 essay, “we are once again confronted with the question: why did Cratchit not seek to enhance his skills, as by learning a more remunerative trade? That would certainly have been a great benefit to his family, including affording additional resources with which to possibly rescue Tiny Tim from his malady. But, alas, Bob Cratchit was, once again, either too unambitious or too unimaginative to pursue this course of conduct… Such is the extent of his courage, ambition, and love for his family.”
In the generous spirit of the season, Professor Shaffer let Crachit have it with both barrels instead of only one. He also gave a clear sign that those who prefer the unreformed Scrooge are not alone, so if kicking Cratchit is your idea of holiday fun, go at it (and maybe get in a lick at Scrooge's treacly nephew Fred while you're at it). As Scrooge himself said, "keep Christmas in your own way," which is perhaps the best seasonal advice of all.
The long holiday season offers other delights: paid holiday time, an opportunity to sing, sober or otherwise, the Hallelujah chorus, and nourishment of the dark and lurid hope, a variation of which is also present at NASCAR races, that someone in those Black Friday mobs might get trampled. Verily, there really is something for everyone.
So perhaps grousers, as a revised Tiny Tim might observe, should “stick a cork in it, every one.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226672013-12-08T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:25-05:00Washington Post review: Johnny Cash: The Life
<p>By Dave Shiflett
Johnny Cash rode a boyhood dream and three chords to country music stardom. But as Robert Hilburn’s definitive biography vividly chronicles, that dream spawned a sizable brood of nightmares.
Cash grew up poor, mostly in Dyess, Ark., where his parents took part in a government-backed farmland “colonization” program. While poets, philosophers and singers rhapsodize about living close to the land, Cash knew better. Working in the cotton fields was hard, and the early death of his brother in a sawmill accident further darkened the charms of rural life. Soon enough, he decided he’d rather pluck a guitar than a chicken and dreamed of singing on the radio.
The dream was somewhat audacious, for Cash was no musical prodigy. He left high school not for Nashville but for Pontiac, Mich., where he worked in the auto industry. This was followed by a stint in the military that took him to Germany, where he helped intercept Soviet Morse code messages. He formed a band on his return and performed his first radio gig in May 1955 at age 23. According to Hilburn, it was an amateurish performance, though his first recordings were better (and should have been: “Cry, Cry, Cry” required 35 takes). He was on his way.
Hilburn, a former music critic for the Los Angeles Times, interviewed Cash often during his journalistic career, and, while an admirer, he goes fairly light on the whitewash. He tells, in great and sometimes harrowing detail, how Cash’s professional advancement and personal decline blossomed simultaneously.
One red-letter day in that decline occurred in the fall of 1957, when a fiddle player gave Cash his first amphetamine after hearing him complain about the exhaustion that accompanied constant touring. Cash, who started smoking when he was 10, was quick to form a new addiction, later telling a friend that “one pill was too many and a thousand wasn’t enough.”
Nor was he a slacker in the skirt-chasing competition, despite having expressed undying fidelity to his first wife, Vivian, in his early hit, “I Walk the Line.” Still, he was far more restrained than musical contemporary and fabled horndog Elvis Presley. “One night,” Cash recalled, “we counted nine girls that he had sex with in the dressing room.”
To no surprise, Cash’s first marriage was not one for the record books, due in part to an evolving romance with June Carter, also married at the time. The turmoil was hard not only on Vivian and their four daughters, but on the local wildlife as well. In 1965, after retreating to the Los Padres National Forest to escape home life, he started a fire that killed most of the condor population.
The rings of suffering spread yet further. Fans struggled through mediocre performances; at times, Cash missed more gigs than he made. Yet he suffered the most, not only from the ravages of addiction, which dropped his weight to 125 pounds, but from the agonies of not living up to his Southern Baptist convictions.
Cash’s desire for redemption seemed as powerful as his desire for drugs. He and June, who married in 1968, became regulars at Billy Graham crusades, “testifying” before nearly 2 million people, despite ongoing drug use and a soft reading of the commandment against adultery. Cash, perhaps in a generous mood, described himself as “a C+ Christian.”
He earned much higher marks for his music, though, as Hilburn reminds us, many of his most iconic songs were written by others, including “A Boy Named Sue” (Shel Silverstein), “Ring of Fire” (June Carter and Merle Kilgore) and “I Still Miss Someone” (which was “mostly written” by a nephew). His signature song, “Folsom Prison Blues,” relied so heavily on “Crescent City Blues,” by Gordon Jenkins, that Cash eventually paid Jenkins $75,000 to waive his composer rights. Nonetheless, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall Of Fame , the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But he also went through a long recording slump, earning recognition by USA Today for making one of the 10 worst albums of 1987 (“Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town”). Fortune smiled again in 1993 when he met producer Rick Rubin, with whom he made a series of sometimes stark recordings that ended his career on a high note. In perhaps the most searing section of the book, Hilburn recounts the making the 2002 video for Cash’s version of rocker Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.” Cash was in ill health, and June had learned the day before that she had a leak in a heart valve. She died in 2003; Cash held on four more hard months, dying at age 71.
Cash had a dream and enough talent and desire to see it through, for better and worse. Interestingly, late in his life he suggested he also benefited from good timing. If he tried to make it in today’s music industry, he mused, “I think the only job I’d be able to get would be singing in a coffeehouse somewhere.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226662013-11-24T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:24-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of Books by Graham Nash, Ray Davies and Donald Fagen
<p>Book Review: 'Wild Tales' by Graham Nash | 'Americana' by Ray Davies | 'Eminent Hipsters' by Donald Fagen
It's a popular complaint that America no longer produces anything when in fact we churn out vast quantities of music and musical merchandise—T-shirts, posters, ball caps, thongs—and a steady stream of celebrity-musician memoirs.
Three Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees—Graham Nash, Ray Davies and Donald Fagen—have now set down their guitars and picked up their pens (or signed on a ghostwriter), joining such illustrious predecessors as Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in reliving their glory years, or at least the parts they care to remember.
Their books include standard features of the genre: early struggle, breakthrough, truckloads of money, rapacious promoters, and nonstop drugs and women, plus arrests, overdoses and rehab. But there's another story line: Ambitious young men working their way out of difficult upbringings to make it big in the Promised Land—America—where they eventually grow old and cranky. Just like the rest of us.
Graham Nash, now 71, is best known for his work with the Hollies and with Crosby, Stills and Nash (sometimes joined by Young). But he grew up in Salford, possibly the worst slum in the north of England. The toilet was al fresco, his wardrobe was provided by the Salvation Army and his father's room and board were supplied, for a time, by the local prison.
Fortunately, Mr. Nash had a talent for singing. As he tells us in "Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life," he and a classmate opened each school day harmonizing the Lord's Prayer, though he was not cut out for the ecclesiastic life. He had been transfixed by radio broadcasts of American pop stars: Elvis, the Platters, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley and the Everly Brothers. He left school at age 16, in 1958, to make a go of it as a performer.
The Hollies (named after Buddy Holly) got their big break in February 1963, after a talent scout caught one of their gigs. Mr. Nash, who makes no pretense of being a master musician, admits that his guitar playing was hardly stunning: At this performance his instrument had no strings. Nevertheless, the band cranked out a string of pleasant pop hits that still haunt the oldies airwaves, including "Bus Stop" (written by teenage songwriter Graham Gouldman), "On a Carousel" and "Carrie Anne."
Soon, though, the young man grew "bored with the moon-and-June rhymes, singing about schoolboy crushes and forbidden sex." He had also fallen in love with America, where he was introduced to future love interest Joni Mitchell, singer David Crosby and drugs.
Readers still amazed by rock excess will get a fix in this breezy memoir. Mr. Nash, turned on to marijuana by Mr. Crosby and to LSD by Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas, became something of a stoner prodigy; one sometimes senses that he considers getting high a heroic act, like storming Omaha Beach. Yet he supplies a cautionary tale by chronicling Mr. Crosby's gruesome transformation into a bloated, lesion-covered addict.
Mr. Nash, whose later hits included singalong standards "Teach Your Children" and "Our House" plus "Just a Song Before I Go" (written after a drug dealer bet him he couldn't compose a song in under an hour), reminds us that rock stars live in a different financial universe than most fans. Soon after moving to California, he found himself short on cash. No problem. Mr. Crosby cut him a check for $80,000. When touring, the band might make $50,000 a day, though Mr. Nash adds that most of the money ended up in other pockets: After one $12 million tour he, Mr. Stills, Mr. Young and Mr. Cosby pocketed $300,000 each. "That left $10.8 million unaccounted for," he writes, and no doubt highly appreciated.
Yet like other mortals, rockers grow older and are susceptible to putting on a righteous grump. He calls Neil Young "utterly self-centered" and takes aim at fatter targets, including George W. Bush, the tobacco lobby and rifles with "hundred-round clips." He seems surprised that 10% of his audience sometimes headed for the exits after the political grumbling commenced, especially in the South. The nerve of those hicks! Despite the manifest flaws of his adopted nation, Mr. Nash loved it enough to become a citizen, settle down, get married—36 years and counting—and otherwise live like a member in good standing of the Rotary Club. He's not alone.
Ray Davies, also from a working-class family in England, found fame and fortune in the U.S., plus a few other things. As a former frontman (with brother Dave) of the Kinks, whose catalog ranges from rock blasters "Lola" and "You Really Got Me" to the serenely beautiful "Waterloo Sunset," he came to the U.S. in 1965 as part of the British invasion, where he rubbed shoulders with people less glamorous than Joni Mitchell, including serial killer John Wayne Gacy, "at the time a community organizer" involved in a fundraising concert. After the Kinks went toes-up in 1996, Mr. Davies continued recording and touring, despite later health problems; his most recent record was released in the U.S. in 2011.
In "Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road," Mr. Davies is more reserved than Mr. Nash, offering fairly temperate accounts of the music life's agonies, ecstasies and ennui. Though Mr. Davies was shot by a New Orleans mugger in 2004, he is far more critical of drugs than firearms, complaining how dope is used to prop up touring musicians: "Pamper them; give them all the drugs they need (legal or otherwise) just to get through. Once the tour is over they can be left to look after their own wreckage."
But Mr. Davies, too, is upbeat on America, even praising how students recite the Pledge of Allegiance, "which I think in a strange way helps form a bond among all new Americans." In his spare time he works on an exchange program between high-school bands in New Orleans and London, which suggests he could rise high in Optimist International.
Not so our third musical great, Donald Fagen, a founding member of Steely Dan. If there were a Cranks Hall of Fame, he'd be a multiple inductee.
Mr. Fagen escaped Kendall Park, a New Jersey suburb, after a youth he claims was made bearable only by jazz radio broadcasts and the "subversive" radio talk show of Jean Shepherd (whose "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" would be made into the film "A Christmas Story"). At Bard College, Mr. Fagen met Walter Becker, with whom he eventually founded Steely Dan (named after a Japanese sexual aid) and produced a string of Classic Rock stalwarts, including "Reelin' in the Years," "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and "Deacon Blues."
Mr. Fagen, 65, is a good writer and highly talented musician—many rockers would have a hard time reading his charts—but what makes his brief book sing is his sharp tongue. He could teach Bill O'Reilly and Alec Baldwin tons about how to deliver a proper tongue-lashing.
Post his tour journal on the Internet? "Why should I let you lazy, spoiled TV Babies read it for nothing in the same way you download all those songs my partner and I sacrificed our entire youth to write and record," he snarls. Mr. Fagen, who once wrote a song called "Godwhacker," in which he envisioned putting out a hit on the Almighty, is similarly harsh on his Earthbound enemies, citing a British study alleging that conservatives have an "inordinately large amygdala" that makes them delusional. "It's got to be the amygdala thing," he insists. "Period. End of story."
Some listeners might point out that such absolutism is also considered a conservative trait. Indeed, Mr. Fagen sounds like his amygdala is a bit swollen when noting that "I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff" and when praising the lack of "soul-deadening porn or violence" on 1960s television.
But what fun is old age if you can't grouse a bit? Geezers do not live by oatmeal alone. Mr. Fagen describes a 2012 concert at which he was performing. The crowd was so "geriatric," he says, that he was "tempted to start calling out bingo numbers." Eventually, the fans were all "on their feet, albeit shakily, rocking out" to the music. "So this, now, is what I do: assisted living."
There's a bright side our author may be overlooking. Should Mr. Fagen tire of the music biz he, along with Mr. Davies and Mr. Nash, have an excellent crack at endorsement deals from the manufacturers of adult diapers and other products for decaying oldsters. For some folks, America's blessings never end.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226652013-07-13T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:24-05:00Wall Street Journal Article: When Summer Was Easy (pre-edited version)
<p>Of all the seasons, summer seems to evoke the most childhood memories, probably due to its singular status as the season of No School! Ah, the freedom to frolic beyond the reach of scolding teachers and paddle-wielding assistant principals, to pursue the idle arts of cloud gazing, star counting, making firefly lanterns and perhaps even to skinny dip with an adventurous cheerleader (or, more likely, her less glamorous cousin).
As we grow older (I was born in 1955, during Eisenhower’s first term) we are also naturally inclined to compare summers then with summers now. To no surprise, those of us who have acquired knowledge, wisdom and an appropriately cranky attitude find that summers sure aren’t what they used to be.
Let us count a few of the ways.
First off, most of us born in the fifties spent summers in the raw, sweltering bosom of Mother Nature, which, with all due respect, wasn’t exactly paradise, especially when the mosquitoes started feeding. Home air-conditioners were rare; only about 10 percent of homes had them by 1965 (around 80 percent of modern homes are climate-controlled). When it got hot you turned on a fan. When it got real hot you prayed for a thunderstorm.
People prayed a lot more back then, at least publicly, perhaps in part because it was still legal. We started school (public) with the Lord’s Prayer, and heads bowed prior to most sporting events, weenie roasts and any other occasion where food was consumed. We were also likely to Praise The Lord when the DDT-spewing anti-mosquito fogger appeared on the horizon (haven’t seen one of those in a while). This was, of course, the era of Mutual Assured Destruction, so it was important to have your bases covered at all times.
Also unlike today, we didn’t watch much television during summer break. There were only three channels, and besides that TV played a far distant fiddle to the preferred vehicles of entertainment and enlightenment: books. We might be out of school but we had summer reading lists, which these days don’t seem to be as rigorous. An NEA newsletter noted a couple of years ago that middle school students in the Arlington School District outside New York were required to read at least one book during the summer. One whole book!
I recall (dimly) reading 40 books one summer – some assigned and some part of a local library program. This wasn’t our only bookish experience. For many children in our neck of the woods, Vacation Bible School was a requirement of citizenship (VBS participation is also down). Besides dispensing cookies, watermelon and (untreated) Kool-Aid, these programs focused young minds on talking snakes, parting seas, and Jezebel’s dangerous allure. We still sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which was excellent preparation for many an afternoon’s chief activity: playing guns.
Contemporary gunaphobes will gasp, but guns were as common as iPhones are today. Most boys I knew had at least one toy rifle, pistol or submachine gun (preferably, one of each). We took our marching orders from guys like Kirby in “Combat!” (Kirb was the Baryshnikov of the Browning Automatic Rifle), Illya Kuryakin of “The Man From Uncle” (played by David McCallum, who has devolved to the mild-mannered Duckie of NCIS) and of course the indomitable Sgt. Rock of comic book fame. As we grew older we got BB-rifles, which were used (one cringes to recall) to reduce the local bird population and harass squirrels and other creatures further down the Great Chain of Being (we were all devout speciesists). We later graduated to .22s and shotguns; summer camps had rifle ranges and offered NRA gun safety courses.
These days – characterized by the recent arrest and suspension of a 14-year old West Virginia student who refused to take off his NRA t-shirt -- a high body count would be assumed. I am happy to report that no member of my heavily armed circle ever shot anyone, though honesty requires the admission that one summer afternoon I did manage to shoot myself.
It happened after a small but heavily armed platoon of us was dropped off at a rural lake for an overnight camping trip. Since this was in the thick of adolescence several of us were working hard to develop a smoking addiction (known back then as simply trying to look cool). As I was taking a drag off a cigarette my pistol fell off a nearby bench and discharged, blasting the Marlboro from between my fingers, cutting a groove in my right index finger and nearly trimming the tip of my nose. Yes, I know. A stupid move -- but also a real-life lesson that there is no such thing as cognitive equality, a fact of life that also gets short shrift these days.
Some readers may wonder why parents weren’t hauled into court for sending their sons into the woods with loaded weapons. As it happens, my parents, who had earlier been traumatized when my older brother threw a spear into my back (it stuck, but only for a few seconds) are learning of the shooting incident as they read this article. The larger fact is that by today’s standards, most parents of that era were worthy of Leavenworth. What sinners they were! They sent us outside without sunscreen, let us ride bikes without helmets, jump on trampolines without “safety barriers,” and smiled as we vied with our siblings for the premier spot in the family sedan: the ledge underneath the back window, where you could stretch out and take a nap.
This isn’t to say they didn’t run a tight ship. When we got out of line we were “corrected” with the help of leather belts or expertly wielded hairbrushes (known in some households as “Officer Porcupine”). If we cussed (more about which in a minute) we got our mouths washed out with soap. If someone had told us that a few decades hence parents could be arrested for such manifestations of concern we would have assumed the commies had made good on their promise of world domination.
Yet back then, fixating on possible death and injury would be seen as neurotic. Perhaps this was because our parents had been through the great depression and World War II, which made post-war life seem relatively placid. Accidents happened but they were accepted as part of life. Another personal story illustrates the point. One summer I got a job on a local farm, where I was soon run over by a tractor and hay trailer, which drove ribs into both my lungs. Though I was initially thought to be dead a crack team of surgeons revived me. Being young and resilient I was out of the hospital in a little over a week (my nurse, blessed creature, supplied me with cigarettes once my chest tube was removed).
We never sued the farm owners. Lawsuits were far rarer than today; “ambulance chaser” was an epithet with a significant societal sting. Under 90,000 civil cases were filed in 1970, according to public policy analyst Jurgen O. Skoppek, a number that by 1986 had risen 192%. These days we’re suing each other over mold, hailed as the “next asbestos,” and my lovely nurse might be brought up on charges of supplying cigarettes to a minor. None of which, to my mind, represents progress.
Summers past looked a lot different. Around 13% of Americans were obese in the early 1960s, as compared to 36% today (about two-thirds of contemporary Americans are considered overweight or obese). All of which makes a trip to the beach a different experience.
The seashore of my youth was populated by people who were, relative to now, fairly thin. Huge people were rare: If you weighed in at 350 or more you had a good crack at getting a job at the freak show (a staple of traveling summer carnivals). Nowadays beaches are covered with human manatees (for reasons of disclosure, I could be considered a junior manatee). This may, in part, be a testament to the self-esteem movement, which routed the notion that body size should be a cause of shame. Or maybe it’s simply another reminder that there’s safety in numbers.
Another cosmetic change: Tattoos, which were largely confined to men with military or maritime experience, and bikers. Nowadays, according to a Harris Poll, 38% of adults 30-39 have tats, as do 30% of those 25-29 and 22% of those 18-24. Inked women slightly outnumber men. By comparison, only 11% of American 50-64 say they have tattoos, a number that drops to 5% for Americans 65 and older. Why the proliferation? Twenty-five percent say tattoos make them feel “rebellious” – like growing long hair back in the 1960s -- while 30% say they make them feel more sexy, 21% more healthy and strong and 8% more intelligent (meanwhile 45% percent of Americans without tattoos believe those who have them are less attractive, while 39% say they’re less sexy and 27% less intelligent). Of course, you could always cut your hair if you got tired of it, or faced an unexpected court date. Getting rid of a tattoo is not so easy, though 86% of tattoo bearers said they have never regretted their decision, perhaps belying the idea that the younger generation has commitment issues.
Modern beaches are also intellectually different. When I was a kid you saw lots of thinner people reading fat books. Now you see larger people staring at thin phones. Many are no doubt chronicling the adventures of their favorite literary character – themselves – updating their Facebook accounts with descriptions of eating Oreos, watching a seagull peck the eye out of a dead fish, and spending 15 minutes the prior evening flushing the sand from between their massive glutes. It’s almost enough to make one pity NSA snoops who might be called upon to monitor these communications, thus putting themselves at extreme risk of acute inanity poisoning.
Which brings up another significant change: the rise of the wildly popular salutation/exhortation/denunciation/benediction known as the F-word, which not so long ago was the hydrogen bomb of obscenities, used primarily by men in combat, stevedores, and golfers. Now it traipses lightly off the tongues of 14-year-olds at the slightest provocation – should, for example, that seagull hop over and steal a potato chip. Should cell coverage lapse the oratory might match that of a pirate whose beard had caught afire.
Many oldsters blame rap music and Hollywood; others the triumph of cliche (speech without thought) but a less judgmental (and that must always be our goal!) analysis starts with weeding out the Fs from a typical conversation. What is left? Usually the transcript of a deeply mundane existence. Could the F-infestation, in part at least, be an attempt to dramatize lives made dull by design – a design requiring mandatory bicycle helmets, risk-free trampolines, pools without diving boards, and now an attempt to drop the presumptive drunk driving alcohol level to .05%, which some people can reach with a single glass of wine? As always, proponents argue that if one life can be saved, it’s worth it, though if that’s the criteria they might also focus their hysteria on such threats as falling out of bed, which claims around 600 American lives a year (Time magazine) and autoerotic asphyxiation, which takes another 1,000 citizens to early graves, according to WebMD.
Hypercaution has saved lives, but it has diminished life in the bargain.
Summers saw other enormous changes. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech in August 1963, which became as familiar to my generation as the Declaration of Independence (July, 1776). The Summer of Love (1967) spread the gospel of getting high, enlightening some and blighting others, while in July 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a testament to aiming high. Richard Nixon resigned in August of 1974, AIDS was formally recognized by U.S. health authorities in June of 1981. Along the way summers saw the passing of national figures ranging from Ronald Reagan to Judy Garland, Jonas Salk, Jim Morrison and Jerry Garcia.
There were also personnel changes closer to home. Adults who seemed immortal in our youthful summers had their brushes with disease and death. Ditto for some cousins, friends, and siblings – and ourselves. We rarely know the names of current bands, usually go to bed when we used to be going out, and say things like “I’d rather get a colonoscopy – make that a double-colonoscopy! – than go camping.”
Alas, our suns have begun to set.
Yet we have absorbed some of the changes that make modern summers so different than the summers past. Should the sun suddenly blink off, for example, we might acknowledge this as a significant setback for our species – but a giant leap forward in the battle against solar-related cancers and premature wrinkling. And just the other day I was thinking that if my family had more progressive ideas about lawsuits when I got run over that long-ago June, I might today be living on a very nice farm.
Live and learn.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226642013-03-10T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:23-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of 'Follow The Money''
<p>The writing life has taken journalist Steve Boggan many exotic places: war zones, up the Amazon in search of hallucinogen- fueled natives (along they way he encountered “rare pink dolphins”), and deep into the bowels of British society during staffer stints at the Independent, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Guardian and the Evening Standard.
Now a freelancer, Mr. Boggan’s first book took him into the gunsights of possibly fatal boredom: He flew from London to Lebanon, Kansas (the center of the United States, by some estimates) to follow a ten dollar bill as it passed from person to person over the course of 30 days. The wandering sawbuck led him to some decidedly non-exotic places, including Hays, Kansas, Harrisonville, Missouri, an apple orchard, a deer hunting camp, and a few motels where bedbugs dare not tread.
“More than once I had questioned my decision to take on this task,” he writes early on. “It was neither smart nor funny. It was just crazy.” Which raises a reasonable question: Why read such a book? For the people, mostly. Ordinary Americans, so-called, bring Mr. Boggan’s book to life (aided, to be sure, by a sharp eye and generous spirit). There’s more to the nation’s interior life than you see from the Interstates, or 39.000 feet.
Mr. Boggan did a similar story for the Guardian, in that case following a ten-pound note around London. The ground rules were simple enough: If a person accepted the bill (either as payment or as change) they were told Mr. Boggan came with it and would stay nearby until the bill changed hands. As he told Rick Chapin, a lodge owner who was the first to get the bill, “Just treat it like any other ten dollar bill and spend it whenever you’re ready.” He fully understands how strange a proposition this would seem to future recipients.
“There is no word other than ‘creepy’ to describe the act of asking a lone woman, traveling hundreds of miles with her four-year-old son, if you can follow her,” he writes. Yet this particular woman, whom he met in Kansas, responded, “Sure. Sounds like fun.”
Before his journey ended, Mr. Boggan shared houses, drinks, tree stands and life stories with a proudly godless truck driver, a pair of evangelical missionaries, an Amish rug maker, a platoon of musicians, a Chicago banker, a bow-hunting waitress, a woman whose son makes his living as a cage-fighter, and a hotel worker named Stacey who shared her own literary aspiration: to publish her book arguing that lesbians co-habitate far quicker than heterosexuals. That title is “Bring Your Own U-Haul” and awaits a nimble agent.
Suspicious readers may be wondering by now if “Follow the Money” is yet another exercise in cross-Atlantic sneering, in which a sophisticated European – perhaps one of those preening metrosexuals! – makes fun of American rubes like Ernie, a Kansas farmer who asks if the Brits are still having martial trouble with the Germans, and, when Mr. Broggan offers to guide him around London should he ever visit, asks “Will you take me to see the Eiffel Tower?”
While Ernie would no doubt send eyes rolling ‘round Islington (and Topeka as well) Mr. Boggan finds Ernie to be a decent man who would fly to England’s assistance should the Germans revert to their old ways. Indeed, he is so enthusiastic about many of the people he meets and the places he visits he could easily get work at local chambers of commerce should the freelance life go sour.
In one St. Louis neighborhood, for instance, he marvels at the number of local theatrical productions, admires young girls working on their ballet steps, and enjoys the thunder of a brass band. He chides English friends who insist the “American Midwest was a cultural wasteland. It wasn’t even a weekend. This was an average Thursday night.”
This isn’t to suggest Mr. Boggan is without opinions. He’s put off by anti-abortion billboards, right-wing radio (he is outraged by the Mancow show, for some reason not realizing you should never take seriously anyone called Mancow), is ill at ease around guns and seems, at first at least, to be a bit of a Jehovahphobe, complaining about radio preachers and feeling a “tightening” in his stomach when people start talking about God. But he gives his subjects a respectful listen, especially the Amish, whose productivity humbles him.
He does find signs of small town decay, yet on the bright side notes corresponding investment opportunities. Mr. Boggan tells of a California doctor who bought a Kansas house on eBay for a few thousand dollars, though when he came to town he “took one look at what he’d bought and drove off without getting out of his car.”
Mr Boggan includes brief local histories and interesting tidbits, some about money itself: during his 30 day trip, the Treasury Department printed around 82 million ten-dollar bills; all told 25-30 million bills of all denominations are printed each day, worth in total about $1 billion, though the cost of each bill is just under a dime (which some people think is close to their true value). Google Earth, he discovered, offers a variety of midpoints for the U.S. If you use a Mac, you get Chanute, Kansas, while the PC version directs you to the Meadowbrook Apartments in St. Lawrence, Kansas. He offers a reasonable explanation: “Could this have anything to do with the fact that Brian McClendon, vice-president of engineering at Google, lived in the Meadowbrook Apartments as a boy? Or that Dan Webb, senior software engineer at Google, grew up in Chanute, Kansas? Surely not.”
The last person to have the bill was a retired Ford auto plant worker named Glenn Waddell, who had won the money in a sports bet. All told, the journey took Mr. Boggan about 3,000 fairly placid miles. Pleasant reading every page though an interesting sequel might start him out someplace slightly more adventurous -- South Central Los Angeles or New Orleans perhaps – where a wandering sawbuck would likely take him places that will tighten more than his stomach.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226632012-09-30T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:22-05:00A New Music Fesival: Poor Farm Fest
<p>Do you have to be crazy to start a music festival?
I wondered that after seeing a notice for the second annual Poor Farm Festival in Williamsburg, West Virginia. There seems to be at least three strikes against success: a resoundingly flat economy, declining attendance at music venues (down 20 percent by some estimates) and gas closing in on four bucks a gallon.
So maybe the organizers are munching a bit too much of the local loco weed.
But there’s something to be said for people whose madness benefits musicians and their listeners. The Poor Farm Fest (www.poorfarmfest.com) listed 29 performing bands this year, and organizer Carolyn Stephens was kind enough to offer me a last-minute slot, bringing the number to an even thirty (to keep the ethics tidy, I did not ask for remuneration). The festival was providing work for over 100 musicians. The only act I’d heard of was Nora Jane Struthers, although the sons of two rock stars – Ginger Baker (Cream) and Greg Allman (Allman Brothers) – were billed as headliners.
Besides all that, I could use a good airing out. Website photos showed a terrific setting – mountains, meadows and deep blue sky. I packed up the camping gear, found a bottle of retsina and off I went.
The drive from Richmond to Williamsburg is nice, as Interstate drives go; I-64 provides dramatic (for this part of the world) views topping Afton Mountain outside Charlottesville and re-enters mountainous terrain just past Lexington. Goshen is a beautiful stretch of mountain and valley; if I end up ashes I wouldn’t mind a few spoonfuls being sprinkled thereabouts (heirs take note). The first kiss of fall (the festival opened Sept. 6) had started to turn the leaves around Clifton Forge and an hour or so later I exited at Lewisburg, W.Va. for the final 25 minutes of the trip. The Williamsburg Road covers the final eight miles or so. It is of interesting design: a paved lane with two gravel shoulders; when cars approach it’s onto the shoulder to avoid collision. Eventually you come around a curve and there’s the Poor Farm: 1,000 acres of meadows and forest, some hilly, plus a house, a stage, and a herd of cattle. Atop a distant mountain ridge a dozen or so white wind turbines twirl away.
The site gets its name from its former function. When residents of Greenbrier County were down and out they could go to the farm and work a section of land. The terrain rolls and in some places dips dramatically – the result of limestone cave collapses – but the concert area is fairly flat and the stage – a sturdy structure enclosed on three sides – has a sound system powerful enough to cover the fairly vast camping area, which for my money is nicer than the camping spaces at Floydfest, Clifftop, and certainly Galax.
All in all, a superior festival site. Only one thing was missing: people.
When I arrived Friday afternoon, the second day of the festival, musicians on stage sometimes nearly outnumbered the audience. If I were running things I might have gone hunting for a cyanide pill. But organizer Carolyn Stephens (aided by husband Pete) was unruffled. Her attitude brought to mind the motto of a childhood hero: What, me worry?
Carolyn is tall, slender, and apparently unflappable. On Saturday morning we talked things over during a drive to make a bank deposit. My first question: What on earth possessed you to jump into the festival biz?
Well, she began, she had booked acts during her school days at Curry College, near Boston. She brought in people like Livingston Taylor, who might not have sold tons of records but who knew how to win over audiences. Later, she worked in radio – once doing shows on three stations in the same market. “One of the stations was adult contemporary, one was country, and the third was a religious station.”
But love of music isn’t the main reason she started her festival. Wal-Mart played a crucial role – the kudzu-like retailer opened two superstores within an hour of Poor Farm at a time she was making her living selling plants. Her horticulture business soon shriveled. If she was going to stay in the area she’d have to create her own job. She recalled the good times booking acts back in college, and she did have a nice0 site for a festival.
“When we decided to do this, I had 45 days total to get ready. We had to put in roads. We had to build a stage. We had to get a vendor, and line up volunteers. I had to get permits, including an ABC license.” There was also promotion, and the small matter of finding bands that could be booked on short notice. “I hadn’t been to a festival since 1978,” she said. “I do everything on the fly. I mean everything.” Internet research helped her find talent. She ended up hiring seventeen acts, cutting deals with many that included a promise to book them the following year in return for a reduced fee.
Yet Carolyn was unable to cut a deal with the Weather Deity – it rained off and on during the festival. But the festival did attract around 600 people. “Four hundred of them were my neighbors who wanted to see what the hell we were up to,” she said. “They didn’t like music. They’re farmers.” But the other 200, she believed, might become repeat customers and would also talk up the festival to their friends. “The rule is, one talks to ten, so by our second year we’d have the possibility of 2000 people coming.” Word of mouth seemed to be working. “The first year, our Facebook page had 200 friends. This year, we had 2,000,” she said. She also developed a list of about 20 newspapers she targeted with press releases (which she wrote) and pictures. “Some of these papers ran the releases without altering them,” she says, adding that she studied journalism in college. She eventually took out an ad in Relix magazine, which she said was hugely expensive. I sensed Relix won’t be getting any more of her money.
After depositing a wad of currency, we headed back to the Farm. Like many of this year’s acts, the Rain God made a return appearance. She acknowledged that bad weather can dampen attendance. But she also said that the first two days of the Poor Farm 2012 were improvements over year one, and that she was very enthusiastic about some of the new acts.
“I avoid agents like the plague,” she said, but two of her stronger acts for 2012 came through agent John Laird at the Americana Agency. “John has a reputation for being both good for the artist, and good for the venue. In the long run they both have to succeed. I told him I had a small festival and he said he had some up-and-coming people who were really good, and who I could get for a good price.” One act was Nora Jane Struthers and her band, TheBootleggers. The other was The Steel Wheels.
“Nora Jane wrote a song about Greenbrier County – about the effect the coal mining and limestone industries have on residents of this county,” she said. “It’s a great song – and she had never played in Greenbrier County. I thought, ‘this is serendipity. This girl needs to be here!’” The Steel Wheels, meantime, had been well received at Merlefest. Another acoustic act, Johnson’s Crossroads, had also played Merlesfest, and while now based in Asheville its two core members are from the area (I’ll profile Nora Jane Struthers and Johnson’s Crossroads soon).
She was also very enthusiastic about Friday night’s headliner: Kofi Baker’s “The Cream Experience.” I had liked them as well. Kofi, son of Cream drummer Ginger Baker, could give his dad a run for his money and his band mates left no one pining away for Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. With a few exceptions (including a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”) they stuck to Cream and Blind Faith hits; Kofi also warbled a version of “Pressed Rat and Warthog” – a tune that goes well with retsina and which probably doesn’t get covered very often. Though he has a top-flight musical pedigree he’s very accessible and good-natured. His running joke had it that Ginger Baker actually wrote all the Cream’s music, only to have it stolen by Eric Clapton (Kofi’s godfather, Carolyn tells me). He also got off a good joke at Jack Bruce’s expense: “How are a cup of 7-11 coffee and Jack Bruce alike? Both are best with Cream.”
The audience loved the band. But from what I could tell there might have been 1oo listeners, max. And that was huge compared to the next day. To be fair, the stage talent had declined a bit by then, at least early on.
Carolyn had given me an 11:30 slot; the plan was to play tunes from my new collection of instrumentals (free here: www.daveshiflett.com) and gently draw festivarians from their tents to the stage area in time for the opening noon act. A consummate professional, I rehearsed earlier than morning, sitting on the stage and playing for a woman with three children plus a security guy who had been up until five drinking moonshine.
But as show time approached it was hard not to notice that the lovely meadow in front of the stage was nearly empty. Indeed, had I left my chair in the meadow for the stage when 11:30 arrived, I would have taken the entire audience with me. Yes, I was the only person awaiting my performance. I’m accustomed to playing for small houses so this was no worry. But it raised a vital question. How long can this festival last without bringing in more people?
Carolyn doesn’t seem worried. She said she would give the festival 3-5 years to succeed, and believes that as word gets out – especially about its excellent site and stage – larger acts will want to make the trek down Williamsburg Road. One band she hopes will help put Poor Farm on the festival map is Donna the Buffalo. “I’ve tried to get them before,” she says. “I really want to get them here next year.”
Donna would seem a perfect musical match for Poor Farm, and if the band’s loyal followers — AKA ‘The Herd” – showed up, that should make the cash registers sing as well. Other good fits would be Hot Tuna, Tim O’Brien (a West Virginia boy), and Lyle Lovett (who told me last year he was probably going to go independent) plus returning favorites (Nora Jane Struthers, the Steel Wheels, Johnson’s Crossroads, Kofi Baker). The roster could be rounded out with younger rock/roots/blues acts trying to climb the ladder.
Can Carolyn pull it off? She said she is putting in as many as eighty hours a week to make Poor Farm fly. She seems determined to succeed, come hell or high water.
There was no lack of the latter on Saturday afternoon. Just as Nora Jane Struthers was about to go on, a ferocious rain/wind storm struck. Canopy frames were twisted like pipe cleaners. My faithful chair, parked directly across from center stage, blew away, never to be found.
I know a sign from heaven when I see one and decided to vamoose. Just before departure, Carolyn drove up, surveyed the situation, and declared that the chance of rain was down to about ten percent. “I can live with that,” she said. Later, she filled me in via email about the final day:
“On Sunday, the sun came out and so did the families. We had tons of kids and families sitting in chairs with winter clothes on…We had a full-fledged super light show, smoke, strobes, and covers from the greats like Black Sabbath and Rush, a huge wild show ending with a professional fire dancer on the audience side of the stage who whirled her fire-pots to the music and just made a grand finale for the weekend…I left the festival feeling like a huge success, and I can’t wait to do it again next year!”
Here’s hoping Carolyn Stephens can find a way to make Poor Farm grow and prosper. I’d like to return, maybe even find my vagabond chair.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226622012-04-13T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:22-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of 'Hit Lit' -- What Makes Blockbusters Tick
<p>If you want to make the big money in fiction, don't skimp on the friction—especially the sexual, spiritual and political varieties—and go light on the navel-gazing. So counsels James W. Hall in "Hit Lit," a study of what makes best sellers tick.
Mr. Hall, himself no stranger to the best-seller lists as a thriller writer, teaches a college course on 20th-century mega-best sellers. "Hit Lit" offers insights from his own study of these books and from his classroom discussions.
"Hit Lit" focuses on a murderer's row of commercial best sellers from the past couple of decades: Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" (1984), John Grisham's "The Firm" (1991), Robert James Waller's "The Bridges of Madison County" (1992) and Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" (2003). It looks back at earlier sensations, too: Stephen King's "The Dead Zone" (1979), Peter Benchley's "Jaws" (1974), William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist" (1971), Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" (1969), Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" (1966), Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960), Grace Metalious's "Peyton Place" (1956) and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" (1936). These literary cash cows may tell us something about prevailing tastes, and they certainly share many features that wannabe blockbuster writers might keep in mind while going for the gold.
Job one, Mr. Hall writes, is to hook readers quickly, perhaps by having a naked young woman chomped in half by a shark or a man murdered by an albino monk, or by flashing some thigh (and perhaps adjacent real estate). Once hooked, customers must be goaded to keep turning the pages, the quicker the better. If they hesitate, you are lost. "Hit Lit" warns sharply against going introspective. People in blockbuster land don't have navels. "These characters are not self-absorbed or contemplative," Mr. Hall explains. They are "pitted against large forces, not characters in conflict with themselves" (take that, William Faulkner). Also, don't dillydally with needless personal detail. He notes that in "Gone With the Wind," Scarlett O'Hara "is married and becomes a widow in a single sentence at the beginning of Chapter 7."
Mr. Hall and his students found that protagonists with mass-market appeal tend to be mavericks, misfits or loners and that they often come from fractured families and communities. (In real life, aren't these types often deeply self-absorbed?) They are also often in pursuit of the American dream, variously defined, and find themselves acting against "a sweeping backdrop" such as the Cold War ("The Hunt for Red October") or the civil-rights struggle ("To Kill a Mockingbird").
Then there is the sweeping backdrop of humanity's eternal yearning to legally invade someone else's nether regions. "Sex sells," Mr. Hall reminds us, which is why even non-blockbuster readers have heard of "Peyton Place" and "Valley of the Dolls," books that benefited by being published in the pre-Internet era. They offered glimpses of furtive gropings long before it was possible to find every possible sexual permutation in the sanctity of a palm-cradled electronic device.
All the books surveyed, Mr. Hall writes, include at least one central sexual incident. Some are salacious, some melodramatic—Scarlett being carried upstairs for a thorough pillaging—and some criminal, such as the alleged rape at the center of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Many of the episodes shine a light on sexual hypocrisy. "New Englanders were outraged and offended that their folksy cover had been blown and their steamy bedrooms laid bare" in "Peyton Place," Mr. Hall writes. Warming to the subject, he declares that " 'Peyton Place' is America, the polite, mannered façade pulled back to reveal the squirming reality below."
Not to throw cold water on this literary hot flash, but if Americans were, en masse, really so sweaty and squirmy, would they buy a book describing what they already knew? Safer to say it was the novelty of the "Peyton Place" story that made the cash registers sing.
Religion is another hot-button subject in the most popular fiction, we're told. The church ladies in "To Kill a Mockingbird" are a flock of hypocrites, according to Mr. Hall, and they're hardly alone in best-seller land—you won't find an uncritical portrayal of traditional religion in any of these books. "It would seem that the bestselling authors of all time are a collection of freethinkers and agnostics who share a tendency to ridicule religious hypocrisy and aggressively challenge standard orthodoxy."
Or perhaps the authors are protecting their own orthodoxy by ridiculing those outside it. In any event, Mr. Hall informs us that religious works of an affirming sense sell so well that "most bestseller lists shunt them off into a separate category so the mainstream nonreligious books will have some slim chance of survival."
You're not likely to learn much about the Beatitudes in best sellers, but the books are instructive in other ways: Blockbusters almost always include an "abundance of facts and information," Mr. Hall says, by offering peeks inside glamorous or closed-off subcultures. He calls them "secret," but we may call them mysterious or little understood. For example: big-time law offices ("The Firm"), the entertainment world ("Valley of the Dolls"), organized crime ("The Godfather") and Opus Dei, the Catholic organization ("The Da Vinci Code"). Mr. Hall dubs this the "didactic function," which doesn't necessarily mean that the publisher has a fact-checking department burning the midnight oil. While Tom Clancy's detailed descriptions of military technology may be fairly accurate, Dan Brown's premise that Jesus was a baby-daddy is no more factually based than "The Wizard of Oz." Then again, they don't call these books fiction for nothing.
Mr. Hall, who writes with a light, amused touch, doesn't pay much attention to the literary quality of the books in his survey, and he can sound dismissive of writers who vastly outshine the multimillionaire club. "I'd wager there is more pure data on a single page of 'The Hunt for Red October' than in many entire novels by Faulkner or Hemingway," he writes. Here's a counter-wager: There are more moments of pure literary pleasure on a single page of Faulkner or Hemingway than in the entirety of "The Hunt for Red October." Here is a typical passage in the Clancy novel, describing the hero at a tense moment: "Ryan was chain-smoking at his station, and his palms were sweating as he struggled to maintain his composure." Faulkner might rather jump off a bridge than commit such pablum to print.
"Hit Lit" seems to take these books a bit too seriously, as when Mr. Hall contemplates the greater meaning of the opening dining scene in "Jaws," in which the main course has gone for a skinny-dip: "One could ask if the self-sufficient woman who abandons her man in a drunken haze is being punished for the sin of independence." Perhaps the shark ate Quint for the sin of drinking too much brandy.
Faculty-lounge politics pop up here and there in "Hit Lit." In a discussion of the "nuclear family" (a presence in many blockbusters), Mr. Hall dismisses William Bennett's lament over the dissolution of the family as a "a somewhat dire description of what some would say is simply a modernization of the family structure or a set of changes that reflect other transformations in modern culture." As Scarlett O'Hara might say: Pshaw—that professor needs to visit the projects.
“ But he also makes some sensible observations. "These days it's harder to profitably press the hot button of sex because that button has just about been worn out from overuse." And while acknowledging that seven of the books he studied were first novels, he notes that the other authors needed nurturing before hitting pay dirt, an increasingly rare corporate indulgence. "These days, if a writer does not succeed on the first or second try, his or her career is likely to flatline."
Mr. Hall includes some interesting tidbits. Ben Franklin—"lustful Ben," as he calls him—"was one of the first Americans to own a copy of John Cleland's scandalous novel 'Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.' " He quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne's put-down of the "horde of female scribblers" and observes that women make up nearly 80% of fiction readers. Which raises a question. Are male readers kept at bay by design, purposely neglected by publishers? Or were they brainwashed by Opus Dei to avoid fiction? There's a novel in there somewhere.
—Mr. Shiflett is author of a lightly
read novel called "In the Matter
of J. Van Pelt."</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226612012-02-17T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:21-05:00Wall Street Journal Essay 'My Family's Bones' -- original, pre-edited version
<p>The recent filming of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” in Richmond and Petersburg, Va. was a reminder that, despite a few holdouts, local residents have made peace with the Civil War’s outcome. Most greeted the second coming of Lincoln (the film focuses on the late president’s visit to the fallen confederate capital less than two weeks before his assassination) as cause for artistic celebration -- and economic gain. It was also a splashy ending to the often somber Civil War sesquicentennial season.
But there was more involved than Hollywood glitz and greenbacks. Those events also stirred memories of an era that recedes ever further into the past, a time not only of Lincoln, Grant, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, but of people little noted, if not anonymous, yet who are in their own way still influential.
I have been thinking lately about one such person. Her name was Marcella Dunn. Her lifetime achievements were, at best, humble. They are certainly little known. So far as I know, this story is the only published record of her existence, though at one time she was listed in various documents – not as a person, but as property.
My family owned Marcella Dunn.
She was alive the day Lincoln came to Richmond – living on the plantation in Buckingham County, Virginia that had passed down through my mother’s side since the 1700s. A slave celebrity of sorts had also lived in the county -- Betsy Hemmings, niece of Sally Hemmings (and by some accounts one of Thomas Jefferson’s children) – who is buried in an attractive grave beside her master, John Wayles Eppes, Jefferson’s son-in-law, at the Millbrook Plantation.
Marcella’s grave, like her life, is all but invisible. It is located on a lightly sloping hillside alongside several dozen slave graves in a segregated section of the family cemetery. Hers is one of perhaps two slave gravestones that include the deceased’s name. The others are marked by bare fieldstones; those resting below are as anonymous in death as they were in life. Marcella’s daughter, Ella, lies among them.
I had seen Marcella’s gravestone during family funerals when I was growing up – you passed the slave graves on the way to the white section of the cemetery, some of which was surrounded by a stone fence. There are three confederate soldiers buried there, including one who fought at Gettysburg. The slave graves were in open land where the cattle grazed; I remember seeing a cowpie on Marcella’s grave during one visit.
But I knew little about her. Relatives would sometimes tell stories about how Marcella helped raise my great-grandmother and grandmother – and my great uncle, Malcolm, a larger than life man whose temperament sometimes seemed straight out of the antebellum era. Then again, to him those days, and ways, were hardly distant. He had the sword of our relative who fought at Gettysburg, and in his youth was cared for by a woman who had been a slave.
In 2000 I took my youngest son (who grew up to be Sarge, whose military deployment was discussed in these pages last July) to Buckingham to talk with Malcolm, then 85. I wanted to record his memories of Marcella and other stories from his life, if not for a future book (a fictionalized version of Malcolm is at the center of my recently published novel “In The Matter of J. Van Pelt”) then at least to make sure they did not disappear with him into his grave. He was the last source of information about Marcella: family records had been destroyed in a fire, as had official records when the county courthouse burned in 1869. Malcolm died two years later, in a world far different than the one he was born into -- a world changed, to some degree I believe, by Marcella.
He called her “A Marcella” – the A standing for Aunt. “I can still see A Marcella walking across the creek land,” Malcolm said, staring off a bit as we sat around the kitchen table. He described her as “tall and skinny” with a light complexion and a deep voice. “A Marcella had a lot to do with raising my mother,” he said, and she also guided him and his siblings in the paths of righteousness. He recalled her taking a stick to a brother, and she gave Malcolm some tongue lashings “like she was my own mother.”
She was born on the plantation in 1818 and in slave times would have been known as an “indoor slave” – someone who worked in the kitchen and tended to the family. “She was part social worker, part domestic help. If somebody got sick they’d send for Marcella.”
She was “loved by everybody. She smiled all the time.”
I asked if she ever talked about slavery. “She used to tell old stories she’d heard by word of mouth that her ancestors were on the first shipload of slaves to Virginia,” Malcolm said. Then he said something jarring: “A Marcella said slavery did black people more good than anything else.”
It was not surprising Malcolm might hold such a view. But could Marcella have really believed such a thing, or was she simply saying what she thought the white folk wanted to hear? There’s no way of knowing, of course, though the possibility she might have is a grim reminder she was born into a world whose best and brightest proclaimed black inferiority as universal objective truth. Lest we forget, a few examples:
"Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race,” said one widely published description of blacks; “idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself." So stated the 1797 Encyclopedia Britannica
In the same spirit philosopher David Hume sneered that a Jamaican black who had gained a reputation for intelligence was "admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly." Even John Locke, champion of the "inalienable rights of man," wrote a provision for slavery in his draft of the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina -- and invested in the Royal Africa Company, which held the British monopoly of the African slave trade.
Transcending such pervasive and grinding bias would require nearly superhuman strength, and there are other, more brutal, reminders of subservient status. While Malcolm insisted whites treated their slaves well, history tells another story, one that also strikes close to home. My family tree includes the names Stevens, Alvis, Coleman, and Cabell -- surnames found in advertisements for runaway slaves from Buckingham and nearby areas.
John Stevens, advertising in the Virginia Argus (Jan. 5, 1803), offered $20 for a slave named Toney, who is described as “about thirty years of age, has scars on his back [not for his good behavior] and one very noted scar on his breast as large as a man's finger.” He had also “been branded on both jaws.” Joseph Cabell, in the Virginia Gazette (Sept. 6, 1799) offered $40 for two slaves named Billy and Judy, a husband and wife who had fled together. In November 1795, John Alloway Strange offered ten pounds for Tom, “about 25 or 26 years old, 5 feet 4 or 5 inches high, has a scar on his head, and a large one on one of his legs, and one on each wrist, occasioned by handcuffs: his back much scarred by whipping.”
I did not ask, though wish I had, if Marcella ever spoke about being beaten, or being intimidated by the Klan, whose local branch included two relatives. Malcolm said he had never seen a lynching but added there was a local “lynching tree” that a “wood company” had cut down a few years prior to our interview. Strange to think, but somewhere that tree may exist in reinvented status as a bed or kitchen table.
Malcolm filled in a few other details of Marcella’s life. She had one child he knew of and likely several grandchildren, though he didn’t know the names of any descendents. The fact that she was light-skinned suggested mixed ancestry. I asked if family slaves had borne children by their masters. “I guess they did,” he said, estimating I had “probably plenty“ of unknown kin, some of whom might be buried near Marcella.
Marcella died a very old woman, in 1927. Her funeral was attended by about 100 people -- “more blacks than whites” with a black and white preacher. “There were buggies and horses under the trees,” Malcolm recalled. “It was a pretty day.” Her gravestone, pictured nearby, includes her name and dates on one side and on the back an inscription stating she had been willed with 20 other slaves to her final master. Near her grave is the only other slave marker I found with an inscription: “Betty Stevens could only read the Bible.”
While you can’t know much about a person from this distance, when I think of Marcella I think of a dignified woman forced to play a difficult hand. She came to know freedom, of sorts at least, and she clearly knew love. She was admired and valued in her community and made her part of the world a better place. Those are worthy accomplishments for anyone, and considering her situation, perhaps great ones.
Yet it is hard not to wonder if her omnipresent smile was a sign of true happiness, a survival technique, or a combination of those and other factors. She was a firm Baptist, Malcolm said, so perhaps her smile also represented a triumph of forgiveness. I like to think Marcella’s smile was the reflection of a nature more powerful than the forces arrayed against her. That would, in my mind, make her a superior person. One also wonders how many Marcellas there were among the 12 generations of American slaves, their contributions unsung but incalculable.
It’s also hard not to also think about the anonymous souls buried alongside her. Who were they? Were they all born on this land? Did some escape the plantation, only to be dragged back? What were their dreams? Did they go through life believing they were inferior, if not sub-human? While Marcella and daughter Ella are said to lie side-by-side, the heart-rending words of Sojourner Truth can haunt as you walk among the fieldstones: "Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me -- and aren't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well -- and ar'n't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen ‘em mos' all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard -- and ar'n't I a woman?"
If David Hume ever spoke words that powerful and eloquent, they slipped my attention.
None are responsible for the sins of their fathers, but there is a connection between generations, for good and bad, sometimes bestowing wealth and privilege, sometimes hardship and sorrow, and many things in between. Time definitely has a way of shuffling the deck. Just as those anonymous bones belonged to people once owned by my family, they now own part of me.
Malcolm’s world was shuffled too, and he seemed to have changed as well, if only a little, perhaps due to Marcella’s influence.
A devout Dixiecrat, Malcolm for many years hosted an annual picnic – featuring fried chitterlings – that attracted upwards of 400 people, including many state politicians. This started out as an all-white event but eventually there were new faces at the table.
“When Doug Wilder was elected they all said I had to have him,” Malcolm recalled near interview’s end, adding that he invited Wilder but wouldn’t allow Virginia’s first African-American governor to sit at his hallowed dining room table. Wilder seems not to held this against him. One day, after he had left office “he stopped in,” Malcolm recalled. “Just came by to say hello.”
I asked what he thought of Wilder.
“He was alright.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226602012-02-03T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:21-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of "Scapegoat"
<p>Truly honorable people—in the wake of some monumental botch—fall on their swords. Most of us, however, would prefer that someone else be chosen to take the hit.
In "Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People," British writer Charlie Campbell traces the habit of buck passing back to the Garden of Eden, where Eve, an apparently gullible person with far too much time on her hands, blamed a talking snake for persuading her to pick the forbidden fruit, thus unleashing our continuing pageant of sorrows.
Whatever our other shortcomings, humans have a profound talent for designating fall guys for problems and disasters that we ourselves are responsible for or that we simply do not understand. As Mr. Campbell observes in this brief and entertaining book, there might not always be a cure for what ails humanity, "but there's always a culprit."
Mr. Campbell traces the word "scapegoat" to William Tyndale's 1530 English-language translation of the Bible. Tyndale used the word to describe a ritual found in Leviticus in which two goats representing Israel's sins were sacrificed to appease the celestial authorities. The translator himself shared a similar fate in Henry VIII's England. He was eventually condemned as a heretic and strangled—then burned at the stake for good measure.
Scapegoating and religion have kept close company, according to Mr. Campbell, a former editor at the Literary Review.
Christianity's central figure can be viewed as a scapegoat, taking on humanity's sin and in the process earning a trip to Golgotha. Early believers were blamed for various disasters and accused of hideous behavior, including incest, cannibalism and child murder—accusations, Mr. Campbell adds, that Christians would later level against their own adversaries. "Ultimately our imagination is relatively limited when it comes to wickedness," Mr. Campbell writes, "and the authorities trot out the same list of accusations towards minorities they wish to demonize."
Jews, perhaps the eternal scapegoats, catch it in the neck even from people they're trying to help. When Crusaders set out in 1096 to retake the Holy Land, Mr. Campbell says, they stopped off in the Rhine Valley and slaughtered Jews—"many of whom had lent the money the Crusaders needed to set out on this religious quest in the first place."
The list of wrongdoing that Jews have been blamed for is quite expansive, Mr. Campbell reminds us, including poisoned wells and crops, missing children and the Black Death, though Pope Clement VI issued a bull relieving them of responsibility for the last horror. Instead, he chalked it up to "a misalignment of the planets," as Mr. Campbell explains, "which is as close as the Church will ever get to saying that it, like the rest of us, just doesn't know."
Yet there has been little lack of certitude in history's scapegoating efforts, some of which may strike readers as laughable despite the horrendous results. Fifteenth-century Dutch scholar Johann Wyler, a witch expert, calculated that there were 7,405,926 witches, "divided into 72 battalions, each led by a prince or a captain." Another estimate put the number at 1.8 million. While most witches apparently escaped detection, some 50,000 were killed.
Mr. Campbell's descriptions of executions are suitably grim, though he also takes a look on the bright side. While the Middle Ages were especially rough times for the accused, they were plush times for a certain type of entrepreneur. Witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins made a killing in the trade in the mid-1600s, earning 20 shillings per conviction (a month's wages for a laborer). On one red-letter day he sent 19 witches to their deaths. Impoverished towns might spend a big portion of their budgets on witch extermination. This was not an exact science. The famous "swimming" test bound witches and lowered them in water. If they floated, they were guilty. If they drowned, they were innocent. (Sorry—we meant well!)
Mr. Campbell trots out other popular scapegoats—communists, financiers, the devil in his various guises and even inanimate objects, including a bell that innocently tolled away in the Russian town of Uglich until a prince was assassinated there in 1591, after which it was shipped off to Siberia, a cursed object, to languish for several centuries.
Yet Mr. Campbell's strangest examples feature animals. He tells the story of a storm that ravaged the Hebridean island of St. Kilda in 1840. A Great Auk, rare in those parts, was seen walking on the beach; it was captured and put on trial for instigating the fatal storm. The Auk, already a flightless bird, was found guilty and stoned to death. In a similarly vengeful spirit, a Parisian cow was executed in 1546 for having amorous relations with a man, though common sense indicates that the man was likely the aggressor. In a nod to fairness, both were hanged, then burned.
Mixing metaphors, insects have endured a similar scrutiny as scapegoats. Mosquitoes, flies and ravenous weevils have been threatened with excommunication by the church. A killing frost would usually solve the problem. But in southern France, the church put the local weevils on trial for a crop blight. The trial went on for eight months, during which time the weevils were granted a plot of land for sanctuary.
While we might like to believe that humanity has outgrown its addiction to scapegoating, Mr. Campbell reminds us otherwise. Economic downturns, he writes, "are extraordinarily complex and hard to fathom, yet that does not deter the blamemongers." Bankers take much of the blame because "they are regarded by the public as being overpaid." They may certainly be blamed for a revived interest in urban camping.
When bankers won't do, creative minds come up with even more exotic malefactors. Author and lecturer David Icke, a former British soccer player and Green Party spokesman, teaches that "the world is run by a secret cabal of giant shape-shifting extraterrestrial lizards known as the Babylon Brotherhood." This group, he says, includes both President Bushes and troubadours Kris Kristofferson and Boxcar Willie. There is apparently a good market for this viewpoint: Mr. Icke has written 18 books, and his website reportedly gets 600,000 hits per week.
Athletes sometimes play the role of the scapegoat, especially if they blow a scoring opportunity that would have clenched the game, as Baltimore Ravens kicker Billy Cundiff did in his team's recent loss in the AFC championship. Mr. Cundiff, who partially blamed a scoreboard error for making him rush the kick, might argue that losing, like winning, is a team effort. Soccer star Andrés Escobar, blamed for scoring a goal against his own team in the 1994 World Cup game, might argue the same, if he had not been murdered in connection with his gaffe.
Finally, there are politicians, who get blamed for a lot, sometimes wrongly. But they may also be the world's pre-eminent blame shifters—demonizing rival politicians with eternal vigilance. Mr. Campbell does acknowledge exceptions to prominent leaders dodging blame. He cites Robert E. Lee's post-Gettysburg mea culpa: "All of this has been my fault. I asked more of my men than should have been asked of them." Then again, the architect of Pickett's Charge had cause for humility.
Mr. Campbell cannot be accused of writing a ringing endorsement of our species. But he has made it clear that many of us operate on a revised version of the Golden Rule: Do unto others what should probably be done unto you.
—Mr. Shiflett is the author of the recently published novel "In the Matter of J. Van Pelt."</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226592011-12-29T19:00:00-05:002021-04-23T01:25:10-04:00Profile: Tara Nevins of Donna the Buffalo
<p>Here's a profile of Tara Nevins I did for my ongoing book: Alive Without Permission.
Tara Nevins is best known for fronting Donna The Buffalo, the enduring (20 plus years) rock/jam/festival band based in Trumansburg, New York. Years pass, band members come and go, but Tara (and co-founder Jeb Puryear) keep Donna hoppin’ and constantly touring.
But in her heart of hearts, Tara Nevins is an old-time fiddler. Her most vivid musical experiences are tied to the traditional music of the North Carolina hills, where she sought out and learned the tunes that still excite her and deeply influence her work with Donna and as a solo artist.
I met Tara last spring at Merlefest. She’s slender and good-looking, with a warm bearing. While some professional musicians seem bored with their routines Tara maintains a passion for music, especially traditional forms, including cajun, zydeco, and old time. She’s something of an old time apostle, and when I told her I was interested in learning more about the music she suggested I attend the Mt. Airy Fiddler’s Convention in Mt. Airy, North Carolina (the subject of an earlier post – scroll down, you’ll find it).
“Mt. Airy has been and still is my Mecca,” she told me. She books no shows during the week of the festival, and sure enough this year she rolled into the festival grounds in Donna The Buffalo’s big purple tour bus, which has an interesting history all its own: among its previous owners are Toby Keith and Jim and Tammy Bakker’s PTL Club.
The sun was on full broil that May weekend and it felt like you could roast potatoes inside the bus, so after a brief talk we stepped outside where Tara pointed out several friends and former band mates who were singing country standards. One old pal is Joe Thrift, well known to old time practitioners for his fiddle tune “Pale Face.” Joe, a highly respected violin maker, once played keyboards for Donna. He was also the band’s bus driver, he told me, and considered himself very good at it. I hope to interview him for this project a bit further on.
The purple bus was on Tara’s mind when I caught up with her a few weeks ago to talk about her early days as a musician, her love of old time, and whatever else came to mind. Donna the Buffalo had played a gig in Annapolis, Maryland the night before and soon after departing for home the bus began shaking violently. The problem turned out to be bad rims. “We all got on our computers and found a 24-hour roadside service,” she said. Several hours and four hundred dollars later they proceeded toward Trumansburg. “I got to bed at six-thirty this morning.” I was reminded of something Jorma Kaukonen wrote a few years back (roughly paraphrased here): Being a professional musician means long hours of driving interspersed with brief periods of actually playing music.
Donna usually does around 100 shows a year, Tara says, but this year they’re doing far more. “We have debt to pay.” She said touring is getting a bit harder as time goes on. “I don’t like being out of my routine. I don’t always get to eat as well as I’d like, or exercise as much. I really like to get in an hour of walking each day, and that can be hard to do when you’re on the road.” The band is currently working on a new disc, and she’s also trying to get out more to promote her latest solo album, “Wood and Stone.” Though she sounded somewhat tired she was also upbeat. She clearly loves the path she has chosen.
I asked her how old she was when she knew she would spend her life making music. “I never consciously thought that,” she says. There was no decision one day to forego everything else in favor of the musical life. But many years were spent developing the chops, and worldview, that made this life possible.
Tara grew up in Orangeburg, New York, not far from New York City. She got her first violin at age 5 and took up the guitar at 14, learning the songs of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Carol King. She wrote her first song at 17 – “it was a silly little song called ‘We’re On Our Way To A New World Now.’ The theme was kinda ‘the younger generation is alive and happening. We know what it’s all about.’ It did foreshadow the uplifting, worldly message that’s in a lot of Donna the Buffalo’s music.”
She played violin in the high school orchestra, and during that time discovered that not all the old masters played classical music. “When I heard the ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ album, it turned my head. I thought ‘That’s what I want to do.’” Her classical violin studies took her to the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, but she did not solely concentrate on the classical curriculum.
“My roommate played in a band called the St. Regis River Valley String Band,” Tara says. “They played old time and I fell in love with it in a minute.” The band liked her as well, and eventually added her as a member. “Before I knew it, playing old time was what I was doing with my life.” While she had earned a teaching degree, “I had no interest in teaching music.”
Instead, she wanted to learn as much about old time as possible. After college, she “dove in,” and no place was more important in her development than the Mt. Airy festival. “We also went to Galax and Brandywine, but Mt. Airy was my favorite. It was small and there were lots of local players to learn from, and some of the greatest players came from that area, including Tommy Jarrell, Benton Flippen, and Fred Cockerham.”
There was, she adds, something of a culture clash. “This was a very southern festival, and we were outsiders. We were from the North, the West Coast, the Midwest, and we were alternative minded. We were called ‘The Revivalists’ because we were the younger generation that was reviving this music. At first, the local people looked at us sort of crossways. I think we amused them. But they knew we respected their culture and that we had come to learn their music. And come Sunday morning when it was time to leave, we left the place spotless. Eventually we were accepted, appreciated and loved.”
One sign of that acceptance was that the outsiders began winning contests. “We started an all-girl band called The Heartbeats and one year won the best up and coming band.” The Heartbeats “were and are an extremely significant band in my life. We are a powerful old time band that plays hard driving fiddle tunes and songs that have a bit of pop sensibility.” Tara also won the fiddle contest. “Being accepted at that level was a very powerful experience,” Tara says , though perhaps her most memorable musical experience followed an on-stage performance of the classic tune “Sally Anne.”
“I played the tune in the fiddle contest and got off the stage. I was standing there and Riley Baugus walked up to me and said there was someone who wanted to meet me. I was a little nervous, but I went with him. So he takes me to a campsite, and there’s Dix Freeman, who played banjo with Tommy Jarrell for years. He had heard me playing ‘Sally Anne’ and said ‘You sound so much like Tommy.’ Well, I had learned the tune from a Tommy Jarrell recording. He asked me to play it again. For me, being face-to-face with Dix was mind blowing. He was very nice and invited me to his house and showed me around. There was a little cabin there where they had square dances. He also had Tommy Jarrell’s moonshine jug. “
For Tara, these were life-shaping events. “These times were like Christmas when you’re a kid. They still are very powerful for me, and I know for a lot of other musicians.” Donna the Buffalo, she adds, has its roots in old time. “Originally, all the people in the band were old time musicians. Jeb picked up the electric guitar and I got an electric violin from my dad. We added drums and morphed into an electric band, but the old time influence is definitely there.”
I asked Tara about songwriting. She is a solitary woman in that regard. While she and Jeb Puryear write all Donna’s original material, and have been doing so for 22 years, “we haven’t written a song together.” She hasn’t co-written with anyone, she adds, though she does perform with other writers, including country hit maker Jim Lauderdale, who appeared on her recent solo album as a harmony singer.
Her new solo disc, “Wood And Stone” (Sugar Hill Records), has stellar contributors, including drummer Levon Helm and producer Larry Campbell, and has kept her in pretty good company, appearing on the Americana charts with recordings from Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and Gillian Welch. The disc is a deeply personal reflection on family life, including the breakup of her longtime marriage. Yet it is not, she says, “maudlin or so private that it’s embarrassing. This is not a woe is me record” or, as she has said elsewhere, a musical version of a “chick flick.” It is also something of a departure from her first solo record, “Mule To Ride,” which came out on Sugar Hill in 1999 and showcased Tara’s fiddling. That disc, which also charted, featured several high profile guest artists, including Ralph Stanley and Mike Seeger.
Her only woe, she says, is that she hasn’t gotten out to play the tunes as much as she’d like due to commitments with Donna the Buffalo.
“I’m thinking I’d like to put together a little band and do more gigs in the spring.” Despite over 20 years of public performances, including gigs before large audiences, she is still uncomfortable unaccompanied. “I never have just played solo, except maybe at a songwriter workshop.” When she’s with a smaller band, she adds, she enjoys talking with the audience, which she doesn’t do much of when playing with Donna. “It’s nice having that sort of communication.”
Near conversation’s end she offered advice for younger musicians. They should listen to the classical masters – Bach, Beethoven et al. – but also to the best of other traditions, whether Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, the Balfa Brothers, Thomas Mapfumo, The Frank Family, plus rock and pop deities including the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Marley. And if old time turns their head, as it turned Tara’s, she suggests Jarrell, Flippen, the Smoky Valley Boys and the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers, for starters.
And, of course, a yearly visit to Mt. Airy. She’ll be the fiddle babe in the big purple bus.
Talking with Tara reminded me of my trip to Mt. Airy and the other great old time players I’d heard there, including Mark Olitsky. Mark’s clawhammer banjo had turned my head when I first heard it a couple of years ago at Clifftop. We eventually struck up a friendship, played some tunes together, and shared campsites at a few festivals. After eating some of my highly carnivorous cooking, Mark went vegan.
So, next time out, a conversation with Mark (if I can track him down). For now, a short break for Christmas. And for those who have wondered about my son Branch (scroll down a bit and you’ll find a piece I did on his deployment to Iraq) — he’s back home. And he’s looking for an upright bass. He’d probably like to find Tommy Jarrell’s moonshine jug as well. Lord help us every one.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226582011-11-18T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:20-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of Several Humor Books -- Unedited Version
<p>We could all use a good laugh these days, unless you happen to be amused by financial peril, sanctimonious street urchins, unsolicited tumors, children who have decided to move back home, and other of life’s non-stop calamities.
The book industry has responded with a barrage of works promising to bring a smile, or least a smirk, to our weary faces. Some of the material is new, some slightly recycled, some clunky. None of it is free.
In the fresh jokes department, comic Demetri Martin’s “This Is A Book” has a contemporary air, as befitting a guy who’s appeared on Conan, the Daily Show and his own slot on Comedy Central. His book includes essays, drawings, short stories and plenty of reminders that we live in an age when some people – make that lots of people – believe everything they think or do should be posted.
“Nearly ½ of all people in the United States are torsos,” Mr. Martin observes in a chapter entitled “Statistics,” along with “Men are 35 times more likely than women to be turned on by looking at a wedgie.” In a chapter about updating flags his new flag of the south features a man in a suit holding a Bible and a waffle. “He looks proud and is standing inside a trailer park.”
This stuff might be a lot funnier with a chaser of nitrous oxide, yet there are plenty of smiles in David McRaney’s “You Are Not So Smart,” which argues that humans are experts at self-delusion and in drawing large lessons from abnormal behavior, some of it not so funny at all. He cites hysterical responses to the Columbine school shootings: “A typical schoolkid is three times more likely to be struck by lightning than to be shot by a classmate,” he writes, “yet schools continue to guard against it as if it could happen at any second.” Keep that in mind the next time your local school officials start chirping about how they’re teaching “critical thinking skills.” A chuckle may ensue.
In a sexier vein, Merrill Markoe’s “Cool, Calm and Contentious” is a wry look at life from a woman who loves dogs but is a bit warier of men, as we see in her account of surrendering her virginity to a loutish hack artist who treated indifferently and failed to make the earth move despite being given several opportunities. His name is Brad, if anyone’s interested.
Some readers might find themselves saying “are you sure you want us to know all this?” yet may be amused by her explanation of why teenagers are “boneheads” about sexting, hooking up and other sexual endeavors: The frontal lobes, which allow us “to comprehend the idea of actions having consequences, aren’t finished being wired for functioning until your late twenties.” Hmmmm. The fact that many of us comprehended the likely consequences of our actions all too well is why we learned the art of lying at a very early age. That’s no joke.
There are lots of world-class laughs in Andy Borowitz’s “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” which includes the work of Mark Twain, S.J. Pereleman, Jean Shepherd, Hunter S. Thompson, Nora Ephron, Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken, Wanda Sykes, Dave Barry and the Onion. Essays on politics are especially timely: Twain writes as a man disclosing his sins prior to running for president: he not only “treed a rheumatic grandfather of mine in the winter of 1850” but went AWOL during Gettysburg. “I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it.” Mencken, meantime, proposes that “unsuccessful candidates for the presidency be quietly hanged, as a matter of public sanitation and decorum” and on further reflection concludes ex-presidents be accorded the same treatment. At heart, maybe Mencken was a premature tea-bagger.
P.J. O’Rourke, now an elder in the temple of mirth and the only self-proclaimed Republican in this bunch, still has his teeth about him in “Holidays in Heck,” a collection of re-written magazine articles from Hong Kong, China, Kyrgyzstan and other exotic locales. Mr. O’Rourke, who has added “cancer survivor” to his resume, takes a scalpel to a modern art display at the Venice Biennale, eviscerating a piece by Italy’s Bruna Esposito, who “scattered onion skins on marble floor tiles and, remarkably, did not title it ‘Get the Broom.’” Looking on the brighter side, Mr. O’Rourke theorizes that many dictators, including Hitler, were frustrated artists, so putting their dreck on display might have kept them out of bigger trouble. That might make a novel fund-raising line: We’re not hanging lousy pictures, we’re aborting world wars. Maybe worth a try.
Calvin Trillin, another elder, sounds a bit cranky in his take on health food in “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin,” a rich compendium of 40 year’s worth of his work. “Am I the only one worried about how unhealthy the people who work in health food stores look?” he asks before smirking at “bee waste” and “stump paste” and wondering why legislation hasn’t been passed that protects consumers from “being reminded constantly of the last days of Howard Hughes.” Give it time, sir.
All told, some worthy additions to the humor vault. Other holiday gift suggestions: Juvenal, whose first- and second-century satires of gluttonous bluebloods keeling over on the way to the baths, and incestuous villainy (“every embryo lump was the living spit of uncle”) could have been written last week (though getting them published might be another matter). There’s also Paul Tabori’s “The Natural Science of Stupidity,” which includes a life insurance policy of sorts from the 16th century: Soldiers are instructed to sew moss taken from the skull of an executed man into their clothing. “As long as you wear the jerkin, you are safe from ball, cut and thrust.” Ah, the days before class action lawsuits.
Some of the best humor isn’t found in books, of course. The funniest line I’ve seen in years is on a funeral urn crafted by artist/songstress Nancy Josephson: “Does this urn make my ashes look big?”
A joke to die for, almost.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226572011-11-09T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:19-05:00Review of 'Where Soldiers Come From' on PBS
<p>It’s been a while between postings – some unexpected writing assignments came up, and there was also a week in San Francisco. I’m still planning on getting to Ashville, North Carolina ASAP to talk to musicians, recording magnates and other purveyors of roots music, but until then here’s a heads-up on a film about another subject this blog has taken up, military deployment.
“Where Soldiers Come From,” a new film about deployment and its consequences, airs Nov. 10 at 9 p.m. on PBS. It will stream Nov. 11-Dec. 11 at http://www.pbs.org/pov/wheresoldierscomefrom. Readers who enjoyed my Wall Street Journal piece, “While My Son Serves” (scroll down a bit; you’ll find it) will likely find this show worthy of your time.
It follows the deployment of a National Guard unit from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Afghanistan and back home again. The project was four years in the making and is very thorough. Those with family members who have deployed will see a lot of their own experiences here, while those who haven’t will get a clear-eyed view of how deployment affects families.
Director Heather Courtney, who is from the same hometown (Hancock) as several of the soldiers, says the film “is about the people who fight our wars and the communities and families they come from. Many Americans, whatever their politics or feelings about war, are very far removed from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars because they don't know anyone personally who has served in them as a soldier. I hope that my film will help viewers get to know these young men and their families, feel compassion for them and see a bit of themselves in the people on the screen.”
The film is entirely respectful of the soldiers and their families, though no one will mistake this for a military recruiting film – or an anti-war film either. For my money, it’s a straight-ahead, non-dramatic look at a group of kids – ranging from late teens to early 20s – and their families and friends as they go through a deployment.
The soldiers signed up during hard times; the military gave them work, a $20,000 signing bonus, a promise of an underwritten education and, for some, a purpose in life. Plus, they were young and looking for adventure. They found plenty of that, though we are eventually reminded that adventure can wear you down after awhile, and definitely change your perspective.
Courtney takes us through the early days of training, wondering if they’ll go overseas, and the fateful day the deployment orders come through. Scenes from a farewell party will be familiar to many families: plenty of booze and stiff upper lips. Then they’re off.
The soldiers are fairly carefree, bantering blithely as they go about their job: detonating Improvised Explosive Devices along Afghan roadways. “I don’t want to kill anyone,” says one soldier. His pals chirp in on other subjects. “Have you had sex yet?” says one. “I’m a lover not a fighter,” says another. Many of the conversations in the film, one should add, are undertaken in what my son calls the “incredible mosaic of obscenity.”
Then – Boom! – a bomb goes off and things get very serious very quickly. If you’ve never seen film of an IED detonating, there are plenty here. Some result in wounds, though Courtney spares us the gore.
Courtney also keeps the families in focusing, reminding viewers that when one family member is deployed, the entire family is deployed. Parents will definitely associate with a father who tells of fearing that “knock on the door” from a Pentagon representative bearing bad news. A girlfriend says there’s “lots of depression. Life is very different.” We see families talking via Skype, conversations that are deeply heartfelt but sometimes awkward; a combination of joy, relief, and trying to come up with small talk.
Back in Afghanistan, the stress begins taking its toll.
In their barracks, soldiers talk about having a hard time sleeping. One develops ulcers and adult asthma. A shift in attitude appears universal.
“I hate everybody here,” one soldier says. “I’m a racist American now because of this war.” Other soldiers have become somewhat disillusioned. The people of Afghanistan, one says, are “stricken with a burden that seems unfixable. What is the point in all this? Who am I fighting this war for?” There is talk of suffering “too many concussions” from being “blown up too many times.”
Yet there is also a high level of compassion, even for their adversaries. One soldier sympathizes with the people who are trying to blow him up, suggesting that if he were a native he might be doing the same thing. After a cache of explosives is found near a home, concerns are raised about what will happen to the family now that the man of the house is being arrested and taken away. One soldier asks what anyone would do if a Taliban insurgent ordered them to shoot at American convoys and hide explosives -- or see their children killed. As for the children, they “are unbelievable. They never stop smiling.”
Finally, it’s time to come home. “It’s just like being pregnant,” says one mother. “It’s on you mind every day until they get back.” When they do, everyone realizes these aren’t the same boys they had known. It can be very difficult getting back into the swing of civilian life – finding a job, restarting relationship – especially when some soldiers are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder or a brain injury. One lapses into fits of extreme anger. The hidden toll of war, we are reminded, can last far longer than the deployment itself.
This is a film worth watching, for military and non-military families alike. Many thanks to Cathy Fisher of POV for sending it along. On a personal note, our family appreciates the concerns and prayers sent aloft on behalf of “Sarge,” whom we expect to reappear in Virginia sometime in December or January. And here at Veteran’s Day, we are especially thankful for the service and safe return of soldiers we know who went overseas, including Ben, Josh, Ralph, Mike, Smitty and Chip. We are proud to call you our friends.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226562011-07-24T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:19-05:00Washington Post review: 'The Three of Us' By George Jones (George And Tammy's Daughter)
<p>Georgette Jones: Standin’ by mom and dad
By Dave Shiflett, Published: July 22
The children of icons seldom achieve at the level of their luminous parents, which is certainly true of Georgette Jones, daughter of country music deities Tammy Wynette and George Jones. That is, for the most part, a good thing for Georgette, as we learn in “The Three of Us,” her memoir of growing up in that deeply fractured household.
She was never her father’s equal as a boozer — few reach those heights — and hasn’t matched her mother’s level of domestic drama (romance with Burt Reynolds, a long string of sometimes malignant marriages and chronic pill-popping). Then there’s music. George Jones recorded some of country music’s greatest songs, including “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and “She Thinks I Still Care,” while Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” is one of country’s best-known anthems.
While Georgette sang a bit with her parents as a child, and later as a backup singer for her mother, she made her living as a nurse before inching back into the family trade. She recognizes that she will never reach her parent’s level of stardom, which, it seems, would suit George and Tammy (RIP) quite well. “In a nutshell,” she writes, “my mom never trusted stardom, and my dad never liked it.”
She provides plenty of run-up to her birth in 1970, including a reminder that, while her parents’ marriage may not have been made in heaven, it was a Nashville dream. “When my mom married my dad, she was marrying her hero,” she writes.
Both came from rural backgrounds, though George’s was more desperate. “Dad had to quit school at a young age to help out his family,” she writes. “No stability and no safety, just poverty and uncertainty.” Music was his way out.
As it was for Virginia Wynette Pugh (Tammy’s real name), a single mother of three when she moved to Nashville in 1966, living in a motel and, in an old Nashville story, rejected by almost everyone on Music Row. Her fortunes changed when she slipped into the office of producer Billy Sherrill and told him, “You are my last hope.” Sherrill liked her voice but not her name and suggested she call herself Tammy — after the title character in the movie “Tammy and the Bachelor.” She soon met Jones at a recording session. She cottoned to “The Possum,” and he to her. They married in 1969.
Whatever marital bliss there might have been was short-lived. By 1972 George and Tammy’s stormy weather was the talk of the tabloids and resonated in their duet “We’re Gonna Hold On,” which, Georgette writes, was “appropriate given their sometimes on-the-rocks marital status.” When they were asked during a television show what would keep their marriage together, a classic line was born: “They agreed it would only work if Dad quit nippin’ and Mom quit naggin.’ ” Neither of which appears to have come to pass. The couple divorced in 1975, and George, for the most part, dropped out of his daughter’s life.
Georgette’s memoir is not an exercise in whining or score settling. Readers looking for yet more stories about George’s legendary guzzling will be disappointed; Georgette says it was largely hidden from her. When he worked the bar and club circuit, she adds, drinking became “a weapon against his introverted nature.”
As for her mom, her major problem involved that other world-class demon: men. Tammy stood by five men, with the last two marriages especially grim. Georgette seems to hold a special, though apparently deserved, animosity for the fifth and final husband, the late George Richey, a songwriter and producer Tammy married in 1978 while “heavily sedated with Demerol.” He was verbally and physically abusive, she writes, and appears to have been a world-class swindler as well.
Georgette, to be sure, didn’t live the convent life, marrying a couple of times and experiencing her own bout of substance abuse, which she backed away from. She later survived cancer and, of greater interest to most readers, her mother’s somewhat mysterious and gruesome death.
The curtain fell in 1998, following years of painkiller addiction partly resulting from multiple operations on abdominal maladies. Tammy apparently lay dead on a sofa several hours before anyone noticed she had stopped breathing. That left her body bloated and her face “cracked,” Georgette recalls. “Mom was dead. Not just dead, but horribly and disfiguringly dead.”
Tammy’s death helped Georgette reestablish her relationship with her father, who had ignored her for long stretches, including begging off when she asked him to walk her down the aisle. Her desire to reconnect, and forgive and forget, is her most engaging and touching characteristic.
All told, the memoir is remarkably upbeat. It also reminds us that Nashville, which operates under the family-values banner, should probably trade that one in for the skull and crossbones.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226552011-07-08T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:19-05:00Wall Street Journal Review: Cabin Fever and Back to the Land
<p>The desire to escape the rat race, till the land, raise your own chickens, listen to the whippoorwills and otherwise escape the grind of city life has launched countless daydreams, many books and at least one highly annoying TV show: "Green Acres."
Two new books—one personal, the other a broad history of "back to the land" enthusiasm—may touch a chord in a desperate urban-dweller's heart, but they may also show, if sometimes inadvertently, that Mother Earth's bosom is not always welcoming to mere humans.
Tom Montgomery Fate, whose "Cabin Fever" falls into the category of "nature writing," is far from a full-time homesteader. He is an English professor at the College of DuPage in Illinois, lives in a Chicago suburb with his family and minivan, participates in the antiwar movement, and could easily be mistaken for a cog in the notorious wheel.
But he is also devoted to Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" and especially to the idea of living a "deliberate life," which Mr. Fate defines as "a search for balance—in mind and body and spirit—amid our daily lives." That search often takes him to a cabin a few hours from his home, where he observes nature, and himself, at close quarters.
The book is organized into seasonal essays, starting with spring, a time when the sun brings the earth to blossom, though Mr. Fate is equally alert to life forms that have kept the pesticide industry in deep clover. He has a fascination for ticks, for instance. They go "questing" for blood donors, spearing their victims with a "beaklike projection" and drawing a "quantity of blood that is a hundred times their 'empty' weight."
Mr. Fate is also a fan of ants. "Today there are more than a million ants for each person on the planet," he claims in a more-the-better spirit. As Mr. Fate watches ants doing their chores, including passing along "regurgitated" food and cooperating in ways that would make Mr. Rogers smile, he arrives at an epiphany: "It strikes me that humans could never reach such communal efficiency and economy." If the ant is condemned to be an ant and nothing more, "we too are absurdly trapped by our design"—but in our case the trap is "the labyrinth of language and reason." We must also contend with mind-numbing "choices" and "possibilities" that the ant might not imagine.
In such passages humans often appear as a less than heroic species. When Mr. Fate finds a "roadkill raccoon" who is not quite dead, he carries the stricken animal to the road's shoulder; soon he finds himself "kneeling down in the damp weeds in a sort of wordless prayer—for forgiveness, I think." He counts himself among the worst beasts in the forest, feeling as he strolls a riverbank "the burden of my role in its slow destruction."
Yet Mr. Fate has a talent for chuckling at the mind-numbing "possibilities" of existence, such as losing one's car in a parking lot. He confesses that he once found his billfold "in the cheese drawer of the refrigerator." Middle-aged readers (ahem) might find themselves mumbling, "Et tu, Fate?"
Best of all, Mr. Fate is a fan of the coyote—a creature whose tenacity is noticeably less precious and humble than the ant's. The city life seems to suit coyotes, Mr. Fate writes, observing that rural coyotes have a "30 percent chance of living through their first year" while their city dwelling cousins "are twice as likely to live that long." He tells the story of a coyote skulking into a Chicago sub shop, apparently in search of food, and another who stalked a 60-year-old woman through a suburban parking lot. Suddenly, Mr. Fate writes, the coyote "lunged for her miniature poodle, clamping his jaws around the dog's hindquarters." The woman prevailed in the ensuing tug-of-war. Perhaps there is hope for us humans yet.
As animals wander into suburban spaces—bears and deer as well as coyotes—they are betting that they'll eat better among humans than among their own kind. Man has attempted a version of this reverse migration, too, over the centuries. The never-ending search for grub is a central theme in Dona Brown's "Back to the Land."
Ms. Brown, also a professor (the University of Vermont), chronicles a movement that embraces people like Mr. Fate— professional, "progressive," concerned about the environment—but that has also included Americans who hoped to find "food self-sufficiency," preferably apart from a life of wage slavery. That desire was sweetly enunciated by 19th-century writer Philip G. Hubert: "Why is it not possible for a healthy man . . . to make bread and butter for his little ones and himself without chaining himself down to a life of drudgery?"
Ms. Brown starts with a look at early back-to-the-land efforts, which she says ended around World War I. They tended to attract Americans, some in financial peril, who struck out for the rustic regions "as a means of preserving artisanal skill, personal autonomy, and household self-sufficiency in the face of a rising tide of mechanization, monopoly and consumerism."
Later chapters carry the story through to later expressions of the same basic impulse: for example, the Southern Agrarian movement, whose ideal society might owe something to feudalism, and the cluster of thinkers known as "decentralists," who sought a world in which "everyone had access to productive property—to the tools and materials that would allow them to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves." In the 1930s, government programs sought to bring about "self-sufficiency," providing land to down-and-outers, including Johnny Cash's parents. Four decades later, suburban kids who didn't know a hoe from a howitzer traded the country club for the commune.
Ms. Brown reads deeply in the movement's core literature, including the seminal "Ten Acres Enough" (1864), by Edmund Morris, both a journalist and real-estate man. The book contained "detailed information about deep plowing, how best to save manure, and the treatment of worms on peach trees." Ms. Brown notes that a revised version of the book is still in print.
Not everyone thought it necessary to leave town to grow your own. Bolton Hall (1854–1938), a wealthy New Yorker with radical economic ideas and perhaps a green thumb, tended a third-acre garden at 137th Street and Lenox Avenue. In his "Three Acres and Liberty" (1907), he hailed other urban food-raising efforts: "Near San Francisco there are a number of frog ranches." In a similar spirit, Henry Ford provided gardens for 50,000 Detroit auto workers after the 1929 stock-market crash. Working the gardens for food was mandatory.
Ms. Brown writes engagingly, and while her sympathies are not exactly right of center, she doesn't mind detailing the hypocrisy and messianic extremes of some of the movement's more radical leaders. Helen and Scott Nearing, devoted homesteaders and ascetic socialists, sought the good life in rural simplicity and preached abstinence from all animal products, even though Helen ate ice cream. Worse yet, she declared that domestic animals were "slaves" and yet owned a cat. Scott ended up fasting to death in 1983, at age 100.
As Ms. Brown makes clear, the rural impulse can inspire a kind of religious intensity. The author and New Age activist Ray Mungo cast modern-day back-to-earthers as holy penitents: "Pushing long hair out of their way and thus marking their foreheads with beautiful penitent dust," he wrote in 1970, they "till the soil to atone for their fathers' destruction of it." Self-adoration, we are reminded, grows everywhere like a weed.
Toward the end of her survey, Ms. Brown observes that "the old question of food self-sufficiency simply no longer requires quite the same go-it-alone approach that characterized the 1970s." We have more cooperatives stores now, she says, and community-supported farms. And there are hopeful signs, in her view: The Obamas dug up part of the White House lawn in 2009 and planted a garden, while in Los Angeles 245 people (latest count) have joined the online "Los Angeles Urban Chicken Group."
Still, one has to wonder how many Americans would truly forsake their daily grind to raise chickens (and frogs), shovel manure, and operate that wonder of nature known as the cow udder. While a small portion may find solace in the soil, far more would probably prefer not to flirt with dirt.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226542011-07-03T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:18-05:00Wall Street Journal Deployment Story: While My Son Serves
<p>What's it like seeing a family member off to Iraq, and perhaps beyond?
The question comes up regularly these days as our 26-year-old son prepares to ship out. Kids in our middle-class world tend to head for college or for the sort of job that eventually convinces them that college isn't such a bad idea after all. Some friends wonder how our son ended up a sergeant in the Army National Guard.
"Sarge" (as we call him now) didn't volunteer because of family influence. We are Virginians and have served, but only when called. The Vietnam War ended before I got called up, but my father was a World War II navigator in the Naval Air Corps, transporting troops from Hawaii to Guam, and Sarge's grandfather on the other side was in a front-line artillery unit in Korea. A century before, the man I was named after did some surveillance work for Robert E. Lee, and in something of that spirit, our son became an Army Scout.
As America celebrates Independence Day this weekend, it's a good time to think of the men and women serving their country overseas.
He is, to be sure, a good demographic fit: Over two-thirds of our armed forces are white, most are male, and Southerners continue to be well-represented in the ranks. There was also his early fascination with soldiers and guns, but that's true of many boys.
Sarge has always possessed one habit of mind seemingly at odds with military life, which many critics insist is fit only for drones. He possesses what we lovingly call a hard head, an independent streak that, as it happens, is an inherited characteristic.
After his enlistment I had to ask why he would join an organization where taking orders is a way of life. "It's how you get to the big game," he replied. Put another way, he's a single young man looking for adventure—and perhaps meaning—and tends to believe that the people who man the office cubicles are the real drones.
He certainly chose an unusual path: Fewer than 1% of Americans wear the uniform these days. That, in turn, puts families of deployed soldiers in something of a world of their own.
For one thing, you're unlikely to bump into someone at the local tavern to commiserate with (which is not an argument for avoiding taverns, tavern life being one of the traditions that our children cross the oceans to protect).
New acquaintances sometimes seem shocked to meet someone with a deployed family member. "I'm so sorry," is their typical response. You'd almost think the lad was heading into rehab or entering the slave trade.
“'When I'm out in the desert, I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing,' our son said after returning home. Sometimes you have to travel 7,000 miles to find a sense of purpose.”
Others simply have no experience with the phenomenon of military service. At a Christmas party a few years ago, a colleague told me, very earnestly, that I was the only person he knew with someone in the military and that my son (whom he had never met) was his only link to that world.
Sheldon Kelly, an old family friend who served with the 82nd Airborne and whose own son has done multiple tours, recalls a lunch in Washington, D.C., with professional friends when the Iraq war was at a high point. "They were all war hawks," he recalled, "but when I told them my son was in Iraq, they were stunned. It was like I was in a different class." None, he added, had children in the military.
All of which can result in a feeling of isolation for some service families and an assumption of societal indifference. With so few people deployed, it's almost as if these conflicts are not really happening.
One local couple, whose son earned a Purple Heart in Iraq, told me that while plenty of people are happy to "ribbon up"—attach those "Support Our Troops" stickers to their cars—that's pretty much the extent of their outreach.
For the most part, however, the usual response when we tell people about Sarge is to say that we must be proud—which we are—and we must also be worried. Well, sure. We're parents—worry is our fate. Yet we try to worry wisely. And thankfully, at this point in his life, Sarge is not leaving behind a family of his own.
His first deployment, in 2007, was supposed to take him to Baghdad, but he ended up in a much quieter area at the southern border. He did not like that, but my wife and I sure did. This time around his gun truck will be driving point on convoys taking troops out of Iraq.
While the Iraq war has wound down, there are still dangers. In June, 11 servicemen were killed, five in a single rocket attack. Death by improvised explosive device is a possibility for anyone riding those roads, and so visions of your son bleeding out as he screams for his mother can appear, unsolicited, in the middle of the night. Some level of apprehension is unavoidable.
Then again, why do we have children if not to give us plenty to think about at 3 a.m.?
Sarge shows few signs of coffin phobia, though he is not looking forward to dealing with intense heat, scorpions and camel spiders (which, he tells us, can grow to the size of your hand, hiss loudly, and sometimes charge in packs). As for other hazards: Sandstorms can be blinding, it's not advisable to date the locals, and a cold beer can be very hard to come by.
And you never know where his service might eventually lead him. The U.S. is supposed to be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, but that could change. With Sarge's new deployment set at 400 days, we suspect a bonus trip to Afghanistan may be in the bargain. Who knows—maybe he'll end up seeing wild, wonderful Tripoli!
There's a saying that when one family member deploys, the entire family deploys. What often isn't said is that, despite the definite downsides to military deployment (including the possibility of becoming a casualty and, at the very least, long separations), it has a strange knack for bringing people together and even making life better.
“There's a saying that when one family member deploys, the entire family deploys.”
Sarge's 2007 deployment had some positive health benefits for me, though for nonheroic reasons. Here's why: If your soldier is killed (not a great possibility, though some parents lose sight of that), there will be a knock at your door. Accordingly, if you happen to be home in the afternoon when the FedEx guy drops by, you might experience an unwelcome cardiac jolt.
To avoid that experience I took up walking, often logging 30 to 40 miles per week. Not quite boot camp, but the exercise probably added a few years to my life.
There are also moments that simply would not have happened were it not for deployment. I remember a call from our son (via cellphone) who said he was out in the middle of the desert under a bright canopy of stars. Despite a short voice delay, the reception was incredible.
"You out there by yourself?" I asked.
"No, Dad. I have my machine gun."
It was a strange, intense moment of bonding, even though he was probably 7,000 miles away.
Deployment also cured me of a lingering cable-TV habit. Whatever patience I once had for the chattering class—make that the braying class—disappeared. I don't know what is worse: raving about how our soldiers are "mercenaries" or hearing a parlor patriot (go get 'em, boys!) suggest that because recent conflicts are "low-casualty" (compared with Vietnam, Korea and the world wars), they are nothing to get worked up about. As my friend Sheldon pointed out, it does seem that the people with the biggest heart for war never seem to have any blood on the line.
It is undoubtedly true that war is good not only for munitions makers but also for what a friend calls the "prayer life." In the run-up to Sarge's 2007 deployment, a celestial petition entered my mind so effortlessly and naturally that I assumed the same has been true for soldiers' parents through the ages: If a life must be taken, take mine and spare his.
Deployment can also be a positive experience for soldiers. After returning home, our son said that "when I'm out in the desert, I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing." Sometimes you have to travel 7,000 miles to find a sense of purpose, and many men, I suspect, may come to wish they had made a similar journey.
It's my impression that men like me, who never served, often feel that we've missed out on an important part of life. We don't know what it's like to be young and far away from home, vulnerable to instant personal extinction but also part of the comradeship that such danger creates. In this sense my son's service is a far greater thing than I have ever done.
Back home from deployments, soldiers can experience a vast array of problems, from nervousness while driving under an overpass (ambush?) or in traffic (since cars in today's war zones can carry bombs) to the more serious manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder. The military offers some support. A Department of Defense service called MilitaryHomefront provides support for those suffering from various maladies, including combat stress, domestic abuse and suicide prevention.
For families whose soldiers didn't make it home, of course, there is an unfathomable depth of sorrow.
On a happier note, the one area in which deployment is nearly unsurpassed lies in its ability to bring people together for a grand sendoff.
We held Sarge's farewell party just before June 1, his official deployment date (he won't arrive in Iraq until this month).
This was definitely not a Norman Rockwell scene, though one suspects Norman would have had a rocking time. A smoky cooking fire (my idea to roast an octopus was vetoed; our oldest son flew in from San Francisco to butcher and cook a pig) cast a rich haze over 100 or so friends, relatives and a few thirsty strangers, some bearing musical instruments while many others, including soldiers with hard combat experience, came armed with a host of jugs.
When soldiers and musicians gather, the alcohol deities smile broadly. Thirsts worthy of condemned pirates were slaked with passion, and as the smoke and noise levels rose, neighbors could be forgiven for thinking the Vikings had landed (though none sounded the alarm down at the local sheriff's office, for which we are thankful). One senses that many serious head wounds required treatment the next morning, but there was the solace of knowing that the damage was sustained in the line of duty.
This party was not as raucous as the one for Sarge's first deployment, where lights-out came around 5 a.m. This time, all was quiet by 2. The last departure was also officially marked by a ceremony in which Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine traveled to Portsmouth to shake the hands of the hundreds of soldiers departing with my son's unit. Families appreciated that. This time, the current governor didn't show up at the sendoff, which was held in downtown Richmond.
For now, memories of Sarge's sendoff will keep us smiling as we ride out the 400-day deployment.
Grandmother: "Will the vehicle you're riding around in have any weapons?"
Sarge: "Yes, Grandma. We'll be taking along a .50-cal."
While Sarge is away, we're likely to see the local boys who have completed their tours and sometimes gather in a home-built "speakeasy," bedecked with the flags of their respective services: Army, Marines, Navy.
I recall a conversation with them one night about an American flag that has accompanied them on various deployments, sometimes tucked under their battle armor to keep it—and perhaps themselves—safe. The cable TV brayers would scoff at this as "gaudy patriotism," but to my eye this level of communal devotion is another thing soldiers have that most of us don't.
“Despite the definite downsides to deployment, it has a strange knack for bringing people together.”
These vets—young in years but in some cases having witnessed profound horrors—were in full hoot at the send-off, singing along to woozily brilliant renditions of Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried," Paul Simon's "The Boxer," a deeply fractured rendition of the Beatles' "Rocky Raccoon," and the Grateful Dead's "Dire Wolf," with its resoundingly appropriate chorus, "Don't murder me!"
There was also a glorious "Over the Rainbow," sung by a woman whose voice brought hope for better days, and then the farewell toast:
Know that you will be constantly in our thoughts and prayers.
We look forward to gathering together again to welcome you home.
Until then, don't mess with the women.
Keep your head down, and
Godspeed.
Now, off he goes.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226532011-05-28T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:18-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of "Bunnies and Bachelors" -- Hugh Hefner, feminist
<p>The Feminist Mystique of Hugh Hefner
By DAVE SHIFLETT
Journalists lately have taken to portraying Hugh Hefner as an octogenarian whose libido requires chemical upgrades and whose mansion is stuffed with tattered mattresses and stained carpets. But he still has his admirers. These include Carrie Pitzulo, a self-described feminist, who in "Bachelors and Bunnies" casts Mr. Hefner as something of a philosopher king and underappreciated crusader for women's advancement. How dare anyone think the Bunnyboy was ever simply a guy on the make?
Ms. Pitzulo, an assistant history professor at the University of West Georgia, begins by sketching Mr. Hefner's origins. He was born in 1926 into what he called a "typical Midwestern, Methodist home with a lot of repression." As a teenager, he appears to have been less repressed than enthusiastically self-obsessed. He began documenting his life in a series of scrapbooks that now numbers more than 2,000. After a girl rejected him in high school, he "reinvented" himself as "Hef," Ms. Pitzulo says, and he began dressing dapper and writing a music column in the school paper.
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copyright Playboy Magazine
A 1964 Playboy ad, claiming that its typical reader 'knows his way around.'
Mr. Hefner married in 1949 and had two children—a son, David, and daughter, Christie, who would eventually take over his empire. He and his wife, Mildred, didn't divorce until 1959, but by then he had made it clear that standard domesticity, that hotbed of monogamy, was not for him. In 1953, the former Esquire magazine copywriter had launched Playboy, a magazine that, as Ms. Pitzulo describes it, championed as its ideal "a swinging single Lothario" who rejected marriage in favor of "self-indulgence, materialism and promiscuous bachelorhood." Oh, and there were photos of naked women.
The magazine also included articles on fashion, food and gadgets such as the "Tensolator," which provided "bodybuilding isotonic tension," perhaps to make up for slow nights in the rumpus room. Mr. Hefner also wanted to appeal to men with intellectual pretensions. The Playboy man, he wrote in the inaugural issue, liked nothing more than "mixing up cocktails and an hors d' oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Yet the rabbit logo was not meant to celebrate the cerebral nature of the insatiable hare.
Ms. Pitzulo looks closely at the true stars of the show: the Playmates, especially those who appeared in the centerfold—the three-page spread that was among the most sacred item of teenage contraband. While promoted by Mr. Hefner as the "girl next door" and "not unlike the women his readers encountered every day," writes Ms. Pitzulo, these women were actually the stuff of fantasy: perfectly sculpted and without detectable blemish.
Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy
By Carrie Pitzulo
Chicago, 240 pages, $25
In the 1960s, Playmates became the target of feminist ire. Protesters at the 1968 Miss America threw Playboys into a "freedom trashcan" and even Jennifer Jackson, the first African-American Playmate (March 1965), later called Mr. Hefner a "glorified pimp," though she added that she did like him as a person. Gloria Steinem, ever the subtle critic, dragged the Holocaust into the discussion in 1970: "A woman reading Playboy," she declared, "feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."
Far more troubling to Ms. Pitzulo than the girly pictures was the tone of early stories, such as "Miss Gold-Digger of 1953," which painted "women as conniving wenches only out for money." Another mainstay of the early years: articles belittling marriage and long-term commitment. Yet Ms. Pitzulo also detects a "budding attitude" in the magazine encouraging "sexual autonomy, expression, and pleasure for men and for women." Playboy came to support "progressive" political causes, including opposition to the Vietnam War and support for abortion rights. Eventually Mr. Hefner even stopped advocating male "flight from commitment." While "militant" feminists continued to despise the magazine, Ms. Pitzulo says, Playboy was actually working "toward feminist goals." Mr. Hefner could not agree more. "I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism," he told Esquire in 2002.
Freeing women from sexual restraint and ensuring their access to abortion, of course, are causes hailed in barracks, frat houses and other places where nonfeminists gather, but Ms. Pitzulo is not one to make such observations. She often writes with a messianic earnestness—we're told early on that her editor considers her efforts "worthy and important." She doesn't stint on the academic jargon as she "deciphers" the deeper meaning of centerfolds in "the context of postwar America" and refers to "the feminist porn critique" and the "heterosexual project." As prose goes, this can hit you like a very cold shower.
She also denounces the "religious right" and other "conservatives" with a tone suggesting she's writing universal objective truth, clearly unaware that perhaps her adversaries are not the only ones who adhere to a rigid orthodoxy.
But who among us is without blemish—except the Playmates, a few of whom grace these pages, including the thoroughly stunning Linda Summers (August 1972), stretched out in the sand with a look that says, "Hey boys, soup's on." There's also an in-house ad from 1964 boasting that 43% of Playboy readers had at least three drinks a week in a bar or restaurant, thus making the magazine an excellent buy for booze merchants. It's a reminder that Mr. Hefner believed it was his philosophy attracting the commerce that kept the bunny hopping.
"We do live, now, in a Playboy world," Mr. Hefner said in a 2006 interview, which might be news many places, including those where women still go around wearing sacks. Yet many standard-issue American male readers may conclude they owe Mr. Hefner a debt of thanks. They might have believed it was those guitar lessons, steak dinners and charming conversation that greased the romantic skids, but maybe it was the philosophical Lothario with the smoking jacket and deep reverence for rabbits who actually turned the key to paradise.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226522011-05-17T20:00:00-04:002021-06-26T15:36:07-04:00Washington Post Review of "33 Revolutions" -- A History of Protest Music
<p>By Dave Shiflett
Protest music isn’t what it used to be.
“Steal From Walmart” and even the hundreds of anti-war songs that blossomed in the blood of the Iraq wars don’t approach the societal resonance of “We Shall Overcome” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” as U.K. music critic Dorian Lynskey confirms, and mourns, in “33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day,” (ecco/HarperCollins; 656 pages; $19.99).
“I began this book intending to write a history of a still vital form of music,” Linskey writes in his epilogue . “I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy.”
As eulogies go this is a lively and sprawling one, beginning with a chapter on “Strange Fruit,” written in 1939, and ending with largely ignored attacks on George W. Bush’s military policy.
“Strange Fruit,” a darkly powerful meditation on lynching, was anything but ignored. It put 24-year-old Billie Holiday on the map and remains vibrant today, thanks in part thanks to the ministrations of arranger Danny Mendelsohn, who initially dismissed it as “something or other alleged to be music.” While protest songs up to that point were “propaganda,” Lynskey writes, this one “proved they could be art.”’
Most protest songs, to be sure, are far less vocally demanding, including Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” written in a New York flophouse in 1940 and borrowing part of its melody from the Carter family’s “Little Darling Pal of Mine.”
In a similar sharing spirit “We Shall Overcome” commandeered an 18th century melody and boasts four lyricists, including Pete Seeger, whose rendition found an instant fan in Dr. Martin Luther King. “There’s something about that song that haunts you,” King said, though it did have its critics, not all of them named Bubba. “If you’re going to get yourself a .45 and start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I’m with you,” Malcolm X told a Harlem rally in 1964.
Lynskey writes passionately and often admiringly but doesn’t stint on the criticism, giving ample praise to Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” but adding that fellow folkie Tom Paxton dismissed “Blowing in the Wind” as “a grocery list song where one line has absolutely no relevance to the next line.” Lynskey also reminds us that Dylan was a master of sometimes clunky contrariness: a few weeks after JFK’s assassination he claimed a strange kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald: “I saw some of myself in him,” he told a New York audience, which rewarded him with a bouquet of cat-calls.
Sing-along fans will appreciate Lynskey’s inclusion of Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” perhaps most famous for the Fish Cheer that preceded it at Woodstock, which helped launch the F-bomb’s glorious ascendancy. In this case the criticism comes from McDonald himself. “What’s almost unfathomable is the smallness of it,” he says. “It was just another song.”
Yet we still remember that Rag, unlike the hundreds (if not thousands) of songs inspired by the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, known in some quarters as the Haliburton Expansion Initiative. Lynskey suggests one explanation: “The nature of the antiwar movement changed dramatically in February 1966,” he writes, “when the Selective Service System extended conscription to the campuses.” In that era singing anti-war songs might be considered an act of self preservation; today, the absence of a draft drains such warbling of urgency and audience.
The book ranges far beyond the sixties and includes songs celebrating gay and black pride, protesting apartheid and hunger, and denouncing various meanies including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There are also amusing non-musical asides, including a fond remembrance of punkster Jello Biafra’s run for mayor of San Francisco, where he took a respectable 4 percent of the vote, though that placed him behind Diane Feinstein and Sister Boom-Boom. (page 316) . Biafra would later say punk was “a close-minded, self-centered social club” and “a meaningless fad.”
The theme of smugness and encroaching irrelevance weaves through the book, with Lynskey reminding early on that many protest songs are short on chord changes and long on sanctimony, with fans to match. He characterizes the attitude as: “We understand. We are not like them. We are all on the same side.”
He gives a terrific example of another problem: the profundity-groping musician, in this case Steve Earle, who insisted that American Taliban John Walker Lindh was something of a post- adolescent everyman: “I became acutely aware that what happened to him could have happened to my son, and your son, and anyone’s son,” (Page 509) weirdly suggesting a widespread youthful desire to join an ultra-religious warrior group that doesn’t allow you to drink beer, listen to popular music, and stones you to death for unsanctioned sex.
Thankfully, we get a more sober and context-setting observation from the voice of reason himself, Keith Richards: “You don’t shoulder any responsibility when you pick up a guitar or sing a song, because it’s not a position of responsibility.”
Is protest music dead? The better question, Lynskey writes, is “Is anybody listening?” Not to protest music, it seems, which interrupts the pursuit of unencumbered entertainment. “It is not just that people have lost faith in any performer to help bring about change, it is that they resent anyone who attempts to do so,” he concludes.
Perhaps the only way to bring protest music back home is to re-institute the draft.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226512011-05-12T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:17-05:00Merlefest Interviews with Del McCoury, Peter Rowan, Tara Nevins, Jerry Douglas and More
<p>By Dave Shiflett
If Peter Rowan or Jerry Douglas were to give a commencement address this spring, it might be titled: “Wise up, Punks. There’s more to music than Lady Gaga.”
Del McCoury thinks so too.
During interviews at the recent Merlefest festival in Wilkesboro, N.C., several legendary roots musicians discussed the music they think is essential for young people to become familiar with, and with any luck fully embrace.
To no surprise, Bill Monroe was at the top of several lists, but the old guard also had kind words for Jimi Hendrix, aboriginal music from Australia, and even Mick Jagger’s brother.
They were less generous when discussing attempts to cut funding to NPR and PBS, while one suggested a novel cure for Attention Deficit Disorder.
“Of course they should listen to Bach and Beethoven,” said Peter Rowan, perhaps best known for writing the stoner anthem “Panama Red” and his collaboration with the late Jerry Garcia in the band Old and In the Way.
Rowan, who played with Monroe from 1965 to 1967, says Monroe and blues singer Robert Johnson were crucial in creating a sound often lost in a world awash with musical expression.
“There’s too much music available,” said Rowan as he chomped a banana in the artist’s lounge. Lost in the thicket of commercial radio, YouTube and Myspace are traditions that deserve a better hearing, including “black church music, prison songs” and “aboriginal music” from Australia, which he characterized as “three chord” tunes that are an important element in the indigenous peoples’ civil rights movement.
Rowan, who recently returned from Australia, said that movement “has yet to have its Martin Luther King moment,” making the music all the more crucial for maintaining momentum. When asked for a contemporary artist he likes, Rowan suggested crooner Chris Jagger – “Mick’s brother.”
The festival featured several other former Monroe band mates, including Grammy winning bluegrasser Del McCoury, who played in Monroe’s band in 1963. McCoury, known for his piercing voice and gray pompadour, cited Monroe and “the Baptist hymnal” as wellsprings of roots music; Monroe’s picking style, he said, has yet to be topped.
“You can’t beat the innovator,” he said prior to a performance.
Yet McCoury, who recently released a CD with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, agreed that some things have gotten bigger and better. “When we were starting out,” he cackled, “our PA systems were so small you could carry the speakers under one arm and put the microphones in your pocket.”
At Merlefest, the speakers had to be trucked in, and people came in droves. Festival attendance has gone way up since the first multi-day bluegrass festival in Fincastle, Virginia in 1965. Merlefest organizers said 80,000 people attended the four-day event, which has raised $8 million for Wilkes Community College since starting in 1988.
Monroe wasn’t on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Rory Block, a willowy blues singer who grew up in Manhattan, sang the praises of the Rev. Gary Davis, Son House, Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith. “They’re the ones I listened to when I was growing up,” she said after a foot-stomping set. Tara Nevins, a masterful fiddler who helps front Donna The Buffalo and also has a vibrant solo career, cited old-time musicians who are far below most radar screens. “I never book gigs during the Mt. Airy old time festival,” she said, adding that many of the players there are unknown but brilliant.
Nashville mainstay Sam Bush, best known for his innovative mandolin playing, praised Doc Watson, Chet Atkins, Les Paul and Eric Clapton.
Several players, including Bush, denounced efforts to cut funding to arts and music education, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. Jens Kruger of the Kruger Brothers insisted that keeping music in the schools will pay profound medical benefits.
“In our schools,” he said of growing up in Europe, “we sang a song together every morning,” which he says focused minds and created a sense of community. When morning singing was cancelled, grades went down, he said, but rose again when the practice resumed.
If American schools made group singing a part of their morning routine, he said, it “would eliminate ADD” though that wouldn’t be music to the ears of the pharmaceutical industry.
Dobro master Jerry Douglas, who cited Flatt and Scruggs as perhaps his most important influences, said he had recently discovered the joys of singing publicly.
Douglas, who will be touring into November in support of Alison Krauss and Union Station’s new “Paper Airplane” CD, said he had launched his singing career the previous week during a Carnegie Hall gig.
“I’m 55,” he smiled. “I figured it was time.”
Had he sung a gentle, heartfelt tune?
“No. I did a murder ballad -- Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe.’”
Wonder how Bill Monroe would have liked that.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226502011-04-19T20:00:00-04:002021-09-10T02:57:56-04:00Bloomberg Interview with Bruce Molsky, Old Time Fiddle Master (pre-edited version)
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – The Americana/roots festival season kicks off in earnest later this month with Merlefest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina (April 28-May 1) and the National Folk Festival in Canberra, Australia (April 22-25)reflecting the worldwide appeal of songs that often originated in the Appalachian mountains and other rural hotspots.
While performers such as Doc Watson, Del McCoury and Robert Plant are better known and acts such as Blind Boy Chocolate and the Milk Sheiks and the Corklickers more cleverly named, few performers are more admired – and perhaps unlikely -- than Bruce Molsky, considered one of the world’s premier old time fiddlers.
Molsky, 55, who will play in Canberra, didn’t take up the fiddle until he was 18 and didn’t launch his full time music career until he was 41. Contrary to stereotypes this purveyor of mountain music has all his teeth and even wears an earring.
Plus, he’s from the Bronx.
Rembrandt of Appalachia
I caught up with Molsky during a recent swing through the southeast to talk about life as a traditional musician and the growing interest, especially among young listeners and musicians, in the songs he champions.
But first I wanted to know how a guy from the Bronx ends up as “the Rembrandt of Appalachian fiddlers,” as violin master Darol Anger calls him.
It started, Molsky says, when jazz legend Billy Taylor visited P.S. 81 when Molsky was 11: “I heard him play and thought -- man I want that.” Molsky bought a guitar and took lessons for a year, later immersing himself in fiddle and banjo music and earned a living as a mechanical engineer until going full-time at 40, which he calls “the nicest favor I ever did for myself.”
Tears From Ronstadt
Traditional music is on a “definite uptick” because of its purity and communal appeal, according to Molsky. “This is the music of communities and of workers trying to escape their grinds.” Or, in some cases, watching their grinds disappear.
In “Peg ‘n’ Awl,” Molsky sings about a shoe factor worker who is replaced by a machine.
They’ve invented a new machine, peg and awl
They’ve invented a new machine,
I peg one shoe, it pegs fifteen,
I’m gonna lay me down my awl, my peg and awl.
Sung in a sturdy baritone, the song could draw a tear from the most ardent advocate of automation.
“I cried when I heard that song the first time,” says Linda Ronstadt, a Molsky admirer, “and I’m not a crybaby.” She played it for her siblings, she said from San Francisco, and they cried too. Molsky’s rendition of the traditional song has “the same power as Mozart.”
Ronstadt believes Molsky and other traditional performers appeal to listeners tired of “pop music that is so empty,” a belief seconded by Molsky fan and collaborator Jerry Douglas, probably the world’s best-known Dobro player and a mainstay in Alison Krauss’s Union Station band.
“Bruce honors traditional music,” he said from Nashville. He also says Molsky is “a chameleon. With his fiddle, banjo and guitar playing, he can fit into a lot of situations.”
Douglas says younger musicians and listeners are sick of “overproduced, slick stuff.” He and Molsky cite acts such as Crooked Still, Abigail Washburn and the Carolina Chocolate Drops as taking the ancient songs into the future.
Checkered Demon’s brew
Molsky’s influence extends beyond roots music. “Both my String Quartet No. 3 and my Concerto for Violin and Cello and Symphony Orchestra have inspiration from Bruce's playing, his rhythmic drive and how spirited his music is,” composer/violinist Mark O’Connor said in an email.
Douglas adds another kudo: “Bruce isn’t a diva.”
Or rich. “I made a more secure living as a professional person,” Molsky chuckles. He drove his recent southern tour in a Toyota Prius. “I got 46.5 miles to the gallon -- the entire gas bill was $150” – less than a typical bottle of bubbly slurped down by upper-tier rock musicians.
My last question had to do with the origins of his company name: Tree Frog Music. “I was writing liner notes for an album,” he says, and wanted a moniker different than his own name. “There was a Zap comic on the table” in which he found a mention of “the Checkered Demon’s favorite grog: Tree-Frog beer.”
A toast may be in order. Molsky just got word he’ll be teaching and performing at the Berklee School Of Music in Boston in the spring of 2012. Sometimes, dropping out of school and leaving your job pays big dividends.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226492011-03-31T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:16-05:00Review of 'Chinaberry Sidewalks' by Rodney Crowell (pre-edited version)
<p>Grammy Winner Rodney Crowell’s Passionate Glance At His Own Family’s Somewhat Twisted Tree
By Dave Shiflett
Most families are strange in their own way, to twist Leo Tolstoy’s observation a bit, while some families, including Grammy winning songwriter Rodney Crowell’s, are strange through and through.
That could make life dicey but also provided material for a delightful and sometimes moving memoir.
Crowell, whose hits include “Shame on the Moon,” “If Looks Could Kill” and “Til I Gain Control Again” is from truly interesting stock.
Father James Walter Crowell was a hard-drinking, honky-tonking wife beater. He was born in 1923 and said he never slept on anything but straw until 1941: “It’s a wonder I don’t crow like a rooster,” he once told his son. (page 44)
Mother Cauzette, born in 1924, was a Pentecostal epileptic who suffered 13 miscarriages, lost one child in infancy and sent her husband to the hospital on at least one occasion to have a wound closed.
And they were nothing compared to other relatives, including an octogenarian great-grandfather whose 1960 death inspired the reflection that “he hadn’t answered a direct question truthfully since his twelfth birthday and hadn’t taken a bath since he fell in the Blood River in 1936” (page 44). Nor was he bound by traditional mores, Crowell writes “His sexual preferences included daughters, sisters, granddaughters neighbor’s wives and the odd farm animal. “
A grandmother, meantime, “excelled in four areas: beating her children, fighting with her husband, baking biscuits and breaking wind, the latter being her greatest passion.” (Page 45)
It may be a miracle Rodney Crowell came out as well as he did.
Born in 1950, Crowell writes with passion and a sometimes bemused horror about his upbringing in a Houston subdivision of cookie cutter houses, towering scrub brush and chinaberry trees. His parents, he notes, were not cut out to be members of the landed gentry, or any other gentry for that matter. They “took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.” (page 12)
Pop practiced might be called laissez faire home maintenance, allowing the house -- “essentially a tar paper shack” (page 13) -- to slowly disintegrate. His parents eventually “had to strategically place a number 3 washtub, a five-gallon Igloo water cooler, an ice chest, and various pots and pans to catch the rainwater coming through the ceiling” – through which, he adds, one could see the nighttime constellations. (page 14).
The family also struggled financially. Crowell writes movingly of watching his mother cook eggs in an aluminum pie plate heated by an electric iron and of watching his parents fight, sometimes to the point where bones were broken and blood was shed.
Yet this is far from a sneering look at the family tree. It is, for the most part, a story of love, if not of the fairy book variety certainly of the enduring type. It is also a story of pursuing dreams, especially his father’s desire to be a country crooner, which introduced Crowell to musical performance -- initially as a drummer.
He got the job, he admits, not because of his drumming prowess but because the regular drummer in his father’s band had departed and dad knew he wouldn’t have to pay Rodney, whose first gig was dreadful. Yet performing in dive bars was an eye-opening experience for the pre-teen percussionist. “I saw every kind of skirt lifting, ass grabbing, ear licking, tongue sucking and dry humping there is,” he writes. (page 157)
Crowell also recalls the fateful day in 1958 when he and his parents attended a concert featuring Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash: “twenty three years later I’d produce a live recording of those three artists” (page 229) and he’d also marry Cash’s daughter, Roseanne, though the marriage was short-lived.
We get a fleeting glimpse of Crowell’s musical development, which included stints with bands called The Rolling Tones and the Arbitrators, as well as personal struggles, including a drug overdose that landed him in the hospital.
Yet the focus is on life with his parents. He vividly recalls attending Pentecostal church services with his mother, where he encountered Brother Pemberton, who “gives the impression that he might burst into flames at any moment. With his greasy pompadour spilling down over his eyes, his necktie flying, his shirt hanging halfway out of his pants, his face turned to the heavens like a satellite dish awaiting God’s direct signals, which once received will be spat at the congregation like bullets from a Gatling gun, Brother Pemberton in full flight is a sight to behold.” (page 69).
Despite his fire and brimstone, Crowell writes, “he, too, was bored” – which was revealed during one service when Brother Pemberton winked at him. It was a transforming moment. “In the wink of an eye,” Crowell writes, “ I saw a compassionate, tolerant, and non-judgmental God of love and great humor. My own faith was planted as a seed that morning, and there are days its fruit sustains me still.” 77
He also writes powerfully about his father’s demise, which was wrenching though ultimately closed the circle with his wife. “Your daddy looks like he did the day I married him,” Cauzette said just after he died. (page 247). She lived on several more years.
Crowell warmly embraces his role as “a witness to and harvester of my family’s past” (page 9) which helped him “realize that life’s basic impulse – given half a chance, even in death – is to heal itself.” 230
His healing has produced a memoir that is, in its own strange way, quite life-affirming.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226472011-03-22T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:16-05:00Bloomberg column/Civil War Sesquicentennial/pre-edited version
<p>Roll Over Picasso: Lee, Davis Still Rule Richmond
By Dave Shiflett(Bloomberg)— They don’t commemorate wars like they used to – or at least the Civil War, whose sesquicentennial observance is under way in Richmond, Va., capital of the doomed confederacy.
While the Picasso exhibit at the Virginia Museum for Fine Arts dominates local headlines, the “war of northern aggression,” as some traditionalists call the bloody conflict, still rules much of the city’s cultural landscape.
Yet that landscape is definitely changing, says S. Waite Rawls III, president and CEO of The Museum of the Confederacy, which opened in 1896.
“The centennial of the war was largely about re-enactments of battles,” he says, while this year the emphasis is on how the war affected women, children and the 4 million blacks who lived in the South at wartime, 3.6 million of whom were slaves. In the same spirit a state tourism website refers to the sesquicentennial as the “150th Anniversary of the American Civil War and Emancipation.”
“It’s not just about white guys fighting,” adds Vickie R. Yates, head of the museum’s marketing and public relations department.
There are painful reminders of enslavement and privation in new domestic-themed exhibits, including displays of rough cloth woven by slaves.
Yet reminders of combat are never far away. There’s a dinner plate used by a Luray, Va. woman to bang a foraging union soldier over the head. “Put him out cold,” Yates says. There’s also a wartime textbook that includes this somewhat tendentious math problem: “If one Confederate soldier kills 90 Yankees, how many Yankees can 10 Confederate soldiers kill?”
The tonal shift, while subtle to a casual observer, is raising serious hackles in some quarters. Roger McCredie, executive director of the Southern Legal Resource Center, which identifies itself as “a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of citizens involved in Southern heritage issues,” writes in an email that “it is already painfully clear that the sesquicentennial is going to be the apogee of thirty years' worth of South-bashing.” He adds that the “only acceptable way for Southerners to mention their Confederate heritage this time around is through self abasement and abject apology.”
Rawls, who sports a bow tie and once worked for Chemical Bank in Manhattan, prefers to focus on the vast interest in the war, which stretches far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. Twenty percent of museum visitors in January were from the UK, he says, and he smilingly recalls the day he was summoned to the museum’s front desk to meet a group of battle re-enactors from Stuttgart. “They said they have a hard time doing re-enactments in Germany,” he says, “because no one wants to play the part of the Yankees.”
You don’t have to be a re-enactor to be awed and sometimes amused by some of the museum’s exhibits, including one challenging the popular story (in the North) that confederate president Jefferson Davis was wearing a dress when captured by Union troops. There’s also a handkerchief stained with what is believed to be the blood of the mortally wounded Stonewall Jackson.
What would Stonewall think of the Picasso exhibit? “He probably would not attend,” Rawls responds.
There’s also the uniform Robert E. Lee wore while surrendering to U.S. Grant. Yates points out that while Lee stood nearly six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds, his boots are a petite size 5.
With the cocktail hour approaching, I was inspired to observe: “What, no flask?” According to Rawls, neither Jackson nor Lee were drinkers, quite unlike the victorious Gen. Grant.
Visitors sometimes rub shoulders with contemporary eminences, including Ken Burns, who used the museum artifacts in his sprawling Civil War documentary, and Stephen Spielberg, who visited the adjacent White House of the Confederacy in November, Yates says, doing prep work for an upcoming movie on Abraham Lincoln -- still considered a war criminal by some of the southern faithful.
While McCredie refers to Union troops as “an invading army” most southerners seem to have stacked their muskets long ago. Varina Davis, wife of the former CSA president, relocated to New York after her husband’s death, according to tour guide Dean Knight, and lived at the Hotel Gerard on W. 44th Street and wrote newspaper columns for Joseph Pulitzer’s “New York World.”
Would Varina have gone to the Picasso exhibit? Yes, Rawls says, adding she was “thrilled to have Oscar Wilde” visit her post-war home. “But she probably wouldn’t have liked it.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226462010-12-26T19:00:00-05:002023-12-10T12:15:52-05:00Review of 'The Girl in the Song' Featuring The Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Clapton, Crosby Stills Nash
<p>Dave Shiflett | from: AARP The Magazine | December 23, 2010
The guy with the guitar always gets the girl — or so goes the legend popular among aspiring rockers. Yet to judge by the tales related in The Girl in the Song: The True Stories Behind 50 Rock Classics, it seems just as accurate to say that the girl with the pretty face (or similarly arresting attribute) always gets the guitarist.
In this compact collection of breezy profiles, veteran music writers Michael Heatley and Frank Hopkinson showcase the muses who inspired pop and rock’s top songwriting tier — the Beatles; the Rolling Stones; Eric Clapton; Bob Dylan; James Taylor; Elton John; Pink Floyd; U2; Crosby Stills Nash & Young — to produce their epic love songs (and, in a few cases, punishing put-downs). They also focus on hitmakers a few notches farther down the charts, including Counting Crows, the Knack, Toto, Steely Dan, Buddy Holly, Coldplay, Oasis, Billy Joel, and Leonard Cohen. Although most of the muses highlighted here were young, female, and fetching, a few were unique — and at least one appears not to have started life as a girl at all.
Perhaps no modern muse is more celebrated than Pattie Boyd, credited with inspiring memorable melodies by both George Harrison (her husband from 1966 to 1977) and Eric Clapton (her husband from 1979 to 1988). The stunning blonde and former convent girl also had deeply intimate knowledge of the romantically tangled and tragic lifestyles of many rock superstars.
The first time Boyd heard “Something” — the tune she says she inspired Harrison to write (though he would later say he was thinking of Ray Charles) — was in the couple’s house in Esher, England. Like many a show-business honeymoon, the Boyd-Harrison glow was fairly short-lived; Pattie eventually came to feel neglected by George, especially upon learning of his various flings (including one with Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen). By 1970 Boyd was romantically linked to Clapton, whom she would prompt to pen “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight” in her honor. Intriguingly, Pattie’s younger sister, Jenny Boyd, married two rockers — Mick Fleetwood (twice) and King Crimson drummer Ian Wallace — and is credited with inspiring Donovan’s lilting “Jennifer Juniper” (though Donovan himself maintained he and Jennie were never an item).
Heatley and Hopkinson unveil the gynocentric genesis of several iconic Beatles hits. “Dear Prudence,” we learn, was written in a bid to lure Mia Farrow’s younger sister away from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Prudence Farrow shared the band’s infatuation (in their case, brief) with the Maharishi, but John Lennon, according to the account here, had become concerned that she was “going insane” from too much meditation. What she needed was a customized song that would reel her back to the real world: “Dear Prudence, won’t you open up your eyes?” Yet Prudence would later state she had “no recollection of being serenaded” by Lennon.
It was hardly the last time a Beatles muse would be less than floored by an air she had inspired. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” often thought to be an ode to LSD, was actually engendered by a drawing of Lucy O’Donnell, a friend of Lennon’s first son, Julian. Lucy — only 4 years old when Julian sketched her — would grow up to tell an interviewer that “I just don’t like [the song]. I don’t see a 4-year-old kid running around with kaleidoscopic eyes. It doesn’t make sense.” What the song did make was money, and plenty of it: By 2010 it had generated millions in royalties for Apple Records.
The girls in the songs were frequently members of the Rolling Stones coterie, too. “Hey Negrita,” for one, was sparked by Mick Jagger’s wife Bianca. She later made it clear that having a pop song written for you is no guarantor of marital bliss: “My marriage ended on my wedding day.” Another Stones standby, “Miss Amanda Jones,” reportedly honors one Amanda Lear — who, claims The Girl in the Song, may have undergone a sex-change operation in Casablanca in 1963, possibly paid for by surrealist Salvador Dalí.
The award for Most Inspiring Transgender Muse, however, must go to Candy Darling — born James Slattery — who is credited with inspiring the Kinks hit “Lola.” James-cum-Candy likewise inspirited the Velvet Underground to write “Candy Says” and Morrissey to compose “You Know I Couldn’t Last.” She even merited a mention in Lou Reed’s far-better-known “Walk on the Wild Side.”
As you may have gathered, the book abounds with muses unmoved by their enshrinement in song. Stephen Stills composed “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” hoping to recapture the heart of songstress Judy Collins, only to have her remark, “It was beautiful, so beautiful… too bad it’s not going to work.” By the same token, “Our House” — a celebration of his infatuation with Joni Mitchell by a hopelessly smitten Graham Nash — failed to persuade Mitchell to buy into the song’s vaunted connubial bliss; Mitchell broke it off with Nash in 1969. (Commerce reconstituted the ashes of love, however: A U.K. bank ultimately used the song in a mortgage commercial.)
It’s nice to be celebrated in a song, sure, but some muses rightfully wound up feeling exploited. Take Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto: The real-life “girl from Ipanema” was just 15 years old when her extreme pulchritude spurred Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes to compose the bossa-nova anthem that brought her worldwide fame — and not a single centavo in royalties. When Heloísa later opened a boutique called “Garota de Ipanema” (“The Girl from Ipanema”), the heirs of the song composers sued, claiming a trademark violation. But Heloísa stood her ground. “They want to prohibit me from being the girl from Ipanema,” she commonsensically pointed out, “which is really going too far.”
The judge agreed, calling to mind another pop classic: “You Don’t Own Me.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226452010-12-09T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:16-05:00Review of Carrie Fisher's 'Wishful Drinking'
<p>Review by Dave Shiflett
Tis the season to eat, drink and be merry – for tomorrow we may all land in detox.
So we are hysterically reminded in
Carrie Fisher’s “Wishful Drinking,” which airs on HBO Sunday night at 9 p.m. New York time.
Fisher, perhaps best known as Princess Leia in George Lucas’s “Star Wars” and as one-time wife of Paul Simon, lays out her credentials early on in this rollicking 90-minute special.
She’s an alcoholic and a drug addict as well, working in a nice spin on the old Karl Marx chestnut regarding religion and opiates: “I took masses of opiates religiously.”
She also comes from a fabled but somewhat non-traditional family, which included late father Eddie Fisher, whom she calls “puff daddy” because he smoked “five joints a day” and brought his drug dealer to one of her performances.
Fisher has also been immortalized as a PEZ dispenser, an inflatable sex doll ($800 a copy, she says) and as a textbook example of a manic-depressive.
She’s both salty and sweet and near impossible not to like.
The one-woman show, filmed before a live audience, has many hilarious moments, including a discussion of having a friend die in her bed – a Republican lobbyist, no less. An audience member asks, in this very audience-interactive program, if she was naked at the time.
“I haven’t been naked in fifteen years,” she responds, or “sleeveless in twenty.” Fisher also cracks that she once Googled herself and found this posting: “She used to be so hot. Now she looks like Elton John.”
Ah, humility. How rare and refreshing, especially considering that, as she reminds with an old publicity photo from her Star Wars days, she was once out-and-out gorgeous.
The show, which Fisher wrote, is not an exercise in blame shifting, though her recollections of mother Debbie Reynolds’ various eccentricities and a segment on the “incestuous” nature of Hollywood, which includes mocking descriptions of her father’s multiple marriages, could help explain, in part of least, why she’s been around the bend a few times.
She tells a tale of a child who grew up in a “storybook” family who eventually discovered that the stuff so many dreams are made of – especially celebrity – is often quite hollow and unstable.
Sure, her dad was also married to Elizabeth Taylor, but then Liz dumped him the second she laid eyes on Richard Burton. He followed Liz with Connie Stevens and later a former Miss Louisiana, but these marriages failed and he ended up having so many facelifts he looked “asian.”
In the same spirit her mother was an authentic movie legend and the embodiment of purity in her portrayal of Tammy, yet she married poorly as well though wanted daughter Carrie to father a child by one of her husbands, in part because she liked his eyes.
Mom, in a weirdly endearing way, believed her daughter could be artificially inseminated by injecting sperm into her arm.
After hearing all this, most viewers will have little trouble agreeing with Fisher than despite all the fairy dust her family is “blue blooded white trash” and one, she adds, whose celebrity has faded. In perhaps her most poignant aside, she notes that celebrity is merely “obscurity biding its time.”
All told Fisher shows a depth of humor, humility and wisdom that can only come from acute suffering. The other great thing about her is that she’s clearly not trying to bamboozle us into thinking she’s some sort of role model.
She ends her performance by being carried out of the theater on a gurney and slid into an ambulance, having left her audience with this sage advice: “Cry all you want, you’ll pee less.”
In this season of often-forced mirth, Carrie Fisher offers some hard-won comfort and something approaching joy.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226442010-11-17T19:00:00-05:002021-11-11T00:33:42-05:00Review of 'Lennon Naked' Airing in PBS Nov. 21
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Being a Beatle bugged John Lennon almost as much as being the son of a wayward drunk.
He had issues with his mother as well according to “Lennon Naked,” which airs on PBS Sunday night at 9 p.m. New York time, along with wife Cynthia and the bearded and babbling Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
The only person that seems to have made him happy was Yoko Ono, which made him none too popular with almost everyone else in his life, including his band mates and a snarling mother-in-law.
Few days in Lennon’s life were blissful, if this 90-minute drama is to be believed.
Christopher Eccleston stars as the rock icon. He’s not quite a dead ringer – especially his sizable beak -- though with his Jesus hair and wire-rimmed glasses he’s close enough.
The film opens with Lennon and manager Brian Epstein (Rory Kinnear) motoring to a hotel where they meet Lennon’s father, Freddie (Christopher Fairbank), who vamoosed when Lennon was six and hadn’t made contact in 17 years.
He’s a booze hound with a fondness for scotch and, soon enough, a 19-year-old girl, the latter which impresses John, who sets the old man and his babe up in a house. Yet his bitterness toward his father rages throughout the film, which purports to be “based on real events.”
Eccleston’s portrayal of a Lennon as a tormented product of a dissolved home is powerful. Though he would become one of the world’s predominant peace activists he is rarely at peace with himself.
In a pivotal scene he tells his “primal scream” therapist of being forced to choose between his mother and his father during a tense seaside meeting. He initially chose dad, then ran to mom, who took him off and farmed him out to an aunt. The sense of abandonment haunted him ever after.
Yet Yoko Ono (Naoko Mori) did bring some relief. For Lennon it was close to love at first site: He sees her sitting there in an art studio, decked out in her underwear. Soon enough, he sends for her and the rest is history.
They get naked a few times in the film though not in a way to get anyone’s sap rising. In one bare-butted scene Yoko sports enough ballast to keep a medium-sized schooner aloft in a stiff wind.
She’s also given to arcane musings, saying she’s “just thinking about acorns” and that “John and I want to change the world.” Yet she comes across as a sympathetic character, especially after losing a child and getting a perpetually cold shoulder from the other Beatles, who are not even close to dead ringers.
Anyone looking for a Beatle recharge will find the film a bummer. Indeed, Lennon calls much of the Beatle’s music “bollocks” and sneeringly refers to the band as “the nation’s little pets.”
There are funny scenes, including Lennon’s meet-up with his mother-in-law during his divorce proceedings. The old bat calls him “a lying little drug addict” and “a sex maniac, just like his mother.”
Yet the real parallel is with his father, who had left him just as Lennon eventually left son Julian and moved to New York, where he was murdered in 1980. Though a symbol of personal and artistic freedom he comes across here as yet another man deeply and sadly ensnared by his past.
Imagine that.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226432010-11-13T19:00:00-05:002021-08-25T01:29:07-04:00"Wartorn" -- James Gandolfini's New Film on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
<p>(Bloomberg) – James Gandolfini, who cracked plenty of skulls as Tony Soprano, visits the haunted minds of soldiers in “Wartorn: 1861-2010,” a powerful documentary airing on HBO Nov. 11 at 9 p.m. New York time.
There’s a special place for Gandolfini in the hearts of many military families. Despite their small numbers he has focused on issues that can make their lives hellish.
In his earlier “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq” Gandolfini interviewed hideously wounded veterans, reminding Americans -- and with any luck their representatives -- of the terrible cost of combat.
In this Veteran’s Day broadcast he traces the phenomenon now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which has long raged behind a cloak of silence that has yet to be fully stripped away.
The film opens with the case of Angelo Crapsey, a Civil War infantryman from Pennsylvania, who chronicled his own descent into madness – known then as “hysteria” of “melancholia” -- in a series of letters.
He went to war at 18 a hard charger, dismissing a sergeant who committed suicide and deserters as “cowards,” yet by the fall of 1863 he wrote that “I am clear off the hooks” and was discharged.
His sister noted he “looked wild” after his return home and had to be tied down to his bed. He committed suicide in August 1864. According to the film, after the war more than half the patients in mental wards were veterans.
Gandolfini, sporting a beard and a powerful girth, enjoyed good access for this project, including a sit-down in Baghdad with Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who believes “we’re much more aware” of stress-related problems in large part due to Vietnam.
“I think society changes over the years,” he says before correcting Gandolfini’s suggestion that 15 percent of veterans may suffer from PTSD. He says the number is closer to 30 percent.
Most of the time, however, Gandolfini stays out of the picture, preferring to let the horrors of war speak for themselves. He digs up searing combat footage I’ve never seen and offers several case studies of the PTSD’s devastating effects.
One of the saddest stories is that of Noah Pierce, who did two tours in Iraq, came home and committed suicide by holding his dog tags to a temple and shooting himself through the tags. His mother reads part of the 23-year-old’s suicide note: “Mom, I am so sorry…I have done bad things. I have taken lives. Now it is time to take mine.”
Gandolfini revisits the 1943 incident in which General George S. Patton slapped a soldier suffering from “combat fatigue,” as PTSD was known then, called him a “yellow son of a bitch” and ordered him back to combat. His views were standard issue, as reflected in a wartime film in which a clearly disturbed soldier is coolly berated for admitting “I can’t stand seeing people killed.”
Several World War II Veterans tell of personal and family dissolution they blame on PTSD. Al Maher, a former Army Air Corps lieutenant, became an abusive drunk and hasn’t spoken to his sons in 25 years. Watching these old men cry is heart-rending.
While progress is being made, the old viewpoint has not evaporated, the film indicates. Gandolfini interviews Army vice chief of staff Peter Chiarelli, who is attempting to “change attitudes towards PTSD and suicide in the army.”
Gandolfini asks is he is “meeting resistance.”
“You’re fighting a culture that really doesn’t believe in these things,” Chiarelli responds before arguing that you’re not a “weaker person because you see something that no human being should ever have to see” and develop problems.
The film says PTSD affects not only its immediate victims but has a wider societal impact. Nearly 40 percent of incarcerated veterans have screened positive for PTSD.
Gandolfini does good work here; perhaps he could someday turn his attention to the numbskulls who start wars.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226422010-10-25T20:00:00-04:002021-07-02T01:14:38-04:00Wall Street Journal Review of Manthropology and Is There Anything Good About Men? (pre-edited version)
<p>By Dave Shiflett
Have men gone limp?
Totally so, according to “Manthropology,” in which author Peter McAllister argues that contemporary men are a faint shadow of their shaggy forebears.
Modern man, he declares in his first sentence, is “the worst man in history.” A thorough indictment, though not every reader will be convinced.
Mr. McAllister is an entertaining writer whose book is full of interesting information, especially regarding male-sponsored mayhem.
In a section on initiation rights, for example, he dismisses modern-day “blood pinning,” in which military insignia are jabbed into soldier’s chests, as minor league at best. The Sambian men of New Guinea, he notes, initiated their young by jamming cane splints up their nostrils, vines down their throats, and slitting their privates with bamboo blades.
Similarly, while we cringe at waterboarding, it’s pure affection compared to the 17th century Native American practice of not only scalping victims but “heaping hot coals onto their scalped heads.” Which in turn is nothing compared to the attentions lavished on an ancient Christian named Apphianus, who was racked for 24 hours, scourged so hard “his ribs and spine showed, and then had his feet soaked in oil and burned to stumps.”
On a vaster scale, Mr. McAllister writes that recent wars are comparatively wimpy. While World War II killed 3 percent of the world’s 1938 population, the 17th century’s Thirty Years War took out 30 percent of Germany’s people. Which was not all that impressive when compared to the brutality of Genghis Khan’s son Tolui, who killed nearly every inhabitant of Merv in Turkmenistan, then the world’s largest city: as many as 1.3 million were butchered. All told, Mr. McAllister writes, the Mongols killed as many as 60 million people during their 90 year reign. “Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” he adds with something of a sneer, “succeeded in killing 14,602 people worldwide in 2005.”
All true enough, though by some readings Mr. McAllister is describing a positive development.
He also roughs up modern soldiers, noting that Army recruits are required to run only 12 miles in four hours compared to Wu Dynasty soldiers in the sixth-century BCE, who did 80 mile runs without a break. Then again, one scrawny grunt armed with a mini-gun could hold off all the ancient armies combined with one hand while downloading porn with the other. If the ultimate mission is to get the killing done, modern soldiers have plenty of the right stuff.
He also sees decline in the world sports. “Ultimate fighting,” Mr. McAllister writes, is “a ridiculously safe form of combat” when compared to Olympic boxing back in the good old days – 490s BCE – when a boxer named Cleomedes killed his opponent Iccus “by driving his hand into his stomach and disemboweling him.” Yet who misses that, or post-game revelries such as the 532 CE “victory” riot in Constantinople, led by charioteer Porphyrius, which claimed some 30,000 lives?
Roy E. Baumeister, another male writer, is not ready to lower the Y-chromosome to half-staff. In his feisty “Is There Anything Good About Men?” he argues that men have been “exploited” by the cultures they have created, which consider them much more “expendable” than women.
This is reflected not only in wartime casualty rates. While men tend to hold the highest levels of power in politics and business, they also die more often in work-related accidents, make up the bulk of the prison population and for the most part are supremely disadvantaged when it comes to sex.
Women, Mr. Baumeister writes, don’t pay for sex because “they don’t have to. Women can get sex for nothing. Men usually can’t.” He notes that when women offer themselves to male celebrities, men often jump at the opportunity. When men do the same to women celebrities, they might expect a visit from the security detail.
Mr. Baumeister, a professor of psychology, writes with a hopeful air, insisting that while men and women are different they are also able to create partnerships based on complementary skills and that men are willing to share power. And so merrily we’ll roll along, perhaps toward ever-better days.
Both books leave the impression, perhaps not intentionally, that while mistakes have been made things could be far worse. Mr. McAllister points out that rapper 50 Cent has composed some 6000 lines while Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” contain 27,803. While this is offered as proof that contemporary bards are no match for the ancients, aren’t 6000 lines of 50 Cent enough?
And, all told, aren’t men much better off these days?
Mr. McAllister answers the question at book’s end by envisioning a male Homo erectus from 1,000,000 BCE plucked off the African plain and plunked down at a NASCAR event. By his reading the visitor would be horrified by the wimpy moderns and bellow (if he could indeed speak) “My sons, my sons, why have you forsaken me?”
Yet there is an alternate view. If ancient erectus were told his “sons” had driven to the event at 70 miles per hour in cars outfitted with a televisions and satellite radios; that they lived in climate-controlled houses whose refrigerators are full of steaks from Argentina, sausages from Germany and wine from France (none of which comes with a side order of intestinal parasites); and if he knew they would bedding down with wives who smelled nothing like his missus, whose olfactory signature is frightfully close to that of a decomposing pig, then he’d likely bellow, “My sons, you have found the Kingdom of Heaven!”
And, comparatively speaking, he’d be right.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226412010-10-04T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:15-05:00The Good Wife -- Second Season Is No Letdown
<p>Review By Dave Shiflett
Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) - I’d hate to take on “The Good Wife.”
The series, which airs on CBS Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. New
York time, features a formidable cast that includes two of the
most compelling characters on television.
Julianna Margulies returns as Alicia Florrick, a defense
attorney so attractive -- sharp, slender, and beautiful -- I’d
consider committing a felony just to hang out with her.
Alan Cumming, who plays political operative Eli Gold, is so
slick and snaky it’s a miracle he doesn’t slide right out of his
pin-stripe suits.
Both characters, and the actors playing them, help put this
show in a class by itself.
Alicia, to be sure, has first-hand knowledge of the
criminal element in the person of her husband, Peter (Chris
Noth), the disgraced state’s attorney whose sex and corruption
scandal landed him in the jug. This season he’s free and back on
the campaign trail as yet another politico’s sex scandal
threatens to remind voters of Peter’s past indiscretions (with a
little reminding from his opponent).
While Peter wanted to steer clear of the low road, Eli knew
trouble was coming. This week it arrives big time in the form of
a television ad featuring a cheesy blonde purring about how
Peter wants tough sentences -- “the stiffer the better”
Dirty Tricksters
We’re reminded that in the dirty tricks department, Richard
Nixon has many rivals.
The series floats between the worlds of politics and the
law, with lawyers coming off better, largely thanks to Alicia.
She takes on tough cases, though not always on behalf of
sympathetic clients. In the opener she coached a self-defending
murder suspect deploying a “unicorn” defense -- the government
had set him up, he crazily argued -- and got him easy time,
despite believing he was guilty.
This week, she finds herself defending a sympathetic murder
suspect in a military court overseen by a female judge with all
the charm of a Claymore mine. “If I order you to be unbiased
will you be?” the judge asks a member of the court martial
panel, who readily assents that her wish is most definitely his
command.
The case has several twists and turns and at the end you
want to give Alicia a big hug -- and maybe a big tip. As does
her mentor in the firm, Will Gardner (Josh Charles), who carries
a serious torch for her and vice-versa. Will seems a bit mousy
and cold, but he sure beats Peter.
Lou Dobbs!
Lou Dobbs visits te firm, playing his bombastic self and
likely reminding many viewers they’re glad he’s a bit scarce
these days. Law partner Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) is
no fan either, though she rejects Lou’s idea that she can’t
provide good legal advice, reminding him that she also defends
murderers.
He likes her reasoning, and perhaps her middle-aged good
looks, and they forge an alliance that may prove interesting.
Meantime, office investigator Kalinda Sharma, (Archie Panjabi)
fills the screen with her dark fatal eyes and ever-suspicious
nature.
There is serious trouble afoot in this seriously terrific
show. Peter seems determined to recapture his good wife’s heart,
or at least some of the adjoining real estate, and last week
launched a romantic surprise attack in a steamy bathroom scene.
Alicia seems in danger of slipping back into his clutches.
Here’s hoping she dumps the creep. Being too good a wife may be
her only flaw.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226402010-09-30T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:14-05:00Review of Wallander II -- PBS Series
<p>(Bloomberg) – Brooders rejoice. Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, perhaps the most melancholy man on television, is back on PBS starting Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Wallander (Kenneth Branagh) has plenty of reason to mope in “Faceless Killers,” the first of three episodes in “Wallander II.” The shows are based on the crime novels of Henning Mankell and hosted by Alan Cumming, the slithery political aide in “The Good Wife.”
He’s trying to solve the extremely grisly murder of an elderly Swedish couple that has inspired a hate group to target foreign workers, who are suspected of having carried out the gruesome deed.
His father (David Warner)_is in the grips of dementia and has taken to strolling the roadways in his pajamas, burning his furniture and beating his skull while screaming “Space!” He also pleads to his son, “For God’s sake don’t put me away,” as if he might take rumors of euthanasia quite seriously.
Meanwhile, daughter Linda (Jeany Spark) has taken up with a Syrian doctor, which appears to have incited a repressed strain of xenophobia in the deeply decent Wallander, who detests the anti-foreigner sentiment in his fellow Swedes.
Plus he’s living in the port town of Ystad, home to a fair number of psychos and, in the opening episode, murderous thugs who run the Tilt A Whirl at a traveling fair.
This first-rate drama is far different from your typical cop series, where most of the women are babes, the men tend to be glib cynics, and even the file clerks can dust a felon without remorse.
Wallander’s got no swagger, no wisecracks, and definitely no tan. He doesn’t waltz onto a crime scene but instead takes a preparatory deep breath as if he’s about to get himself a root canal. Bodies spook him as opposed to shows where the cops might use a dead man’s chest for an ashtray.
And he’s almost impossible not to like. Wallander’s without pretension or, it appears, an ironed shirt. He’s got stubble on his face, a mole under his lip, and hair he clearly combs twice a year, max. He appears to have last done a sit-up in the 1980s.
His heart is very much with the downtrodden, especially migrant workers, who are under the gun in the opener. One is shot dead in a field and after an explosion at a worker camp Wallander runs into a burning trailer to perform a heroic rescue – though it turns out he saves an inanimate object.
Perhaps there’s something symbolic there, as with other scenes featuring dead flies on a window sill and a roaming white stallion that doesn’t get to trot off into the Nordic sunset. There’s also lots of stark scenery and a musical score featuring lonely piano lines, all of which may put viewers in a Wallander frame of mind.
Yet he is a competent cop. “I am not interested in correctness” he declares, but only “the truth.” With the help of a tipster he discovers the elderly deaths may involve a mistress, a bastard son and lots of money.
He finally gets one of his men in a way that would make Dirty Hairy proud yet this sends him into a profoundly deep funk, even though if ever a thug deserved to die it was this one: a neo-nazi assassin who was working hard to kill Wallander.
You find yourself wondering if this conflicted cop should find another line of work, a thought that haunts Wallander as the series continues through October 17.
Think of him as Brother Grim with a badge, and a terrific show.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226392010-09-17T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:14-05:00Washington Post Review of Nashville Chrome
<p>Fame Is For Fools And Other Unfortunate People
“Nashville Chrome”
Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
256 Pages, $24
By Dave Shiflett
Fame is something you wish only for those at the very top of your enemies list, at least according to “Nashville Chrome,” a darkly engaging “reality-based” novel that might make you think twice before trying out for American Idol.
Rick Bass, an O. Henry award-winner, based the novel on the lives of siblings Maxine, Bonnie and Jim Ed Brown, whose peerless vocal harmonies, at least according to the novel, were much imitated but never matched, not even by the Beatles, who were mesmerized by the rustic trio.
So why don’t we remember the Browns? Their flame flickered and died in the early 1960s, which turned out to be a blessing to Bonnie and Jim Ed, though it was also Maxine’s undoing.
Bass, who spent five years working with the Browns on the project, launches the tale in Poplar Creek, Arkansas, where the family, though humble, lived a life of sometimes exemplary misfortune.
Father Floyd guzzled moonshine, caroused a bit and ran a sawmill that provided hard wages while relieving him of a few fingers. He also lost a leg in the timber trade, which he occasionally abandoned for the restaurant business. His wife Birdie was renowned for her pies and hard work, though their establishments were somewhat prone to burning to the ground.
Yet the sawmill was a conservatory of sorts for Maxine, Jim Ed and Bonnie, who early on revealed their musical precociousness by identifying exactly when a spinning saw blade had been properly tempered. Their precise ears informed their precise harmonies, which first caught the attention of parents and neighbors, then a predatory manager named Fabor Robinson, whose credo, Bass writes, held that while “a star might be born, a star would most assuredly not get paid.” Page 41.
There’s no downside these days to whipping music industry weasels and Bass lashes Fabor as a country music version of Fagin, who by comparison was actually a charming fellow.
Fabor was a parasite’s parasite, living large off the sweat of the Browns’ brows while showing them all the warmth of a wolverine. They were paid next to nothing and when they went broke touring he refused to send gas money, leaving them to wash dishes to make enough to get back home. The eventual falling out, however, was in response to a monstrously lecherous move on Bonnie, who had also caught the eye of the young and not-yet-jaded Elvis Presley.
The Browns rubbed shoulders with many greats – Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, and eventually the Beatles, with whom they played a series of UK gigs. They also worked closely with Chet Atkins, the guitar god whom Bass says eventually discovered that “what he really loved doing was helping other musicians bring out the best in themselves.” PAGE 127> While there will be readers who consider Atkins’ “Nashville sound” sappy enough to make Mantovani blush, he’s pretty much the only guy wearing a white hat in this tale.
Elvis, meantime, is Exhibit A of how greatness and fame can corrode an otherwise charming momma’s boy.
They Browns knew him early on and for several years, at least according to this story, Elvis was a gentle soul who walked in their shadow. Yet he was a marked man who would eventually be transformed into “the bloated extrapolation of insatiable American appetite and surface showmanship,” PAGE 117 Brown writes. Even after becoming famous beyond earlier imagining he told the Browns “he was pretty sad most of the time.”
They largely escaped his fate. The act fell apart by the early 1960s; Bonnie met a doctor who every thing Elvis wasn’t – even deaf in one ear, which Maxine found scandalous. Jim Ed, after bedding hundreds of adoring babes, settled in on a singer and had a moderately successful solo career.
Poor Maxine, however, led a train wreck of a life. She married a philandering lawyer who eventually flew the coup, leaving her with a couple of kids. She retired to the deeper recesses of the bottle, spicing her morning coffee with rum as Jim Ed tried an intervention, though she eventually shook that demon.
The fame devil, however, did not go so easily. Maxine spent half a century desperately hoping to somehow launch a comeback. How desperate? She posted an ad on a Piggly Wiggly food store bulletin board seeking someone – anyone – who would make a movie about her life. Her ad was answered, albeit not by Tom Hanks, though the film project and its unlikely director provided something of a happy ending to her tale of woe.
The novel is fairly short but richly written. There are times, to be sure, when a reader hears a loud Faulknerian echo – but there are far greater sins. Bass can certainly leave you with an arresting mental image, including this one from Elvis’s funeral: The King, he writes, lay “in an open casket on ice, his insides baking, they said, decomposing faster than most normal people, falling apart, riven by violent internal chemistries, the simmerings of errant prescriptions and unsustainable excess.” Page 249.
Bass has clear sympathy for those whose fate is to haunt some A-list or another. “There is no right or wrong to greatness,” Bass writes, “there is only the forward movement of it, and those who possess the most of it are the least in control of it.” 201
Yet you’re left with the impression that the desire for fame might well be considered a form of mental illness. The next time you feel the urge to hire a publicist, you might be better off hiring an exorcist instead.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226382010-09-16T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:14-05:00Bloomberg Review of HBO Crime Series 'Boardwalk Empire'
<p>Review by Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— Fans of pin-striped, trash-talking thugs will find bliss in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” which launches Sept. 19 at 9 p.m. New York time.
The 12-part series, created by Terence Winter of Sopranos fame and co-directed by Martin Scorsese, is set in 1920s Atlantic City as Prohibition rears its sober head.
Steve Buscemi stars as Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, town treasurer, prime thug and a true eel of a man. He’s as comfortable telling a sob-story about eating rats to the weeping ladies of the Temperance Union (who come to life when another speaker hollers “Liquor, thy name’s delirium!”) as he is doing whiskey deals.
He goes around in a powder-blue Rolls Royce and dresses to match, though his pencil-sized neck sometimes gets lost in his collar. He and his similarly slick associates like to salt and pepper their bravado with the F-word, which by now is rapidly approaching cliché. The temperance ladies might think of them as dapper vulgarians.
Nucky is also an artesian well of shopworn expressions and lame jokes. “First rule of politics,” he tells an associate, is to “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Then there’s “How we gonna keep you down on the farm?” He may have a sharp tongue but he’s lugging around a pretty dull brain.
The series starts with the promise of a slaughter afoot but soon enters a sometimes slow-paced segment during which we meet the other principles, including Nucky’s brother and town sheriff Elias (Shea Whigham) and Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a 22-year-old just home from World War I who says he killed plenty of Germans and soon retrains his sites on the local competition.
There’s also Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), a mousy and pregnant temperance enthusiast who, in all fairness, has come to her passion honestly: her husband’s an abusive drunk. She visits Nucky in hopes he’ll give hubby a job, promising “I’ll name my child after you.” The boss man eventually arranges a job of sorts, but not the kind she was expecting.
The series features thug movie stalwarts Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza), Al Capone (Stephen Graham) and a Caruso-loving Big Jim Colosimo (Frank Crudele), who eventually experiences a graphic act of cranial ventilation.
The opener is not excessively violent and sex is rare, though both pick up a bit as the series progresses. The first naked woman we see is a corpse in a funeral home. Later on Nucky has at it with a finely crafted floozy who invokes a rodeo theme, much to the city slicker’s chagrin.
When the blood finally flows it does so memorably, especially a scene featuring a shot-gun blast to an unfortunate head. The resulting goo pile may haunt some viewers.
There are arresting and sometimes disturbing period touches, including a black-faced brass band and a reverent appraisal of Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” plus some truly strange scenes, including a storefront window through which we watch nurses place infants in incubators and a boxing match between dwarfs who are instructed “no low blows!”
Though the opener sometimes drags a bit the series picks up steam as Nucky, who’s been a widower for seven years, takes a liking to the freshly widowed Margaret as Jimmy Darmody and Al Capone build their own empires. Meantime, prohibition agents led by the stern and righteous Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon) try to close the net on Nucky and his fellow vice lords, sometimes employing thuggery that rivals that of the bad guys.
While “Boardwalk Empire” won’t likely cause many viewers to forget “The Sopranos” it’s strong enough to hook you. Here’s hoping Nucky ends up in an oil drum.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226372010-09-14T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T11:52:02-05:00Review of HBO Documentary 'The Fence'
<p>Review by Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— If idiocy were a capital crime, at least 73 percent of Congress would be facing the hangman.
That’s the percentage of legislators who supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which created one of the most stunning boondoggles in U.S. history, at least according to “The Fence (La Barda)” which airs on HBO Sept. 16 at 8 p.m. New York time.
Emmy-winning filmmaker Rory Kennedy (“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib”) starts out with the fence’s major problem: there’s lots more hole than fence. While the U.S.-Mexican border stretches over 2000 miles, the fence only covers only 700.
In one of several “this can’t really be true” segments, a member of a “Minutemen” patrol tells Kennedy that if undocumented migrants don’t want to scale the fence where he’s being interviewed, all they need do is travel a mile to where the fence abruptly ends. Which is does, creating one of many huge gaps in the “protective” barrier.
Bill Odle, who owns a ranch in the area, says the fence is “not performing its function” though that depends on how you define function. To the 7000 construction workers, 350 engineers and 19 construction companies that built the barricade, at a cost of about $3 billion, the fence represents manna from Washington.
But it has spectacularly failed to serve its stated purposes, Kennedy says: to prevent terrorism and slow the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs into the U.S.
Kennedy, who narrates the film, interviews fence-jumpers, human smugglers known as coyotes, Border Patrol agents and members of various “Minutemen” groups, one of whom insists a “full blown invasion from the south” is underway that threatens to turn the U.S. into a “third world cesspool.”
“My gosh!” sputters Glen Beck in archived footage. “We better wake up soon!”
The need to sober up seems more like it.
Kennedy, who maintains a sense of humor throughout the film, says the construction of the fence did not represent the nation’s greatest engineering feat. Part of the stretch through New Mexico, for instance, was built six feet into Mexican territory and had to be torn down and rebuilt at a cost of millions.
While the fence has deterred wildlife from using traditional migration routes it is little more than a speed bump for many of the estimated 500,000 undocumented aliens who cross the border each year. Footage from cameras posted along the fence shows people scaling the obstacle with little trouble; in a truly hilarious scene a pickup truck roars up a ramp and flies over the barricade as if hellbent to make LA for the cocktail hour.
Kennedy adds that the drug trade has not been slowed, nor has the fence deterred any terrorist activity. Then again, she says, of the 29 acts of terrorism that have taken place on U.S. soil in the past 25 years, none of the perpetrators entered the U.S. from Mexico. It seems terrorists prefer jetting into New York to trekking across the blazing desert.
If the fence has had any effect it’s been to force people to cross the border in more remote desert areas. Kennedy says that has driven up the death rate, which now averages two people a day.
In 2010 the office of Homeland Security froze funding to the project, though maintenance costs over the next 25 years are estimated at $49 billion, according to the film.
“We don’t care about fences,” says one coyote. “We’ll just find another way to cross.” Maybe it’s time for a fresh trek to the drawing board.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226362010-08-22T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:13-05:00Bloomberg Review of Spike Lee's New Documentary: 'If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don't Rise'
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) -- The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina brings has inspired the second coming of Spike Lee, who offers a fresh post-mortem of the disaster in “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise,” a sprawling two-part documentary premiering on HBO August 23 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Picking up where his 2006 documentary, “When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts,” left off, the new film is exhaustive at four hours (the final segment airs in the same time slot August 24) yet enduringly interesting.
Lee mixes archived footage with hundreds of fresh interviews. While very dark at times he also finds many silver linings.
To residents such as Curtis Green the storm was a blessing. Green fled to Houston and met his future wife, an especially good catch he tells Lee (always off-camera) because she had not only a house but nice feet. “I have a foot fetish,” he sheepishly admits.
Others, such as Pastor R.C. Blakes, says he experienced a change in his “world view” when white, upper middle class Republicans “reached out in tangible ways” to poor blacks. “I’ve seen that,” he says with a degree of wonderment suggesting he’d just beheld a unicorn.
Yet for many Katrina left scars that may never heal. Lee includes footage of a young victim’s funeral; the wailing mother’s grief is unnerving. Other enduring problems include a ravaged school system, a high crime rate and a lack of affordable shelter. Public housing, says former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, was “atrocious before Katrina” but has been “worse after.” The same is true of mental health services for the city’s most desperate citizens.
Lee spends plenty of time revisiting the official response to the storm, including an interview with former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown.
Brown seems worried about the verdict of history, predicting a less than glowing obit in The New York Times. He lashes the Bush administration for wasting “five days” trying to decide how to respond to the emergency and says former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff “didn’t know what he was doing.” One senses the obit writers will not be moved.
Not everyone complained about the response, especially Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, seen in footage bellowing that his constitutions “are not into victimhood” -- perhaps, according to the film, because they were in relatively deep clover.
Former Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco argues that Mississippi got just as much federal aid as Louisiana even though it suffered only 23 percent of the damage compared to Louisiana’s 75 percent.
The film detours to the January 2010 Haitian earthquake and credits the Obama administration with a rapid response. This segment offers the most gruesome footage in the premier: a large dump truck depositing a load of rotting corpses in a mass grave.
On a brighter note, Lee interviews Brad Pitt, who is spearheading a non-profit homebuilding project in New Orleans. Pitt, sporting a white hat, beard and sunglasses, says the effort, which has so far erected around 50 houses, has “exceeded my expectations” though only 38 percent of percent of the private homes have been rebuilt, according to the film.
The second night includes a detailed look at police misconduct in the wake of the storm and a blistering analysis of the British Petroleum Gulf oil spill.
Famed New Orleans musician Dr. John blames the spill on the “love of money” and says “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.” George Bush and Dick Cheney are roasted by historian Douglas Brinkley for creating an anti-regulatory environment that set the stage for the disaster, while the Obama Administration is lashed for a somewhat lackluster response, even by Democratic strategist James Carville, who says President Franklin Roosevelt would have “jumped out of his wheelchair and run down there.” Brinkley warns the spill could become known as “Obama’s Katrina.”
At four hours, Lee’s latest is truly epic. All that’s missing is a plaque of locusts and a killer asteroid.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226352010-08-20T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:13-05:00Wall Street Journal Review of 'Why We FIght' by Simon Van Booy (pre-edited version)
<p>Why We Fight, Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter, Why We Love
Edited by Simon Van Booy
Harper Perennial, $10 each
Plumbing life’s “big questions” continues to feather a few literary nests, though not to the degree enjoyed by the purveyors of histories, pornography and cookbooks.
Simon Van Booy, a gentle-souled writer who believes that contemplating “central questions” (such as why we fight and love, and what if any effect our decisions actually have) helps us “experience more fulfillment in our relationships, in our work, and how we view ourselves,“ has produced a trio of books brimming with worthy thoughts from some of history’s pre-eminent ponderers, including the peerless Almighty.
In “Why We Fight,” Van Booy opens with the Genesis account of Cain and Abel, perhaps the world’s best known fratricide, which he says underscores the role “excessive pride” plays in human mayhem. While spiritual and religious writers are given their due, Van Booy also includes lengthy excerpts from writers as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Sophocles, Charles Dickens, James Joyce and Desmond Morris of Naked Ape fame, who argues the long-term solution to human aggression is “massive de-population, or a rapid spread of the species on to other planets” which, to some of us at least, merely sounds like a change of venue.
To no surprise there’s little agreement as to why so many of us are constantly at each other’s throat, or if indeed we’re the insatiable predators, bullies and throat-slicers some insist we are. Anthropologist Richard Leaky argues that “humans are innately non-aggressive toward one another” which might have earned him a bullet through the skull from Gen. George S. Patton, whose thoughts are found in the speech that clearly informed George C. Scott’s magnificent opening monologue in “Patton.”
The famed tanker not only argues that all “real Americans love the clash and sting of battle” but urges that without exception the “cowards” in the ranks “should be killed off like rats” (this obscenity-laced address is almost worth the price of the book).
Meanwhile, “Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter” is not, as the title may suggest, a droning collection of excerpts on predestination or meaninglessness, but reminds that we shouldn’t sit around sweating the little stuff, such as worrying about eating that extra Twinkie or puffing a therapeutic cigar. As Mark Twain observes, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Perhaps an argument for less treadmill and more barstool.
Readers will likely take issue with some of the thinkers, including the late Mother Teresa, who in “Why We Love” opines that the “hunger for love is much harder to remove than the hunger for bread.” To some this may suggest she never fully contemplated the sometime fruits of matrimony – or, for that matter, the romance destroying powers of addiction to the National Football League.
Besides being full of highly interesting and, for the most part, well-written observations, Mr. Van Booy’s learned volumes are also small enough to be easily concealed inside the countless publications hellbent on advancing every fashion save the thinking cap. Here’s a writer who has truly thought things through.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226342010-08-15T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:13-05:00Laura Linney Stars in Showtimie's 'The C Word' (pre-edited Bloomberg review)
<p>TV: Stricken By Cancer And Animated by Death
By Dave Shiflett
August 00 (Bloomberg) – Laura Linney is slender, blond and terminal in “The Big C,” a surprisingly positive and often amusing new Showtime series debuting Aug. 16 at 10:30 p.m. New York time.
She’s got melanoma, a year to live, a shaky marriage to a beefy drunk plus a bratty son. On the bright side, her young doctor is developing the hots for her and the feeling seems to be mutual.
Linney, who as Abigail Adams had to put up with a cantankerous John Adams in the hit HBO series, is as plucky as Abigail but far more modern. Who would have guessed that under that colonial garb there lurked such a terrific physique, parts of which occasionally protrude from her bathrobe.
She can also wag a fairly salty tongue, though for the most part this is a series about living with cancer with as much a smile as possible. I sense it’ll be around longer than a single season.
Linney stars as Cathy Jamison, a teacher who has decided against chemo, figuring it will extend her life only a little and create a hindrance to friends and family. She’s also refused to tell anyone about her condition.
Yet while death has entered the room it hasn’t sucked the wind from her sails. To the contrary, it has animated her. She resolves to live fully till lights out.
That’s not necessarily good news for husband Paul (Oliver Platt), an advanced-age adolescent who pours drinks on the sofa, uses the front yard for a urinal and has sensibly been exiled to a friend’s sofa. He wants back in her good graces, as well as her bathrobe.
Their obnoxious son Adam (Gabriel Basso) could also benefit from a serious strapping. He is such a slacker that he refuses to plunge the toilet, leaving the vile job to mom.
But it’s a new day at Cathy’s place. Before the opener is over she pays him back with interest, and starts making other changes as well.
The show is a reminder that cancer, like war and other hardships, can bring people together. Cathy decides it’s finally time to meet neighbor Marlene (Phyllis Somerville), a reclusive widow who may be dancing with death herself. She confides “I think about it all the time but I just keep waking up.”
Other regulars include brother Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), an activist fixated on the dangers of plastic grocery bags and also devoutly opposed to regular bathing. He’s a bit of a flake – maybe someone should scan his brain for tumors -- though he likes sis’s new attitude, telling her approvingly that “You’re starting to get your old weird back.”
She may also get her old mojo working. Her young doctor, Todd (Reid Scott), seems to have her in his crosshairs and she’s hardly running for cover. Meantime, she also offers to pay seriously plump student Andrea (Gabourney Sidibe) $100 for every pound she loses. If Andrea rises to the challenge Cathy’s going broke before she goes toes-up.
Sometimes the show gets a little too peppy, as when Cathy does cartwheels down a school hallway, apparently for the sheer joy of it. Yet for the most part the series will resonate with viewers whose lives have been touched by cancer – which is to say just about all of us.
In the most moving scene Cathy finally confides her condition to a neighbor – one incapable of passing on the info – in a monologue that mixes bravery and sadness. She points out that all parents want to outlive their children, so “I’m living the dream.” Her eyes reflect the knowledge she’s also heading into a protracted nightmare.
The series promises to be a bittersweet look at how a cancer patient progresses as a person even as she is ravaged by the disease.
Looks like Linney may have another hit on her hands.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226332010-08-05T20:00:00-04:002022-01-03T17:36:40-05:00'Real L-Word" Pretty Much a Real Bore
<p>Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Whitney is a saber-toothed tigress
with tattoos and a runaway libido. Tracy is a gorgeous movie
executive who’s morphing into a high-class model. Nikki, a
divorced Hollywood agent, is hearing wedding bells again.
On Showtime’s “The Real L Word,” lesbians aren’t just out
of the closet. They’re high-profile, mostly gorgeous and -- I’m
sorry to say -- awfully boring.
The summer show, a reality version of Showtime’s “The L
Word” drama that ended its six-season run last year, follows
six gay women and their assorted pals in Los Angeles, where they
produce fashion events, work on indie movies and juggle
relationships.
Although the show features a lot of boozing, carousing and
smooching, these ladies are often as enthralling as C-Span.
Their reality is my boredom.
And it’s not because I’m a hetero male. The target audience
clearly isn’t just lesbians. Why else would so many of the women
look like a lonely guy’s fantasy?
Yet the leer factor is fairly tame, by contemporary
standards, and these California girls are hardly exotic
creatures. Once you get past the chatter about “sagging
vaginas,” what you have is a group of young women living pretty
ordinary lives.
Wedding Plans
Like their straight counterparts, they pursue love with
varying degrees of passion.
Whitney has a proprietary streak. When foxy girlfriend Sara
makes it clear she can rumble without emotional attachment,
Whitney gets a little pouty.
Nikki and Jill are all about monogamy and have been
planning their nuptials. They’re so square they could be
mistaken for a pair of Mormon debutantes. Both are horrified by
the costs of matrimony, especially the price of dresses, though
either would look terrific in a trash bag.
“You better love me forever,” Nikki purrs to her
sweetheart. Good luck with that!
Not everyone is so sweet. Rose, a somewhat beefy tart you
might see drinking boilermakers at a pool hall, throws a
stripper-and-beer party that features lap dancing and breasts
that seem to be stuffed with bowling balls.
The series, which runs on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. New York
time through Aug. 15, isn’t all frivolous. Tracy’s mother is
troubled by her sexuality, while Mikey struggles to find backers
for a major fashion event.
Lunar Cycles
The hour-long program is broken into so many short segments
that it sometimes resembles a YouTube video. When the subject
gets too esoteric -- I have absolutely no interest in lunar
cycles -- just wait a minute and it will change.
The problem with reality shows is not so much the shows but
the reality, which even with contrived situations include long
stretches of monotony, job grind, relationship friction and
family upheaval.
Who needs to be reminded of that? Give me a dose of
unreality anytime.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226322010-07-23T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:13-05:00Bloomberg Review of Season Four Debut of Mad Men (pre-edited version)
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226312010-06-26T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:12-05:00Washington Post Review of Books on Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison (pre-edited version)
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226302010-06-20T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:12-05:00Review Of "Gasland' -- Flaming Tap Water, Explosive Air
<p>(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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226292010-06-13T20:00:00-04:002021-09-09T16:00:34-04:00Wall Street Journal Review of 'Furious Love' Starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton (uncut version)
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226282010-05-27T20:00:00-04:002021-07-09T13:51:12-04:00Review of HBO Film 'The Special Relationship'
<p>(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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226272010-05-23T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:11-05:00Wall Street Journal review of a new history of Time Magazine
<p>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</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226262010-05-09T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:11-05:00Review of Ric Burns's Documentary on Whaling, Airing on PBS
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226252010-04-26T20:00:00-04:002022-04-04T20:55:17-04:00PBS Special: Economic Collapse Tied to Lizard Brain
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226242010-04-11T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:11-05:00Review: HBO's New Series About New Orleans -- Treme
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226232010-04-11T20:00:00-04:002022-03-24T08:42:46-04:00Review: Dad's In Heaven With Nixon
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226222010-03-10T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:10-05:00Review of HBO's "The Pacific:" Hanks, Spielberg and Goetzman Shift From Europe To Guadalcanal, Okinawa and Iwo Jima
<p>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.
(</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226212010-02-28T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:10-05:00PBS' 'Dolley Madison': She Really Was A Cupcake
<p>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.
(</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226202010-02-24T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:10-05:00La-La Land, One of Dumbest Shows Ever, Comes to a Close
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226192010-02-13T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:09-05:00Washington Post Review of Two Elvis Presley Books
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226182010-02-12T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:09-05:00Wall Street Journal Reivew of Alexandra Penney's 'Bag Lady Papers'
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226172010-01-24T19:00:00-05:002021-10-28T11:14:58-04:00Tracey Ullman's State of the Union: Prez Gets Pass, Madoff Gets Pasted
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226162010-01-18T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:09-05:00Review of PBS's 'Copyright Criminals' featuring Igor Stravinsky and George Clinton
<p>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.
(</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226152009-12-27T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:08-05:00PBS Special: Louisa May Alcott -- Maybe A Bit of a Cougar
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226142009-12-09T19:00:00-05:002021-09-08T05:56:07-04:00Narco State: Lisa Ling Special on Drugs and Murder in Phoenix and Juarez
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226132009-11-23T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:08-05:00Review of PBS Special: The Card Game (Frontline)
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226122009-11-12T19:00:00-05:002022-03-25T06:22:16-04:00Review of PBS Presentation of Collision
<p>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.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226112009-10-26T20:00:00-04:002021-07-19T21:39:13-04:00Review of 'The Botany Of Desire' on PBS: Horny Hemp, Tulip Mania
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226102009-10-18T20:00:00-04:002022-07-29T01:23:12-04:00Review of HBO's 'Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags'
<p>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.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226092009-10-15T20:00:00-04:002021-08-30T07:26:00-04:00Wall Street Journal Review of Dr. Ralph Stanley's "Man of Constant Sorrow"
<p>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</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226082009-09-27T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:07-05:00Note By Note: A film about making a Steinway Grand
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226072009-09-20T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:07-05:00Jewish Sam Spade in HBO's Bored To Death
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226062009-08-12T20:00:00-04:002021-02-11T23:56:46-05:00Mad Men, Season Three: Sex, Booze, and a Touch of Hog Fat
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226052009-08-09T20:00:00-04:002021-12-12T20:38:15-05:00HBO Movie Review: Marion Barry: Drugs, Sex, and Serial Reelection
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226042009-07-26T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:06-05:00Yes Men Say No to Milton Friedman, Halliburton, Exxon Mobil
<p>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.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226032009-07-10T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:05-05:00Apollo 11 40th Anniversary Celebrates Original Moonwalkers: Wall Street Journal Review (unedited version)
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226022009-07-05T20:00:00-04:002021-12-12T20:33:15-05:00PBS Special Features Jason Crigler, New York musician, who overcame brain bleeder
<p>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.”</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226012009-06-28T20:00:00-04:002022-07-26T19:07:47-04:00HBO Special, Shouting FIre, Says Big Brother Getting Better At Watching You
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61226002009-06-07T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:05-05:00Edie Falco, Jada Pinkett Smith Star in New Nurse Shows
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225992009-05-25T20:00:00-04:002022-07-23T17:11:26-04:00Alex Jones and Pals warn of Halliburton Concentration Camps -- In America
<p>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.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225982009-05-10T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:04-05:00PBS Presents Special On Bernie Madoff, Pope of Ponzi
<p>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.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225972009-04-15T20:00:00-04:002021-12-12T20:30:55-05:00Grey Gardens -- Where Jackie's Kin Lived with Cats, Coons, and Broken Hearts
<p>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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225962009-04-09T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:04-05:00Tracey Ullman Whacks Bushes, Huffington, Celine Dion
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – George Bush is gone but not forgotten, at least not by Tracey Ullman, who whacks Bush and wife Laura early and often in the season opener of “Tracy Ullman’s State of the Union.”
The half-hour series, whose second season debuts on Showtime Sunday night at 10 p.m. New York time, also features Ullman’s barbed impersonations of Arianna Huffington, Heather Mills and Celine Dion.
Nobody, however, gets busted like the Bushes.
Several skits are set at the Bush retreat in Crawford, Texas, where Laura is getting ready for a presidential garage sale. Ullman’s Laura is not quite as dead-on as Tina Fey’ Sarah Palin, but it’s pretty dang good, as the Bushes might put it.
She’s chirpy and also a chain-smoking thief, having pinched several White House treasures on the way out of town, including a longish fertility symbol from Zimbabwe chief Robert Mugabe, a family portrait of the Lincolns, and a pair of French love seats. Also slated for sale: the presidential seal.
Bush himself is more heard than seen. He’s first encountered as a snoring bed lump; it sounds as if he might have returned to the bottle, though that is mere speculation. He later drags a dead deer into the house and the deer’s not the only corpse in the room. Laura rekindles the issue of brain death with this jibe: “Remember when you asked where there are no old buildings in Hiroshima?”
The Obamas come off far better, though their presence is restricted to phone conversations with Laura and Arianna Huffington, who may consider Ullman’s portrayal far too close for comfort.
Huffington phones the new prez in pursuit of patronage. She’d be a perfect envoy to Greece, she insists, and is even willing to travel business class. Self-flattery gets her nowhere, however. The president apparently has his mind set on Meryl Streep (good eye, sir).
“She does look good in Spandex, for her age,” snips the jilted Arianna. After she hangs up she says: “Maybe I should have gone with Hillary.” One senses that’s exactly how she would react to such a snubbing.
Ullman’s impersonations are not restricted to politicos. Paul McCartney ex Heather Mills-McCartney belts out “Baby, I’m gonna make it on my own,” then tosses away her fake leg, instantly proving otherwise. Celine Dion, looking somewhat like a lizard, does a Larry King interview from New Orleans, flooding the set with phony tears and making me wish a thug had come along and strangled her.
There’s also a production number hailing the “American Spirit” that includes a paean to urban violence -- “Drive by shootings, yes we can!” -- and a line that links Warren Buffett and Charles Manson.
Being funny for a half hour is a tough assignment and things go a bit flat in skits featuring a pair of flight attendants. Political types may complain that Ullman is not a member of the fair and balanced revolution, especially at the end, when the cameras return to Crawford.
Laura fires up her final smoke of the day and asks snoring George if there were things he wishes he could take back, such as “letting Cheney run hog-wild in Iraq” and “destroying the American financial system” – even though, with the latter at least, he had much bipartisan help.
Other viewers might simply think these tend to be safe targets – kicking Bush and Heather Mills is not exactly an exercise in daring. Fear not, however. Future episodes include one that links the Catholic Church to a polygamist cult. That should stir things up.
(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225952009-04-06T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:03-05:00Fred Astaire: Dancer, Singer, Fierce Monogamist
<p>Here's a review currently running in The Wall Street Journal. This is the pre-edited version. You can find the Journal piece at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123879685776088067.htm
________
By Dave Shiflett
Hollywood, fabled kingdom of detox and botox, is not known for producing sturdy role models. Fred Astaire was an exception. Then again, by celebrity standards, Mr. Astaire was a freak.
Two new books remind just how unusual he was. The late Peter J. Levinson’s “Putting on the Ritz: Fred Astaire and the Fine Art of Panache” (St. Martin’s, 426 pages, $32.50) thoroughly chronicles this extraordinary life while Joseph Epstein’s “Fred Astaire” (Yale University Press, 191 pages, $22) is much lighter on its feet while pursuing the question: “Whence derived Fred Astaire’s sublimity, his magic?”
Mr. Levinson’s book will have great appeal to readers who desire details such as Mr. Astaire’s waist measurement (29 inches) while Mr. Epstein’s book, part of a series on “American Icons,” will delight readers who have come to admire his sometimes magical prose. Together they provide an engaging portrait of the sultan of suave.
He was definitely an odd bird. He despised publicity, appears to have been a fierce monogamist, was a regular churchgoer and decidedly Republican in his politics. He was also pleasantly bi-polar: To the south, one of the best pair of feet ever to grace a stage while, to the north, a highly disciplined head -- topped by a hairpiece and, in its most memorable moments, a top hat.
In between wasn’t bad either. Mr. Astaire was around 5’7”and weighed 135 pounds; he never grew a gut (“What is a calorie anyway?” he once asked jazz critic Benny Green), was always dressed to the nines – or tens -- and remained light on his feet until his death in 1987.
He wasn’t born sublime, but instead in Omaha , in (1899). His father was a Catholic of Jewish heritage who appears to have tap-danced around the commandment regarding adultery while his mother dedicated herself to ushering Fred and sister Adele, three years older, into a show business career. They hit the road for New York in 1905 and found early fortune as traveling entertainers; a gig with on the Orpheum Circuit paid $150 a week, writes Mr. Levinson (who died in 2008), compared to the weekly $2 skilled workers made at the time.
Adele was the golden one, hailed by George Bernard Shaw as “one of the most beautiful women I have ever met.” Fred, whose features were nowhere near as stunning as his clothes, developed a capacity for hard work that would drive his sister and future dancing partners crazy – and result in performances that drove fans to tears. “Freddie,” Noel Coward said, “when I see you dance it makes me cry.”
Hard work might not explain all his sublimity but it played a big part, as did the angelic (looking, at least) women who followed Aldele as partners (Mr. Astaire and his sister last danced professionally in 1932). Mr. Epstein’s pulse especially quickens while recalling Cyd Charisse, though there was also Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, Leslie Caron, Barrie Chase and of course Ginger Rogers.
Both authors agree that Ms. Rogers was not the most polished dancer of the lot, though as Mr. Epstein says that may have been central to producing magical results. “What it meant, in practice, was that Fred Astaire, through relentless rehearsal, in effect trained her – and trained her above all else to dance his way with him.” Part of their appeal arose from common roots. Ms. Rogers was also a midwesterner (born in Independence, Missouri) and together they were glamorous yet, as Mr. Epstein puts it, “never lost the common touch.”
While both books primarily focus on Mr. Astaire’s feet they also offer high praise for his vocal chords, often overlooked despite a long list of hits including “Top Hat,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “ The Way You Look Tonight,” “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
The authors are in good company. “He’s as good as any of them – as good as Jolson or Crosby or Sinatra,” said Irving Berlin. “Astaire can’t do anything bad,” agreed Jerome Kern. He was also a favorite of the Gershwins and incredibly proficient in the studio. While contemporary rock bands may spend a year of more cobbling together instantly forgettable albums, Mr. Astaire released a historic series of records in the 1950s that were largely unrehearsed, Mr. Epstein writes, “and none required more than four takes.”
Also unlike some musicians, Astaire actually sought out the company of police officers. Mr. Levinson tells the story of when Mr. Astaire, who liked to ride around in patrol cars, was present at the capture of a bank robber: The collared crook produced the piece of paper he had drawn the robbery plans on and asked for an autograph.
He knew his share of sadness. His first wife, Phyllis, died of lung cancer in 1954 at 46, and he remained single until marrying Robyn Smith, a jockey, in 1980. He was 80, she was 43 years younger – which to some readers will seem the epitome of sublimity, though Mr. Levinson reviles Mrs. Astaire the Younger for what he believes has been a tight-fisted administration of his estate.
Mr. Astaire seems not to have thought himself especially sublime, at least according to Debbie Reynolds, who says he “called himself a businessman, an ordinary man, not a dancer. He felt he was a businessman who danced.” Yet Mr. Epstein is not exaggerating in writing that what “Fred Astaire did was elevate the entertainment of popular dance into an art; and he did it by dint of superior taste and sublime style.”
If that’s not sublimity, it’s close enough for this world. If we ever get around to cloning people, let’s hope Fred Astaire’s at the top of the list.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225942009-03-30T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:03-05:00Ray Suarez, PBS To Jerusalem: Center of the World
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – PBS, alleged hotbed of leftist heathens, will ruffle few orthodox feathers with its presentation of “Jerusalem: Center of the World.”
The two-hour special, which airs April 1 at 9 p.m. New York time, will likely win hosannas from true believers of the three major faiths – Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim -- that hold the 40-century-old city dear.
Other interested parties will appreciate host Ray Suarez’s dressed-down yet respectful delivery (no robes for Ray; instead a denim shirt and khakis) and producer/director Andrew Goldberg‘s wonderful cinematography and use of traditional and modern artwork.
This is an often-told story but also a fresh reminder that humans not only believe some fairly counterintuitive things but are willing to kill and die for them in large numbers.
The tale begins with Abraham, a man who heard voices in the night and who today is revered by billions, says Suarez, senior correspondent for “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.”
God promised “I will make nations of you,” yet Abraham was to discover the Almighty had, at least by modern lights, an odd way of sealing the deal: circumcision. Even viewers long familiar with the story and practice may discover this segment, illustrated with a grand old painting, sets their empathetic teeth to chattering. You can almost hear Abraham saying, “Lord – are you sure?”
The show features the A-List of prophets, saints, and other holy men who have either called Jerusalem home or whose visits became world-changing events, including the heavenly ascents of Jesus and Mohammed.
There is perennial favorite David – harpist, psalmist, skirt-chaser and giant-slayer – who moved the Ark of the Covenant into town. “God in effect had entered his new home,” as Suarez puts it.
The First Temple, the show says, may not have been as grand as sometimes thought, perhaps 90 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 45 feet high – not much larger than some suburban garages. Solomon, who oversaw construction, was not only wise but perhaps a bit wily, according to the film. He was visited by the queen of Sheba who, in some tellings, left town bearing his child.
The Second Temple would put modern-day mega-churches to shame. It was the length of five football fields and sheathed in white marble. It was also the last stop for countless sacrificial animals, illustrated by paintings featuring lots of smoke and serious faces. Jerusalem could be a very rough place to be a sheep.
And to be a prince of peace. The well-known story of Jesus includes humanizing tidbits of interest to animal lovers. Not only did he overturn the money changer’s tables but freed beasts slated to be sacrificed. He chose to ride a donkey into town as a sign of humility.
Yet he would soon discover that Jerusalem can be a tough and unforgiving neighborhood, a fact of life that hasn’t changed. The longstanding disputes between Christians, Jews and Muslims are cited chapter and verse, up to the present day.
While there’s little new in the show it shares its subject’s timeless quality and would well serve as a holy land primer for those who don’t know much about history (a large portion of the population). Besides that, Jerusalem has little use for novelty: If it didn’t happen thousands of years ago it’s not all that important.
The exception, the show reminds us, is a future event closely associated with Jerusalem: Judgment Day, which will again put the old town center stage. Suarez doesn’t suggest he knows when JD is coming down, though his reporting for this film affirms the belief that it won’t be pretty.
(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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225922009-03-03T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:03-05:00From Berklee Blog: How I Did the Videos You See Above
<p>In an act of generosity, songwriter Andrea Stolpe asked me to explain how I put together the videos for 'My Beautiful Friend' and 'All the Good Men.' Here's the piece, which she ran on her Berklee blog. It starts with Andrea's intro.
A fellow writer and blog reader of mine recently brought to my attention a valuable and artful marketing tool he uses to promote his songwriting. Always in the mood for new ways to spark my own creativity and suggestions on how to reach more lovers of music, I asked Dave to share in detail about his experience with this tool. He was kind enough to oblige. As he explains, one marketing tool alone grows stale and ineffective after too much use, but a multi-pronged approach can be just what we need to keep fans following our latest music and entice new listeners to get on board. Read below how Dave Shiflett brought new sparkle and ‘vision’ with videography to some of his original songs.
-Andrea Stolpe
If you’re a member of the vast unknown horde of songwriters, the big trick is getting recording artists, music supervisors, or publishers to actually listen. My experience as an unknown has been that getting someone to agree to listen to a song is not a huge problem. Yet my assumption is that much of the time, if not most of the time, the song never gets listened to. .
Recently, I tried a new approach that seems to have vastly expanded the listener-ship for two songs I’ve been circulating for over a year. I created videos on my computer to “illustrate” the songs. Early indications are that videos greatly increase chances of getting heard.
I had never made a video before. I’m a world-class computer klutz. Besides that, I’m not a photographer or videographer. So, if I can do this, anyone can.
The first video was for a song called “All the Good Men.” This is a “reality of war” song based on my experience as the father of a soldier. Grim material, to be sure, but I really believe in the song and the recording, which was done in a studio. I had sent the song around and had small success with some folk DJs. But for the most part there was very little response from music industry “weasels” (Eric Beall’s excellent term).
So, I decided to try to make the package more appealing by creating a video, even though I had no idea how to proceed or little money to spend. Fortunately, I discovered that my computer, which runs on Windows XP, includes a video-making program called Movie Maker. Even better, the program is made for idiots like me. Best yet, making the videos hasn’t cost a cent. Without even reading the tutorial I soon figured out how to import a copy of my song to Movie Maker and begin adding visual material to accompany the music.
This particular song tells the story of a soldier’s body coming home in a flag-draped coffin. I went online and found a couple of sites that offer free photographs, including a source for U.S. government photos (http://www.unclesamsphotos.com)
and another site that offers thousands of photos in the public domain. (http://people.uwec.edu/koroghcm/public_domain.htm).
After a few minutes of trial and error I began transferring a wide selection of photos to my computer and began matching them to the lyrics. Within a few hours, I had a pretty good video, which you can check out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuySpA6wuvQ.
I posted the video on YouTube – which is very computer-idot friendly – and sent out emails to friends and music-industry contacts directing them to the site. The response has been encouraging. I have heard from people who never responded when I had sent the songs – when requested — on CDs or had sent along links to sites where they are posted. In another interesting response, a DJ got back in touch to say he was so taken by the video that he went to my songwriting site (http://www.Daveshiflett.com), downloaded the song and played it on his show that week.
I’m assuming a few people stumbled across the video on their own, yet I never did anything to promote it. Getting lots of hits isn’t the mission. Getting the “right” hits is. Within a couple of days, I had more viewers than had been on the original email list, suggesting that most of those I contacted had bothered to view the video, and perhaps suggest it to friends and contacts. I also created a free widget with ReverbNation, which is quickly approaching the number of hits the songs have gotten on Myspace over the course of a year.
A few weeks later I made another video (which, as it turns out, I like even more) about a song called “My Beautiful Friend.” This is a song about going through hard times, so I went back to the public domain site and found a huge collection of photos from the depression (see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOE8sCmWeIQ).
In another interesting response, a label titan to whom I had send a CD copy of the song many months ago, responded almost instantly to say how much he had enjoyed the song and video. It was clear he had never gotten around to spinning the CD.
Of course, none of this guarantees anything more will happen with these songs, but at least the songs are being heard. My only note of caution would be to make sure you don’t overuse the video option. All things grow old. Choose your songs carefully, and try to make sure the video is at least as compelling as your tune. Perhaps a rule of thumb should be this: Think two or three times before submitting any song you wouldn’t spend a few extra hours turning into a video.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225892009-02-15T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:55:03-05:00PBS Frontline Presents Inside the Meltdown -- Paulson Plays the Goat
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Credit is tight these days but we’re increasingly rich in recriminations over who’s to blame for the economic crisis.
Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is the designated goat in Frontline’s “Inside the Meltdown,” which airs on PBS Feb. 17 at 9 p.m. New York time, with supporting roles by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a few CEOs and a confederacy of right-wingers.
The show starts by recounting a Sept. 18, 2008, emergency meeting between Paulson, Bernanke and key congressional members. Paulson dramatically announced that if Congress didn’t pass a $700 billion bailout “tomorrow, we won’t have an economy on Monday.”
"There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left," says Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.)
Paulson’s plan, according to the show, was a total repudiation of his belief in “moral hazard,” which holds that one bailout is likely to beget additional bailouts. Earlier adherence to this doctrine, according to the show, made a bad situation much worse.
The hour-long program, produced and directed by Michael Kirk, traces the rapid-fire catastrophe beginning with the collapse of Bear Stearns, followed by crises at Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and eventually spreading overseas.
Along the way, viewers are reminded of the central role perception plays in markets. “Rumors are such that they can just plain put you out of business," says former Bear Stearns chief Alan "Ace" Greenberg, and he should know.
After CNBC reported that Stearns was “dragging the rest of the markets down” Greenberg, though no longer running the operation, phoned in to insist rumors of the firm’s “eminent demise” were false. Jitters remained, so CEO Alan Schwartz went on-air with the hope that correspondent David Faber would pitch a few softballs, which he would knock out of the park and end the panic.
Instead, Faber asked about rumors that Goldman Sachs might desert Stearns; Schwartz’s less than reassuring response was “the kiss of death,” according to author Bryan Burrough.
Schwartz isn’t the only chief that takes a lashing. Lehman chief Dick Fuld oversaw a company that had become reckless.
Former Lehman employee Michael Petrucelli says Lehman “kept pushing the envelope on acceptable loan terms,” a sensation likened to intoxication. “I think in hindsight it’s easy to see there was a bubble, but when you’re at a party having a good time, sometimes it’s hard to stop and leave the party.”
Paulson’s refusal to bail out Lehman, the show suggests, was partially personal: he didn’t like Fuld, against whom he had competed during his Wall Street years. Though Paulson demanded that Fuld find a buyer for Lehman, the show says, Fuld declined because he “had watched the government save Bear Stearns.”
While Bernanke is, for the most part, cast as a reasonable man, Paulson gets no breaks. He “personally made hundreds of millions of dollars believing the best government was no government,” the show says. Nobel Laureate/columnist Paul Krugman dismisses him as not “the most reflective guy” whose Lehman policy could be likened to “the decision that destroyed the world.”
Also piling on is Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who performs a bit of ideological ax grinding. "You had a conservative secretary of the Treasury and conservative administration. There was a lot of right-wing criticism over Bear Stearns," Frank says.
As there was over the demand for $700 billion to buy up toxic assets which, according to journalist Mark Landler, was “as close to a blank check as you can get without asking for a blank check.” “Right wing Republicans” opposed the plan, the show reminds, though reasonable people across the political spectrum are also wary of handing Congress a blank check for any reason.
“Meltdown” would have benefited by reviewing how Congress created the sub-prime environment the bankers frolicked in, and from a short glance at the cozy relationship between congressional bigwigs, including Mr. Frank, and Fannie Mae.
Those topics will no doubt be taken up elsewhere as we wait to see if our political and financial leadership has created a problem it can’t solve.
(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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225852009-02-11T19:00:00-05:002024-03-02T17:58:13-05:00Fagin Gets Facelift in New PBS Take on Oliver Twist
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Fagin gets a makeover in the latest take on Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” graduating from sinister prince of thieves to a fairly lovable professor of pickpockets.
Purists may howl but most viewers will find plenty to like in this Masterpiece Theater adaptation, which premiers on PBS Feb. 15 at 9 p.m. New York time.
If you’re feeling bad about your life, Oliver’s story is a reminder that things could be worse. His oft-told tale starts at the Mudfog workhouse, where the newborn exists mother Agnes moments before her sweaty death.
His early years are desperately tough, with lashes on his back and grubs in his porridge, yet bright-eyed Oliver (William Miller) develops a steely integrity, taking no guff from anyone, including sweatshop mistress Mrs. Corney (Sarah Lancashire) or Mr. Bumble (Gregor Fisher), the bumptious beadle who seems to enjoy beating him as much as he does sizing up Corney’s magnificent rump, the conquest of which bears fruition later in the film’s second half, which airs Feb. 22.
This was Dickens’ second novel and the first in the English language to feature a child in its central role. Oliver rubbed shabby elbows with several other children, most notably the Artful Dodger (Adam Arnold), who quickly lives up to his name by helping Oliver, fresh to London, dodge an incoming round from a chamber pot.
Yet the most memorable character is Fagin (Timothy Spall) -- “one of nature’s philanthropists” according to the Dodger -- who in this telling of the tale is a fairly stark departure from the literary Fagin and Alec Guinness’s 1948 version.
Many viewers may think he was due for an update. Guinness’s Fagin could have been lifted from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” with a nose as big and sharp as a dorsal fin and a personality to match.
Spall’s Fagin is fat, bulb-nosed, and somewhat reminiscent of Mama Cass. He’s got very bad teeth though a sweet disposition, most of the time, plus a pet crow named Ezekiel, to whom he delivers a stern warning: “Never trust the Goyim.”
Sage advice in his neighborhood, especially concerning Bill Sikes (Tom Hardy) the ferocious predator who boasts “There ain’t no worse than me.” On his behalf, Sikes has a fairly well-behaved dog, Bullseye, and an angelic girlfriend, Nancy (Sophie Okonedo), whom of course he later murders.
Purists may object to some deviations from the Dickens text. The vile Monks (Julian Rhind-Tutt) is now grandson of the warm-hearted Mr. Brownlow (Edward Fox), whose palatial estate is home to the also-angelic Rose (Morven Christie), who lived in a country bungalow in the original telling. Other characters disappear altogether and some plot remakes seem clunkers. After his eventual conviction Fagin is offered leniency if he will convert to Christianity and Sikes’ spectacular hanging is cast in a much different light, and location.
I prefer a more sinister Fagin and found the 1948 version created an unforgettable sense of bleakness. You could almost smell the millipedes rooting around in the rotting wood of the London tenements.
Yet viewers with a taste for grimness will still find a feast here. There’s slop in the streets, corruption in the courts, and decent gallows humor. After Oliver experiences a work-related injury – shot in the commission of a burglary -- his doctor asks for “first refusal on the cadaver” should his patient succumb to infection.
Some deviations are also likely to meet universal approval, including the fate of Sikes’ dog, whose brains are bashed out in Dickens’ book. This version ends with him trotting down the street with the Dodger, who, in the original, was sent off to Australia after being caught pinching a snuff box.
All things considered, both clearly prefer to be in London. The film brings the gritty old town back to life and opens a series of remakes of other Dickens’ classics, including “Little Dorrit” and “The Old Curiosity Shop,” plus an encore of “David Copperfield,” which air Sunday evenings well into spring.
(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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225792009-01-11T19:00:00-05:002021-07-07T07:38:54-04:00Volker, Gross on PBS Money Special; Damages Back for Season Two
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Belief in the almighty dollar may be a bit on the wane, yet history indicates we should keep the faith.
So indicates “The Ascent of Money,” a sweeping two-hour special airing on PBS Jan. 13 at 9 p.m. New York time. Host Niall Ferguson, a Harvard professor, reminds us that meltdowns and swindlers are nothing new.
Ferguson offers a precise definition of his subject: money, he says, is “the tangible expression of the relationship between lender and borrower, creditor and debtor, a relationship built on trust.” He shows a small clay tablet from ancient Babylon promising to pay a debt of “300 measures of grain on harvest day.”
That piece of clay tells a great story, he says. Credit, which Ferguson calls “a system of mutual trust,” allowed humans to rise above subsistence farming and eventually live in plush penthouses.
Well, some of us anyway.
Ferguson interviews many heavyweights including Paul Volker, now an adviser to President-elect Barak Obama, who says our economy is indeed a “confidence game” based on a foundation of trust, though sometimes confidence is misplaced, as when mortgages were given to people who may not have had jobs.
The sub-prime crisis, which Ferguson explores in depth, is a case of good intentions gone awry. Politicians, including President George Bush, wanted to make homeownership available to minority citizens still suffering the legacy of red-lining, which denied low-cost mortgages to low income, mostly minority citizens. Red-lining, Ferguson says, was a key factor in the 1967 Detroit riots, which claimed 43 lives and were mainly directed at property, with some 3,000 buildings looted and/or torched.
Yet many sub-prime borrowers defaulted and even homeowners making their payments are now learning a hard lesson: Those hoping to retire on the proceeds of a home sale should probably come up with a Plan B. “It turns out that no amount of financial alchemy can turn little suburban boxes into treasure chests with roofs,” he says.
Ferguson is as much at home among blue collars as mega titans. He yacks with hedge fund maestro George Soros, Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, and PIMCO bond king Bill Gross. He also snoops around at the lower end of the spectrum, including Memphis, Tennessee, which he calls “the bankruptcy capital of America.” Companies offering “payday advances,” a pawn shop “the size of a department store,” and, for the really desperate, a place to “sell blood for 25 dollars a pop” constitute “an economic sector based on people who are broke.”
He takes a ride Richie, a repo man, who tells of being bloodied with a rifle barrel. Ferguson says it sounds exciting and maybe he’d like to try his hand at this trade. “I’ll tell you what,” Ritchie beams, “it’s interesting.”
Ferguson revisits various swindles including Enron, which promised “wealth beyond the dreams of avarice” but actually delivered “the biggest corporate fraud in modern American history.” He singles out former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan for a lashing: “Without Greenspan’s policies Enron’s bubble would have been impossible.”
Always passionate but never alarmist, Ferguson closes with a look at “Chimerica,” an economic entity comprised of China and America in which “East Chimerica did the saving while West Chimerica did the spending.” This arrangement may be waning, he says, though that doesn’t mean it’s time to open a vein.
Economies have “never run smoothly,” Ferguson says, and they “never will.”
So take heart, investors, and move away from that ledge.
DAMAGES
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Manhattan, Patty Hewes and her merry band of cutthroats – excuse me, lawyers – are now in their second season of “Damages,” which airs on FX at 10 p.m. New York time.
Patty (Glenn Close) still looks good in a skirt and can flash a totally insincere smile, yet she seems weary from last season’s wrenching class action suit against Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson). These days she’s fixated on setting up a foundation to help New York’s hungry, which cynical viewers may see as an atonement grope.
Danson, gunned down at the end of last season, now lies in a hospital, bearded and moaning to his orderly about how “pathetic” he is. “I’m the most hated man in America and you’re being nice to me.”
He was much more compelling as an unrepentant villain. If we’re lucky the orderly will slip a little rat poison in his IV.
Patty still drinks bourbon while the sun is high and twists arms with aplomb but the focus of ferocity has shifted to aid Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), who has gone tarantula. She holds Patty responsible for her boyfriend’s death and is working with the FBI to bring her down.
If that doesn’t work, it appears she may turn to the firm of Smith and Wesson for satisfaction. At the end of last week’s opener Ellen pointed a pistol at the camera and pulled off two rounds.
Maybe this week we’ll see if she shot Patty, or only her stockbroker. Whichever, still an entertaining hour.
(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225782008-12-29T19:00:00-05:002022-04-04T21:12:09-04:00PBS Special On Hitler Banning Jews from German Film Industry
<p>Hitler Banned Jewish Filmmakers, Who Struck Back
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – For Adolf Hitler, perhaps the only thing worse than a Jew was a Jew with a camera.
Hitler banned Jews from Germany’s world-renowned film industry soon after becoming chancellor in 1933, a sad story with a silver lining told in “Cinema’s Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood,” which airs Jan. 1 on PBS at 9:30 p.m. New York time.
Some 800 mostly-Jewish exiles, including actors, writers, directors, composers, set designers and camera operators made their way to the U.S. over the next six years, eventually helping create films earning 150 Oscar nominations and 20 Academy Awards.
The two-hour special, narrated by Sigourney Weaver, brims with legends such as actors Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr and Felix Bressart; directors Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Henry Koster, and composers Frederick Hollander, Franz Waxman, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
There are also plenty of clips of the photogenic Fuhrer and his henchmen, at least one of whom – Joseph Goebbels -- had a soft spot for films made by Jews.
The film starts with an overview of pre-Nazi Berlin. While 1 percent of the German population was Jewish, Weaver says, Jews made up around 5 percent of Berlin’s inhabitants. Many were part of the film industry, which produced innovative classics such as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Metropolis,” and “The Blue Angel.”
In one of many segments featuring archived film, we see 28-year-old Marlene Dietrich’s “Blue Angel” screen test. She hops up on piano, sounding a jarring chord as she steps on the keyboard, then hikes her stockings and does a bit of warbling. One suspects her legs played a key role in landing the gig as Lola-Lola, the cabaret girl.
She beat the exodus, departing for the U.S. on April 1, 1930, the night the film premiered in Berlin, yet would later team up with director Ernst Lubitsch to create an “underground railroad” for artistic exiles, many of whom initially headed for Paris and other points in Europe before finally steaming to America.
“We were changing countries more often than our shoes,” Bertolt Brecht said.
Exiles took work wherever they could find it, including westerns and horror movies such as “The Bride of Frankenstein”, “The Wolfman” -- an allegory of how Hitler seduced Germany – and “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” a movie about courage in the face of evil, Weaver says.
Yet the American film industry did not initially show a united front against Hitler. While Warner Brothers stopped distributing films in Germany in 1935, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount didn’t stop until 1940, removing Jewish credits to appease German censors, Weaver adds.
Once Hollywood entered the war, it did so with both barrels blazing, producing some 160 anti-Nazi movies including “To Be Or Not To Be,” “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” and, most notably, “Casablanca,” which won the Academy Award for Best Film in 1943. Exiles worked, in some capacity, on about a third of these films.
Life in America was not easy. Most exiles did not succeed in the industry, and those who did had to struggle. “This golden Hollywood is a hell for some,” said composer Frederick Hollander. “I never fought so hard.”
The show includes interesting asides. Soon after Hitler’s ascension propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was asked to name some films he admired. Of the dozen named, 11 had been made by Jews. The first Cannes film festival, in 1939, screened only one film -- “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” -- before being cancelled due to Germany’s invasion of Poland. Hedy Lamarr disguised herself as a maid during her escape from Vienna in 1937.
While America offered opportunity, émigrés did not totally escape the horrors, nor did they lose a longing for their home country.
Billy Wilder, who came to the U.S. in 1934, was hired to film the horrors of the death camps. He lost three-quarters of his relatives, including his mother, in Auschwitz, according to the program.
“It wasn’t my idea to leave,” Wilder says in an archived interview. “It was Hitler’s.”
(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225772008-10-31T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:02-05:00Wall Street Journal Review -- 'Influence,' by Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen
<p>By Dave Shiflett
Wall Street Journal
The Olsen twins – actresses, designers, fashion icons and entrepreneurs – sensed a general wonderment about who has been instrumental in inspiring and guiding their sparkling journey to the center of world consciousness, a project also important, Ashley adds, because she’s taking her life “to the next level” and that trek “requires you to pay attention to everyone and everything.” Assisted by writer Derek Blasberg, these interviews with 23 or so “creative visionaries” who left their marks on the girls were “treated like a religious pilgrimage,” albeit one devoid of holy men or women, or for that matter serious authors, scientists, economists or even apostles of the high colonic. They instead focus on A-listers from the world of glitz who share iconic thoughts, smocks, boots, art and home furnishings. We behold interior architect David Collins’s dip-dyed and embroidered curtains -- to die for no doubt -- and the paintings of George Condo, which in some parts of the world would still attract torch-bearing mobs. His Jesus appears to be transubstantiating into a cloud of Fruity Pebbles while his God looks like a Hobbit who just swallowed a bad oyster. Photographer Terry Richardson shares his picture of Robin and Batman smooching it up – is nothing left sacred? – and we also get plenty of inspiration messages, including Diane von Furstenberg’s take on human husbandry: “We have to be very careful who we have sex with. So you better know whom you’re spreading the seed with. Even if there’s no seed being spread.” Karl Lagerfeld, meanwhile, notes that jeans “are becoming too tight. You can kill yourself in those jeans.” Ashley and Mary-Kate also focus inward, submitting to the “Proust Questionnaire,” which reveals “true characteristics and emotions.” Ashley reveals Jane Austen as her favorite prose writer and Freud as her favorite poet, while Mary-Kate’s favorite occupation is “being a full-time Gemini” who likes Plato and Kafka. The twins include plenty of photos of themselves, sometimes looking like innocent schoolgirls, other times like drug-addicted hookers, along with a host of Polaroid snapshots – Polaroid being this crew’s true Boswell.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225762008-10-29T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:01-05:00Dennis Hopper's A Weird But Sympathetic Character in Crash
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – “Crash,” the new Starz series starring Dennis Hopper, is starting to come together.
Inspired by the 2005 Oscar-winning movie of the same name, the 13-part series, which debuted in mid-October, started off with several seemingly disconnected story lines.
While it’s too early for certainty, one senses some sort of redemption is afoot, featuring a mysterious Guatemalan last seen running toward America in a dead man’s shoes.
A strange prediction, but this a strange show.
The story to date:
Ben Cendars (Hopper), is a music mogul we first encountered as he enjoyed intimacies with himself in the back of his limo.
All told, his life is pretty lame. He can’t find any new music he likes and is tired of the current craze, which won’t go away. “Hip hop’s a zombie,” he observes, “and you can’t kill a zombie.”
Gray haired, wiry and given to philosophical meanderings, Cenders is also haunted by death, noting “that good dark night” is closing in though he’s not ready to give up his ghost quite yet.
Meantime, most of the other characters in the LA-based show, which next airs Friday at 10 p.m. New York time, are caught up in their own dramas, none of which are especially heroic.
Christine Emory (Clare Carey) is a horny housewife deeply lusting after a new kitchen, among other things. Her husband, a real estate shark named Peter (D.B. Sweeney), instructs her that this is “not the time to be asking for a raise on your allowance.” In a bow to tradition, Christine squeezes a commitment out of him the old fashioned way. We assume she’s warming up for other conquests.
The crisply written series also features corrupt and philandering cops Axel Finet (Nick E. Tarabay) and Kenny Battaglia (Ross McCall), a paramedic named Eddie Choi (Brian Tee) who recently left life as a gangbanger, a world-class nympho named Inez (Moran Atias) and, most intriguingly, Cesar Uman (Luis Chavez) a young Guatemalan making his way toward America and enduring hell every step of the way.
Last week Cesar was captured by the Mexican police, a gang of meaty thugs who shook him down for his last peso, then attempted to put him on a bus back home.
Cesar managed to escape, thanks in part to a pair of shoes he took off a corpse. He was last seen running in the direction of his promised land, where one senses he may change the lives of at least some of the desperate Angelenos.
Cendars seems primed for transformation. While initially a mere weirdo with a cashbox for a heart, he is an increasingly sympathetic figure -- lonely, unhealthy, and now determined to make a rap star out of his limo driver, Anthony Adams (Jocko Sims), despite Anthony’s lack of credentials.
“What do you mean you don’t rap?” Cendars asked after lining up a studio session with a local magnate.
“I write poetry,” Anthony replied.
No matter, the boss declared in fine philosophical feather. “This is Saint Crispin’s Day. True genius is never planned.”
Cendars also waxed poetical about how Anthony should “feel the beat of the African Diaspora cruising through your veins,” underscoring a habit of sending illicit substances through his own bloodstream.
“My clarity is crystal until the devil offers his confections,” he tells Anthony, and there are plenty of demons in Los Angeles, one of whom lights Cendars during the recording session.
“I’m dying,” a deeply stoned Ben utters at the end of last week’s show. “This is what death looks like.”
Yet maybe help is on the way, wearing resurrected shoes. Or maybe Cesar is Cendars’s love child. The show, though quirky, is worth watching to learn weird Ben’s fate.
(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225752008-09-02T20:00:00-04:002021-09-25T05:05:56-04:00New HBO Vampire Series: True Blood
<p>Vamps Depart Coffins, Seek Mainstream in HBO Series
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – The time has come to rethink the vampire question.
“True Blood,” a strange but often amusing new HBO series debuting Sept. 7 at 9 p.m. New York time, disputes the historic belief that the only good vampire is one with a stake through his heart.
The scariest creatures in this show sleep in beds, not coffins.
The series, based on novels by Charlaine Harris, is set in the small Louisiana hamlet of Bon Temps. Thanks to the invention of Tru Blood, a synthetic hemo-drink, vampires can establish meaningful relationships with humans without guzzling their gore.
Another example of better living through chemistry, though not everyone believes vampires belong in the mainstream. The struggle for tolerance is one of the show’s themes, though at heart this is a love story.
Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), is a goodhearted waitress who has the ability to read minds. That’s not an enviable talent during business hours at Merlotte’s, where the brain waves are far from elevated. We’re reminded that if we really knew what was on people’s minds we’d want to bang most of them over the head with a lead pipe.
Her life changes dramatically when a tall, dark stranger walks into Merlotte’s. Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) sends Sookie swooning. “I’ve been waiting for this to happen ever since they came out of the coffin two years ago,” she gushes.
Yes, Bill is a vamp. And it appears to be love at first site.
Though 173 years old, Bill could easily pass for a twentysomething, and that’s not his only attribute. “I can’t hear you,” Sookie says of her inability to monitor his mental transmissions. She’s also a bit surprised by some of his other qualities, including room-temperature hands, until she is reminded by a workmate that he’s not really alive, in the traditional sense.
“That’s not his fault,” she says protectively.
Bill is clearly attracted to Sookie, sensing a superhuman element in the chirpy blond. One suspects they may be exchanging vital fluids soon, yet for now they are embodiments of innocence, which distinguishes them from several locals.
The debut features steamy sex scenes you won’t find in any Bela Lugosi film, including an extremely animated vamp/human encounter augmented by a rope. There’s also a murder pinned on Sookie’s brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), a local horndog of note. Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), Sookie’s best pal, has a salty tongue but good heart, while bar owner Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell) carries a torch for Sookie. Maybe he should get himself a set of fangs to improve his chances.
The vilest characters are the Rattrays (Karina Logue and James Parks), who supplement their dope-selling income by “draining” unsuspecting vampires and selling the blood on the black market. That leaves Bill a few pints low before he’s rescued by Sookie, though at show’s end it looks like he’ll soon be in a position to return the favor.
The tolerance theme provides plenty of jokes. A spokeswoman for the American Vampire League tells Bill Maher (who plays himself) that “we never owned slaves or detonated nuclear weapons.” Good point – and that’s a nice set of incisors you’re packing, sweetheart. “Fang-bangers” are vampire groupies, and there’s a Vampire Rights Amendment embraced by the more progressive members of society.
Not a show for everyone, though it’s likely to find a loyal audience among open-minded viewers, plus those who believe vampire/human rope-sex is a taboo worth retiring.
(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225742008-07-20T20:00:00-04:002022-05-11T22:37:23-04:00So Long, Harvey Laub
<p>My brother-in-law, Harvey Laub, died July 13. His memorial service was July 20. Last count, there were 205 cars there, which by my estimate puts 4-500 people at the memorial service, held in the meeting hall at Innisfree, outside of Charlottesville, VA.
Harvey was a family doctor who began his medical career at a reservation for the Spokane Indians in Washington state. He later practiced family medicine in Virginia. He died at age 53, far too young. His was a hard death, from lung cancer. He maintained his spirit and dignity until the very end.
His was a life that mattered, in a positive way. It's my hope that somewhere in this universe, or perhaps the one beyond, Harvey's seeing patients. There's no doubt he lives in the hearts of all who knew him.
After his diagnosis with stage four lung cancer, Harvey wrote a song for my sister. It is a terrific song -- entitled 'Just Want to Know (That I've Beeen Know By You)' and you can find it on the Music Page. Another friend who lost a family member to cancer said that Harvey had said just what she wished her dad had said to her mom before he passed on. So, please send Harvey's song around to anyone you think might benefit from it. And God bless you, Harvey Laub.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225732008-07-10T20:00:00-04:002021-06-26T18:55:56-04:00HBO's The Wire: Grunt-Eye View of Iraq
<p>Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – HBO’s “Generation Kill” will thrill fans of David Simon and Ed Burns, who brought us “The Wire,” that gritty tale of urban warfare in Baltimore.
This time the target is Baghdad and environs. The seven-part miniseries, which runs Sunday nights starting July 13 at 9 p.m. New York time, is told from the perspective the Marine’s First Reconnaissance Battalion, the “tip of the spear” in the ground invasion of Iraq.
You wouldn’t want to meet these guys in a dark desert – or a well-lighted one. You might not want you sister to meet them either, unless she’s very tough.
Based on the award-winning book by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with the First Recon, the series starts out as the troops cool their heels in northern Kuwait awaiting the green light from Lt. Col. Stephen “Godfather” Ferrando (Chance Kelly), whose raspy voice, he informs Wright (played by Lee Tergesen) is not the result of smoking, but throat cancer.
“I guess I got lucky,” he croaks.
The large cast also includes David Barrera, Josh Barrett, Neal Jones, Billy Lush, Michael Kelly, Alexander Skarsgard, John Huertas, Marc Menchaca, Eric Nenninger, Wilson Bethel, Benjamin Busch, J. Salome Martinez Jr. and Brian Patrick Wade.
They portray very tough guys, though Wright says there are no fictional or composite characters in the series. One Marine has A-bomb envy, wishing he had been in on the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soldiers mock letters from school children who believe peace is better than war. Au contraire, comes one response: “War is the mother------- answer.”
Viewers with G-rated ears may want to find something else to watch. These Marines often make the street criminals on “The Wire” sound like ushers at a tent revival.
They’re also a sensitivity trainer’s worst nightmare. In one of the more printable cultural observations, one Marine recalls a woman with “eyes so slanty you could blindfold her with dental floss.” Racial and sexual epithets are delivered with mini-gun speed.
And while there are no women at the tip of this spear, they have a definite presence. The grunts are wary of Wright until he reveals that he once wrote the “Beaver Hunt” feature for Hustler magazine, which makes him an immediate hero. And in a profoundly unprintable analysis, a soldier explains why the entire war could have been avoided if the sexually repressed Republican Guard had spent a week in Vegas.
There’s not much combat in the opener, though one soldier is burned by an exploding espresso machine. Instead there’s a focus on the mundane aspects of military life. Skoal smokeless tobacco is popular, and while Skittles candy is allowed in Humvees, Charms are banned because they’re thought to bring misfortune.
Meantime, soldiers endure pettiness at an extreme level. Sergeant Major John Sixta (Neal Jones) enforces the unit’s “moustache protocol” with howitzer-level ferocity, one reason why he’s known, far behind his back, as “Mr. Potato Head.”
While the series focuses on the initial weeks of the war, it includes controversies that have marked the five-year conflict. The first encounter with armed Iraqis results in the Marines being ordered to hold their fire, an example of rules of engagement many soldiers believed are dangerously stringent, and perhaps of a killjoy nature.
“I had a beautiful head shot,” complains one sharpshooter.
Meantime, refugees given promise of safe haven are given serious reason to regret their trust.
Yet this isn’t a politicized version of the invasion, but instead promises to show the war in realistic terms. Simon and Burns do deliver some memorable lines I don’t recall hearing from network embeds, including a classic from a soldier watching the bombardment unfold through night-vision glasses:
“Damn, I wish I had some ‘shrooms.”
www.hbo.com
(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.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at +1-212-617-3486 or
mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225722008-07-06T20:00:00-04:002021-07-28T13:10:07-04:00PBS's History Detectives Uncover Treachery, Heroes, Phony Art
<p>By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – “The History Detectives,” just into its sixth season on PBS, provides a cool antidote to this summer’s overheated political yack.
There’s no ranting or raving, though plenty of reminders that political treachery and buffoonery are hardly modern inventions.
The July 7 episode, airing at 9 p.m. New York time, opens with a segment about a flag purchased on the Internet. It’s not much to look at: a red handprint on a white background, bordered by red vertical stripes and American flags sewn on front and back corners. Its owner, a black female veteran, suspects it may have belonged to an African-American World War I infantry unit.
Elyse Luray, a nice-looking blond and former Christie’s appraiser, goes in search of its origins. In the process she revisits a painful chapter in America’s long history of racial discrimination: wartime officials didn’t want blacks to rise even to the level of cannon fodder.
According to the show, 700,000 blacks signed up for military service the first week of the war, proving they were patriots despite being, in many respects, second-class citizens. Some 2 million joined the military during the conflict.
Yet they were largely assigned to labor details, perhaps out of fear that black combat heroes would upset notions that African-Americans could not or would not fight. Protests ensued, however, and two black divisions were created, though even then the U.S. excluded most black soldiers from combat. Instead, they were assigned to French commanders, who knew better.
Luray discovers the flag was the pennant of a French general whose black unit took heavy casualties. She further reports the heroic sacrifices of black soldiers were sometimes left unrecognized until long after hostilities ceased.
Cpl. Freddie Stowers, the only black soldier from World War I awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, was killed Sept 28, 1918. Congress didn’t get around to honoring him until April 24, 1991.
An innocent oversight, no doubt.
There’s nothing fancy about the hour-long episodes. The “detectives” simply visit experts who help them piece together their historic puzzles. If there’s a prevailing theme it’s that seemingly ordinary objects are sometimes part of a large, often troubling, mosaic.
In another segment Gwendolyn Wright, a Columbia University professor of architecture, planning, preservation and history, sets out to shed some light on a ramshackle building located in Isleton, California. While the structure looks like wrecking ball bait, she eventually discovers it was home to a branch of the Bing Kong tong, headquartered in San Francisco.
While tongs are routinely associated with violence and crime, Wright learns that most were simply community organizations for belabored and sometimes besieged Chinese immigrants.
Some members did take part in the “vice trades” of prostitution and opium smuggling, partly because the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which declared that the presence of Chinese laborers “endangers the good order of certain localities” and put many immigrants out of work.
One hopes that legislative triumph doesn’t give contemporary politicians any ideas.
The remaining segment traces the origins of a painting, also bought on the Internet, supposedly the work of 19th century artist Seth Eastman. The Belfast dealer let it go for a song – a bit over $300, even though some Eastman paintings have brought more than $900,000.
Tukufu Zuberi, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually discovers the painting, which features a couple of Indians playing checkers, is a fake. In the process he stumbles on another example of political infamy, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which expelled all Indians who lived east of Mississippi.
Eastman, he reports, was not only a painter who documented Indian life but a soldier who helped implement the expulsion policy. An apparent Renaissance man, he had a secret Indian wife with whom he had a child, a descendent of whom Zuberi tracks down.
She declines an invitation to trash he famed relative, explaining she was “raised to respect” her elders.
A refreshing program that reminds us “the good old days” have yet to arrive.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225712008-06-29T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:00-05:00PBS Airs "War of the World": Earth's Bloodiest Century
<p>20th Century Pox: War, Race Hatred, Mass Slaughter
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Historian Niall Ferguson compares the 20th Century’s unrivalled bloodletting to the mayhem depicted in H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” with one difference: Humans played the part of marauding Martian invaders.
Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard, counts the bodies, and suggests causes, in “The War of the World,” which airs on PBS starting June 30 at 10 p.m. New York time.
The three-part series, which opens with footage of a flamethrower doing its signature work, deeply challenges the notion that we’re an advanced species, save at the art of extermination.
Why was the century so bloody?
Ferguson argues that three factors converged to create a “hundred-year global war”: economic volatility, the breakdown of formerly harmonious multi-ethnic societies in places like Yugoslavia and Poland, and the unraveling of old empires, which unleashed a wave of revolutions and similar power gropes.
Racial animosity also reached new levels of virulence, Ferguson says. Hate recognized no borders. The Russian press denounced the Japanese as “jaundiced monkeys” in the run-up to the Russo-Japanese war; the Japanese repaid the compliment by sending most of the Baltic fleet to the bottom of the sea in 1905.
The Japanese held the Chinese in similar regard, starting a war in 1937 that Ferguson says was the real outbreak of World War II. Then there was Hitler and company: Ferguson argues that the Holocaust, while not the first of the century’s genocides, was unique because it was carried out by one of the most sophisticated and highly educated societies in history.
Hitler, he adds, considered Americans a “decadent” and “racially mongrel people.” Whatever our racial credentials, we were very good at building weapons, which we gladly lent to Joseph Stalin, another ferocious race-baiter.
Viewers who believe Stalin has too long walked in Hitler’s murderous shadow will find a kindred spirit in Ferguson, who closely examines Stalin’s bloody policies, many of which, he argues, were “racial persecution disguised as class warfare.” Stalin, he says, was “deeply suspicious” of all non-Russians, and Stalin’s suspicion was often a death sentence.
In an arresting segment, Ferguson peruses the archives of the Soviet Gulag – row upon row of brown-covered books containing the names and pictures of victims. He finds it “rather haunting to look at these faces” and reads the entry of a woman who got ten years in the camps for simply criticizing the government.
Ferguson’s views on the Allies’ victory in World War 11, featured in the second installment (July 7), will likely be the most controversial. Ferguson argues that 1943-45 was the “cataclysmic crux” of the “war of the world,” during which the Allies adopted some of the same strategies as the Axis powers.
American troops often killed Japanese soldiers attempting to surrender, he says, partially explaining why some fought to the death. Allied bombers also targeted civilian populations, killing 35,000-50,000 in Hamburg, at least 35,000 in Dresden, followed by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While Ferguson makes a distinction between gassing innocent civilians and attacking cities in nations that unleashed war, he says the effects were frightfully similar, and calls the Allied effort a “tarnished victory.”
While the world wars featured massive killing grounds – Ferguson says the pivotal battle of Kursk (1943) between Germany and the Soviets took place on a battlefield “the size of Wales”— many deaths occurred in more remote places and circumstances. The “age of genocide” kicked off, he says, with the 1915 Turkish slaughter of up to 1.5 Armenians, many of whom were driven into the desert to perish. Within Russia, millions died from either execution or starvation policies.
All told, the dogs of war have been insatiable and Ferguson warns they’re hardly sleeping.
The series concludes July 14 with a look at the last half of the 20th century, which wasn’t so great an improvement over the first. With some 20 million deaths in conflicts including proxy wars between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it’s safe to say the Age of Aquarius was mostly a theatrical phenomenon.
Meantime, a new Eastern power is rising – China – whose expansive designs may cause as much mayhem as Japan’s imperial excesses, Ferguson warns. The Middle East, he adds, could unleash a conflict as staggering as “anything we saw in the 20th Century.”
One comes away thinking a backyard bomb shelter may be a wise investment after all.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225702008-06-08T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:00-05:00On HBO: Golf Gods Nicklaus, Hogan, Palmer Recall 1960 Showdown
<p>A little golfing lore on the eve of the U.S. Open
(Bloomberg) -- Non-golfers (ahem) are likely to be clueless as to why the 1960 U.S. Open holds a sacred place in the hearts of the duffer faithful.
HBO explains it all in ``Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open,'' which airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. New York time, the eve of the 108th U.S. Open.
Even those who prefer the 19th hole to the previous 18 will find this an hour pleasantly spent. The 1960 championship, after all, featured golf's holy trinity -- Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus -- and memories of the event continue to electrify those who love the game.
Sportswriter Dan Jenkins says the matchup was ``too big, too wildly exciting, too crazily suspenseful, too suffocatingly dramatic,'' adding that ``in the span of just 18 holes, we witnessed the arrival of Nicklaus, the coronation of Palmer and the end of Hogan.''
Other than being great golfers, the three titans had little in common.
Only Nicklaus was from a country club background. His father ran a string of drug stores in Columbus, Ohio and young Jack was something of a prodigy, shooting a 51 his first time around nine holes (at age 10) and winning the Ohio Open at 16.
He was also a highly talented beer drinker, as he reveals in an interview.
All the Beer in Columbus
``I tried to drink all the beer they made in Columbus, Ohio,'' he says, an exertion that saddled him with an impressive gut.
Palmer had a gentrified connection of a different sort. His father was groundskeeper at the Latrobe Country Club in Pennsylvania. Arnie was ``taught as a young boy that I was not a member of the club,'' which meant that instead of swimming at the pool he cooled off in a nearby creek, sharing those rustic facilities ``with the snakes.''
Hogan, meantime, rose from ``the dirt,'' as he called his hardscrabble origins in Dublin, Texas. His story is by far the most tragic of the three.
His father committed suicide when Hogan was 6; according to a newspaper account, he shot himself as young Ben looked on. Hogan got into golf on the ground floor, caddying for 65 cents per 18 holes and sometimes, the film says, sleeping in sand traps when he didn't want to make the long walk home.
Comeback Kid
He also showed an affinity for the game and a tenacity that saw him through hard times, including a 1949 collision with a bus that nearly killed him. His comeback was the stuff of legend and a Hollywood film: ``Follow the Sun'' (1951) starred Glenn Ford as the heroic Hogan.
Hogan, who died in 1997, was definitely the prickliest of the three.
``He was never friendly to me,'' Palmer recalls. ``It didn't mean that I didn't appreciate the fact that he was one of the great guys, great players of all time. But as my father said to me, there's no reason why you can't be good and be nice.''
The show builds slowly to the championship at Cherry Hills County Club, outside Denver. Hogan was the sentimental favorite but an initial spree of poor putting made some wonder if he'd even make the cut.
Indeed, there was ferocious hacking all around, with Nicklaus and Palmer spending significant time in Bogeyville. Yet Palmer staged one of the most amazing comebacks in golf history, with six birdies on seven holes.
Hogan hit the wall on the 17th hole of the final round, where his ball landed in a water hazard. We watch the aging great take off one shoe and sock and blasting the aqua-ball onto the green, where he missed his putt. He gruffly recalled in a later interview that hardly a month went by when memories of the 17th didn't ``cut my guts out.''
The future was brighter for Nicklaus and Palmer, with Arnie buying the Latrobe Country Club in 1971, having come a long way from bathing with the snakes.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225692008-05-21T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:00-05:00HBO's Take On Florida Recount Heavy on Republican Dragons and Drones
<p>Dimpled Chads may not sound like good fodder for a movie, but HBO's Recont is much better than you might expect. Here's my review.
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— The GOP probably won’t like HBO’s portrayal of how GWB won FLA.
“Recount,” which airs Sunday night at 9 p.m. New York time, takes us back to the 36-day political and legal slugfest over re-tallying the 2000 Florida vote, which was finally settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of George W. Bush.
Bush might have won that war but he and his cronies come across as world-class goons and loons in this two-hour film.
The story focuses on attempts by the Democratic candidate Al Gore’s team, lead by former chief of staff Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), to get a vote recount. Klain starts out as a kitten but evolves into a tiger.
He has no choice. He’s up against the Republican attack machine, led by Bush family pal James Baker III, played by Tom Wilkinson, recently seen as a slightly scheming Benjamin Franklin in HBO’s “John Adams.”
Baker is Franklin to the tenth degree: a cocky and aggressive political operator hell-bound to win. He’s assisted by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, (Laura Dern), a ditzy witch with messianic delusions.
“Ten years ago I was teaching the chicken dance to seniors,” she cackles, and now the “eyes of the world have landed on me.”
Her worst inclinations are stoked by GOP lobbyist Mac “Mac the Knife” Stipanovich (Bruce McGill), a thoroughbred political reptile.
“You’re about to pick the leader of the free world,” he counsels the bony-faced, big-haired Harris. “You need to bring this election in for a landing” with “George W. Bush in the cockpit.”
Republicans are either dragons or drones. Lead Counsel Ben Ginsberg (Bob Balaban) peps his prim troops by promising “By tomorrow morning the stains of Bill Clinton will be washed away. Honor and dignity will finally be restored to the White House.”
The young Republicans applaud vigorously, as if their trust funds had just doubled in value.
The Democrats, by contrast, are simply trying to make every vote count. Warren Christopher (John Hurt), is given to majestic platitudes such as “There is no shame in placing country above party.” Attorney David Boies (Ed Begley Jr.) earnestly argues that voter “intent” is clearly present in those dimpled chads.
The edgiest Dem is chief strategist Michael Whouley (Denis Leary), a street-fighter who gets off his best line at Christopher’s expense: He “probably eats his M&Ms with a knife and fork.”
The Good v. Evil nature of the film does keep it interesting, not a given for a movie whose plot hinges on dimpled chads, butterfly ballots, and legal wrangling.
The film includes contemporary news footage with some old faces: CNNS’s Bernard Shaw and Daryn Kagan, the late Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather delivering signature lines as the crisis deepens: “Call a doctor, call the police, call a psychic.” There’s also Joe Lieberman, then a Democrat (and candidate for vice president) and Katie Couric, then with lots of viewers.
Gore and Bush are rarely seen or heard from, though there is a replay of the famous conversation when Gore called Bush back to say he was not, after all, conceding the election. After Bush freaks, Gore responds, “Excuse me, but you don’t have to get snippy about it.”
In the end, however, Gore is forced to call Klain with the bad news: “I have to end this war when I know I can’t win. Even if I win I can’t win.”
Baker does go somewhat human near the end while explaining why he switched parties at age 40. His wife had died of cancer, he tells Ginsberg, and a Republican badgered him into participating in a campaign because he didn’t want to see Baker “so sad all” the time. That Republican, he says, was George Herbert Walker Bush.
He also assures his victorious troops that they’ve been on the side of the angels.
“The system worked,” he says, noting this was an “orderly transfer” of power was accomplished with “no tanks on the streets.”
One can’t help but think of things to come.
Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225682008-05-18T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:55:00-05:00PBS Special on Lord of the Ants -- E.O. Wilson
<p>Interesting show on E.O. Wilson, who discovered how ants communicate with one another, and tell larger stories about humans.
May 19 (Bloomberg) -- E.O. Wilson, the world's foremost authority on ants, has profoundly bugged some people during his storied career.
Described by narrator Harrison Ford as the ``most controversial evolutionist since Darwin,'' Wilson doesn't look like a troublemaker. Now 78 and gray, the retired Harvard professor came from the calm backwoods of southern Alabama, where he spent countless hours pursuing turtles, snakes and insects.
In ``Lord of the Ants,'' a one-hour program airing tomorrow on PBS at 8 p.m. New York time, Wilson lovingly describes those years as ``my little savage period,'' during which he lost most of the sight in one eye in a fishing accident. He gravitated toward studying ants, he explains, because they can be gingerly held between the thumb and forefinger for a closer look.
Like his beloved ants, Wilson can't hear very well. (Ants also have poor vision.) So he wondered how they communicate, which in turn led to a major scientific controversy.
Wilson discovered that ants secrete chemicals that tell colleagues when danger lurks, where food is, and even what ``caste'' they belong to. He eventually concluded that the ability to send and receive those signals is encoded and that ants aren't the only creatures whose behavior is genetically determined.
Nazi Label
In his 1975 book, ``Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,'' Wilson argued that human behavior also has a genetic component, a position that drew fire and brimstone from social scientists, who denounced Wilson as a proponent of biological determinism. They likened him to a Nazi -- Hitler in a smock.
All of which is recalled by Wilson with some amusement, especially when he describes being doused with a pitcher of cold water during a lecture. He claims to be the ``only scientist in modern times to be physically assaulted for an idea,'' which might come as a surprise to Andrei Sakharov and other dissident scientists who challenged the Soviet system.
The show includes high praise from famed naturalist David Attenborough, looking a bit long in the tooth these days but still highly spirited. He says Wilson ``is able to step back not just one pace but three paces and see the entire panorama of not just invertebrates but of the whole magic complex web of organisms -- animals and plants.''
That ability turned Wilson into a committed conservationist -- and not of the armchair variety.
Extinction?
One segment recounts a 1965 experiment in which he and biologist Daniel Simberloff catalogued every species on a small island off the Florida coast, then hired an exterminator to fumigate the place. They studied how the island was re-colonized and concluded that the smaller the space, the greater the chance of extinction.
Wilson says rich countries should establish large land reserves to protect threatened species. He estimates it would cost about $50 billion, which he calls ``chump change.''
Otherwise, he warns, we are heading toward a mass extinction like the one that eliminated dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
(</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225672008-05-11T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:54:59-05:00Wall Street Journal Review: Gross National Happiness
<p>A new book about what makes people happy. Budweiser mysteriously missing from list.
*******
How to Be of Good Cheer
By DAVE SHIFLETT
May 12, 2008
Gross National Happiness
By Arthur C. Brooks
(Basic Books, 277 pages, $26.95)
The advice will sound familiar: Get a job, get married, go to church and don't listen to wild-eyed utopians. In such a way, it is said, you will find your portion of happiness. To this list of imperatives Arthur C. Brooks would add one other: Avoid this summer's Democratic National Convention.
In "Gross National Happiness," Mr. Brooks has assembled an array of statistics to measure the mood of America's citizens and to discover the reasons they feel as they do. Most often he cites polls that ask for self-described happiness levels, matching up the answers with various beliefs, habits, life choices or experiences.
And what exactly is happiness? Who knows? The term might refer joy or contentment or moral self-approval or material well-being or appetitive pleasure – or some combination of them all. Mr. Brooks is aware of the problem. He says that Potter Stewart, the Supreme Court justice, could have been describing happiness when he said, of pornography, "I know it when I see it."
At the end of the day, Mr. Brooks notes, "political conservatives take the happiness prize hands down." Those who identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, he says, are twice as likely to say that they're very happy as those who identify themselves as liberal or very liberal. What explains the rightists' relative bliss? It seems that a conservative political disposition exists alongside other happy habits of being.
Mr. Brooks points especially to Holy Matrimony, with an emphasis on the Holy. Citing 2004 data, he writes that conservatives are twice as likely to go to church or temple once a week than liberals and that "two-thirds of conservatives are married versus only a third of liberals." Married conservatives, he says, are "more than three times likely to say they're very happy than single liberals to say they are very happy."
And though conservative religious people are often regarded as sexless puritans, they turn out to have 80% more kids than secular liberals, and their children tend to be religious, meaning that they'll probably further populate the Earth with more religious, right-leaning monogamists. This kind of news tends to cause secularists to feel very unhappy and increasingly outnumbered.
Marriage, Mr. Brooks reasonably observes, is not to be confused with total happiness, especially after those so-called bundles of joy begin arriving. "Children do not make for happier marriages," Mr. Brooks explains, thanks in part to certain burdens they bring with them, such as sleep deprivation, cleaning duty, financial worry and, for some families, the delight of getting to know a parole officer on a first-name basis. Senior couples that had no children, he adds, are no less happy than those who did. Yet the achievement of raising children makes kids part of a "happiness package." Curiously, or perhaps not, women are seven percentage points more likely than men to be "very happy after losing a spouse to death" and "9 points likelier to be very happy if never married."
And what about Mr. Brooks himself? Is he one of those sunny, hymn-singing types who are so hard to take at neighborhood picnics? He tells us that he is a Roman Catholic, though not of the ultramontane variety; he generally considers himself to be an "ebullient grouch." He says that he doesn't know whether faith produces happiness or happiness makes people want to practice their faith. The categories are "mutually reinforcing." He does firmly believe that the Founders were right to insist that the "pursuit of happiness" was central to the American creed; thus government policies should not hamper the pursuit.
He challenges those partial to tales about long-suffering Wal-Mart workers and surly burger flippers to rethink their victimology creed. The woe is not nearly as widespread as rumored: 89% of Americans who work more than 10 hours a week are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs while only 11% are not very satisfied or not at all satisfied. Most surprisingly, Mr. Brooks writes, there "is no difference at all in job satisfaction between those with below-average and above-average incomes."
What really makes Americans hate their jobs is a perception that advancement is impossible. And while Mr. Brooks agrees that the nation's income gap is growing, the national happiness level is steady. Just under one-third of American adults say that they are "very happy"; up to 15% are not too happy; and everyone else is somewhere in the middle. Those numbers have been roughly true since the early 1970s. More government spending doesn't seem to raise happiness levels, though direct government assistance may diminish it. Charitable giving, Mr. Brooks adds, generally lifts the spirits; Americans do a lot of it.
"Gross National Happiness" ends with a list of policy suggestions: Government should aim for economic opportunity, not income equality; it should not penalize marriage with tax policies; and it should resist excessive security measures (think of the screening process at airports), which inhibit freedom and increase unhappiness.
In an observation of particular relevance at the moment, Mr. Brooks says that political "extremists" – who comprise 10% to 20% of the population – may be among the happiest people in America, because they "believe with perfect certainty in the correctness of their political dogmas." Yet their ferocity brings the rest of us down, so he suggests that political parties stop pandering to them. Good idea, though it sounds a little utopian.
Mr. Shiflett is a writer in Midlothian, Va.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225662008-05-04T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:54:59-05:00Wacky Cultist Beds Naked Virgins, Waits for Judgment Day:
<p>Here's a show that reminds us that no matter how crazy you are, you can find followers.
by Dave Shiflett
May 5 (Bloomberg) -- Michael Travesser says being a
cult leader requires great sacrifice. In his case, that
includes bedding his son's wife, getting naked with teenage
girls and pocketing his followers' worldly possessions.
So how does a guy with two failed marriages, a bad
childhood and the look of an underfed bridge-dweller pull
this off? You can find out by watching ``Inside a Cult,'' a
fascinating National Geographic program that airs May 7
at 10 p.m. New York time.
Travesser, 66, allowed a crew to spend seven months
filming what he promised was a run-up to Judgment Day,
which he had penciled in for Oct. 31, 2007. While the world
didn't end as scheduled, we do hear startling admissions
from some of the 56 Strong City cult members, including
Travesser's son Jeff, a former San Francisco cop.
Like David Koresh of Waco fame, Travesser started out
as a Seventh-day Adventist preacher. He left the church
in 1987 with a handful of followers and eventually moved to
Union County, New Mexico, where Travesser got his Big
Assignment.
``One day I was in my trailer just relaxing and there
was nothing on my mind in particular and then God said to
me you are the Messiah,'' Travesser recalls.
Not everyone said amen to his extravagant claim. Some
followers departed, though two members' wives, supposedly
under divine guidance, offered themselves as ``witnesses''
to his divinity by having sex with him. Since the women
were doing God's will, Travesser told their husbands, they
should direct any complaints heavenward.
God's Knockdown
Travesser has a crazed look as he declares himself
``the embodiment of God. I am divinity and humanity
combined.'' Yet other times during the hour-long show, one
senses there's a touch of the fox in this old loon.
In one bizarre segment, he tells of being ``knocked to
the floor'' by the Almighty, who informed him that
``consummation was imminent.'' At that very moment, his
son's wife was experiencing an urge to visit Travesser and
``ask for the consummation tonight.''
It turned out to be a harmonic convergence. When asked
if that ``consummation'' was the only one, a sly grin
appears on Travesser's face.
``Could you not answer that question yourself?'' he
responds. ``Do husbands and wives only consummate once?''
Cult leaders often commandeer the sex lives of their
followers. Koresh did it, as did Jim Jones.
Naked Virgins
Travesser plays the part of the holy roller with
gusto. Once, he says, seven virgins stripped down and
climbed into bed with him. He insists they didn't have sex,
even though one of the virgins threatened to kill herself
if he didn't deflower her. Such are the sacrifices of being
God's right-hand man.
The show includes a look back at other cults,
including Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate, whose 39
members committed suicide in 1997 so they could hook up
with a spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet.
Relatives of some Strong City cultists feared
Travesser had similar intentions for Oct. 31, 2007.
A few days prior to the big event Travesser's son
promised the camera crew a ``defining moment'' when the
``world will be judged. You can take that to the bank.
We're done.''
On Judgment Night, with a half moon hanging overhead,
the camera crew waits outside the compound's front gate.
Just after midnight, the cultists come marching down the
road, screeching deliriously with Travesser in tow.
Travesser had hinted that he would appear in a new
body, but if he did, it looked suspiciously like the old
one.
(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The
opinions expressed are his own.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225652008-04-28T20:00:00-04:002022-06-01T21:33:20-04:00Ringo Yacks It Up on New HBO Special
<p>Ringo -- the handsome Beatle -- is featured in a new HBO special airing May 2. Here's my review:
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— Ringo Starr has a ready explanation for the “music explosion” of the 1960s that produced, among other things, the Beatles.
“We were the first generation that didn’t go into the army,” he says on “Ringo Starr: Off the Record,” which airs on HBO May 2 at 11 p.m. New York time. He missed “the call-up” by “about ten months.”
As a result, members of his generation were able to follow their own drummers, who would turn out to include Ringo himself.
He’s looking pretty good at 67, though his hair is much shorter and thinner than in his heyday and he long ago traded his colorful psychedelic regalia for undertaker’s basic black.
His pleasant hour-long conversation with rocker Dave Stewart – who looks as if he could be Ringo’s brother, though Ringo has him beat in the earring competition – will delight old Beatles fans and perhaps even viewers who hold rock music in less esteem.
Ringo never appears to have confused himself, or his musical peers, with Mozart.
In the beginning, he tells Stewart and a studio audience, musicians “didn’t have to be able to play” an instrument to join a band. He says he had “no sense of timing.”
Nor were they aware they were living in the Age of Aquarius. He tells of an early gig during which George Harrison got into a fistfight. George, he cracks, “wasn’t always a guru.”
Ringo, who continues to write and perform, often reminds viewers he’s a maestro of the self-deprecating riff, pointing out he only knows three chords on the guitar and that when he’d present a song to his band mates their likely response was to laugh.
He also tells an amusing story of how he came up with “Octopus’ Garden,” one of his better-known tunes. While vacationing on Peter Sellers’ yacht he was baffled by a lunchtime entre. The captain explained that the mystery meat was octopus and further explained that the creatures make gardens on the sea floor for their apparent amusement.
Ringo says the information nearly caused his head to explode, admitting his intense enthusiasm might have been fueled by “medication,” which we presume was not the type prescribed by a doctor.
He wasn’t alone in seeing a great deal in the mundane and has great fun at the expense of those who saw genius in everything the Beatles did.
The deeply analyzed cover of “Abbey Road” was not the result of deep thinking, he assures us. After considering shooting the cover in Egypt or another exotic location, someone in the band said “Sod it, let’s just go out and walk across the road.”
Nonetheless, he says, critics swooned, saying “Oh! look at what they thought of.”
His drumming technique received similar treatment, which continues to amuse him. He notes that while left handed, he plays a right-handed drum kit, which led some observers to proclaim “he’s a genius.” The real explanation, he says, is that his grandmother made him learn to do everything as if he were right handed, including playing the drums.
Ringo’s reflections as one of rock’s elder statesman are sprinkled throughout the program. While many contemporary bands expect penthouse suites, limo service and other extravagant perks, he says the Beatles “were lucky if we got a cup of tea.”
“Even after Shea Stadium we were sharing a room,” he says.
He also wonders if extensive multi-track recording is a good thing. While “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was made on a four-track recorder new technology offers dozens of tracks and encourages a fragmented recording process. Many musicians “don’t play as a band” but record “one chord, then come back a week later and play another one.”
He closes with a new song, sung in a voice that, while hardly golden, is a very solid brass: “I had to follow my heart and I never missed a beat.”
Or, if he did, he no doubt meant to.
www.homeboxoffice.com
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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225642008-04-13T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:54:59-05:00PBS Cancer Special: Live Long Enough, Cancer 'Inevitable'
<p>The War On Cancer Is Far From Over, a new PBS special says. Here's my take:
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, and while Nixon’s long gone (taken out by a stroke) cancer is very much with us and not likely to surrender any time soon.
So says “The Truth About Cancer,” which airs on PBS April 16 at 9 p.m. New York time. The film opens in a graveyard though the news isn’t entirely grim.
Various drugs are giving patients extra months and even years, while some forms of cancer, such as childhood leukemia, have high survivability rates, the show says.
Yet several “stars” of the 90-minute film die before the credits roll, including Larry D’Onofrio, husband of filmmaker Linda Garmon. Garmon initially hoped her film “could have a happy ending” yet she and her husband soon realized a starker reality: “Cancer isn’t for sissies.”
There’s no sugar coating here, with D’Onofrio’s case illustrating a disheartening fact: He did everything right – watched what he ate, exercised regularly, yet was ravaged by mesothelioma, which Garmon blames on exposure to asbestos during summer construction work. Says Gorman: “You can follow all the rules and just have bad luck.” A doctor tells of the look of “betrayal” on many health-conscious patient’s faces when they first hear their diagnosis.
A patient named Jamie Klayman had her first indication of luck gone bad when she felt a “funny kind of pain” in her stomach. Her diagnosis: pancreatic cancer. She tells Garmon she quickly realized the “numbers were not in my favor” yet like many patients she, and her family, hoped for a “home run.”
Her story illustrates the devastation cancer wreaks on both patients and family members, who in one segment bicker about what a doctor may or may not have said about survivability. Over the course of the film, which includes patients with breast cancer and leukemia, the disease ravages her body and eventually her hope. She finally concludes that “nobody’s hiding the secret magic beans” that could save her.
Viewers with experience in the cancer wards will see many familiar sites: dripping chemo bottles, CT scanners, and hopeful messages scrawled on colored paper hung round a patient’s room: “Pray, hope and don’t worry.”
Sometimes the news is good, as when patients respond well to the drug Gleevec. One doctor says news of the drug’s success resulted in 600 emails a day from patients wondering if the drug could help them.
Yet the news is often grim. Patients have “little chance of surviving more than five years” once a cancer metastasizes, the show says, and screening efforts often fail to detect the presence of the disease.
Dr. David Nathan, author of a popular book on cancer treatments, says cardiologists play a role by keeping patients ticking into old age. If we live long enough, he says, cancer is all but “inevitable.” All we can do, he adds, is “treat it, and treat it well.”
Viewers of a fatalistic bent may be reminded to live fully while we can. It’s also hard not to be impressed by patients who seem to fight hardest when there is little life left, including Jamie Klayman, who died Nov. 29, 2007. A film taken near the end of her life shows her bravely running the bases is a backyard ball game.
There will be “no peace treaty” in this struggle, the show concludes. “More likely, we’ll see the war won one group of patients at a time.” The film is followed by a 30-minute panel discussion moderated by Linda Ellerbee, a cancer survivor whose luck is currently holding.
http://pressroom.pbs.org/programs/the_truth_about_cancer
Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225632008-03-13T20:00:00-04:002023-12-10T11:44:32-05:00John Adams Brought Back To Life In HBO Special
<p>Terrific miniseries coming up on HBO.
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Roll over, Sam Adams. Cousin John is about to eclipse you.
Though he was the nation’s first vice president, second president and a prime mover in the American revolution, John Adams has not enjoyed the prominence of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or even cousin Sam Adams, who enjoys high name recognition due to association with a popular grog.
A new HBO miniseries debuting March 16 at 8 p.m. New York time, should help remedy all that.
Based on the Pulitzer prize-winning book by David McCullough, executive-produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and directed by Tom Hooper, “Sam Adams” is a substantial piece of work that brings its subject fully from history’s shadow.
Paul Giamatti plays a slightly chunky, deeply passionate and somewhat vain Adams, while Laura Linney, as Abigail Adams, portrays a formidable woman every bit his husband’s match. Both turn in spectacular performances over the course of the seven-part series.
The story begins March 5, 1770 in Boston, then a town of around 15,000, where the natives made the unwise decision to shower British troops with ice, stones, and oyster shells. The resulting massacre killed five Americans (a routine mall shooting in our time), stoked the fires of revolution and brought Adams, a lawyer, to prominence as the soldiers’ legal counsel.
Adams convinced a jury that the Brits fired in self defense, saving them from the noose. He would soon advocate war against the mother country.
If the film has a central message it is that Adams was every bit the equal of Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane), George Washington (David Morse), and Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson), the latter portrayed as part weasel, part wise man, and a highly accomplished bon vivant. “I am an extreme moderate,” Franklin tells Adams early on. “My opinion is that I have no opinion.”
Some viewers may detect more than a hint of a contemporary politician in Franklin.
Shot largely in Virginia, the film is rich in memorable scenes.
After Adams insists that Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, the sage of Monticello brings in his draft for peer review.
By Jefferson’s accounting men have rights that are “sacred and undeniable” yet Franklin disagrees, saying TJ’s formulation “smacks of the pulpit.” He suggests “self-evident.”
Jefferson, radiating a profound though silent exasperation, is not destined to win this argument. Writers in the audience are thus reminded editors are an eternal curse.
A searing tar and feathering scene depicts the horrors of the mob while perhaps the most memorable, and wrenching, scene depicts Abigail having herself and her children inoculated for smallpox.
While today’s vaccines come in vials, here the local doctor carts in a pustule-encrusted child whose eyes roll back as he clutches a cross. His hideous sores are lanced and the proceeds implanted in Abigail and her children, one of whom barely survives.
It is difficult to find fault with the nearly three-hour opening; if a warning is due it is that the series may be a challenge to casual viewers.
Writer Kirk Ellis‘s script reminds us that Adams and his contemporaries did not spend their formative years playing video games, but instead reading Latin and Greek. The dialogue is elevated (and obscenity-free); one almost imagines Hanks and company toying with the idea of subtitles.
Ellis provides many other details illustrating the vast difference between Adams’ world and ours.
The colonials were cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and decidedly short on appliances. We see Abigail scrubbing the floors with vinegar and a brick and John writing some of history’s most enduring documents with the help of his era’s word processor: the quill. Yet for all his brilliance he was not unfamiliar with illiteracy. “My mother could not read,” he tells Abigail.
The series, which will air at 9 p.m. on subsequent Sundays through April 20, follows Adams to Europe, back the United States, and through his tumultuous years as vice president and president, ending on July 4,1826, the day Adams and Jefferson, who parted ways but eventually reconciled, die.
Hanks and company have brought John Adams brilliantly back to life. Perhaps someone should name a commodity after him – a fine claret seems just about right.
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.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225622008-03-12T20:00:00-04:002019-12-18T17:54:58-05:00Eliot Spitzer Felled by the Nookie Monster
<p>My report on the fall of Spitzer:
Commentary by Dave Shiflett
March 13 (Bloomberg) -- Eliot Spitzer's quickie resignation
speech left every indication that the atonement for his
``private failings'' had just begun.
The wait wasn't long: By the end of the day, the Woman in
Question had told the New York Times that she doesn't want ``to
be thought of as a monster.''
Those of us who have monitored the New York governor's
flameout these past two days perked up as the day progressed.
Cable commentators had started running low on material, despite
moments of exciting insight.
My favorite was the wild-eyed woman on CNN, who said
Spitzer was commanded by impulses radiating from the back of his
brain. Expensive boarding schools, Ivy League educations and the
best of breeding seem powerless before such primal instincts.
I also was entranced by the elite ex-call girl who detailed
her former lifestyle on NBC's ``Today'' show. She said she once
made $29,000 in one weekend.
``It's like Wall Street,'' she said. ``You have to go in,
make your money and get out.''
Just before noon, Spitzer rode -- inched, actually, through
Manhattan's unforgiving traffic -- to the rescue in a gas-
guzzling SUV. He was accompanied by his wife Silda, who assumed
the position of humiliated spouse as her husband explained that
he'd begun the healing process with his family.
She didn't look like much healing had sunk in yet, but who
can blame her? She's bound to have lots on her mind. When your
husband's been bedding hookers, who knows what he's brought
home?
`Out of Body'
On MSNBC we were treated to expert testimony from Dina
Matos McGreevey, similarly poleaxed by former New Jersey
Governor Jim McGreevey, who left his wife for a man. She
accompanied him before the cameras on that grim day in August
2004, she explained, for the sake of their daughter, whom she
thought would benefit by seeing mom standing by dad in his hour
of need. Must be a strange child.
She further described the day as an ``out of body
experience,'' looking as if she had yet to fully return home.
Like many viewers, no doubt, I found myself wondering what
my dear frau would do if I pulled such a stunt. Not likely she'd
show up at the press conference in the flesh. She'd probably
send along an arrangement of orchids -- with a tarantula hidden
in the stems.
Spitzer's speech hardly ends the affair, the commentator
corps now insists. This is surely correct. Besides the
possibility of money laundering and other criminal charges,
there are other reasons to believe this story, like those five-
grand call girls, has pretty good legs.
The now legendary $4,300 payout appears not to have been
Spitzer's first interaction with the accounts-payable department
at the Emperors Club. I assume a platoon or two of Spitzer girls
have lawyered and agented up and are in the process of
contacting the appropriate media outlets.
Maid's Outfit?
The smart money says more juicy stuff lies ahead. The woman
in the Feb. 13 tryst, identified in a Federal Bureau of
Investigation affidavit as ``Kristen,'' was reportedly told by
her dispatcher that ``Client-9,'' as the governor is referred
to, might ask her ``to do things that, like, you might not think
were safe.'' The mind whirls. Will we soon see photos of Spitzer
in a French maid's outfit?
We didn't have to wait long. By the early evening,
``Kristen'' had come forward with her real, albeit somewhat
Tennessee-Williamsish name, Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Unlike
Blanche DuBois, however, Ashley, 22, has a MySpace page loaded
with details of a troubled childhood and artistic aspirations to
accompany that deluxe price tag.
Whether she ever sings on ``American Idol,'' we do know now
that Ashley Dupre sang Monday in Federal court. The song was
familiar. I'm sure it won't be long before we hear every warbled
note.
(Dave Shiflett is a television critic for Bloomberg News.
The opinions expressed are his own.)</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225612008-03-04T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:54:58-05:00It's A Wrap for 'The Wire' -- Tony Soprano Would Be Impressed
<p>The Wire wraps up this weekend. A good run, and here's my parting review, unedited version.
A Wrap For ‘The Wire,’ Which Closes with a Bang
By Dave Shiflett
March 5 – (Bloomberg) – “The Wire” ends its five- year run in a hail of gunfire, resignations, reassignments and reproach.
Tony Soprano would no doubt be impressed.
The finale, which airs on HBO March 9 at 9 p.m. New York time, is grand indeed, with creator David Simon putting his Baltimore-based series to bed with a powerful, poignant closer.
The episode begins in city hall, where Mayor Thomas Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) finds himself in the middle of a perfect effluvia storm.
It’s not that the serial killer he’s been promising to save Baltimore from has struck again. It’s far worse than that: He now knows what viewers have known all along – the “killer” was created by Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) to force the mayor to free up funds the police can use to pursue real crimials.
The ruse worked perfectly: Drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), hit man Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe) plus several associates are in jail awaiting trial. Yet this scandal could keep Carcetti from winning the governor’s mansion.
We’ll miss Carcetti -- Boss Hogg without the charm – who reminded us, week in and week out, that while there’s little room for purity in urban politics there’s lots of space for scheming, oily demagogues. Fonder memories are likely for Colonel Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) and assistant state attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy), whose final dispositions, in contrast to the mayor’s, drive home a regular Wire story line: the cream often doesn’t rise nearly so high as the scum.
Faithful viewers will also miss McNulty and his pals over at the cop house, who sometimes did bad in order to do good. Not everyone, to be sure, was quite so ethically elastic, including detectives Shakima “Kima” Greggs (Sonja Sohn) and William “Bunk” Moreland (Wendell Pierce), the latter showing a fondness for cigars and aphorisms. He likens problems caused by creating a fake killer to going to war: “easy to get in, hell to get out.”
Here’s hoping they pop up in a new show.
Simon also created world-class street criminals, not all of whom make it to the final episode, including Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson), the latter succumbing to a slug to the head in the penultimate episode. Head-shot aficionados will not go away disappointed from the finale; other regulars experience sudden spikes in their cranial lead levels.
Then there’s drug lord Marlo Stanfield, who kept the undertakers busy yet at times was more sympathetic than Carcetti. He experiences a chain of events few viewers will guess but which underscores another Wire message: Street criminals have much in common with the folks working in the “legitimate” economy.
Simon began this season promising to focus on how journalism is responding to America’s urban crisis. His final critique is pitiless.
At the Baltimore Sun, where Simon worked for 13 years, city editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) is now sure that some of star reporter/suck-up Scott Templeton’s (Tom McCarthy) stories are as phony as McNulty’s serial killer.
While not divulging Simon’s final blast, viewers who believe that journalism reserves its highest rewards for blowhards and weenies may be inspired to offer a standing ovation. Simon adds an ironic grace note by focusing on a quotation about newspapering by H.L Mencken prominently displayed in the Sun’s offices: “It is really the life of kings.”
Simon made an orthodoxy of an old (and perhaps increasingly out-of-fashion) journalistic creed: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In that spirit he leaves viewers with a disquieting image.
Near curtain’s fall a young black male – 12 years or so, wearing the standard white t-shirt and distant look – is led away in handcuffs.
“The Wire” is history. The kid, Simon indicates, is the future.
Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225602008-02-21T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:54:58-05:00Joe Louis Special On HBO: IRS Tougher Than Nazi Poster Boy
<p>Joe Louis, aka the Brown Bomber, took out Hitler's favorite boxer, Max Schmeling, in just over two minutes. He wasn't so lucky with the IRS. Here's my review:
Joe Louis Shamed Hitler, Was Hounded By IRS
By Dave Shiflett
In the annals of performance anxiety, German boxer Max Schmeling holds a special place, as we are richly reminded in “Joe Lewis, American Hero … Betrayed,” an engrossing and bittersweet HBO special airing Feb. 23 at 8 p.m. New York time.
On June 22, 1938, Schmeling and Louis duked it out in Yankee Stadium before 80,000 fans, augmented by a worldwide radio audience estimated at 100 million. Schmeling’s performance was of special interest to Adolf Hitler, who expected his Aryan superman to defeat America’s “Brown Bomber.”
With Louis at his throat and the Fuhrer at his back, Schmeling definitely found himself between the fabled rock and hard place. It turned out to be a short visit: Schmeling, who had earlier defeated Louis, kissed the canvas is just over two minutes.
Louis became an instant hero while Schmeling went home to a career change: he was made a paratrooper. Yet Schmeling would later bounce back while Louis’s triumph would be followed by a series of setbacks and humiliations painfully detailed in the film.
Bill Cosby, Maya Angelou, Dick Gregory and Charles Rangel all recall how Louis, in Rangel’s words, was “the epitome of racial pride” at a time when there were simply no prominent blacks.
He was born Joe Louis Barrow on May 13, 1914, the seventh child in an Alabama sharecropping family that eventually departed for Detroit seeking opportunity and escape from the lynch mobs terrorizing the rural south. He gravitated to boxing, which the film says was the province of tough characters both inside and outside the ring.
Louis’s management team included men deeply involved in the numbers racket and one who had done time for murder. Yet they sensed his potential and helped Louis break through the color barrier to take on white boxers, which where the big money was.
He had fists of gold. While the average Depression-era American earned $1,400 a year, the film says, Louis made as much as $400,000.
His private life was equally dynamic. The public was fed a story of monogamous bliss though Louis was a lady’s man with few rivals. Son Joe Louis Barrow Jr. recalls his father once going out for a loaf of bread and not returning home for several weeks.
He was nothing, however, if not faithful to his country and fellow blacks. He quit boxing during World War II and traveled the world putting on exhibition matches for troops. Yet he would only box if blacks were allowed to attend, a policy that initially found resistance. He entertained several million troops during the war, the show says.
His greatest battles, however, lay ahead. Louis ran up a massive tax bill and thus discovered an eternal truth: Nothing is so ferocious as a tax collector scorned.
The film goes into great detail about Louis’s attempt to pay off his debt. He became a pitch man for cigarettes and booze and even started a song and dance routine, archived film of which indicates he would not have fared well on “American Idol.” He eventually re-entered the ring – as a professional wrestler. He told a friend “it beats stealing.”
In a particularly galling development, Coke hired Schmeling as a distributor, which made him a millionaire. The company made no such offer to Louis -- who, as the film reminds us, had been an American hero and who also had no association with Hitler.
His later years were as grim and his early ones were glorious. He developed drug problems and a severe paranoia, often fearing antagonists were attempting to poison him. Another blow came from Muhammad Ali, who called him an Uncle Tom.
He did enjoy the loyalty of friends, however, especially Frank Sinatra, who assisted with medical care. Louis was to suffer one more slight: Following his death April 12, 1981, bureaucrats determined he was not qualified to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Then-president Ronald Reagan waved the rules and ordered a full military funeral.
One hopes no IRS agents are planted nearby.
www.homeboxoffice.com</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225592008-02-18T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:54:57-05:00PBS Special Highlights Mensa Monkeys
<p>They don't call them the Great Apes for nothing. A PBS special reminds us that the shaggier primates have a few more lights on upstairs than perhaps some of our friends and acquaintances. Here's the review I did for Bloomberg:
Genius' Apes Carve Spears, Grab Floating Peanut: Dave Shiflett
Review by Dave Shiflett
Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Apes are different from you and me - - though not by much.
That's the lesson of ``Ape Genius,'' a fascinating PBS special that strongly suggests some monkeys could almost qualify for Mensa membership.
According to the show, which airs tonight at 8 p.m. New York time, chimps, orangutans, gorillas and bonobos can solve complex problems, make and use tools, and display emotional depth that may draw tears from some viewers.
In one of many filmed experiments featured in the hourlong special, a female chimp is presented with a long transparent tube containing a peanut. The peanut is at the bottom of the tube, which is fastened securely to her cage.
She sizes up the problem, cogitates a moment, takes a gulp of water and spits into the tube. A few repetitions later and the peanut has risen within reach.
Would you have figured that out?
The program includes interviews with experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, Kyoto University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, but the shaggy bipeds are the real stars.
One chimp shows a remarkable knowledge of language. At the request of her handler, who wears a mask to conceal telltale expressions, the chimp hands over some sticks, fetches a ball and picks up a set of keys and puts them in a refrigerator. This extra-furry ape recognizes 3,000 English words, more than enough to be a reality-show star.
Making Weapons
Anthropologist Jane Goodall, looking waiflike here in archived footage, long ago documented that chimps use tools to harvest termites. Jill Pruetz, an Iowa State University anthropologist interviewed for the program, shows that some apes are more heavily armed.
In Senegal, chimps are filmed making spears from broken branches. They sharpen the tips with their teeth before pursuing their prey: bush babies, small nocturnal primates that hide out in hollowed-out trees during the day.
When the hunters detect dinner, they thrust their spears with arms that are up to five times stronger than their human counterparts. While we are spared the actual impaling, we see the resulting feast -- the treetop version of munching a porterhouse.
Dead Baby
Goodall also documented the strong emotional life of chimps, painfully updated in the program's most wrenching segment: film of a mother's devastation over the death of a young one. She is unable to part with the body for weeks, carrying it around on her back and stroking its lifeless forehead.
There are, of course, significant differences between apes and humans. The former have less impulse control and often avoid cooperating with one another, while humans appear to have an innate expectation to be taught and a powerful desire to teach.
As a result we learn more quickly and pass much more information between generations. Still, chimps have a pretty good life.
In one scene we see them sitting on tree branches munching fruit, then lowering themselves into a small pool of water and chattering away with obvious delight. Sounds idyllic to me: no mortgages, no taxes, no Britney.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225582008-01-18T19:00:00-05:002021-11-29T10:14:15-05:00From Wall Street Journal: Tom Cruise Takes A Missile From Biographer
<p>Duty calls, and I got called upon to review a new book about Tom Cruise. The good news is that the review is real short.
Airplane Reading
By DAVE SHIFLETT
January 19, 2008
Tom Cruise
By Andrew Morton
St. Martin's, 344 pages, $25.95
Tom Cruise is much more than one of the world's pre-eminent celebrities, according to Andrew Morton's unauthorized biography. He's a top-gun Scientologist who is up to no good. Unlike celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof, who merely want to change the world by fighting poverty and similar scourges, Mr. Cruise "is part of an organization that wants to conquer the planet." Mr. Morton, apparently unfazed by the reputation of the group's notoriously hair-triggered legal department, leaves few stones unhurled. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is portrayed as a charlatan and a quack: "If you really want to make a million," Mr. Hubbard is quoted as telling a 1947 meeting of science-fiction writers, "the quickest way is to start your own religion." Mr. Morton includes a photograph of Hubbard using a device that Scientologists call an E-meter -- "a crude lie detector" -- to measure the emotional state of a tomato (apparently Scientologists are attuned to the inner lives of plants). The author cites Nobel laureate Isidor Isaac Rabi, a molecular physicist, as saying of Scientology's bible, Hubbard's "Dianetics," that the book contains "more promises and less evidence per page than has any publication since the invention of printing." We are advised to keep a wary eye on Mr. Cruise, described by old acquaintances as an "Al Capone character" with a "nasty streak" who allegedly hopes to use his fame and connections to evangelize the world on behalf of Scientology. In one photo, we see Mr. Cruise pictured with Bill Clinton, who would be a tough man to convert -- though if Hillary needs to scrounge additional votes in California, anything's possible.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225572008-01-07T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:54:57-05:00Very Cool PBS Show On Pursuit of 'Absolute Zero'
<p>It's supposed to hit the seventies today -- at least where I am. Fear not, the cold will be back. Meantime, PBS has a very interesting series on the search for absolute zero, which could make life much better for warm-blooded types.
Jan. 4 (Bloomberg) -- With winter upon us, it's a perfect time for ``Absolute Zero,'' a fascinating two-part PBS series on the upside of extreme cold.
Down at the very bottom of the thermometer -- where temperatures dip to about minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit -- light slows to ``bicycle speed'' while liquids defy gravity and flow upward. Numbsville to be sure, yet ultra-cold environments may yield benefits every bit as important as the harnessing of heat.
``The Conquest of Cold,'' which airs Jan. 8 at 8 p.m. New York time, begins with a re-creation of the first known stab at air conditioning. Cornelius Drebbel, an alchemist and magician for King James I who is credited with inventing the submarine, told the boss he could turn summer into winter, at least in the Great Hall at Westminster.
His AC unit was likely composed of vessels filled with salted ice and a human-powered fan. The king, portrayed here as a beefy fellow familiar with breaking a royal sweat, was duly impressed. Yet air conditioning would not be developed for three centuries, and then not on behalf of sweating humanity.
The series, based on Tom Shachtman's book ``Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold,'' features interviews with Nobel laureates Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle, all pioneers on the frigid frontier.
There's long been gold in cold, as we see in a segment on New England's 19th-century ice industry, which employed tens of thousands of workers and served markets as far away as China.
Ice Ships
Although an ice ship lost about 20 percent of its cargo over the course of a voyage, profits were still high. The industry also shrank the world. Henry David Thoreau observed that ice taken from Walden Pond might end up in the cup of an ``East Indian philosopher.''
Refrigeration put steaks on plates across America, much to the benefit of meat-packing cities such as Chicago. Flash- freezing, created by Clarence Birdseye in the early 20th century, was another great step in food preservation, leading to the invention of the TV dinner.
People need cooling too, even though air conditioning was initially devised to chill inanimate objects.
In July 1902, the show says, a fan maker named Willis Carrier was called to the Brooklyn offices of Judge magazine, where the humidity was so high ink wouldn't dry on the pages.
Absolute Zero
Carrier's solution: Blow air across cooled coils, which decreased the humidity and dropped the temperature. The July issue was saved and air conditioning was on its way; benefits included allowing buildings to rise above 20 stories, where high winds make open windows impractical.
``The Race for Absolute Zero,'' which airs Jan. 15 at 8 p.m., picks up the story later in the 20th century as scientists pursued absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), described as ``the Holy Grail of cold.'' We're still just short of the goal, though scientists have gotten within a 10th of a billionth of a degree.
At these depths atoms reach a virtual standstill and particles can be ``everywhere at once,'' the show says. Liquefied gases flow upward and leak through glass, creating perpetual fountains shown in the series' most fascinating segments.
This mind-bending stuff has practical applications, including ``quantum computers'' unhindered by heat and boasting vastly expanded capabilities. The show concludes that while harnessing heat has played a key role in human development, the ``future may lie in continuing conquest of cold.''
Let us never speak ill of winter again.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225562007-12-30T19:00:00-05:002022-04-21T07:18:47-04:00PBS Features Andy Jackson, A Dynamic Pol
<p>As we yawn our way toward the primaries, PBS airs an interesting show on our seventh president.
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- If you're bored by the soporific slate of U.S. presidential candidates, consider watching PBS's new documentary on Andrew Jackson. It proves that politicians don't have to be dull.
``Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency,'' which airs Wednesday on PBS at 9 p.m. New York time, tells how a man born in a log cabin and orphaned as a teenager grew up to be the seventh U.S. president.
Along the way, Jackson killed a man in a gambling-related duel, ran off with another man' wife, led an unauthorized invasion of Spanish-ruled Florida, sent thousands of American Indians to their deaths on the ``Trail of Tears'' and accused John Quincy Adams of procuring a whore for a Russian czar.
In his spare time the slave-owning Jackson helped launch the Democratic Party and warned Americans of the rising power of bankers and corporations. Mike Huckabee, he wasn't.
Narrated by Martin Sheen, the program explains how Jackson earned his nickname ``Old Hickory.'' Jackson learned to brawl, drink whiskey and fight the detested British on the Carolina frontier, where he was reputed to be as tough as hickory wood, according to biographer Jon Meacham, one of several historians interviewed for the two-hour show.
Battle of New Orleans
Jackson became a lawyer at age 20 and signed on as a frontier prosecutor. He met another free spirit, Rachel Robards, in Nashville, Tennessee, around 1788. She was married at the time but took a shine to Jackson. Their adulterous relationship, which led to marriage, would haunt her later in life.
Jackson was a tough opponent, as British troops discovered in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans and Adams found out during two presidential elections.
They first battled for the White House in 1824, a contest eventually decided in Adams's favor by the House of Representatives. Jackson, who thought the election had been stolen, challenged Adams in a nasty rematch four years later.
The Adams camp got a newspaper to print Rachel's divorce proceedings, and soon editorialists were calling her the ``American Jezebel'' and Jackson ``Western Bluebeard.'' Jackson's supporters struck back with a false charge that Adams, while serving as minister to Russia, had hired a prostitute for the czar.
`Old Hickory'
Although Jackson won the 1828 election, Rachel never accompanied him to Washington; she died a few weeks after her husband's victory, and Jackson blamed Adams for her demise.
The program, which makes good use of lithographs, letters and documents from Jackson's time, reminds us that ``Old Hickory'' was hardly a favorite of high society. For his first inaugural (he served two terms), Jackson invited the public to the White House, and the huge crowds ended up trashing the building.
``What a scene we did witness,'' wrote one socialite, who noted the ``struggle to get punch'' and an abundance of fainting ladies. Thomas Jefferson deemed Jackson to be ``unfit'' for his office.
Indians, Slaves
Jackson's harsh treatment of American Indians gets a thorough airing, especially his support of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that forced tribes living east of the Mississippi River to move to unsettled territories in the West. Thousands of men, women and children died during the relocation.
His handling of slaves also was brutal. Historian Bobby L. Lovett recounts that Jackson once offered a reward to anyone who administered 300 lashes to one of his escaped slaves -- a virtual death sentence.
This was the same president who warned that powerful corporations and ``unelected'' bankers were a threat to the common man, or at least those of proper hue.
Jackson was a powerful friend and a ferocious enemy. His first biographer, James Parton, may have summed him up best: ``He was a democratic autocrat, an urbane savage, an atrocious saint.''
And never, it appears, dull.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225552007-12-10T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:54:57-05:00From The Wall Street Journal: Jesus Returns -- On Rollerblades
<p>Some might call it a shameless attempt to turn a buck, while others will insist it's a way to beat Satan at the toybox level. Religious action figures, including a Rollerblading Jesus, are available for Christmas purchase. Here's a piece on the subject I did a little while back for The Wall Street Journal.
God Made Flesh, Then Plastic
By Dave Shiflett
Anyone seeking a mischievous stocking stuffer for Christopher Hitchens or less exalted scoffers need look no further. A growing phalanx of religious action figures—including Adam, Eve, Daniel, Job, Esther, Goliath, Sampson and Jesus—offer a tweaking reminder that despite Heathendom’s best efforts, the faith-based marketplace is forever expanding.
Plastic saints, to be sure, aren’t exactly new. Mary, mother of Jesus, has long ridden shotgun in Catholic vehicles. Yet some of the faithful, including a few with a gift for retail, concluded that she needed reinforcements.
David Socha, chief executive of One2believe, which offers a line of religious action figures, told the Associated Press that there is a “battle for the toy box” under way, in which good and evil vie for the young. “If you’re very religious, it’s a battle for your children’s minds and what they’re playing with and pretending,” he said. “There are remakes out there of Satan and evil things.”
Old Scratch and associates may now have their hands full. Jesus, for example, comes in several incarnations, including a football player, skier, rollerblader and the best-selling “Baseball Jesus Sports Statue,” offered by Catholic Supply for $20. “A contemporary statue for today’s youth,” the sales pitch says of the figure, promising a hands-on reminder that “Jesus is with us in everything we do, watching over us & involved in all of our acts & activities.”
The company’s Web site also anoints its statue with a bit of marketplace myrrh: “As seen on the Conan O’Brien show!”
The deployment of Jesus and other biblical bigs to the toy-box war includes some contemporary updates. One supplier, in a bow toward divinity and diversity, offers figures in both dark- and light-skinned models (Adam and Eve, it should be noted, are portrayed in post-fall attire reminiscent of bathing suits). Meantime, at the Family Values Center, there’s Moses ($12.99), who comes with “shield and sword, along with fully illustrated comic book.”
Interestingly, two female dolls—Deborah the Warrior and Queen Esther—cost $24.99. Must be their wardrobes.
Whether these toys have divine sanction is another matter. At a Web site called Itsyourtimes.com, a minister posted a sour appraisal, noting that the most popular action figure is Samson, “a gambler, womanizer, thief, murderer, arsonist and he was extremely cruel to animals.” The clergyman’s sarcastic conclusion won’t be mistaken for a benediction: “I am so pleased that we finally have some ‘Christian’ role models to inspire our children, instead of those heathen Super Heroes like Spider Man.” Other concerned parties warn that the figures are nothing less than the graven images warned of in the Ten Commandments, indicating a devilish plot of an especially sly and sinister nature may be afoot.
Those controversies aside, Mr. Socha’s company has achieved one of this world’s most desirable sanctions: Wal Mart is “test selling” his products at 425 of its 3,376 discount stores and Supercenters, possibly resulting in some serious manna.
To no one’s surprise, other faiths are getting in on the action. A company named Kridana, which says it consulted “with Indian parents across the globe,” will begin shipping figures representing Shri Hanuman and Lord Rama this November. “Just in time for the holidays, our first series will help make this year’s celebrations even more memorable for you and your child,” the company promises. “By sharing these toys with the children in your life, you ensure that they will have fun acting out the great epic stories.”
Purists may fear
ecumenical repercussions. Fully funded toy boxes might easily include figures from different faith traditions and eras, creating an environment rife with historical and ecclesiastical error, and maybe worse. One easily imagines a play session in which Jesus is sent rollerblading past Moses or Lord Rama, perhaps screaming “Out of the way, you geezer!” In the same spirit, there may be awkward efforts to evangelize Barbie and Ken, whose spiritual affiliation has always been kept secret (some suspect a very mild Presbyterianism, augmented by Prozac).
All of which may inspire literary scoffers to chortle, though there is humility in remembering that no child will ever play with action figures of grumpy men clattering away at keyboards.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225542007-12-02T19:00:00-05:002022-02-24T05:14:26-05:00Holiday Wish: Please Drop a Meteorite on This Church
<p>Here's a piece to get the blood boiling: It's about Hillsboro Baptist Church, which has made a name for itself by picketing military funerals. Showtime's got a film on the subject Tuesday night. Here's my Bloomberg review:
Nutty Church Rejoices Over Dead U.S. Soldiers
By Dave Shiflett
Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- It takes a deeply vile person to picket military funerals, especially with signs proclaiming ``Thank God for Dead Soldiers'' and ``God Is Your Enemy.''
Meet the Reverend Fred Phelps, whose Westboro Baptist Church congregation takes to the streets and cemeteries to celebrate American combat deaths. Phelps and his twisted flock are the subjects of ``Fall From Grace,'' which airs Dec. 4 on Showtime at 10 p.m. New York time.
Why does the reverend rage?
Phelps and his followers, mostly members of his family, believe military deaths are divine payback for tolerating homosexuality. Indeed, any calamity that befalls America, including Hurricane Katrina, is seen as a sign of the Almighty's anti-gay wrath. Their creed is summed up pretty well in the names of two of the church's Web sites: http://www.godhatesamerica.com and http://www.godhatesfags.com .
Subtlety is not their strong suit.
The 70-minute documentary marks the filmmaking debut of K. Ryan Jones, a student at the University of Kansas who interviewed Phelps and several of his 13 children. Most appear to have inherited the loony gene; one or two have also succumbed to the temptations of the deep-fat fryer.
Yet they do have one profound talent: spewing hatred.
The church, based in Topeka, Kansas, was recently ordered to pay a Baltimore family $11 million in damages for picketing their soldier son's funeral. The film makes it clear that the protests are designed to inflict maximum pain to survivors.
Disbarred Lawyer
Church members, including children, trample flags, chant hate messages and wave venomous signs such as ``God Hates You,'' ``God Is Your Enemy'' and ``Your Pastor Is a Whore.''
Phelps, a disbarred lawyer, agreed to several interviews. During one he insists that military casualties are divine comeuppance for an act of vandalism against his church. Jones also filmed Phelps's services, which no one will mistake for Quaker meetings. The reverend looks pale and skeletal in his calmer moments, but as his ranting increases his face turns red and his eyes flash with rage.
Four of his children have left the church and two agreed to participate in off-camera telephone interviews. They say Phelps was fond of beating his offspring, either with a barber's strop or a mattock handle. One believes his ``cult'' is capable of violence.
Two segments are especially troubling. One shows protests at the funeral of Lucas Frantz, who was killed in Iraq on his 22nd birthday.
``It wasn't supposed to be like that,'' his widow tearfully says of the picketing. ``Not on that day.'' As the father of a deployed soldier, I found myself wondering where the snipers are when you really need them.
Roaring Harleys
When the Westboro flock targeted a ceremony to retire Frantz's football jersey, they were surrounded by a local biker gang whose members gunned their engines, totally drowning out the chanting. This is clearly why the Good Lord made Harley- Davidsons.
Perhaps the most disturbing segment features interviews with children of church members. The tykes appear hardly old enough to drink soda pop, yet their prejudices are fully formed. They call gays ``evil beasts'' who are ``going to hell forever.''
Jones also interviews city officials and local clerics, all of whom clearly wish Westboro Baptist would be visited by a well-aimed meteorite. Yet Phelps, who says he wishes U.S. combat deaths were in the millions, seems certain that he and his brood of vipers will slither into heaven.
I predict a hotter, subterranean fate awaits them.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225532007-11-25T19:00:00-05:002019-12-18T17:54:56-05:00Holiday Gift Ideas, Take One: Red Molly
<p>In the spirit of the season -- this time of boundless capitalism and ferocious retail warfare -- I'll be posting a few gift ideas.
Below this entry, for example, there's a short review of Tom Brokaw's new book. It's not cheap, and not exactly a grabber, though it does have its moments. I won't pan it but won't push it, either.
A much better bargain, at least for those who prefer music to journalistic yack, is a band called Red Molly. I recently encountered Red Molly by accident, and am glad I did. I can highly recommend the band to anyone who likes acoustic music that features female vocalists singing nearly peerless harmonies. These girls no doubt make the angels jealous.
Here's a brief recounting of my encounter:
It was a dark and windy night, and this Brooklyn-based trio had driven down to Richmond to play at a place called Babe's. There was strong competition in town: Robert Earl Keen and Vienna Teng. My original intent was to hear REK. Then, fate stepped in.
Not too long before show time I saw an obscure listing of Red Molly's gig. Obscure indeed. It seems I was the only person in Richmond who saw the listing, for when I slipped by Babe's a bit before show time, there was no one there but the bartender.
This was quite ominous. He was pleasant enough, but had the look of the disco fan about him.
Soon, Red Molly showed up and went about preparing for the show. I found myself on those fabled horns of the proverbial dilemma. I could slip out into the night, go hear Robert Earl Keen, and Red Molly would never be the wiser.
However, I've played to plenty of empty chairs in my time as a hack musician. It is a terrible feeling, often accompanied by slack CD sales. It would be a terrible thing if Red Molly drove all the way here and no one showed up to hear them. A terrible thing indeed.
Go or stay -- that was the question.
I introduced myself to the Dobro player, whose name is Abbie Gardner. She was quite nice, not the kind of girl you want to see drive long distances to play for disco-loving barmen. Then again, Robert Earl Keen doesn't come to town every day.
Then it dawned on me -- if I bought a CD I would have done my duty and could move along with a clear conscience. As fate would have it there were two discs on sale -- a full length CD plus a four-song EP. I bought both and slipped into the night.
Yet fate had not played its final card. While entertaining a shapely beer at a nearby bistro, I was suddenly bitten by the sharp pangs of conscience. How terrible it would be for these excellent musicians -- whom I knew by reputation -- to play solely for DIsco Dan. Besides that, Robert Earl Keen's show was by now standing room only. He didn't need me.
I should also point out that Abbie is a babe, as are her bandmates, Laurie MacAllister and Carolann Solebello. The situation suddenly clarified itself: A guy like me can do lots worse than being seranaded in such circumstances.
I beat it back to Babe's, paid the cover, and took my seat. There were still plenty available. When the show started the audience consisted of me and a couple who had driven two hours for the show.
Later recon discovered that Red Molly is accustomed to playing before large, and sometimes very large, audiences. Yet from the first note they played beautifully and without complaint for the three of us. (As the evening progressed a few people drifted in; by the third set there may have been ten of us altogether). I was reminded of passages from a book about Bill Monroe, who had slow nights of his own, even after he was fairly famous. On one occasion, the book noted, there were only two people at a show, yet Monroe and his band performed as if at Carnegie Hall. So Red Molly's in good company.
It was a night I'll always remember.
You can find their discs at www.redmolly.com, and can buy both for less than you'd pay for Brokaw's tome. Indeed, you'll have enough left over for a few pints, which you can tip in the direction of Brooklyn.
Later this week, my unsolicited views on the latest toy craze: Rollerblading Jesus.</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225522007-11-13T19:00:00-05:002022-02-07T03:34:25-05:00BTK: You Can't Tell A Serial Killer By His Cover
<p>What's this -- another book review?
As it happens there are a few of them lying about, and this one is about a pretty strange fellow: Dennis Rader, AKA the BTK killer.
On the outside, he appeared profoundly normal. Yet that hid a monster lurking within.
Being a professional cynic, i'm reminded how our political candidates strive mightily to seem like ordinary folks, though who knows what lurks beneath their highly manipulative personas.
Nothing good, you can be assured.
Here it is:
*****
BTK Killer Looked Like Mr. Normal, Loved Bondage, Torture, Drag
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) -- A new book about Dennis Rader, aka the BTK killer, teaches a chilling lesson: That really ordinary guy living next door could be a serial killer.
Rader, according to John Douglas's ``Inside the Mind of BTK,'' ``could out-normal even the most normal person,'' which helps explain how he evaded capture for more than 30 years.
His social resume was right out of Norman Rockwell: two kids, Boy Scout leader, church congregation president, Air Force veteran and married for more than 30 years to the same woman.
Indeed, at the time of his arrest on Feb. 25, 2005, the balding resident of Park City, Kansas, made his living catching dogs and handing out citations for overgrown lawns -- a yard Nazi.
Yet beneath that white-bread exterior lurked a monster. Rader is known to have killed 10 people between 1974 and 1991, beginning with a quadruple murder whose victims included an 11- year-old girl, with whom he left a DNA calling card. That practice would eventually help identify him.
John Douglas, a former FBI criminal profiler, provides gruesome details from Rader's journals and police reports. It's an unforgettable portrait of a guy most of us are glad we never met.
Rader was weird from early on. In elementary school he developed a fetish for tying himself up, an exercise that provided an intense sexual reward.
A poem from his middle-school years finds a warped mind at work: ``There once was a girl who had all the right curves/and a large tummy/All the better to wrap up tight/and make a Mummy.''
Torture, Underwear
He did his apprenticeship torturing animals and later began breaking into houses and rooting around for women's underwear, which he put to erotic use. Ropes and bondage were his passion, and Rader himself supplied the BTK moniker -- Bind, Torture, Kill -- in one of several post-murder letters bragging of his deeds.
Assisted by writer Johnny Dodd, Douglas often sounds like a true-crime scribe. He notes that the evening sky ``reminded me of a bruise I'd once seen covering the battered body of a woman stretched out atop an autopsy table.'' He offers the occasional rogue's profile, including a suspect with ``a lengthy history of deviant behavior that included an arrest for having sex with a duck.''
He also provides a look inside the minds of various serial killers he's interviewed, including Richard Speck and David ``Son of Sam'' Berkowitz. In a particularly chilling note, he writes that some killers tape-record their victim's pleas and screams, later listening to them ``much like a normal person would listen to a piano concerto by Mozart on their stereos.''
Bound in Drag
Douglas was long puzzled by Rader's ability to go years between murders. One reason, he concludes, may have been an ultimatum from his wife after she discovered her beloved bound and in drag inside the family residence. The fear of her walking out may have cooled his murderous jets.
Yet his ego would eventually trip him up. After learning that a local lawyer was planning to write a book on his crimes, in March 2004 he got in touch with a local television station.
A police contact assured him that he was perfectly safe sending future messages via floppy disc, and he mailed off a missive that was traced to a church computer. He was soon in custody.
Douglas has no soft spot for BTK, arguing that Rader should be put to death -- a position, he notes, that Rader shares. Because all his crimes were committed during a time when Kansas had no death penalty, Rader will live out his years in prison, though his new neighbors are probably not buying the ``normal'' act.
``Inside the Mind of BTK: The True Story Behind the 30-Year Hunt for the Notorious Wichita Serial Killer'' is published by Jossey-Bass (344 pages, $26.95).</p>
Dave Shifletttag:daveshiflett.com,2005:Post/61225512007-11-09T19:00:00-05:002022-05-06T12:17:16-04:00Britney Spears No Johnny Cash, In Lots of Ways
<p>I do a few book reviews from time to time. Here's a recent one that ran in the Weekly Standard about Johnny Cash. If you like Britney Spears, you may want to skip this.
##########
He Walked the Line
The Man in Black "was rarely out of addiction's grip."
by Dave Shiflett
11/05/2007, Volume 013, Issue 08
Johnny Cash
The Biography
by Michael Streissguth
Da Capo, 320 pp., $26
Britney Spears, the world's most prominent lip-syncher, is under scrutiny these days, with tales of substance abuse and excessive butt-flashing that have put her at risk of losing permanent custody of her children. While she'll no doubt eventually convert her troubles into a career-boosting sympathy tour, that she could be considered even a minor practitioner of the dissipative arts indicates a severe decline in standards.
Consider, for example, the late Johnny Cash, a world-class pill-popper who, according to long-held lore, was saved only by divine intervention, along with a little help from wife June Carter Cash. Yet this new biography indicates that even the Good Lord couldn't keep him clean for long. In addition, Cash, who lent his talents to the Billy Graham organization, seems to have spent the 1970s and '80s in the occasional company of various -Jezebels. He was a maestro on many fronts.
Following his death in 2003, a basic theme ran through many Cash remembrances, including a popular film starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon: After years of wretched excess, the Man in Black saw the light, married June, and basically lived happily ever after.
Yet according to Michael Streissguth, rumors of his rehabilitation were greatly exaggerated. Cash was rarely out of addiction's grip. Johnny Cash: The Biography provides the basic background of Cash's birth, first marriage, stints in the Air Force and as an appliance salesman, and his early musical career, playing three-chord music on a five-dollar guitar of German provenance. Three chords or not, Cash was a prodigy when it came to doping, which played second fiddle to nothing, including Carnegie Hall. Streissguth writes that a 1962 appearance at the fabled New York venue found Cash so debilitated that he could only manage to "whisper" his lyrics.
It only got worse. In October 1965, Cash crashed and burned on the stage of The Steve Lawrence Show (CBS), where he had been slated to open the evening with his mega-hit "I Walk the Line." Guitarist Luther Perkins played the intro, Streissguth writes, but Cash blanked on the lyrics. Perkins, an apparently patient sideman, tried 11 more times to get the ball rolling, yet Cash was too stoned to sing. That debacle was followed, a few days later, with a drug bust in El Paso.
Eventually he simply stopped showing up for shows. By 1967, as many as half of his dates were being cancelled.
Those wondering what it takes to compete at this level may be astounded by Cash's dosage. His typical intake was 20-30 amphetamines at a time, three to four times a day. When it came time to throttle back, he'd knock back 20 or so tranquilizers. In the early part of their romance, which ran concurrent with Cash's first marriage, June Carter was also popping pills, though at a reduced rate, according to Streissguth. While myth and moviemakers have Cash cleaning up in order to marry June, former sideman Marshall Grant says Cash was back on dope soon after the wedding and, except for a dry period during 1970-76, was rarely drug-free.
"There wasn't five days from 1976 until he came down with his disease that he was straight," Grant is quoted as saying. "They did a good job covering it up."
Indeed, it seems that tales of divine intervention, at least of the subterranean type, were also ill-founded: Many Cash eulogies mentioned a pre-marriage descent into Nickajack Cave near Chattanooga, where his plan to commit suicide was vetoed by God. "That did not happen," says Grant. We are also reminded that Cash, like many touring musicians, was not the best of family men.
"Dad quit coming home," says Kathy Cash, a product of his first marriage. "I remember one year Mom went an entire year without knowing where he was."
Streissguth recaps a few of Cash's other troubles, including being forced to fork over $82,000 for causing a forest fire in Los Padres National Forest in California that destroyed 500 acres and much of the (endangered) condor population. And in an act of what might be karmic significance, one of Cash's worst years of drug backsliding (1983) came "after an ostrich that inhabited an exotic animal farm he owned attacked him and broke five ribs."
The author, who also wrote Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, is clearly an admirer, yet does not look past the soft spots in Cash's body of work. He also writes with gentle humor about Cash's big-screen version of the Jesus story, which the author says included a score consisting of
Gospel set to boom-chicka-boom. The movie itself proved a compelling personal statement and a credible interpretation of Christ's days on earth, if one could look past the sharp southern accent of Mary Magdalene and the preponderance of combovers among males in the cast.
Streissguth also reminds us, movingly at times, that Cash's latter years were hard. Besides addiction problems, he lost his Nashville recording contract, experienced an erosion of his songwriting talent, and was forced to endure a stint in Branson, Missouri. His alliance with producer Rick Rubin resulted in a series of recordings which are, as Streissguth has it, somewhat mixed: His originals could be compelling, though some covers are reminiscent of an old man crooning on a park bench to the full dismay of the local pigeons.
His final days were black indeed, with June gone--according to the book, Rubin dispatched a faith healer on her behalf--and Cash slowly slipping away. His spirits, Streissguth writes,
collapsed as the sun fell. The gloaming, he'd say, invoking the Scottish term for evening, was the hardest part of the day. It was the hour when she had passed. He'd stare out the office window, absorbing what he could discern of the shimmering of the setting sun on the lake.
Johnny Cash's music remains popular--he sold over 50 million records--especially with a younger audience that considers the Man in Black to be one of their own. And in any case, whatever his personal shortcomings, much better JC than Britney, who should put on some underwear, get back to rehab, and recognize that her ring of fire, like her voice, is a mere flicker compared with the real thing.</p>
Dave Shiflett