Thursday, July 28, 2011

Amy Winehouse

With the sad death of Ms. Winehouse I would ask her fans to seek out and support some of the real soul survivors and soul sisters who would be thrilled (and deserve) to have some of your CD/download dollars and would love even a small amount of the press bestowed upon Ms. Winehouse. 
For your consideration:  Barbara Lynn, Sharon Jones, Bettye LaVette, La La Brooks, Jean Knight, Tammy Lynn, The Velvalettes, Dorothy Moore, Mavis Staples, Irma Thomas, Barbara Harris and I am sure there are many more I am forgetting about.  Make sure you are supporting the real thing and giving the folks that chose to work and survive the respect, honor and money that are their due!

Friday, July 22, 2011

Following Atticus

We here in Newburyport (our fair city) have been very fortunate to be featured in three wonderful books recently.  The first was Joel Brown’s superb murder mystery “Mirror Ball Man,” next was Andre Dubus’ celebrated “Townie” and next up is Tom Ryan’s “Following Atticus.”  Newburyport residents know Mr. Ryan as the provocative editor of the local political journal “The Undertoad.”  He was reviled by some and loved by many for his intrepid news reporting and his courageous stands against authority and power.  Mr. Ryan and “The Undertoad” were by turns smart, petulant, insightful, caustic, sentimental, enormously funny and ALWAYS worth reading.  In the days of “The Undertoad” you truly could not be considered “in the know” about Newburyport if you had not devoured the latest issue. 
Those of us who got to know Tom Ryan knew he was a fine writer, great storyteller and immensely witty.  Much like our local son’s Joel and Andre, Tom simply knows how to write.  In what I trust will be the first of many books, on September 20 “Following Atticus” will be published.  Newburyporter’s will certainly delight in his characterizations of our fair city and his observations of some of its inhabitants, both named and un-named. 
“Following Atticus” is best described as a memoir that really reads like a novel.  As I got further into the book I would often forget that I knew Tom and much of the story and find myself just enjoying the craft, wit and heart of his storytelling.  The core of the book is Tom’s relationship with his amazing little dog Atticus and their adventures hiking in the White Mountains, but the story begins to unfold as family elements come into play and you soon realize that what you are really reading is a tale of redemption and discovery.  About a third of the way thru the book my wife asked me how I liked it and I told her with great authority that; “I didn’t care what Tom said, this is a dog book.”  Of course about 50 pages later as the book deepened and opened up I had to eat my words; this was certainly not a “dog book” or a “hiking book” but a great story.  In the way Moby Dick is not a “whale book”
Tom had succeeded in using his hiking quest and his friendship with this little dog to tell a much grander story about love, survival, fear, change, dysfunctional families, and of course small New England cities.  Like all great writers he uses the colors of his simple story to paint a much grander canvas about life itself and he does it with a quiet skill and artfulness of a fine writer.  So it will not matter if you love dogs, or care anything about hiking or the White Mountains, or live in a small New England city this book will draw you in with its heartfelt tale of love, survival and triumph.           

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Just say HELL NO, after all “Deficits Don’t Matter”!

WOW, remember the halcyon days just a few short years ago when the Republican controlled Congress easily passed 8 increases to America’s debt ceiling with little or no debate and back when the great sage Dick Cheney told Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in 2002 that “deficits don’t matter” – ahhhh, those golden days of our youth!  There are so many glorious high points; back in 2003 Congress raised the debt ceiling “by almost 1 trillion dollars to cover the second round of Bush tax cuts approved by Congress, at $350 billion.  And to cover the President’s Medicare prescription drug bill, projected at $400 billion (but at an actual cost greater then $600 billion).  Bush signed it into law without the revenue to fund it” (from The Washington Spectator from July 15, 2011).  In a mind boggling dereliction of duty, the day the $350 billion tax cut was passed was the same day as the debt ceiling increase, clearly the new “hell no” Republican Party was not in session that day. 
I know what you are thinking, back in those splendid days a Republican was president, but in fact there was a young senator who spoke up deploring the raising of the debt ceiling:  “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” the senator thundered. “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. . . . Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.”  Of course the young Senator was Barak Obama in an earlier incarnation, before he morphed in to George W. V2 and brought us our current 3rd term of the Bush administration complete with continued idiotic wars, insane tax policy, corporate welfare, more unfunded mandates and entitlements, same war on terrorism and rising deficits.   

So the question is; are the gates of hell going to open up and swallow us if we do not increase the debt ceiling by 8/2, probably not but the results could be very damaging.   It is important to remember that increasing the debt ceiling has nothing really to do with spending levels.  Increasing the debt ceiling is simply coming up with the money to pay the bills that are coming thru the door, bills that Congress itself approved.  One of the very real dangers in any sort of default no matter how minor is its effect on the interest rate we have to pay to borrow money.  As Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration wrote in the Washington Post today:  “J.P. Morgan recently surveyed its clients and asked how much rates would rise if there was a delay in (debt) payments, even a very brief one. Domestic investors thought they would go up by 0.37 percentage points, but foreign buyers — who own close to half the publicly held debt — predicted an increase of more than half a percentage point. Any increase in this range would raise Treasury’s borrowing costs by tens of billions of dollars per year.”

So at the end of the day this is not the stupid game of chicken that the tea party morons seem to think it is.  It is also not about taking a stand on debt, as this is money to pay the credit card bill for the stuff we already charged.  This August 2nd “deadline” is an important line in the sand, do our elected officials have the intellect and guts to start down that road to more fiscal sanity.   The American people are simply asking our elected officials to do what millions of Americans have been doing (and struggling with) over the past 2 years; control spending, lower debt and live within our means.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Justice Scalia plays a Grimm game of Mortal Kombat

Part of Justice Scalia’s assenting decision in last week’s Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association (the case concerned whether California could regulate the selling of violent video games to minors) was much quoted:
California's argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children's access to depictions of violence, but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm's Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just deserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers "till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy." . . . Cinderella's evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven.

High-school reading lists are full of similar fare. Homer's Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops by grinding out his eye with a heated stake. . . . ("Even so did we seize the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows all about, as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame"). In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they be skewered by devils above the surface. . . . And Golding's Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other children while marooned on an island.

To the right this decision is another triumphant win for the 1st amendment and free speech (I wonder if the right is going to end up regretting equating free speech with corporate profits), for the left it is another in a line of successes by big business in the Roberts court (about 20% of the sales of violent video games are to players under the age of 17).    

What struck me about Scalia’s argument was how vacuous it was.  Grimm’s fairy tales, stories that inhabit a moral universe, are being compared with games such as Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto which inhabits an amoral and nihilistic universe where violence is both random and extreme; intellectually, artistically and morally there is almost no reasonable basis for this comparison.  Secondly children were READ Grimm’s fairy tales not being asked to PARTICIPATE in them!  If the Grimm brothers had created a modern video game of Hansel and Gretel the players would have to devise the most violent and graphic death of their captors, and believe me it would not be as prosaic as being baked in an oven!  In Scalia’s argument all violence is equal and is not measured by its function in a story but just its severity, how else could anyone make a moral equivalence of Homer’s Odyssey and Mortal Kombat as Scalia essentially does?        

If the primary issue is that our society has not set up proper safeguards on ultra-violent imagery being delivered to minors as we have for pornographic content then so be it, Justice Scalia, spare us this insipid argument.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Cars 2, Audience 0

It is with great sadness that I write that heretofore the least film in the Pixar universe, Cars, has now been supplanted by a new and decidedly more marginal film “Cars 2.”  From Blue Sky or Dreamworks Animation studio’s Cars 2 would have seemed OK, but from John Lasseter and Pixar it becomes a major disappointment.  The film is to long with a spy plot that is too complicated for most kids, and it was certainly a questionable decision to make Tow Mater the main character. 
In the middle of the film my six year old spend 5 minutes searching for a piece of candy she thought she had dropped on the floor, and while she is a very experienced movie watcher I am quite sure she had no idea what was the hell was going on.  As soon as the end credits started running she looked at me and said, “Can we go now?” – not a good sign.  Of course the movie looks great, with stunning racing visuals but it is strangely heartless.  It is almost devoid of the tremendous feeling and soulfulness that Pixar seems to be able to conjure up with ease.  It was also lacking their laser like focus on story and character.  You have nothing in Cars 2 that even approaches the poignant depth of the furnace scene near the end of “Toy Story 3”, or the elegant space ballet between Wall-E and Eve in “Wall-E”, or that amazing voice over from Peter O’Toole that serves as the story climax in “Ratatouille.”  Moreover Cars 2 is built around the friendship between Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater but it never rings as true as the one between Sully and Mike in “Monsters Inc.”

While most of us assume that Lasseter is the mastermind at Pixar one wonders if he should have brought in some of the other geniuses at Pixar for help with Cars 2 such as Andrew Stanton or Brad Bird.  In any case Cars 2 is not bad; it is gorgeous and entertaining enough but just don’t expect the sheer greatness and emotional depth we have come to expect from Pixar Studios.