DAILY DIGRESSIONS PRIOR TO JUNE 2009
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for June 4, 2009
A line Obama should've added to his speech in Cairo:
"He who doesn't want to be treated like a stereotype
shouldn't act stereotypically."
____________________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for June 3, 2009
Wow! According to MySpace, my new song
"Life's Just a Single Blast" has already been
played hundreds of times by visitors to my MySpace
page -- and I just uploaded the song to the site
around a week ago!
I'm grateful and glad listeners are
connecting with the tune (and I'm thankful great
radio stations like KCRW and KALX have aired it).
Check it out (and download it for free) at
www.myspace.com/paulioriosongs.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- Yes, all songs on my MySpace site were
composed, performed and produced solely by me!
____________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for June 1, 2009
Hey, dig those pics of Barack back when he was a member
of Sly and the Family Stone! Very phresh! And now
he's hangin' out in the West Village, too. I'm liking
this guy more and more!
And, the other day, I heard a recording of him singing, and
-- guess what? -- he's not a bad singer at all. He croons
plenty better than Clinton (Bill, that is) plays
sax. He should cut a record.
* * *
Excerpt from Joe Biden's tell-all memoir, "Biding My
Time: My Years as Vice President," which I'm guessing
will be released around 2025:
"You know, I never really had the chemistry I
should've had with some of Obama's inner circle. I
think a few of them always thought they
were just a little bit better than cup o'-Joe Joe
Biden, the Amtrak-riding senior Senator who never got
in the Georgetown swim. I have to confess I was shut
out of too many decision-making meetings and my advice
went unheeded too often."
* * *
Excerpt from Bob Woodward's upcoming (and unwritten) book
on the Obama administration:
President Obama's voice on the telephone was tense,
agitated, unlike his usual calm. The President
wanted to talk with Vice President Biden in
the Oval Office, right now, post-haste.
"I do have some business in Wilmington this morning,"
the vice president said.
"Cancel it," said the president tersely.
"Yessir, I'll be right over to the Oval Office,"
Biden said.
When the vice president arrived, Obama wasted no time
getting to the point.
"Joe, what were you thinking?! 'Everyone should stay away
from crowded places' because of the H1N1?"
"I'm sorry Mr. President -- a poor choice of words on
my part," said the vice-president, scratching the part of
his head where he had had surgery years before.
"I know you know that's exactly the sort of thing
that can cause a panic, Joe."
"I didn't mean for it to come out that way," Biden said.
"Joe, you know I love your frankness, your candor. That's
why I picked you," continued the president. "But let's try not
to stray from the script anymore, ok?"
"Yessir, Mr. President."
* * * *
Well, some of you have heard my new song "Life's Just a
Single Blast" on KCRW, KALX and other great radio
stations (thanks a lot to those stations for playing
it, by the way!).
Now everyone can hear "Life's Just a Single Blast"
on MySpace. Just go to
www.myspace.com/paulioriosongs to listen to it.
I must admit that of all the hundreds of songs
I've written over the years, "Life's Just a Single Blast"
has connected with more listeners than any of
my other ones. And I'm real glad people seem
to enjoy it! (You can download it for free for
now -- it's on me.)
(P.S. -- I'm posting new uploads to MySpace every few
days so you can have a fresh selection of the many
songs I've written and recorded. Today I added "Time
Begins to End." Of course, every song I've posted
is composed, performed and produced solely by me.)
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for May 20, 2009
Maureen Dowd Should Take Six Months Off
And not just because she plagiarized Josh
Marshall's Talking Points Memo in her
column last Sunday -- though that's a serious
journalistic felony -- but because she's
becoming predictable, repetitive, stale,
off-key. She needs to freshen up her prose,
do something else for several months and
then come back to her twice-weekly column.
First, the plagiarism scandal, which resonates
in Dowd's case because: 1) she actually defended
the disgraced Jayson Blair in print in the early
stages of the scandal that almost brought down her
newspaper, and 2) there have been several
instances (and I've mentioned them in the Digression
over the months (search columns posted below
for the name "Maureen Dowd" to find them)) where
she appears to have swiped unique coinages or phrases
or ideas of my own (to cite only one example, I
coined the term "Palinista" to refer to supporters
of Sarah Palin last year and the very next day she
also used the word "Palinista," which had not been
used by anyone else up to that point).
In the current Maureen Dowd plagiarism case,
she plagiarized, virtually verbatim, an entire
paragraph from Marshall without crediting him.
Here's what she wrote:
"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why,
if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to
happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was
looking for what was essentially political information to justify
the invasion of Iraq."
And here's what she plagiarized from Marshall:
"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the
torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly
during the period when we were looking for what was essentially
political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."
Now, according to media blogs, she's justifying
herself with what appears to be a transparent lie: that
a friend discussed the idea with her on the phone, and
then she repurposed that idea for her column.
So we're supposed to believe that her friend
discussed the idea with her using Marshall's
exact words?! And that Maureen took word-for-word
dictation from her friend?! You expect us to
believe that?! That's High Cheney, Maureen. No
wonder you believed Jayson back when.
Now there appears to be a second excuse: that
she cut-and-pasted the passage and
then mistook it for her own. (Hey, she
wasn't writing a book, for crissakes, just
a dinky column!)
So in addition to her plagiarism violation, she
now now has a credibility problem, too. As her
dad the cop probably told her: sometimes the
cover-up is worse than the crime.
And as I mentioned, she's also becoming too
predictable. I mean, here's my own imitation of a
typical Maureen Dowd column:
"W was a president without a precedent when it came to torture,
but might the closing of Gitmo turn out to be a precedent
without a president?
Is Barack Obama second-guessing his own decision to
shut down the un-American detention center designed to
defend America?"
Typical (and right off the top of my head, too). There's
too much word reversal, idea reversal stuff, and
labored convoluted wordplay. She should take
six months off and come back to the paper around
Thanksgiving.
But that won't happen. She'll get a pass (much as
the far less well-known and far less-talented Edward
Guthmann got a pass at the San Francisco Chronicle).
Why? Because if you're friends with the right
people in journalism, your editors will overlook
almost any transgression. If you're not,
you'll be fired for merely misplacing a comma.
* * * *
Californians to California: "Drop Dead"
Funny thing is, the election in California
yesterday, in which almost all of several
ballot propositions to raise taxes were
defeated at the polls, seemed to generate
more media coverage in the national press than
locally. I live in the Bay Area and didn't
vote, and I usually do, and I don't know
anyone who did. There was almost zero buzz
about the ballot measures -- and most
of the local news coverage was about the
low voter turn-out.
I know: if the propositions had passed, they
would have helped to solve the huge budget
shortfall that the state government now has
to offset with deep spending cuts.
But in this recession, when everybody except
the state of California seems to be getting a
federal bail-out, I and most Californians
echoed that famous New York newspaper
headline of the 1970s and, on Tuesday, said
to the state, "Drop dead!"
But I digress. Paul
__________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for May 3, 2009
Last Night's Van Morrison Show
There are tales and legends of Van Morrison concerts
at which Van rides a sunbeam up through the cumulus
clouds and into centrifugal orbit -- and last night's
show in Berkeley, Calif., or part of last night's
show, was sort of like that.
I'm referring to his performance of "Like Young Lovers
Do," which simply overflowed with melody into the
open-air Greek Theater and up to the hills above
(where I heard it) and into the clouds, where I'm
sure that deities from Zeus to Krishna were
sitting, catching a freebie, catching the
sounds of heaven on Earth, on this
intermittently rainy night.
"Then we sat on our own star and dreamed...,"
he sang, and he sang it as if he had just
freshly composed it, with the lyrics, of
course, just sounds, a way to facilitate
emotion, given that Van generally sings
(or scats) along the contours of the feeling
of the moment, whatever that sounds like.
Whatever. If you haven't yet discovered the
live version of "Like Young Lovers Do," do
so. (It's available on his "Live at the
Hollywood Bowl" DVD, released a couple
months ago.) By the way, can you imagine
what David Hidalgo and Los Lobos could
do with that one?
The design of the concert was to perform
his entire "Astral Weeks" album, after
a warm-up set of Van classics, so
"Like Young Lovers Do," the peak of
a concert full of peaks, came around
mid-way through the "Astral" segment.
Earlier, Morrison had performed "Moondance,"
reimagined in a jazzier arrangement, an
irresistible "Wild Night" and a version
of Them's "Baby Please Don't Go" that had
people dancing wildly -- plus plenty
of radical scatting that made it seem
like Van was trying to re-invent singing
itself.
This tour is well worth checking out.
And you can see him on Leno this Wednesday.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 29, 2009
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the balance of
political power in the United States has
come down to one single individual: the
guy who used to play Stuart Smalley on
"Saturday Night Live." Who'd-a thunk it?
* * *
Now that the state of Florida is
considering offering car license
plates with a picture of Jesus Christ
on them, here are a couple captions
to go with the pic.
"Right Guard Dry: never let them see you sweat!"
"Gee, Dad," says Jesus from the cross, "thanks
a whole lot -- you were a huge help!"
* * *
I've decided that Bill Maher is a funnier Lenny
Bruce -- or (more accurately) a funny Lenny
Bruce.
* * *
I don't have a pet dog, but if I ever get
one, I've decided to call him or her Rolf.
But I digress. Paul
[picture of crucifixion by unknown artist]
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 27, 2009
"Dr." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ph.D.; "Those who
believe fact-based truths are racist" is
the level of a lot of what he says. [drawing
by Paul Iorio]
Funny thing about personal experience; it doesn't
always have a direct, linear effect on what
you do or say. A songwriter, for example, can
have personal tragedy or trauma in his life and
still continue to write mediocre songs. But
another writer who is merely moved by someone
else's tragedy or trauma can come up with a
work of genius like "Hey Jude" (as Paul McCartney
did, loosely playing off circumstances
surrounding John Lennon's painful divorce
from Cynthia). Interesting that Lennon
himself, as brilliant as he was, never came up
with anything nearly as moving that directly
related to his marital break-up.
Likewise, lots of soldiers endure the trauma of combat,
but very, very few come up with a work on the order of
"The Naked and the Dead" or "Platoon." Most soldiers
who have seen friends die on the battlefield write
only banalities and doggerel and are unable to
transform their experience into meaningful art.
One of the greatest war novels ever -- "The Red
Badge of Courage" -- was penned by someone who
never saw a day of combat, Stephen Crane.
And, likewise, one can have an education and still
not be educated at all. Witness Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who has a Ph.D. but is still
"astonishingly uneducated," to quote
Columbia University president Lee Bollinger.
The latest evidence of that was his appearance on
ABC's "This Week," in which he said the following:
"The Holocaust, if this is indeed a historical event,
why do they want to turn it into a holy thing? And
nobody should be allowed to ask any questions about
that? Nobody study it, research it,
permit it to research it. Why?"
One wonders about such a mind. If Ahmadinejad doubts
the Holocaust, what else does he doubt? The existence
of gravity? The fact that the Earth is round? Does
he have the same problem with all fact-based truth?
Does he only accept mythological truth?
And Ahmadinejad seems to be drawing a feeble
parallel, saying, See, you're as totalitarian in
the West as we are when it comes to something
you hold sacred.
But that's not true. If he wants to deny the Holocaust,
we in the West say, go ahead. We allow you the freedom
to publicly say and write that the holocaust didn't
happen. Sure, people might get angry, but there would
be no deadly riots in the streets as a result
(the way there were riots after the Jyllands-Posten
published the irreverent Mohammed cartoons).
What Ahmadinejad and other fundamentalists don't
understand is there are many different tools with
which to respond to something offensive (e.g.,
boycotts, civil disobedience, opinion pieces,
etc.). But, when offended, too many Muslim
extremists choose homicide from their tool kit -- as
their first and only response.
My feeling about newspapers and public figures that
deny the Holocaust is that they bring on their own
punishment: lack of credibility. Who would ever
take such a source seriously again?
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is:
too many members of the U.N. General Assembly --
and too many Ph.Ds with disdain for
fact-based truth.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 26, 2009
The Dalai Lama Visits Berkeley, Calif.!
Free Tibet buttons (which, by the way, aren't
free) on sale outside the theater where the Dalai
Lama appeared in Berkeley yesterday afternoon.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
--
Students hanging out of dorm windows at
the University of California to catch a
glimpse of His Holiness.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 23, 2009
What Ever Happened to Al Gore?
my own Al Gore sighting, as seen at
around two o'clock this afternoon in
Berkeley, Calif. (above).
[photo by Paul Iorio]
I was wondering the other day: where did Al Gore
go? He seems to be the only first-rank Democrat
who hasn't become an Obama appointee or subsidiary.
In fact, he's been sort of invisible since November.
Well, I got my answer this afternoon. Gore was
speaking at the University of California at Berkeley,
and I dropped by to listen.
And I am here to report first-hand that he has
not reverted to his post-Beatles break-up beard,
that he seems almost younger than yesterday,
even slimmer than when I last saw him (two-and-a-half
years ago at a Prop 87 rally), though grayer, looking
much like the ex-president he'd finally be now, if
he hadn't been unfairly blocked from taking
the job he won in '00.
And on this day after Earth Day, his speech was
vintage Gore ("The entire north polar ice cap is
melting right before our eyes....."), though the
actual reason for his appearance was a
groundbreaking ceremony for UC's Blum Center.
For those wondering: Gore didn't mention whether
he'd run again for president in 2016 (or whether he'd
pull a -- banish the thought! -- primary challenge
in 2012).
* * * *
Obama's First Hundred Days
Barack Obama may well become our greatest
president since JFK and has probably already
inspired as many people as Kennedy did by
'62. Time will tell. But one hundred days
into his presidency, he still seems a bit
like the hip, super-smart substitute teacher
at the experimental school who does wonders
with the students and maybe can even help
junior get out of his funk! (And wouldn't
it be great if we could put him on staff
permanently?)
Joking aside, Obama seems to be made for this job.
I don't think there's another recent president
who has had fewer mis-steps and made fewer
mistakes in the post-inaugural months. And
he's checking off his campaign promises, one
by one, doing exactly what he said he'd do during
the election season.
I bet some of his supporters must be thinking
that this might be the time to repeal the 22nd
Amendment (because he's only going to be 55
when he finishes his second term, if he wins
in '12).
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 22, 2009
The Rise of Religious Tyranny
(and Why Blasphemy Makes More Sense Than Ever!)
The badly-educated religious totalitarians who
wrote this trashy U.N. resolution (above) probably
would've stoned Copernicus and Galileo for "religious
defamation." (Has Obama condemned it yet?)
--
The new U.N. logo?
--
Written by lazy plagiarists who shamelessly
stole supernatural tall tales from "The Book of the
Dead," the Hammurabi Code, etc.
--
Now that it's finally being released in
the U.K., might Bill Maher's very funny
"Religulous" run afoul of Britain's
antiquated blasphemy laws?
And so the United Nations's so-called Human Rights
Council -- a mis-named group dominated by Muslim
fundamentalist sympathizers that (by the way) has
yet to formally condemn the many human rights abuses
under Sharia law -- has drafted a
resolution condemning what it calls "religious
defamation."
Free speech, says the non-binding resolution
passed a couple weeks ago by the General
Assembly, should be restricted to protect
"morals and general welfare," which
pretty much opens the door for censorship
by any government for any arbitrary reason.
Because the backers of the resolution, led by
Pakistan and cheered on by Hugo Chavez, obviously
did not do much critical thinking in drafting it,
let me ask the questions they should have.
Are you aware that religious defamation is what
scientists like Copernicus and Galileo were accused
of? Are you aware that many major advances in
science and philosophy throughout history were
once called blasphemous by religious literalists?
If you're against "defamation" of religion, then
why aren't you also against defamation of
political groups, governments and individuals?
Is it a human rights violation to make a joke
about the Saudi King? Is it a human rights
violation to ridicule the Republican party?
If not, why not? If I consider
my political beliefs more sacred than
my religious beliefs, then why shouldn't
my political beliefs be equally protected
against defamation? By defamation, don't
you really mean...merely criticizing
religion?
Lately there has been a lot of platitudinous
talk about showing respect for various
religious fanatics. But certainly there
are some people and groups not worthy of
respect. For example, bin Laden
and his followers are not worthy of respect
(just as the Ku Klux Klan and Charles Manson
are not worthy of respect). Others who have
not earned respect are: the Muslim
fanatic who murdered Theo van Gogh, abortion
clinic bombers, Islamic militants
who kill people because they're offended
by a mere cartoon. (Muslim militants have
apparently become the new Rodney Dangerfields!)
You see, the people who wrote that U.N.
resolution misunderstand the real problem,
which is religious totalitarianism and
the tyranny of absolutism. Muslim
fundamentalists simply don't want to give
Western progressives the same freedoms that
progressives give to fundamentalists.
In the U.S. and in most of Europe, we
say: if you want to prohibit pictures
of Mohammed in your mosque, you can do so.
You can lay down the law within your
mosque and forbid any drawings of
deities. That is your freedom.
But Muslim fundamentalists do not reciprocate.
They don't want to grant secularists the
freedom to display pictures of
deities if that's their choice.
The people who wrote that U.N. resolution
don't understand that Mohammed, to me,
is a figure from history, not from
religion -- and I will portray him (and
Napoleon and Hirohito and Plato
and Mao, etc.) any way I choose, thank
you very much.
It's disturbing that even Britain has
blasphemy laws on the books, but,
thankfully, that hasn't stopped the recent
release of Bill Maher's very funny and
wise documentary "Religulous" in the U.K.
In "Religulous" -- the top grossing documentary
of '08, yet unfairly shut out from the Best
Feature Docu category at the Oscars -- Maher
shows wit worthy of Groucho as he takes
apart the supernatural plagiarized tales of
the Bible.
One of the best parts of the film is when
Maher shows how the supposed biographical
details about Jesus (e.g., the virgin birth,
the resurrection, his ability to heal the
sick, etc.) are suspiciously similar to and
seem to have been lifted from stories about
the lives of deities from centuries before
the supposed birth of Christ (e.g., Mithra,
Attis, Buddha, etc.).
In other words, the holy tall tales told
for centuries in ancient Egypt and India
were such a great box office draw in Cairo
and Bombay that the writers of the Bible
couldn't help but steal some of the best
bits for their brand new character, Jesus
Christ, star of a sketch in which a father
(God) is OK with having his only son
murdered by a mob. (How heartwarming!
And one of Melissa Huckabee's favorite
stories, by the way.)
And the way the Koran steals from the Torah,
you'd think the holy wars would be about
copyright infringement!
Elsewhere in the Bible, Maher notes, there are
supernatural yarns worthy of Marvel comics.
As he notes, it's astonishing that otherwise
smart adults actually believe cartoons about
a talking snake, a man living inside
a whale, and a virgin birth.
By the way, Ray Suarez's comment that fewer people
went to church less often in America in the 18th
century may be true, but it's also true that
far more people back then took the Bible more
literally than they do today; as science
continues to explain phenomena that the Bible
had attributed to supernatural forces, the
overall trend is, generally, away from
fundamentalism.
As I said, a terrific docu. I only wish Maher
had interviewed the loony former mayor of
Inglis, Florida, who memorably banned
the devil from her town! Also wish he had
been able to use Tom Lehrer's "The Vatican
Rag" for his segment at the Vatican.
To digress for a moment: I've always thought
that if the story of Jesus Christ were true,
and it's probably not, and if Jesus were
to come back to life and to Earth, Jesus
would probably not be well-liked. I mean,
after the initial novelty of Christ's
resurrection wore off, people would get
very tired of Jesus throwing around his weight
and saying arrogant and egotistical things
like "I am the way and the light" and "I
am the son of God" and "Hey, babe, you
can't worship anyone but me." Imagine him
demanding a good table at a crowded restaurant
because "I'm the son of God." After two or
three months of this, I can imagine people would
want to crucify him all over again!
Anyway, see "Religulous," if you haven't already.
And put that U.N. resolution to good use -- in
the bird cage.
But I digress. Paul
[U.N. resolution from www.un.org; satiric U.N.
logo by Paul Iorio (Mohammed drawing from
Jyllands-Posten); Holy Bible from
ancient-future.net; "Religulous" image
from the Lion's Gate DVD.]
______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 10 - 12, 2009
New on DVD: "Slumdog Millionaire"
The TV biz is murder in India, no? They actually
dish out torture for suspected game show
cheating? I can't imagine the authorities
could torture someone more if they thought
he knew where bin Laden was hiding. (I hope
Regis isn't like that!)
That said, the quiz show subplot is
surprisingly secondary, or almost
secondary, and doesn't even fully kick
in until the 90-minute mark, despite the
film makers's contrived attempts to show
how the questions on the TV program relate
to past experiences in Jamal's life. Still,
one wonders how a guy raised in bookless
squalor came to have such an expanse of
knowledge (and such fluency in English,
too!). In somewhat similarly-themed
movies about braniacs, like "Quiz Show" or
"Good Will Hunting," one gets a real sense
of a character's brilliance permeating other
parts of his life -- but here, Jamal
doesn't seem exceptionally bright
off screen.
Also, he's handed over to the cops (by
the host of the show, no less!) and
suspected of fraud (an accusation that
even makes headlines!) and then is allowed
to return to the program for the final
round, all freshened up after a session
of torture, his reputation restored.
But such loose ends can be overlooked
because the film making -- by the guy who
directed "Trainspotting" and the writer
who scripted "The Full Monty" -- is genuinely
seductive. Despite its flaws, "Slumdog" is
gripping, harrowing, scalding, touching,
suspenseful, twisty.
Everyone (rightly) talks about how impressive
Dev Patel is as Jamal, but the real unsung
actor here is Madhur Mittal, the guy
who plays the older version of Salim,
who benefits from some memorable lines
and makes the most of some very
small lines (e.g., "Still?!,"
which Mittal makes so poignant; it takes a
resourceful actor to draw out the vast meaning
in that one small word).
But Mittal is also the victim of an oddly
conceived scene in which he covers himself
with money in a bathtub (it would have been
better if he had filled the tub with dough
and then put a match to it, saying something
like, "Hey, Javed, here's your money").
Movie could've easily been more multidimensional,
showing how some of the elements of "Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire" are much like the capitalist
system itself, in that you can lose (or gain)
everything with a single risk.
Still, it's well worth seeing, though not the
best movie of 2008 (that was "The Wrestler,"
which itself could have been far greater if
the film makers had merely added 15 minutes
of footage dramatizing The Ram's glory days
as a wrestler; instead, it's like "Raging Bull"
without LaMotta's early period).
The dance sequence finale is winning, a sweetener
that's necessary in order to counterbalance the
brutality elsewhere, which threatens to overwhelm
one's overall memory of the film.
DVD has no extras of note, no deleted scenes,
but the film is so meaty that you don't
notice that.
* * *
Bravo to Madonna Ciccone for donating money to
the earthquake victims near L'Aquila, Italy.
Far less admirable is Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, who surveyed the tent city of those
made homeless by the quake and said it looked
"like a weekend of camping." And I guess he
must think the Nazi concentration camps were
just a huge slumber party.
* * *
the perfect song for Good Friday and Easter!
* * * *
Turns out that the face of pure evil is
(evidently) a Sunday school teacher, the
granddaughter of a pastor. (Above, the
official booking info for the suspected
Tracy killer.) By the way, if she did
do it, you can bet it wasn't the first time
she had done something like that. Are there
any similar unsolved murders in the area of
L.A. County where she lived before last year?
In all likelihood, she wouldn't have been
so brazen as to commit an abduction
in broad daylight (and in public) if
she hadn't done it before and gotten
away with it.
* * * *
Newt Gingrich has once again proved how heartless
he is by calling the hoopla around the First Pooch,
Bo, "stupid." Aw, c'mon! Thatza cute pup. Look
at those boots. And you gotta love the name, redolent
as it is of Bo Diddley, who would be smiling right
about now. The best White House pooch in a
long time (and better than the one that bit that
Reuters reporter!).
* * * *
One way to manage the pirate problem off Somalia
might be to have the Coast Guard or Navy send out
decoy ships (posing as private vessels) on a regular
basis to those waters. Then we can capture and
jail the pirates who take the bait, creating a
huge downside for the bandits, reducing their
confidence and incentive.
* * * *
People continue to ask about songs I wrote
for my album "75 Songs," which I self-released
last year. (And I must say I'm very grateful
to those who have connected with my songs
and have played them on the radio!)
A couple people asked about how "Time Begins
To End" came about, and another asked about
"Chasin' You."
"Time Begins To End" is perhaps the most
personally cathartic song I've written,
in that I felt better after writing it.
Based loosely on the very sad experience
of having seen my father just before
he died of cancer.
I wrote "Time Begins to End" in my apartment
in Berkeley, Calif., between late December 2007
and early January 2008. I began
writing the song in late November 2007 when
the line "asleep at the wake" came to me
out of the blue. In late December '07
and early January '08, the whole song came
rolling out of me, melody and lyric in
one piece.
Finished it on January 13, 2008, and (as
usual) sent it to myself in an email,
presented below:
* *
And (below) here's the line I came up with that gave
birth to the track:
* *
"Chasin' You" has a different origin. I
wrote that one in 1981 during my New York
years, put it on a 1994 cassette of my
own songs, which I didn't release until
1998, when I put together around a dozen
of my songs on a cassette tape
and sent it around (to around ten people!).
[None of my songs was released on CD
until late 2005 -- except "Ten Years Ago."]
I wrote most of "Chasin' You" while living on
West 74th Street in Manhattan. And I wrote
the rest in '85 after I had moved
to a new place on West 110th St. that
had a broken window (actually, the whole
window frame was pushed from its hinges
after I tried to buttress it during a
hurricane -- yes, a hurricane! -- in New
York City in the late Fall of '85).
Anyway, through this busted window I could see,
in a nearby apartment building, a really hot
looking woman who was dancing in her room
virtually naked. And that's when I came up
with (among other things!) a new song,
or a fragment of a song, that went,
"Fortunate for me, good luck dances naked
in broken windows."
But I was unable to develop the fragment, though
I found it fit well as a sort of cryptic coda
to "Chasin' You," and that's how that part
was written.
the "broken window" in my apartment (above)
on the Upper West Side from which I once saw a
beautiful woman dancing naked (fortunate for
me!), inspiring part of my song
"Chasin' You" in the 1980s. (window wasn't
broken when this shot was taken!)
* *
"Chasin' You" (number 9 on the list, above) was one of
around 17 songs I had written that I was going to
release in 1994; most didn't get released until
1998 (on cassette tape, to around 10 people!). None
of my songs was released on CD until late 2005 --
except "Ten Years Ago."
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 9, 2009
Kurt Cobain died 15 years ago this week,
which means he would've been 42 by now,
older than John Lennon ever was, but only
halfway to a full lifespan, which
should've ended naturally sometime in
the 2040s, in mid-century, after he had
created at least a couple dozen new
albums, both solo and with Nirvana and
perhaps with others, too.
But he ended it way back in the 20th
century, in the pre-Internet era, so
long ago that no undergrad currently in
college could have a contemporaneous
memory of the release of a brand new
Nirvana studio album.
Anyway, to mark the 15th anniversary, here
are some original photos I shot in 2002 of
Cobain's house and of other Cobain-related
locations in Seattle. Several photos from
this series were published
by the Washington Post in 2002,
accompanying a story I'd written and
reported about Seattle for the paper.
But most of these shots have never been
published, so I thought I'd share
them here.
a bench marked with graffiti about
Cobain, next door to Cobain's house. [photo
by Paul Iorio]
* * *
the house where Cobain killed himself.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
* * *
Cobain lived in the Madrona district
of Seattle, on Lake Washington. (As you
can see, I was there on a very rare
blue-sky day in Seattle!) [photo by Paul Iorio.]
* * *
Seattle's Re-Bar, site of the "Nevermind"
record release party, from which Nirvana
was bounced for food fighting! [photo
by Paul Iorio]
But I digress. Paul
______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 8, 2009
A friend asked me the other day what I
meant when I wrote a particular line in
my song "Love's the Heaven You Can't Reach."
The line she wanted to know about is:
"She's living in a hole/the pilot light
has gone from blue to yellow/you can
almost see the CO in the air."
I wrote that line after going to an
apartment (I won't say whose!) in the
Bay Area in '08 and feeling dizzy
because of the air quality in the
place. I suspected there was CO in the air
and noticed that the pilot light on the
heater was a sort of sickly yellow. Later,
at my computer, I Googled "pilot light" and "CO"
and found that one major indicator of CO emission
is when a gas pilot light goes from a healthy
blue to a flickering yellow. So I put that
detail into the song, which is sort of about
a woman living a boho Lower East Side
existence, and it fit nicely.
I wrote "Love's The Heaven You Can't Reach"
as I've written almost all of my songs, on
the tape recorder, with the lyric and melody
coming simultaneously. (And then, as I also
always do, I emailed the song to myself
so that I would know exactly when I came
up with it. Hence, for what it's worth, I
know I finished "Love's The Heaven" on
August 9, 2008, at around 9:30 AM! (A nifty
device, this email thing, eh?) Studio
version is from an August 19 session, by
the way. For anyone interested, here's
the top of the email I sent to myself:
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 6, 2009
The word is out: Crime, the pioneering San Francisco
punk band of the 1970s, will definitely appear on
Marshall Stax's show on KALX radio next week!
For those unfamiliar with his program, it
features music by the unsigned and the
unsung, happens every Monday at 6pm, and
is one of the more inspired shows on the
airwaves. (And I'm not just saying that
because he has played my own songs on
KALX from time to time; I'd still tune in,
even if he didn't air my stuff!) Anyway,
his show is called the Next Big Thing and
(I think)it's streamed live on the web -- and
the Crime appearance should be
well worth checking out.
* * * *
I just wrote a story with John D. Thomas
for the online edition of Playboy magazine;
it's a humorous look at all those
misleading ads that A.I.G. and other financial
services firms ran before the recession,
and here it is:
http://www.playboy.com/articles/ad-it-up-financial-institution-ads/index.html
___________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 5, 2009
On the Sunday morning talk shows this morning,
all the expert analyses of the North Korean
missile test omitted one of the most chilling and
truly dangerous elements of the launch:
the fact that Kim Jong Il recently had a
major stroke. As any medical professional
would tell you, strokes can easily turn
someone into a clinical paranoid or create
other kinds of mental illnesses.
Which is doubly troubling in Kim's case,
given that the North Korean leader had
obvious paranoid tendencies before
the stroke.
Isn't this what we've all been worried about
since the birth of the Bomb: that some
deranged leader will become mentally unstable
enough to start lobbing nukes? I guess we
should be truly alarmed if Kim starts talking
about his "precious bodily fluids."
It's altogether possible that, a year from now,
President Obama will be saying stuff like: "If you
told me a year ago that my main foreign policy
concern right now would be American involvement
in the war between North Korea and Japan, I'd
have said you're wayy off."
* * * *
Good for George Stephanopoulos for questioning
Obama advisor Susan Rice about the
administration's silence on the horrific flogging
of a 17-year old Pakistani girl by the Taliban
for refusing to marry some local geezer (or some
such "offense") -- an act of violence that is
all the talk in Pakistan and elsewhere lately.
Susan Rice was so outraged by the brutal beating
that she even went so far as to call it
"inconsistent." How Dukakasian.
I know what they're probably thinking in the White House:
let Zardari handle it; it will only harden
the Taliban position if the Great Infidel (aka, the USA)
weighs in with predictable condemnation.
Maybe. But the application of Sharia law
in this sort of way is a human rights
violation, plain and simple, and we should
call it exactly what it is: barbaric.
Cultural relativism doesn't apply in this
case, any more than it did when Dr. Mengele
did his medical experiments in Germany in
the 1940s.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for April 4, 2009
Editing Maureen Dowd
While reading Maureen Dowd's latest column in The
New York Times (3/5/09), I couldn't help but think
that perhaps she needed the help of an editor
this time.
So I've decided to present Dowd's column here,
along with my own editorial comments and suggestions
(in bold caps):
Barack Obama grew up learning how to slip in and out
of different worlds — black and white, foreign and
American, rich and poor.
The son of an anthropologist [WHO BARACK NEVER KNEW
AND ONLY MET ONCE], he developed a lot of “tricks,”
as he put it, training himself to be a close observer
of human nature [YOU'RE SAYING THAT AS IF HE LEARNED
THAT BY BEING THE SON OF AN ANTHROPOLOGIST, BUT (AS
I SAID) HE NEVER KNEW HIS DAD], figuring out what
others needed so he could get where he wanted to go.
He was able to banish any fear in older white folk
that he was an angry young black man — with smiles,
courtesy and, as he wrote in his memoir, “no sudden
moves.” He learned negotiating skills as a community
organizer and was able to ascend to the presidency
of the Harvard Law Review by letting a disparate
band of self-regarding eggheads feel that they were
being heard and heeded [THIS PART READS LIKE A GLOWING
OBIT, MAUREEN. BTW, ARE YOU IMPLYING HE WAS
BEING DECEPTIVE AND DUPLICITOUS, MAKING THEM
FEEL THEY WERE BEING HEARD AND HEEDED WHEN
IN REALITY HE ACTUALLY DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN
ABOUT THEIR VIEWS?].
As Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law
professor who mentored the young Obama, put it,
“He can enter your space and organize your thoughts
without necessarily revealing his own concerns
and conflicts.” He can leave you thinking he agrees,
when often he’s only agreeing to leave you thinking
he agrees. [YOU QUOTE OGLETREE'S ONE-LINER AND
THEN SLYLY SLIDE IN YOUR OWN AMENDMENT TO HIS
QUOTE, SORT OF MAKING IT LOOK LIKE OGLETREE IS
SAYING BOTH THINGS, WHEN IN FACT YOUR STATEMENT
IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT OGLETREE IS SAYING
AND, AGAIN, YOU (NOT OGLETREE) SEEM TO BE
IMPLYING THAT OBAMA HAS A TALENT FOR DECEPTION,
WHEN IN FACT HE SEEMS MUCH MORE TRANSPARENT
AND HONEST THAN YOU MAKE HIM OUT TO BE.]
He privately rolls his eyes at the way many
in politics and government spend so much time
preening and maneuvering for credit rather
than simply doing their jobs. Yet with that
detached and novelistic eye that allows him to
be a great writer [SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE
FLIRTING WITH BARACK], he is also
able to do a kind of political jujitsu,
where he assesses the bluster and
insecurities of other politicians,
defuses them, and then uses them to his advantage.
Gabriel Byrne’s brooding psychoanalyst on
“In Treatment” might envy Barack Obama’s
[YOU'RE STILL USING FIRST AND LAST NAME
FOR OBAMA THIS FAR INTO THE PIECE?] calming
psychoanalysis in Europe. He may not have
come away with all he wanted substantively
[INADVERTENT UNDERSTATEMENT].
His hand was too weak going in, and there was
too much hostility toward America, thanks
to W.’s blunders and Cheney’s bullying. But
he showed a psychological finesse that has
been missing from American leadership for
a long time.
“Each country has its own quirks,” he said at
his London press conference, indicating that
you had to intuit how much you could prod
each leader.
W. always bragged about his instincts, saying he
knew whom [WHOM? YOU SOUND LIKE A BUTLER. READ
STRUNK & WHITE] to trust based on his gut. But even
with the help of psychologists putting together
profiles of dictators and other major players for
our intelligence services, Bush and his inner
circle were extraordinarily obtuse about reading
the motivations and the intentions of friends
and foes.
How could it never occur to them that Saddam Hussein
might simply be bluffing about the size of his
W.M.D. arsenal to keep the Iranians and other
antagonists at bay? [HEY, I HAVE ALWAYS
BEEN AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR, BUT YOU'RE BRINGING UP
A POINT BUSH COULD EASILY KNOCK DOWN. BUSH WOULD
RESPOND WITH, IF A BURGLAR AT YOUR DOOR CLAIMS
TO HAVE A GUN, YOU HAVE TO ACT AS IF HE DOES
HAVE A GUN, EVEN IF HE DOESN'T. BUT IN THE CASE OF
IRAQ IN 2003, SADDAM HUSSEIN, YOU MAY RECALL,
WAS CLAIMING THAT HE DID NOT HAVE W.M.D.s.
FURTHER, OUR MISTAKEN BELIEF THAT HE
DID HAVE W.M.D.s WAS NOT BASED
ON HIS PAST BOASTS.]
[WHILE YOU'RE POINTING FINGERS ABOUT
BEING OBLIVIOUS: HOW COULD YOU HAVE
NOT SEEN THAT JAYSON BLAIR WAS DISHONEST
AND FRAUDULENT, EVEN WHEN THE EVIDENCE
AGAINST HIM HAD PILED UP? AS I RECALL, YOU
DEFENDED BLAIR IN AT LEAST ONE OF YOUR
COLUMNS -- BEFORE YOU WERE PROVED DEEPLY
WRONG. WHY SHOULD WE BELIEVE THAT YOU
CAN DETECT A FUTURE JAYSON BLAIR WHEN
YOU COULDN'T DETECT A PAST ONE? IF YOU HAD
HAD YOUR WAY, BLAIR WOULD STILL BE AT
THE PAPER, PROBABLY RUNNING IT AS A #2 TO
RAINES BY NOW. (BUT I DIGRESS.)]
W. bristled at French and German leaders
because he thought they were condescending
to him. He thought he saw into Vladimir Putin’s
soul until the Russian leader showed his
totalitarian stripes.
W. and Condi were so clueless about the mind-set
of Palestinians that Condi was blindsided by
the Hamas victory in 2006, learning the news
from TV as she did the elliptical at 5 a.m.
in the gym of her Watergate apartment. {HOW
COULD CONDI HAVE KNOWN THE ELECTION RESULTS
BEFORE THE ELECTION RESULTS WERE ANNOUNCED?]
The Bush chuckleheads misread the world
and insisted that everyone else go along
with their deluded perception, and they
bullied the world and got huffy if the
world didn’t quickly fall in line.
President Obama, by contrast, employed smart
psychology in the global club, even on small
things, like asking other leaders if they
wanted to start talking first at news conferences.
[BUT OBAMA'S "SMART PSYCHOLOGY" AND
PERSUASIVENESS GOT HIM ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE AT
THE G-20 IN TERMS OF CONVINCING THE EUROPEANS
TO GO ALONG WITH SENDING COMBAT TROOPS TO
AFGHANISTAN, HIS MAIN REQUEST.]
With Anglo-American capitalism on trial and
Gordon Brown floundering in the polls,
Mr. Obama took pains to drape an arm around
“Gordon” and return to using the phrase
“special relationship.” He gave a shout-out
to the Brown kids, saying he’d talked dinosaurs
with them. [SOUNDS LIKE HIGH W.]
He won points with a prickly Sarkozy when he
intervened in an argument about tax havens
between the French and Chinese leaders, pulling
them into a corner to help them “get this all
in some kind of perspective” and find a
middle ground. Mr. Obama also played to the
ego of the Napoleonic French leader, saying
at their press conference, “He’s courageous
on so many fronts, it’s hard to keep up.”
[HE PROBABLY JUST SAID THAT ABOUT SARKO TO
GET HIM TO PONY UP SOME TROOPS FOR AFGHANISTAN;
BUT SARKO SAID NO, DESPITE OBAMA'S
FLATTERY.]
Soon Sarko was back gushing over his charmant
Americain ami. [YEAH, BUT DID YOU CATCH THE
FOOTAGE OF SARKO JEALOUSLY WATCHING EVERY
MOVE OBAMA MADE AROUND HIS GORGEOUS WIFE?]
Having an Iowa-style town hall in Strasbourg
with enthusiastic French and German students
was a clever ploy to underscore his popularity
on the world stage, and put European leaders
on notice that many of their constituents
are also his.
Like a good shrink, the president listens;
it’s a way of flattering his subjects and
sussing them out without having to fathom
what’s in their soul. “It is easy to talk
to him,” Dmitri Medvedev said after their
meeting. “He can listen.” [YEAH, BUT THIS
WAS NO "LISTENING TOUR"; REMEMBER, HE
ALSO LECTURED THE EUROPEANS ABOUT THEIR
WRONGHEADED VIEW OF AMERICANS, AMONG OTHER THINGS]
The Russian president called the American
one “my new comrade.”[PUTIN WAS EVEN MORE PUBLICLY
ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT BUSH AT FIRST, BUT IN THE
END THEY BECAME AS ADVERSARIAL AS TWO
COLD WARRIORS.]
Mr. Obama, the least silly of men, was even
willing to mug for a silly Facebook-ready
picture, grinning and giving a thumbs-up
with Medvedev and a goofy-looking
Silvio Berlusconi [I'LL AGREE WITH YOU THERE;
BERLUSCONI IS AS BUFFOONISH AND CLASS-CLOWNISH
AS TRACY MORGAN.]
Now that America can’t put everyone under
its thumb, a thumbs-up and a killer smile
can go a long way. [GO A LONG WAY? REALLY?
THEN HOW COME HE COULDN'T CONVINCE A SINGLE
EUROPEAN LEADER TO DEPLOY TROOPS TO AFGHANISTAN?
THE "KILLER SMILE" ALSO DIDN'T STOP THE RIOTS
IN THE STREETS EVERYWHERE HE VISITED, WHICH
YOU ODDLY FAILED TO MENTION.]
But I digress. Paul
[The April 4, 2009, Digression was revised
on April 8.]
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
For March 25, 2009
[An online magazine has just bought (and says
it will publish) a version of the Digression that
appeared on this day. So I'm taking it down from
this space and will provide a link to the
published piece later.]
______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 24, 2009
"A Whole Host" of Obamisms
Sure, many presidents and public figures sometimes
find themselves unable to stop repeating certain
words or phrases during a speech, and President
Obama, at his news conference tonight, was no
exception.
Like Richard Nixon repeatedly saying he could
have easily taken the easy path, or George W. Bush
telling us the presidency is "hard work," President
Obama now has his own pet phrase: "a whole host."
At tonight's Q&A session, he used "whole host"
seven times; for those who missed the
repetitions, here they are:
-- "...the FDIC could step in, as it does with a
whole host of banks..."
-- "the American people are making a host
of sacrifices"
-- "It is going to take a whole host of
adjustments"
-- "There are a whole host of veterans' issues"
-- "There are a whole host of people who are students
of the procurement process"
-- "Let's do a whole host of things"
-- "So there are a whole host of steps"
And the phrase is catchy, too; his press secretary, Robert
Gibbs, was using the phrase earlier in the day.
Prior to the Obama era, "whole host" was
perhaps best known pop culturally as a phrase in
a well-known James Taylor song, "Carolina in
My Mind," which Taylor playfully altered this way:
"With a holy host of others standing 'round me
Still I'm on the dark side of the moon...."
I expect the president will probably be
using the phrase in a whole host of new
ways in the future.
But I digress. Paul
______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 23 - 24, 2009
Obama's Appearance on "60 Minutes" Last Night, etc.
It's official: President Obama already has
seniority among former presidents, having
served longer in the White House than our
ninth president, William Henry Harrison, who
dropped dead around a month after his inauguration.
So if Obama were to quit his job today -- and
I hope he doesn't -- he wouldn't be the
president with the shortest tenure.
On "60 Minutes" last night, Obama showed us the
White House-as-a-family-residence, and that
got me wondering about the particulars of
presidential living (not that I'm thinking
of running for anything). But I wondered:
would I be covered by a lease during my
tenancy at the White House? Would I be
effectively classed as a renter, with the
rent paid by the federal government? Would I
have to pay a security deposit?
Sounds like Obama is, effectively, a temporary
tenant who has to vacate in 3 years and several
months, unless he wins the 2012 election.
Suppose I came into the White House and said,
not for me, not my style. Too 19th century. But
I'll keep it as my nominal residence, while
actually residing in, say, Arlington, in a
21st century A-frame place with modern sculpture
and a grand green front lawn, where I'd feel more
comfortable. I'm the president -- I can do
that, right?
Look, I can understand relocating to D.C. as
part of the job. But why do you have to live
in a one-size-fits-all house that
still has all the smells and stains and ghosts
of your predecessor?
In other words (and let's be frank), Bush's
Crawford friends, some with b.o. and dripping
bar-b-q sauce and mud, probably left their own
unique imprint and odor, and I would want to get
all that deep-cleaned immediately. (Remember the
"Seinfeld" episode with the smelly car? Sorta like
that.) But what if the cleaners have done their
best and yet I'm still smelling 43 and his
frat buds? Or, what if I just can't stand the
idea of sleeping in the same place
where you-know-who slept for eight years?
I guess I'd feel stir crazy and cooped up in
the White House. I'd be looking to get out
and take solitary walks at every opportunity.
I'd have to find a way. Could I wear a
super-realistic face mask that makes me look
like I'm a completely different person -- and
then take a walk in the woods? If not, then
who's running things around here: me or my
security people?
And what if the president -- who is the decider,
after all -- decides to veto his security
peeps and insists on going to the grocery
store on his own, without anyone else? Can his
security people overrule him? Suppose the president
says, "So arrest me." Can Secret Service
agents then detain or bust the president
and physically stop him from going to the
grocery store? Would they have to handcuff the
prez and place him in a detention area?
I mean, how would that look? Everyone would ask
whether there's any difference between a president
and a prison inmate. Everyone would wonder why
the president has the power to drop
nukes and annihilate life on earth but doesn't
have the authority to buy a pack of smokes
at the 7-11. Shouldn't the commander-in-chief
have the last word?
Frankly, I don't think I'd last even as
long in the White House as William Henry
Harrison. Not enough power in the position.
* * * *
STUPID BUMPER STICKER OF THE WEEK!
A more stupid bumper sticker than "9/11 Was an
Inside Job" probably does not exist (although
"What Has Any Afghan Ever Done to You?,"
which cropped up after 9/11, is
a runner-up in the idiocy sweepstakes).
Also, note the adjacent leftover "Dennis
Kucinich for President" bumper sticker, which
just shows that Kucinich -- who is as
smart about domestic policy as he is unwise about
defense issues -- has a way of attracting foreign
policy crazies.
If any fresh proof were needed of Kucinich's
foreign policy ineptitude, check out his
recent statements opposing President Obama's very
necessary deployment of 17,000 troops to Afghanistan,
reported prominently on the the Russia Television
(RT) news service, which can sometimes seem like
a propaganda arm of the Kremlin. (The Kremlin,
of course, has a personal interest in opposing
our involvement in Afghanistan, because
Medvedev/Putin probably wouldn't want to
see us succeed where their nation failed
militarily in the 1980s. Moscow conveniently
forgets the U.S. was attacked in '01 by
terrorists based in Afghanistan and backed
by the Taliban government there -- and the
people who attacked us are currently regrouping
in that area. So, obviously, we want to
stop that resurgence.)
Like former Sen. George McGovern, a World War II
vet, I am against some wars, not all wars,
and Afghanistan is a necessary one. Pacificism
merely means the other guy's violence
prevails.
As I wrote in this space a couple years ago:
those who spout platitudes like "war doesn't solve anything"
are just spouting platitudes. Yes, war should be avoided at
almost all costs, but -- hmm, let's see -- war stopped slavery
in the United States, war stopped Adolf Hitler in Germany,
war stopped bin Laden's proxy government in Afghanistan.
Sometimes you have to counter-intuitively light a backfire
to stop the main fire, you have to inject a little smallpox
to get rid of smallpox. (That's where guys like Howard Zinn
and Noam Chomsky, who were once wise in their younger days
but not in their post-9/11 older years, make big mistakes
in judgment, not understanding such a central paradox. But
then we all get old.)
With regard to the Afghanistan war, I side with Sen. John
Kerry, another vet, who not only supported that conflict
but said we should have gotten in sooner (why on earth did
we wait till October '01, giving bin Laden a chance to
escape?!) and should have stayed longer to bomb Tora Bora.
What exactly did the anti-Afghanistan war activists
suggest we do in the weeks after 9/11? Serve bin Laden
a subpoena in the neverlands of Tora Bora? And what
if his protectors had started shooting? Then we're
shooting back, right? Well, hey, that's precisely
what war is!
So "war doesn't solve anything" is one of those
platitudes -- like "love conquers all" and "I am
the way and the light" -- that really, when you
examine it, isn't very wise or true and doesn't
make a whole lot of practical sense.
And let's hope that we don't let the national trauma
of the Iraq conflict cloud our collective judgment so
that we don't see that the next war, if there is one,
may be very just. A patient traumatized by
inept surgery may be overly reluctant to
have a necessary operation in the future.
But I digress. Paul
____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 22, 2009
New on DVD: "Milk"
Take it from me, a hard-core, incorrigible
heterosexual: "Milk" is magnificent.
The story of late-blooming politician Harvey
Milk, a city councilman (they call them
supervisors in San Francisco) who served for
only a year but broke new ground by being
openly gay and putting gay issues defiantly
front and center, this biopic is
riveting, inspired, carbonated, airborne.
Sean Penn disappears into the role of Milk as
magically as Robert DeNiro became Jake LaMotta in
"Raging Bull" all those years ago. It's on that
level, easily.
Josh Brolin is also brilliant in his very
knowing, very smart psychological portrait
of a deeply repressed homosexual,
assassin Dan White, a role that probably should
have been expanded (if only to show how financial
pressures contributed to White's mental illness).
"Milk" is also a vivid evocation of a long-ago
counter-culture era (and scenes are packed with
such obsolete phenomena as record players,
typewriters, unprotected sex, landlines and the
San Francisco Chronicle).
The Anita Bryant footage is priceless; she almost
comes across as an actress in an ironic
performance trying to portray a truly
ludicrous holy roller, which is exactly what
she was.
And excellent use of Bowie's "Queen Bitch" and
Sly's "Everyday People" in the film (Tom Robinson's
exciting but unjustly forgotten "All Right, All
Night" would've fit perfectly here).
Also, S.F. supe Tom Ammiano makes a nice,
passionate cameo.
But don't look for any deleted scenes of note
on the DVD; evidently, all the magic was used
in the picture.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 20, 2009
Visiting A.I.G. Execs is Only the First Step
"Well I'm going to the mansions where Pfizer
lives/the mansions that they built by ripping
off the sick/I'm gonna tell 'em that they can't
do that no more/There's a deep discount on aisle
four/I'm stealin' medication," goes the lyrics
of one of my latest songs, "Stealin'
Medication," which has actually gotten some radio
airplay in recent months.
As the composer of "Stealin' Medication," I was
gratified to see this story --
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/nyregion/20siege.html --
in today's online edition of The New York Times,
reporting about a group that is
taking its anger about the A.I.G. bonuses to
the streets where the executives live.
Great idea. It's what I've been advocating in
this space and elsewhere for a long time: bring
your protests to the neighborhoods where venal,
overcompensated executives live -- and make some
noise there. Those excessive bonuses are
both the symbol and the reality of exactly
what is unfair about the accumulation of
wealth in America: the wrong people are
rewarded.
More than talent, more than hard work,
gaming the system, along with
nepotism and luck, will make you wealthy and
successful in the U.S.A.
Let's be real: those execs at AIG are failures,
incompetent in their own fields, yet they're
fabulously wealthy. Explain
to me how that happened so we can stop it from
ever happening again, at A.I.G. or elsewhere.
My advice to protesters is to put
your time to really good use and target
the heads of companies that make
profits off sick people (e.g., the
major pharmaceutical and health insurance
firms). After all, the execs
at companies like Pfizer and Merck are
basically saying to the uninsured: "go bleed
to death if you can't afford our medication;
it's survival of the fittest in the jungle
out there."
So let's adopt their attitude. Let's take that
very same approach to the rich execs at
the pharma companies. Maybe some picketers will even
be motivated to block their streets and sidewalks.
Maybe other protesters will refuse to come
down from their trees until the execs
make medication affordable to those who need
it.
In other words: exert leverage. Do what they're
doing to us. And remember: almost no harsh protest
tactic could possibly be as callous as denying medication
to sick people who can't afford it.
This is clearly a new era, but President Obama
can take us only so far. In order to get
meaningful health care reform (and business
compensation reform, for that matter), there must
be a combination of official action from the
White House and Congress and
effective acts of civil disobedience,
targeting bad corporate actors where they live.
So come down from your trees, you eco-protesters.
Come down from your occupied buildings,
you anti-Iraq war people. Come put your
resourcefulness and energy to better use
by targeting immoral, unethical, overcompensated
CEOs at the palaces they call home.
Practice on the AIG execs first but then set your
sights on an even nobler target: the residences of
the heads of the pharma and health insurance
firms.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 19, 2009
THE SIXTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR
Last Night's Attack on a Marine Recruiting Center in Berkeley
Exclusive photos
Last night, on the eve of the 6th anniversary of
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, anti-war protesters
(we assume) vandalized a Marine Corps Recruiting
Center on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley, Calif., smashing
plate glass windows and splattering paint. This
is how it looked at daybreak this morning, its
broken windows replaced with wood.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
* * *
Red paint tossed by protesters on the wall of the
Marine center. [photo by Paul Iorio]
* * *
Paint splattered walls and gates of the Marine
center and of an adjacent business.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
* * *
The controversial memorial, in Lafayette, Calif.,
to American soldiers who have died in Iraq. Here's
a shot of it in April 2008, when the number of
dead stood at 4,039 (the number has since been
updated to 4,925).
[photo by Paul Iorio]
* * *
* * *
The Great Recession is everywhere you look these
days. This morning, during an early morning walk,
I snapped this shot of a homeless man sleeping
on a sidewalk next to a Kinko's picture window
in Berkeley. [photo by Paul Iorio]
* * *
Another shot of the homeless man, sleeping next
to shelves of Kinkos's multi-colored paper.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
* * *
One more picture of the man sleeping outside a
Kinko's store. [photo by Paul Iorio]
But I digress. Paul
_______________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 18, 2009
I Was at Britney's First Concert in L.A., Ten Years Ago....
my ticket to Britney's debut live show in L.A.
Haven't seen Britney Spears's "Circus" tour yet,
but I actually did get to see her on her first
tour in 1999, when she performed her debut
concert in Los Angeles at age 17.
Though her first album, "...Baby One More Time,"
had been released only five months earlier, her
following was already intense and massive. She
was playing one of those multi-act stadium shows -- at
Dodger Stadium on June 12, 1999 -- headlined by
one-hit flash Ricky Martin (who I didn't stay
to see) and Will Smith (who I was covering for a
newspaper).
The eclectic pop fest, dubbed Wango Tango, also
featured Nancy Sinatra (doing a fine "How Does
That Grab You?"), an exciting Blondie and a
solid UB40 -- and there were lots of stars in
the audience, too (when Kobe Bryant strolled
down an aisle, carrying himself like an emperor,
the crowd stood and watched his every move).
When Britney appeared, the entire composition of
the audience suddenly changed into an aggressive
all-female, all-teenage mob that seemed to view
me -- the only middle-aged male there (hey, I was
working!)-- as their unwelcome daddy and
chaperone, who they wished would just go away.
I half-thought I was going to
be lynched at one point.
Britney performed on a stage crowded with several
dancers and bandmates doing mass-synchronized
dancing that looked exactly like an aerobics class.
The fans in front of me, standing on chairs, were
so loud I couldn't hear much. And before I knew it,
around 20 minutes into the set, her first concert
in L.A. was over. Her legend, of course, was
just being born.
* * * *
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, edgy last night on Ferguson's show.
With "Seinfeld" in constant syndication, and with
"The New Adventures of Old Christine" a fresh
presence in prime time, a lot of people tend to
take Julia Louis-Dreyfus for granted. One
tends to forget how spontaneous and unpredictably
funny she can be -- until you see her in an
appearance like the one last night on "The Late,
Late Show with Craig Ferguson." She started off
funny, got funnier and then edgy as she
let loose some talk that was completely bleeped
by Standards & Practices and that
seemed to take even Ferguson aback. Would
love to hear the uncensored footage.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 15, 2009
Just listened to the new bin Laden audiotape,
and the first thing that struck me was he sounded
sort of dehydrated, which -- who knows? -- might
be related to his kidney disease, which (in some
cases, doctors say) can feel like the worst
hangover imaginable.
So there is hope!
He also comes out against wine, folks (so I'm sure
he'd be no fan of my recently released song "The
Wine Song," which goes, "I want wine, I want wine,
I want more and more and more wine...").
And he denounces radio, too, and singles out
the BBC for condemnation (which means he
wouldn't like the fact that "The Wine Song"
was recently aired by a radio
station -- double blasphemy!).
Elsewhere, he talks about morality (which is
sort of like Charles Manson lecturing on good
and evil), speaks repeatedly about "temptation,"
talks a few times about "reaching shore" (but,
thankfully, doesn't plagiarize
my song "Drowning Man," which is also about
reaching shore), says something about spears, and
plays the Middle East card rather than justify
his own mass homicidal actions.
And, yeah, he mentions the Koran several times,
though it's unclear what good the book does
him if it guides him only to evil acts.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 14 - 15, 2009
Al Jazeera, staffed with steno secretaries for
al Qaeda who pose as reporters, once again carried
water for bin Laden (such sweet boys!) and won't
tell us where the water came from, which makes
the "network" a bit of a collaborator with bin
Laden, wouldn't you say?
You guys at al Jazeera probably didn't even try to
trace the chain of custody of the latest audiotape
from bin Laden. Maybe you could give us a hint as
to which part of the world it might have come from.
(Sounds like...?)
Let's just say that if bin Laden causes more
bloodshed -- and he will, or will try -- that
some of the blood will be on the hands of
you folks at al Jazeera, because you could've helped
us catch him. Most of the "reporters" at the
"network" can barely conceal their pathological
closet sympathies for bin Laden and his religious
psychos. You guys aren't hiding it well.
The job of a journalist is not to turn in people
like bin Laden, you say. But it is your
job and responsibility when there are
extraordinary circumstances involved. You're
citizens first, journalists second, and you could
save many thousands -- maybe millions -- of lives by
doing the right thing and trying to find where he's
hiding -- and revealing that info to the authorities.
Let me provide an example that you guys
at al Jazeera might understand. Suppose
(and let's hope something like this never occurs)
the wife of the head of al Jazeera were kidnapped
by a terrorist group, and one of your reporters was
able to score an interview with the head of that
group. Are we to believe for one moment that
al Jazeera wouldn't bring all its resources
to bear to find out the location of the interview
and to alert the authorities about where it
was taking place?
Of course they would. In that instance,
al Jazeera would (rightly) be acting more like
cops than reporters -- and would certainly make
no apologies for doing so. They would surely cite
"extraordinary circumstances" in justifying their
actions and their scuttling of confidentiality
agreements.
Well, there you go; you've just agreed that
a confidentiality agreement is not always
inviolable.
It's amazing how people suddenly
see the light with such clarity when an
example is given that involves their own
self-interest.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- Last night's "Saturday Night Live" was one
of the unfunniest in recent memory, standing as
vivid proof, if any were needed, that
Tracy Morgan is not funny. Morgan is under
the misimpression that a bad joke told at
a low volume will miraculously become
funny if you shout it. (Also -- suspicious
sin of omission: why no Jim Cramer sketch,
which would've been a perfect fit for SNL
this week, and everyone knows it. I wonder
which one of Cramer's contacts at SNL or NBC
got such a sketch idea dismissed.)
* * *
How refreshing to hear Congressman Barney
Frank (D-MA) say it honestly and directly
on "Fox News Sunday":
"I'm for a single-payer health care plan
like Medicare."
And he's right: the easiest way to provide
universal health care in the U.S. is to simply
expand Medicare until everyone's covered.
Right now, given the stigma of "single-payer"
among conservatives, incrementalism may be
the best the Obama administration can do.
But the most painless path to universal
health care probably lies in the gradual
expansion of a program that's already
in place.
* * *
Dontcha just hate all those people on TV
interview shows who say (whether it's true
or not), "This was a team effort," "There
is no 'i' in team," "We all checked our egos
at the door," "This wasn't about me but
about the group," etc., etc.?
All well and good if that's true. If something is
really a team effort, then by all means label
it as such.
But can you imagine Picasso unveiling "Guernica" and,
with false modesty, saying, "Ya know, 'Guernica'
was a group project, and I want to thank the team,"
or if Leonardo had displayed "The Last Supper," saying,
"And thanks to the team that made this possible -- it
wasn't just me!"
As I get older, I find that the people who talk the most
about a project being the result of "teamwork" are
generally the ones who had least amount of input into it.
_____________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 12, 2009
New on DVD: "Rachel Getting Married"
Yeah, it's Demme's best feature film in 15 years,
though that's not saying much, given the fact
that his best movies were all made before '94.
The core problem with "Rachel" is the lack of focus
suggested by the inadequate, slightly off title;
after all, the movie is not about Rachel
or her wedding as much as it's about Kym and her
return from rehab, the much more compelling story,
and as such it should've been titled something
like "Home for the Wedding," with its focus
shifted accordingly and more decisively.
It feels like a combination of "Interiors" and "The
Return of the Secaucus Seven," though it would've
been interesting to have seen Kym evolve into
something other than what she was at the beginning
of the film. (Character growth is the element that
makes so many Woody Allen pictures greater than
most others. Remember how Dianne Wiest's character
blossoms by the end of "Hannah"? Or how our
perceptions of Cheech in "Bullets Over Broadway"
shift dramatically as the movie progresses?)
Here, Kym at the beginning is Kym at the end,
unfortunately.
The "grant me the serenity blah blah" rehab scenes
follow the memorable ones in "Traffic," in which
the counselors are either dim and bureaucratic or
platitudinous and cloying (and "Rachel" may be
the first major feature to note that the personal
stories told in group therapy sessions -- which
always leak out, despite guarantees of
confidentiality -- are often as untrue as the
tall tales of James Frey or Herman Rosenblat).
I love the Sayles-ian dishwasher competition, though
I wish Kym could've been worked into it (perhaps she
could've freaked out when she was unable to pull a
stuck dish from the washer, much as she couldn't pull
Ethan from the car seat all those years ago).
All told, the movie is fascinating from start to
finish, despite its flaws (e.g., the focus problem
noted above; the fact that major
plot elements (like the car wreck and the
mother-daughter fight) aren't integrated into
subsequent sequences). And what a surprise to see
Debra Winger all grown up, looking like late
Carole King and attractive in a brand new way.
The DVD includes a generous helping of deleted
scenes, all justifiably cut -- except the funny one
in which Kym meets and greets old friends in the
wedding reception line.
But I digress. Paul
______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 10, 2009
Don't Do Anything for The Taliban That
You Wouldn't Have Also Done for the Ku Klux Klan
Lots of talk in the Obama administration these days
about the possibility of negotiating with the
Taliban in Afghanistan, or having Karzai do so.
My response is this: it depends on how you define
the Taliban. If you mean the people who backed or
worked with Mullah Omar, the answer is a flat-out
no; we shouldn't negotiate with any of those people.
In fact, we should jail or kill most of Omar's
top brass, once we find which caves they're
hiding in.
But if you're referring to the brave folks in
Afghanistan who were only nominally allied with
the Taliban but stood up to (or tried to stand
up to) Mullah Omar and voiced opposition to, say,
the bigoted Taliban policy of forcing Hindus
to wear yellow stars on the streets of Kabul,
and thought it was wrong to throw in with bin
Laden, then I say, yeah, talk with
such courageous individuals. Reward them with
a place at the table. We must reach out to those
in Afghanistan who were the equivalent of the
underground resistance during Nazism (even if
they were part of a self-interested group
like the Northern Alliance).
But to those who backed Omar (and, by extension,
bin Laden) who now sidle up to us hoping for
a concession, we must tell them what Bill McKay
told a corrupt Teamster in "The Candidate":
"I don't think we have shit in common."
Let's not reward, explicitly or implicitly, the wrong
people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even if it
would bring a quicker peace. We don't need that
kind of peace. I would much rather see continued
war -- war that would kill killers planning, say,
dirty bomb attacks on Manhattan right now -- than
a peace that results in Omar's right-wing lieutenants
sharing power in Kabul.
Our guide to policy should be this: don't do
anything for the Taliban that you wouldn't have
also done for the violent terrorists of the
Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s in America.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 8, 2009
Kashmir Border Drawn in Plutonium
I took a taxi from Oakland, Calif., today and
chatted with the driver, who said he was originally
from India. Talk soon turned to last Fall's
Mumbai attacks, and he was passionate about the
tragedy, angrily blaming Pakistani militants and
cursing the Kashmir crisis for helping to create
the climate that caused it.
As I listened to his tirade against Pakistani
militants, I realized this was almost certainly
the temperature throughout much of India: hot
toward Pakistan and ready for
cold vengeance, with Kashmir a way too convenient
flashpoint.
Both sides are profoundly pissed -- and all nuked up,
too. Both sides have barely budged a substantial inch
since '47, it seems. Both sides's competing claims
in Kashmir are now complicated by separatist demands
and counter-claims by China. And the Mumbai
attacks, recently traced to members of the
Lashkar-e-Taiba of Pakistan, have added accelerant
to the tinderbox.
If Kashmir blows in a nuclear way, the body count
could be unthinkably massive -- and the nuke cloud
could travel over....China, or anywhere in the neighborhood,
creating a potentially unprecedented humanitarian
catastrophe.
Yeah, I know, there are lots of global hot spots.
Yeah, we have to establish a two-state solution in
the Middle East. We need to rein in the
increasingly ill Kim Jong Il. We have to
sit down with Ahmadinejad and read him the riot
act. And, most important to U.S. security, we
absolutely have to stop the resurgence of the
Taliban in Afghanistan.
But it's all too easy to imagine breaking news coming
out of Islamabad and Delhi about multiple nuclear
strikes throughout both nations, with each side claiming
the other fired first, with casualties in the millions.
And then we'll wish we had had the foresight to spend
more time on Kashmir than on, say,
Gaza, where nukes aren't really in play.
The line of control in Kashmir is, post-Mumbai,
drawn in plutonium. Hillary Clinton and
Ban Ki Moon should hold a summit with Zardari and
Singh to definitively resolve the Kashmir crisis
so that all parties recognize the borders and LoCs
in the region. (Perhaps there should be (yet another!)
sub-Secretary of State to focus on the region.)
It's unlikely a single summit will settle things; deep
underlying tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the
area are fueling the disputes. But if most Indians
are as enraged at Pakistan as my cabbie was yesterday,
I bet any minor spark could set the whole
region ablaze, possibly radioactively.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 6, 2009
Fresh evocation of American suburbia by San Francisco's
own Robert Bechtle titled "'60 T-Bird" ('67 - '68), now
on display at the Berkeley Art Museum.
[photo by Paul Iorio.]
Visited the Berkeley (Calif.) Art Museum
yesterday and its "Galaxy" exhibition, an
eclectic collection of paintings
BAM hasn't shown for awhile. Highlights include
Magritte's striking "Duo," Warhol's silkscreen
"Race Riot," a couple engravings by William Blake,
a drip painting miniature by Pollock, Rothko's
"Red Over Dark Blue on Dark Gray" and Robert
Bechtle's "'60 T-Bird." (I did a
double-take on the Caracciolo, thinking it
was a Caravaggio, whose style Caracciolo
thoroughly rips off.) Galaxy runs until nearly
Labor Day at BAM.
* * * *
"Are times so stressful that our young president
is going grayer a mere six weeks into the job?,"
asked The Washington Post the other day.
Isn't it more likely that Obama was using
hair dye during the campaign and is only now
showing his real gray? In any event, we elected
him for the gray matter inside (not outside)
his skull.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 2 - 3, 2009
A New Crime Wave?
According to KALX radio's Marshall Stax, Crime, the
seminal Bay Area punk band, may be re-uniting and might
appear on his show, The Next Big Thing,
in the near future. Above, a vintage Crime poster from
a recent exhibit at the Berkeley (Calif.) Art Museum.
(Also, many thanks to Marshall for playing two
new songs of mine, "You're Gettin' Played" and "The
Riot Noise (Off Avalon Green)," on tonight's Next
Big Thing!) [photo of poster by Paul Iorio.]
* * *
Someone asked me what inspired my new
song "The Riot Noise (Off Avalon Green)." I started
writing it after walking into a riot that erupted
in Berkeley, Calif., on September 5, 2008. (I actually
ran into the riot to snap the shot that is the
cover of my upcoming album of the same name.)
In my song, the line "I don't know who threw
the chair but that was no excuse to shoot bullets
in the air" was suggested by this AP photo of
another riot, in Thessaloniki, Greece, on December
7, 2008, where violence escalated after a protester
tossed a chair at cops:
(photo: Nikolas Giakoumidis)
But I digress. Paul
The Daily Digression is not sponsored
by AeroShave! (photo by Paul Iorio.)
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for March 2, 2009
And so we're all supposed to believe that
Bernie Madoff, when he was chairman (not merely
a senior vice president or COO) of
overly-respected Nasdaq, was ethical
and honest? I don't buy it. My business
experience tells me that, generally, a person
exhibits the same sorts of tendencies at
one company that he or she does at another, more
or less. It strains credulity to believe
Madoff only became corrupt in recent years,
and was, prior to that, a model of ethics and
probity. It probably takes a lot of practice
over many decades to become as expertly
nefarious as he became in his sixties.
What does the fact that Madoff was chairman of Nasdaq
tell us about Nasdaq? If you scratched the surface
beneath the fortunes of Madoff's colleagues at
Nasdaq, do you honestly think they'd come up clean?
(Is there such a thing as a completely clean fortune
in America? Was there ever, considering America
was founded on the mass theft of labor via
slavery? Isn't it true that any bum can amass
wealth if all his workers work for free? I digress.)
If one can't trust the former chairman of Nasdaq,
whose later clients/victims included savvy, respectable
folks like John Malkovich and Steven Spielberg, then
who can one trust in the investment world?
BTW, check out the Google News Archives to see how
glowingly some news organizations covered Madoff in
the 1990s. Reminds me of how some financial journalists
today still quote and give credibility to sources
at discredited companies like Moody's, which either
fraudulently or negligently gave triple A ratings
to firms that failed mere months later.
Uh, let's see: Moody's was waay wrong
about fundamental aspects of the
economy, and yet you're still quoting people
from the company. And I'm sure you'll continue to
quote them in the future, throwing good money
after bad in order to justify crappy
journalistic decisions.
[I wrote and posted the above column at
around 12:30am on March 2, 2009; some
of the ideas I originated here were
later echoed by a guest on PBS's "NewsHour" around
15 hours after I posted the ideas here.]
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 24, 2009
The other day I saw a sight from the Pleistocene
era: a McCain bumper sticker on an old, rusty GMC
truck. And I thought, could there possibly be
any sight so yesterday on the planet?
Then this morning I got my answer. There was
old-fashioned Jim Cramer on the "Today" show,
thundering like a Brontosaurus about how the
horse-and-buggy is not disappearing and how talkies
will never supplant silents. And I realized, yes,
there is something more antiquated than a McCain bumper
sticker on an old GMC truck.
Cramer -- an over-amplified defender of discredited
free market policies who wants President Obama to
pass the jellybeans and say "things aren't terrible" -- just
can't get his mind around the fact that unregulated
capitalism has fallen and failed as surely and
decisively as communism fell nearly two
decades ago.
By the way, Cramer shouts too much. I mean, if
this is how he is on camera, can you imagine what
he's like with subordinates? I wonder how many of
his co-workers have accused him of creating a
hostile work environment. That old style of a
rich (and wrong!) boss shouting at poor
subordinates is, thankfully, going down
the toilet as fast as unregulated capitalism
is -- and good riddance.
Why give airtime to this guy and others
like him (such as Zandi of Moody's)? After
all, Cramer and his kind -- the
supply-siders -- have been proved wrong. They
were (and still are) oblivious to the unacceptable
inherent risks of the unregulated marketplace.
Why not give TV airtime to those who
have been proved right?
* * * *
[cartoon/caption by Paul Iorio, 2009;
drawing by unknown artist.]
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 23, 2009
Slum Enchanted Evening
Time was, prior to 9/11, the Oscars were held in
what seemed like the early spring rather than the
late winter, and it fit better there. When
I lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and covered
aspects of the Academy Awards as a reporter, the
Oscars weren't handed out until almost April.
I remember it was like a federal holiday in the
area, and I'd walk through West Hollywood on
the way to pick up my tux or something
and see people all dressed up in their suburban
driveways in the middle of the afternoon, preparing
to drive to the Oscars or a related event.
And it seemed the trees were just starting to
bud and everyone was coming out of hibernation
and there was a sense of re-awakening all around.
But since 9/11, the ceremony has been held
in the dead of winter (which -- admittedly -- is
hard to define in L.A.) as if the Academy
was trying to throw off terrorists by shifting
the typical date of the Oscars.
Last night's ceremony was yet another late-winter
event, and I watched it on TV in Berkeley, Calif.,
and don't have much to say about it, except the
following:
-- It is becoming exceedingly easy to predict
the winners (I predicted all the major ones,
except for Winslet) just by looking at the
winners of the various guild awards.
-- Hugh Jackman worked out better than one might
have expected, though Steve Martin was so funny
in his brief appearance that I began to wish he
was the host. Bill Maher was also a welcome
gust of truth and wit and perhaps he, too, should
be considered to host the 82nd awards ceremony.
-- I wish Alicia Keys had sung something (she's
such a genius as a singer that she virtually sings
when she talks).
-- Very gracious of Sean Penn to have praised Mickey
Rourke from the podium.
-- In another century, in another era, I'm convinced
Kate Winslet would have become a genuine Queen of
some country.
-- Having five actors descend on the actor
nominees felt more like a rehab intervention
than an appreciation.
-- In the old days, if a Woody Allen movie were nominated
in any category, it would also be nominated for the
best director or best original screenplay
prize. It's telling that recent Allen movies are
now noted for something other than his direction
and writing. (He is in something of a late Chaplin
(post-"Monsieur Verdoux") phase.) Cruz's performance
was indeed notable, though it worked only in tandem
with Bardem's.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 20, 2009
Here're a few everyday photos I
recently shot around my neighborhood in
Berkeley, Calif.:
a novel, leftover bumper sticker for You-Know-Who!
* * *
the rainy season has arrived out here, and
this is what it looked like last Sunday.
* * *
occasionally, we have bouts of severe fog in Berkeley
that are almost like heavy smoke, such as this one
last year.
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 14 - 16, 2009
Roman Polanski, and Why All Charges Against Him Should Be Dropped
Roman Polanski is one of the most reflexively brilliant
people I've ever interviewed. Talking with him, one
really feels the pull of genius, in the sense that
he spontaneously puts a fresh angle on
whatever moment you're in and causes you to
re-think what you're thinking. When you've finished
a conversation with Polanski, your mind is somewhat
altered, your view of the world is a bit
different, you come away charged and alive to
the possibilities out there.
I landed my interview with Polanski -- a rarity
and a scoop at the time -- through the late Richard
Sylbert, an enormously gifted production and set
designer of classic films by Polanski, Mike Nichols
and others, and a very close friend of the
director's.
Sylbert seemed to think of a film as a place that
one can return to repeatedly, like an old family
living room from childhood, and hence he designed
locations in movies that millions of us do
return to each year, via cinema (e.g., the
Braddock family home in "The Graduate," Mrs.
Robinson's bedroom in "The Graduate,"
Ida Sessions's apartment house (with its
claustrophobic, parallel outdoor walls that
seem to be closing in on Jake Gittes),
Evelyn Mulwray's foyer (the site of so much trauma),
and on and on. The lives of lots of moviegoers were
partly lived in those spaces, and Sylbert made sure
they stuck in collective memory.
I had planned to talk with Sylbert for only ten
minutes or so to get some quotes for a Los Angeles Times
story on "Chinatown" that I was writing but we hit
it off (as reporter and source) and our conversation
went on for well over an hour. He was
evidently impressed with my expert knowledge
of "Chinatown," which I'd seen hundreds of
times, and at the end of the interview
asked, "You want Roman's phone number?"
And I said something like, yeah, sure.
Keep in mind that getting an interview with Sylbert
himself was a bit of a coup in those days, as his
number was deeply unlisted. (In late 1998, I had
an advantage over many other journalists in that I
had already been using such pre-Google search engines
as Alta Vista and HotBot, which led me to the unlisted
number of a relative of Sylbert's, who referred my
message to Richard.)
Anyway, I called Polanski and left a message on his
answering machine, not expecting much to come of it.
Some time later, I caught a message on
my own machine, and it was unmistakably
Roman, calling from Paris. We exchanged calls back
and forth, and then set up a phone interview for a few
days later, when he would be on a family vacation in
the Dolomites.
A couple days before 1999, I interviewed Polanski
in-depth about "Chinatown" and a bit about other
topics, but the central subject of my article
was "Chinatown," his best film by a fair margin,
in my view, though there are many other high peaks
in his oeuvre (I'd rank "Knife in the Water" higher
if it had come before "L'avventura"). (I'd go on
to do other interviews for the "Chinatown" piece
in early '99.)
My interview with him was the basis of articles
I wrote and reported for the July 8, 1999, issue
of the Los Angeles Times. (A top editor at the paper
said that my story had generated more reader response
than any other article that had appeared in that
section of the Times; I'm flattered that film
aficionados have told me they never completely
understood the film until they read my articles;
an uncut, updated version of the story appears
on my website at www.paulliorio.blogspot.com.)
A few years after creating this cinematic masterpiece,
Polanski was caught in a scandal somewhat similar to
the one that almost prematurely ended the career of
Leonardo da Vinci centuries earlier. Leonardo, accused of
having an affair with an underage model in Verrocchio's
studio, was almost jailed and trashed by the
Florentine authorities -- and imagine the loss to the world
if he had been.
Fact is, there aren't many bona fide geniuses on the
planet, and the human race can't afford to throw them
out as if they were yesterday's Yuban -- unless there
is an absolutely compelling reason that fully overrules
mitigating factors.
And the Samantha Geimer case was never a compelling
enough reason to toss out a world class director like
Polanski. (It was, after all, not a case of murder,
an exponentially more serious crime that no western
nation condones.)
Apart from the narrow legal concerns that are currently
in play in the case, perhaps we should also begin to
rethink and debate the big picture issues about the
basic fairness of such prosecutions and whether we
tend to overstate the seriousness of such crimes
in the States.
First, what Polanski did would not have been illegal
(or at least would not have been prosecuted) had
he done it in his home country (France), his native
country (Poland) or the place where he sometimes
vacations (Italy). Laws regarding age-of-consent vary
wildly from decade to decade and from nation to nation
(and even, to some degree, from state to state
in the U.S.).
As footage in the recent documentary "Roman Polanski:
Wanted and Desired" clearly shows, Polanski seemed to be
genuinely and completely unaware that having sex with
a teenager was illegal in the U.S. In many ways,
this was a case of how the sexual provincialism of
a nation created a high-profile international injustice.
Here's an analogy everybody might understand. Suppose
you visited one of the northern provinces of Nigeria,
where Sharia law is in effect, and suppose you were
in your hotel room innocently playing a mandolin while
your girlfriend was resting on the couch. You might
very well hear a knock on your door and find that the
local police want to arrest you for violating Nigeria's
Sharia law that prohibits playing the mandolin,
particularly in the presence of a woman (look it up;
it's actually against the law in some
parts of Islam).
If the Nigerian police had led you away in handcuffs,
your reaction would be something like: "What're you
talking about? I had no idea such a thing was illegal
in your country. Who would make such a law?" And
they would say, "Playing a mandolin is explicitly
prohibited by Sharia law in parts of Nigeria, and
you, sir, are under arrest."
And you would respond with, "Nobody ever told me this
was against the law in your country. How was I
supposed to have known that? Who was the person
designated from the Nigerian government to tell
me, as I arrived at the airport in Lagos, that
mandolin-playing was illegal in Katsina province?
Did somebody at the airport hand me a list of things that
are illegal in this country but legal in my own?"
Analogously, that's very similar to what happened
in Polanski's case. As I noted before, he was
arrested for something that isn't really a
crime in his home country, and when he was busted he
seemed to be completely unaware that he had done
something illegal. How can it be fair to fully
prosecute someone for behavior that we never told
him was illegal?
If the crime was so serious, then how come the
so-called victim has repeatedly said she was far
more traumatized by Judge Laurence Ritteband's
handling of the "unlawful intercourse" case than
by what she did with Polanski? I think most would
agree today that everybody -- both the "victim"
and the accused and everyone in between -- would
have been far better off if the whole incident
had never been brought into the legal system and
had been handled as a private matter between families.
Don't get me wrong: I would never consider committing
an act similar to the one that got Polanski in
trouble -- and I think aspects of his behavior in
that case (using Quaaludes, for example) are not
very defensible. But just because I wouldn't do
such a thing doesn't mean that I think it should
be prosecuted as a serious crime warranting
excessive legal penalties.
It would seem to be common sense that behavior
that is virtually legal in Vancouver shouldn't
get you a 20-year sentence if you do the same
thing several miles down the highway in Seattle.
I'm not saying there should be international
standardization of laws -- there shouldn't be,
because each nation has its own traditions and
practical realities. But a sensitivity to
cultural differences should be factored into cases
like Polanski's (or into the hypothetical case of
an American prosecuted for playing a mandolin
in Nigeria).
In the current climate of witch hunting and hysteria,
it's not likely Polanski's conviction will be
tossed out now or anytime soon, despite the new evidence
brought to light about malfeasance committed by the
disqualified judge in the case.
Maybe Polanski will just have to heed the hard truths
of "Chinatown" itself, and say to himself:
"Forget it, Roman, it's Santa Monica."
* * * * *
Regarding the Michael Phelps story: it's
not like he was accused of selling pot.
He just took a toot off a bong, standard
behavior for guys that age. Leave 'im alone!
* * * * *
Re: Roland Burris. I told ya so. (See my
column, below, titled "Don't Seat Burris,"
January 7, 2009.)
But I digress. Paul
______________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 12, 2009
Surely, You Must Be Joaquin'.(Or Maybe Not.)
I watched the Joaquin Phoenix interview with
David Letterman in real time last night and
was riveted by what initially looked like
a major actor committing career suicide on late
night TV. I thought, this is either
Johnny-Cash-kicking-out-the-lights-on-the-Opry-stage
or an Andy Kaufman-style hoax. As I thought
about it through the day today, I was starting
to wonder whether it was a Phoenix-Letterman
collaboration along the lines of "The Late Show"'s
Johnny-the-Usher bits.
If not, it ranks right up there with Lennon's
infamous behavior at the Troubadour or Brando's
eccentric late interviews or Norman Mailer's
drunken TV appearances.
Either way, an extremely entertaining departure
from the usual movie promotional fare.
* * *
An interesting fact that I just unearthed: did
you know that only seven popularly-elected U.S.
presidents have served two, full, consecutive
terms? Only seven of our 44 presidents! (According
to my own research.)
It breaks down this way. Thirteen presidents served
two complete terms, but four of them -- George W. Bush,
Monroe, Madison and Jefferson -- were not winners of the
popular vote in at least one of their elections.
Wilson "served" two terms but was actually in charge
for only six years before a stroke incapacitated him
and made him a merely nominal commander-in-chief. And
Cleveland's terms weren't consecutive.
Meanwhile, eleven of our presidents served less than
one complete term in the White House.
* * * *
So, sadly, the Guarneri Quartet begins to end its
existence with a few dozen final shows in North
America, 45 years after its birth.
When I first saw them, in June 1972, when the
quartet was eight years old, they were the new kids
on the classical block, and they would give
controversial interviews comparing classical
composers like Beethoven to Bob Dylan and the
Beatles.
In those days, their performances of the late
and middle Beethoven quartets were causing quite
a buzz, and I was completely blown away (as a 14 year
old!) when I heard them play the No. 11
in F Minor (the so-called "Serioso"), the last
of Beethoven's middle quartets and the one to which
I keep returning 37 years later.
You can still catch the Guarneri in various cities
through June (and there'll be a handful of
performances in October, too), but after that,
there'll be only the recordings.
* * *
Thought I'd share this I picture I shot of the
Hollywood Bowl from an interesting vantage point:
Mulholland Drive. Circa 2000.
But I digress. Paul
__________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 11, 2009
Perfect DVD for President's Day Weekend: "John Adams"
As an evocation of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
and Benjamin Franklin, who really should have been the
central subject of the series, "John Adams," the 2008
HBO mini-series now on DVD, has almost no peer on the
big or small screen. The black hole is unfortunately
the characterization of the title character,
John Adams, second president of the U.S. and
an even-handed figure during our revolution.
John Adams is played here by the usually impressive
Paul Giamatti, who portrays Adams as something
between a sad sack and Jimmy Olsen, looking (without
his wig) a lot like Uncle Fester of "The Addams
Family" -- and 2% from being an inadvertent comic
caricature.
Unfortunately, Adams's life was not as eventful
or fascinating as Lincoln's or Jefferson's or
Franklin's or even Obama's, for that matter,
so we have one episode devoted mostly to the time
Adams caught a bad case of the sniffles in Europe
and we get to see him cough a good deal.
The portrait of Abigail Adams, the second First
Lady, alas, is also flawed. Played by the almost always
winsome Laura Linney, who leans too heavily on being
smugly amused here, Abigail Adams comes
off as someone who is constantly, privately seeing
her husband as an object of ridicule, constantly
chuckling about him to herself.
Elsewhere, much is made of the cultivation of son
John Quincy, but there, unfortunately, is no
foreshadowing of what a mediocrity he'd become
in adulthood.
Yes, the series is based on a book by one of our
best historians, but, frankly, I've lost faith
in the veracity of a lot of history. As I've
gotten older, I've seen people I know covered
in the press, and sometimes their published
life stories are so wildly inaccurate that they
almost qualify as fiction. And this is the 21st
century, when primary documents and firsthand
remembrances are preserved like never before.
Back in Adams's time, a lot of what passed as
fact was almost surely sheer myth.
An example. Look, I love Hillary Clinton, but let's
be real: in an earlier century, her story about
sniper fire in Bosnia would have been stamped by
all historians as the stone cold truth. Yet it
was debunked only because -- incredibly -- there was
actual video footage of the event (and of the sweetest
little sniper you've ever seen!).
So you have to wonder how many stories of
Revolutionary War derring-do are actually,
factually true, and how many are the 18th
century equivalent of, uh, sniper fire
in Bosnia.
Anyway, this is a mostly terrific mini-series -- you
come away feeling as if you've really met
Washington and Franklin -- and it's perfect
for President's Day, though the quality drops off
precipitously after the second episode.
But I digress. Paul
____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 11, 2009
Should We Cap Anchor Salaries at a Half-Mil?
The banking crisis and economic collapse has
opened up -- or should open up -- a wider-ranging
debate about paying executives exorbitant salaries
when their companies are failing.
How about the news biz itself? What about the
massively excessive salaries of executives at top
newspapers that have been failing for years? Some
daily newspapers are losing a million dollars a
week, yet their top executives are paid multimillion
dollar salaries. For what are they paid? To run
the paper into the ground?
Perhaps the salaries of all tv and print journalists,
and associated executives, should be capped at half
a million until their organizations return to
profitability. Or maybe there should be a rule: no
journalist should make more than the president of
the United States. Because a reporter or anchor
who "earns," say, 16 mil a year, is too out of
touch with the everyday concerns of 99%+ of the
citizens they serve. Which probably accounts for
the oddly lacadaisical attitude of a lot of tv
journalists toward the health care crisis in
this country; when they ask questions about it
at news conferences, there is an abject lack of
urgency in their tones.
TV viewers might get a better understanding of the
news they receive if the networks used captions
beneath the faces of the talking heads and anchors
and correspondents who they air (such as: "The
anchor reporting this health care story makes
$7 mil a year; his health care costs are
completely covered, and then some; his
mother-in-law is a top executive at
Pfizer"; or "Correspondent reporting this story
about overly-generous CEO pay makes $11 mil a
year, which is more than the combined salaries of
hundreds of midlevel employees at his company;
and he has a book deal from a company with a huge
stake in the pharmaceutical biz." Etc.
Those who make $9 mil (or whatever) a year in
broadcast news made it because they (or their
agents) were clever at leverage. Because if
they were really worth that money, their companies
and their TV programs wouldn't be failing right
now. If, say, Katie Couric were really worth the
multimillions, her show wouldn't be in third
place; her ratings are roughly below or equal
to the ratings earned by her predecessor anchors,
which suggests one could probably put one of
many correspondents in that spot and have the same
ratings. Which means that last place is rewarded
with something like $15 million.
And to the CEO or anchor who says, "Fine, go ahead
and cap my salary; I'll go somewhere else," we
should start calling that person's bluff. If,
say, Couric balks at having her salary cut to
half a million, let her go. Where would she go?
The other anchor spots are already taken. CNN
would be her only alternative. She'd likely
end up running Larry King's show, and that
would be no real thorn in the side of her
former employer. (And even if she did end up
on a competing news program, one assumes she'd
bring her failing ways there, too.)
Likewise with the heads of the failed banks.
If we cap their salaries at half a mil, to
what collapsed financial institution
would they go for more gravy? And if they
did go elsewhere, they'd probably bring along
their ineptitude there, too.
I'm starting to think it's possible that the
election of President Obama is the first
major symptom of revolutionary change to come,
not the revolutionary change itself. I think
the whole nation has awakened to the
massive, callous, fundamental unfairness of
undeserving people earning millions of dollars
a year while many of us can barely pay our
basic bills.
But I digress. Paul
______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 9 - 10, 2009
After walking home this afternoon (and dodging
Berkeley's traffic cops, who seem to have become
ubiquitous in recent days), I immediately
turned on my favorite radio show, KALX's "Next
Big Thing," and was thrilled to hear Marshall
play my latest song, "Doctor, Please Restore My Youth,"
around an hour ago. Many thanks to the station
and Mr. Stax!
* * * *
Twenty years ago this Saturday, the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, via fatwa, sentenced novelist Salman Rushdie
to death for blasphemy. Though formal advocacy of the
death sentence by Iran has largely ceased, there are
many Islamic hard-liners who still want to do him in for
writing "The Satanic Verses" in 1988.
A couple weeks after the '89 fatwa, I covered a rally in
support of Rushdie in Manhattan that was interrupted
by a bomb threat and wrote about it and associated
issues for the East Coast Rocker newspaper in its
March 29, 1989 issue. Here's that story (and
another piece that has not been published until now):
from The East Coast Rocker newsaper, March 29, 1989
We Must Send These Fundamentalists a Clear and Sharp Message
By Paul Iorio
The rock world has finally started weighing
in with its belated condemnations of the
Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence
on novelist Salman Rushdie. Unfortunately,
certain factions have chosen to use
oppressive tactics to fight the Ayatollah.
Nowhere has that been more evident than in
the organization by several U.S. radio stations
of boycotts and burnings of records by Cat
Stevens, due to the singer's backing of
Khomeini's death threat.
Without a doubt, Stevens's support of
Muslim terrorism is completely damnable,
though record burnings are not the proper
way to vent one's outrage. Indeed,
suppressing Stevens's work on the basis
of his political or religious beliefs is doing
the Ayatollah's job. We should be able
to hear Stevens' music just as we should
be allowed to read Rushdie's books.
When we respond with such a boycott,
by fighting fascism with fascism, we defeat
ourselves. We should combat Khomeini
by making sure that Rushdie's "The Satanic
Verses" is sold and displayed by major
book chains.
And Viking Press should heed
NBC-News's John Chancellor's suggestion
to call the Ayatollah's bluff by bringing Rushdie
over to the U.S. for a publicity tour.
We must send these fundamentalists a
clear and sharp message: no political
or religious leader, not even in our own
country, will intimidate or terrorize us into
limiting freedom of expression.
One can condemn Stevens's approval of
the Rushdie death contract without boycotting
his music, just as one can deplore poet Ezra
Pound's Nazism without condemning his
brilliant Cantos.
Certainly there are grounds for not airing
Stevens's songs, but those grounds are
aesthetic, not political; his wimpy folk lacks
any semblance of edge or energy, enduring
guilty pleasures like "Peace Train" and
"Moonshadow" notwithstanding.
We've had enough censorship from
religious fundamentalists -- from Falwell
to Khomeini -- and should put religious
extremists of all faiths on notice: they have
absolutely no business imposing their
private beliefs on a secular society. Period.
How does one deal with bomb threats and other
violent acts by those who wish to stifle free
speech? Norman Mailer, speaking at a recent
PEN reading of "Satanic Verses" in Manhattan
that I attended (and that was delayed by a
bomb threat), gave advice on how to handle
telephone bomb threats, which, he noted,
only cost a quarter to make. Quoting Jean
Genet, Mailer said to tell such callers:
"Blow out your farts."
* * *
In January 1996, I wrote and reported another story
related to the Rushdie affair. For this piece, I walked
around Manhattan with a copy of "The Satanic Verses"
prominently displayed, visiting both everyday places
and locations where the book might raise eyebrows and
tempers. The idea was to see how provocative
the novel was seven years after the fatwa. Here's
my report (which has never been published):
page one of manuscript (click to enlarge it)
* *
page two of manuscript (click to enlarge it)
* *
page three of manuscript (click to enlarge it)
* *
fourth and final page of manuscript (click to enlarge it)
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- There has been a lot of talk lately about
there not being enough "respect" for various
religious right-wingers in Iran and elsewhere.
Could you please tell me how religious militants
(e.g., the backers of the Rushdie fatwa, those
who supported the 9/11 attacks, etc.) have earned
that respect? Could you please tell me why
such religious militants merit respect?
Could you please tell me what specific actions
they have taken that are worthy of respect?
Am I supposed to "respect" the fact that they
respond with homicidal violence when they
object to a novel or an editorial cartoon? Why
should I respect that?
In my view, most religious militants are
worthy only of contempt. And disrespectful is
as nice as I'll be toward them.
P.S. -- Why are we still listening to rich
twerps like Mark Zandi of Moody's, which (either
negligently or fraudulently) gave top
ratings to companies months before those
companies collapsed?
Isn't there something deeply wrong and
disingenuous about some TV news people (who are
making multi-million dollar salaries) who interview
Zandi and other millionaires (who were virtually
complicit with those who caused our financial crisis)
and say, "Tsk, tsk, off with the heads of the rich"?
Sort of like King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
telling the French revolutionaries, "We're looking
for the culprits, too."
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 9, 2009
Top o' the Grammys!
Alison Krauss, Robert Plant performing in
Golden Gate Park, October 3, 2008.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
The Grammys got it right last night by giving
top awards to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
for their "Raising Sand" collaboration -- and
"Please Read the Letter" was the song to honor,
too. Anyone who was at the penultimate
show of Plant and Krauss's 2008 tour, at Golden
Gate Park in San Francisco last October, saw
an audience that got naturally high from
the moment it heard the opening drumbeat
of "Letter" and then became exhilarated as
the song progressed. I went to a fair
number of concerts last year but not one
(besides the Plant/Krauss one) at which an
audience became so openly transported by
a single song. Looking forward to
"Raising Sand, Vol. 2."
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 8, 2009
Here're a few pictures I've recently shot:
Sullyville (aka, Danville, Calif.), Sully's hometown, shown
here around an hour before he appeared on Jan. 24, 2009. As
you can see here, the town is also proud of the fact that
Eugene O'Neill wrote "Long Day's Journey" when he lived in Danville.
* * *
Remember that night a few weeks ago when the moon made its closest pass
to Earth of '09? Well, here's how it looked in Berkeley, Calif.
* * *
A midnight shot of the barbed wire fence surrounding
eco-protesters in trees last Fall.
But I digress. Paul
________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for February 4, 2009
Was My Phone Tapped In the Bush Years?
A Reporter's Suspicions
As a journalist who has written for almost every
major newspaper in North America, and for a lot of
magazines, I wanted the 9/11 attacks
to be my beat in the years after 9/11. But it
never really happened. At the time, my
specialty was arts and entertainment journalism,
so making the switch to hard news was not easy,
particularly in that period when the newspaper
industry had begun to collapse, leaving
fewer publications to write for.
But in 2004, I did come up with a bit of a scoop:
Using the so-called Wayback Machine search engine,
I discovered time-stamped archived Usenet and chat
room postings on Muslim fundamentalist websites
that seemed to indicate, judging by the dates of
the messages, that some Muslim militants
knew about the 9/11 attacks before they occurred
and that word of the impending attacks might have
been in the air and involved a wider web of people
than just the hijackers and bin Laden's conspirators.
As a freelance writer, I decided to report the story
independently -- asking various government sources for
comment -- and then submit it to various publications.
Though I didn't contact the Joint Terrorism Task Force
(JTTF) for comment, I was called by the JTTF out of
the blue. And, frankly, I was more than happy to get
their perspective and, in the process, talk with
them about my reportage. (As The Washington Post's
Bob Woodward and others have always pointed out, you're
a citizen first and a journalist second, especially
when it comes to issues that could be a matter of
life or death.) My info, after all, did not come
from confidential sources but from obscure
Internet archives that I was not obligated to keep secret.
My interviews with the two JTTF agents were not for
attribution, meaning they spoke on the condition
that they not be identified by name. Suffice it
to say that I spoke to two of them, both
of whom called without having been first contacted
by me. I spoke with the first agent on July 22, 2004,
for around an hour, and the second agent on December
3, 2004.
To be honest, neither gave me the third degree and both
were sensitive to the nature of both their roles and
mine -- and both were refreshingly and unambiguously
un-bigoted about Muslims.
The only red flag came at the beginning of the conversation
with the second JTFF agent on December 3. This call came
the day that Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy
Thompson made his famous remarks about the U.S. food
supply's vulnerability to terrorist tampering, which
was, by the way, one of the plots discussed in
some of the Usenet messages I had uncovered.
Anyway, that second agent said that he had initially
reached my AOL answering service and asked me
about what sort of phone service I had. "Do you
have service through AOL?," he asked.
"No, through ATT," I said.
At the time, I didn't think much of the exchange.
But shortly afterwards, I realized that he had
been a bit too curious about who provided my
phone service. This was a JTTF agent, after all.
I thought, uh oh, I bet my land line is going to be tapped.
In the subsequent months, certain mundane but distinctive
details from my personal phone conversations
seemed to be getting around to people who didn't
know me. At first, I thought, maybe it was
just a nosy neighbor. My apartment, after all, is in
an apartment house whose units are way too close
together, and you can sometimes overhear conversations
in adjacent rooms. That might be it, I thought.
But I wanted to be sure. Suspecting that my land line
might be tapped, and wanting to rule out the nosy
neighbor theory, I conducted a test. I simply called
myself from a remote pay phone, left a message on
my own answering machine and waited to see whether what
I said eventually leaked out.
I took lots of precautions to rule out stray factors.
For example, I made the calls to myself from an
isolated pay phone at a place that could not
be overheard by anyone (on the far east side of
the Clark Kerr campus of the University of
California at Berkeley). I made sure that the
answering machine that would receive my message
in my apartment was muted so there was no chance
a neighbor would overhear it. And I left a message
that contained unique or very personal information
(or misinformation) that could not possibly be
known or said by anyone else.
I'm not going to reveal some of the things I said
into my answering machine -- too personal -- but I
can give an example of the sorts of things I'd say.
I'd always say something that had some sort of
security or confidential component, like: "I know
a journalist who interviewed Rumsfeld, and he tells
me that, off the record, Rumsfeld really can't
stand Tom Ridge. Hates him." Something fictitious
and distinctive that could only have come from me.
And, sure enough, each time I left such a message,
the info seemed to get around to complete strangers
in my daily interactions, usually within around
three or four days. For instance, I'd be in a line
at the grocery store and someone nearby would
pass by and say something like "he can't stand
Ridge." Something like that. Something that
sent a clear signal to me that my phone
line was being monitored.
After this happened a couple times, I quickly moved
to protect the privacy of friends and family members
who would call, switching almost all my telephone
conversations to my new cell phone and
using my land line mainly for dial-up Internet service.
That seemed to clear up the problem.
I must confess that I later saw the mischievous
potential of such a situation; after some
local sociopath (in an unrelated matter)
starting leaving vaguely threatening messages on
my answering machine for no reason, I decided to
use his name as a guinea pig in my experiment,
leaving a message on my answering machine along
the lines of: "[Name deleted] is always praising
bin Laden. Sickening." I did it half-jokingly,
still not knowing at the time whether my
phone was being tapped or not. Interestingly --
and this may be only a coincidence -- the
harassment from the guy ceased within a week.
As for my story, there was substantial interest
in it from CBS's "60 Minutes" and from the Los
Angeles Times for a time, but ultimately
it wasn't published or aired. As a freelancer,
I had to go on to other assigned stories and
couldn't continue to develop or pitch the
9/11 piece. (A version of it is posted on my
home page at http://www.paulliorio.blogspot.com/.)
So was my phone tapped or not? I don't know for
sure, though the circumstantial evidence strongly
suggests it was. Now that a new administration
is in place in Washington, with new priorities, maybe
I should request a copy of my FBI file and solve
the mystery definitively.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- Mostly masterful story in TNY about a region in
which I spent part of my childhood (and it happens
to quote my little sister, too!): southwest Fl.
The only big-picture element that Packer and his
sources neglect to mention is that the more
extreme hurricane seasons of recent years have
made that area a far less desirable place to
settle and do business. People simply don't want
to risk being wiped out every few years by a
Cat 3 or 4, and that's one (albeit only one) of
the reasons behind declining property values
in parts of that area. Remember Al Gore's famous
maps in "An Inconvenient Truth"? Climate
change, more than any other factor, will re-shape
that state in the coming decades.
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 30, 2009
So what will Springsteen play at the Super Bowl?
Here are a few scenarios:
MOST LIKELY SETLIST
opens with "Glory Days"
"The Rising"
"Working on a Dream"
ends with "Born to Run"
LEAST LIKELY SETLIST
opens with "New York City Serenade"
"The Angel"
"If I Was the Priest"
ends with "Drive All Night"
A SETLIST FOR TRUE FANS
opens with "Two Hearts"
"Rendezvous"
"Kitty's Back"
ends with "Glory Days"
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 25, 2009
Maureen Dowd's latest column truly nails
Kirsten Gillibrand, who spent around 20
inconsequential minutes in the U.S. House
before being promoted to the Senate by a feeble
governor not elected to his own post. As she notes,
Gillibrand resembles no one so much as...Tracy
Flick.
Why do we celebrate politicians who have never said
anything original, never written anything memorable,
never led the way on an issue when it was unpopular,
never risked everything to take a brave stand?
When someone like Gillibrand is elevated over
more deserving contenders, one has to suspect
that there are laundered favors or laundered
grudges involved.
Or perhaps the late Sen. Hruska has become more
of a prophet than anyone might have guessed
back when. He was definitely ahead of his time
in championing the rights of the mediocre, for
whom we now seem to have a fetish.
But I digress. Paul
______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 24, 2009
I went to Danville to see Sully Today....
the Danville Green: epicenter of Sully-mania. [photo by
Paul Iorio]
I traveled to Danville, Calif., today to see
Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger make his first
public appearance since he saved 155 lives
last week by landing his crashing jet on
the Hudson River. Danville, of course,
is Sully's hometown, and thousands turned
out on the main Green to see and hear
speeches by him, his wife, and assorted
local politicians.
After his wife, Lorrie, introduced him
("I'd like you to meet my husband, Sully"),
he walked to the podium to enthusiastic
cheers and thanked the audience three times.
The crowd then broke into a spontaneous chant:
"Sull-ee! Sull-ee! Sull-ee!"
In person, he's taller, lankier and more
good-humored than he seems on TV, with an
easy laugh and a likable manner.
At the podium, he kept it brief. In fact,
here's the entire text of his speech:
"Lorrie and I are grateful for your incredible
outpouring of support. It's great to be home
in Danville with our neighbors and our friends.
Circumstance determined that it was this
experienced crew that was scheduled to fly that
particular flight on that particular day. But
I know I can speak for the entire crew
when I tell you: We were simply doing the
jobs we were trained to do. Thank you."
This was a proud day for Danville, an upscale,
distant suburb of San Francisco in a scenic,
BART-less part of the East Bay called the
San Ramon Valley. The place is almost
Capra-esque (people wait in an orderly line
to cross a busy street; a restaurant advertises
"the best tuna melt ever!"; even the manager
of a grocery store looks like the president
of a bank). And there's a sort of New England
gentility to some of the locals (who once
included playwright Eugene O'Neill
in their number).
At the ceremony, people in the crowd exchanged
Sully myths and gossip. One woman talked
(as if she had inside knowledge) about how
Sully had been seen cooly sipping a cup of
coffee right after the Hudson landing, as if
the whole accident had been a routine
procedure.
Of course, we'll have to wait until his
upcoming "60 Minutes" interview to learn
the other details about how a massive
tragedy was, against all odds, averted.
Sully holds up a plaque on a stage in Danville. [photo by
Paul Iorio]
Danville fans of Sully, after his speech. [photo by Paul Iorio]
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 22, 2009
So how is the Obama era being celebrated in
liberal areas like Berkeley, Calif. (the petri
dish of democracy)? This picture pretty much
sums up the mood here.
someone's car
in Berkeley, decked out as an Obama shrine. (I wonder if he can
clear the Caldecott with that on top.) ((photo by Paul Iorio)
* * * *
Here're a few other humorous photos I shot in
the last couple days:
* * * *
But I digress. Paul
[photos above by Paul Iorio]
__________________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 21, 2009
Notes on the Inauguration Ceremony
The ceremony was Greek, not Roman, in spirit,
memorable, not monumental, organic, not
contrived, and Obama's speech didn't overreach
or try to become something grander than it
actually was.
The closest he came to an eternally quotable line
like "Ask not what your country can do" was: "The
question we ask today is not whether our government
is too big or too small, but whether it works."
And I loved the inclusiveness of "We are a nation of
Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and
nonbelievers" (finally, a president who has the
sensitivity and courage to include "nonbelievers").
And then there was his marvelous slam that could
easily apply to the misguided, evil supporters of
bin Laden: "To those leaders around the globe who
seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills
on the West, know that your people will judge you on
what you can build, not what you destroy."
There were also stray lines that stuck, some of
them almost Dylanesque ("we will extend a hand if you
are willing to unclench your fist").
And I loved the way his ascension to the presidency
happened not with some predictable high noon sharp
speech but with live, original music that overflowed
naturally from the Bush years into the Obama era.
Elizabeth Alexander's poem was a marvelous
celebration of the quotidian, though, alas,
I don't think mass audiences have much of an
ear for even the finest poetry.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- Yes, close Guantanamo, by all means and with
due dispatch. But make sure that some of the seriously
violent criminals there are fully prosecuted and not
let out on some legal technicality. Keep in mind that
we have all sorts of degrees of due process in America,
and different standards apply to criminal, civil,
military and corporate cases. "Beyond a reasonable doubt"
is not always the level of proof required to convict
in the United States and probably shouldn't be the
level of proof needed to imprison some of the
mass homicidal folks at Gitmo. Using one of our other
standards in some instances would serve both
justice and security. And, by the way,
it's not hard to see that President Obama's
political career would be completely over
if even one of the Gitmo detainees were to be
released and went on to plot, say, a successful
dirty bomb attack on New York.
____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 19 - 20, 2009
"The Hour When the Ship Comes In..."
impressionistic/blurry photo of President Obama, back when
he was Sen. Obama, in an Oakland (Calif.) crowd in early
2007 by Paul Iorio.
__________________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 16, 2009
Sully Should Head the NTSB
In the folds of ordinary American life are hidden
some astonishingly extraordinary people who
generally toil in obscurity until some
freakish event brings their greatness into
the spotlight. Proof of that happened yesterday
afternoon, when Chesley Sullenberger made a
series of brilliant, reflexive, split-second
decisions that saved perhaps hundreds of lives.
I mean, the temptation for him to try to fly on
to Teterboro would have lured almost every other
pilot into untold tragedy and devastation. This
was spontaneous decision-making of the
highest order.
President-elect Obama should tap Sullenberger, who
is associated with UC Berkeley, to
head the National Transportation Safety Board. But
the way things are going, Sully may be drafted to
run for California governor in 2010. Lucky
Lindy never did what Sully did.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 14, 2009
If I found a brilliant surgeon who had just the
right specialized training and experience for
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 14, 2009
If I found a brilliant surgeon who had just the
right specialized training and experience for
an operation I was about to undergo, I wouldn't
drop him just because I discovered he hadn't
fully filed taxes in the past. Frankly, I wouldn't
care. I'd want the best surgeon I could find,
no matter what problems he might have in terms
of filing forms.
Likewise, with Timothy Geithner. The American
economy is on the operating table and in critical
condition. It needs a smart, super-competent
professional with specialized experience in
the areas that are currently in distress, and
Geithner fits that bill. Frankly, I don't care
about the minor mistakes he might have made in
the past in his personal life; the patient is
dying and in need of Geithner's expertise now.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 13, 2009
Well, Roland ("Trailblazer," if he should say
so himself) Burris is not our first
senile-seeming U.S. Senator. Hope he didn't
have to pay too much for the seat.
Is this the sort of "bold" future we're
talking about?
I must say that the Senate is showing such
a lack of spine lately that I would be very
surprised if it passes any sort of universal
health care legislation by this time next year.
Mark my words. Clip and save this. By January
2010, I bet we still have virtually the same
health care system in place. Welcome to 1993?
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- At this hour, Blogojevich, still receiving
hefty paychecks from the state of Illinois (though
deprived of the bribes he wanted to take), is
probably laughing all the way to Cristophe's.
I would have had a lot of respect for Burris
if he had told Blogojevich, "I won't play
ball with a corrupt official; I'm turning down
your appointment." Why are we rewarding people
like Burris when there are lots of whistleblowers
and quiet heroes out there who are neglected
on the sidelines? That's where the Dems'
partnerships should begin.
___________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 12, 2009
Bush, Frosty
Quote of the day:
"At times, you've misunderestimated me," President
Bush said to journalists at his final press
conference this morning. (Personally, I think
Bush may be mis-accusing the press.)
Bush also said one of his big mistakes was not
finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The
way he phrased it this morning, he made
it seem as if there had been some sort of Easter
egg hunt on the banks of the Euphrates and,
gee whiz, we couldn't find the booty
hidden there.
Truth is, the mistake was not that we couldn't
find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The
mistake was in erroneously believing
that there were WMDs there in the first place.
And with regard to Bush's "connecting dots about
9/11" bit: there's nothing wrong with connecting
dots if there are genuine links between terrorists
and a foreign government. But what Bush
did was to connect dots in order to draw an imaginary
or unfounded linkage between 9/11 and Saddam
Hussein, who virtually hated Osama bin Laden.
Bush might as well have drawn a link between
al Qaeda and the government in Mexico City.
* * * * *
QUICK CUTS:
What's the difference between a loan and a bridge
loan? Isn't every loan effectively a bridge loan?
* * * * *
Isn't the phrase "returning to the status quo ante"
redundant? No need to use "ante."
* * * * *
Can we please retire the very tired phrase
"fifth Beatle" and anyone who uses it?
But I digress. Paul
__________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 11, 2009
Rather than seat Roland Burris, I suggest that Dems
wait until soon-to-be-Governor Pat Quinn appoints someone
like....Jesse White, the man who has refused to sign
Blogojevich's certificate of appointment. Jesse
White seems like the sort of profile in courage
the Senate could use right about now. Blogojevich,
under a cloud of his own hair-stylist's making,
does not deserve the victory that Burris's
seating would give him.
* * * *
Still haven't seen "Frost/Nixon" yet but have seen enough
clips to be sort of puzzled by it.
Look, I lived through the Watergate era as a teenager
who was virtually obsessed with the Nixon scandals
and all the media coverage about them. I was so
involved in anti-Nixon political activism at the
time that I actually was a marshal at and organizer
of a pro-impeachment protest when I was 15-years old
(and I was even covered in my hometown's main
newspaper at the time). But, frankly, I don't
even remember watching David Frost's televised
interviews with Nixon in '77.
In fact, I don't think I've ever watched one
of David Frost's shows from beginning to end, and
I've always been an avid TV viewer.
When I was a kid, in the 1970s, Frost always seemed
a bit remote, aloof, somewhat dense and square. As
a teen, I and my friends much preferred Cavett and
Carson, with an occasional dose of Susskind or
even William F. Buckley. In terms of electric
interviews, Cavett v. Mailer, or Buckley v. Kerouac,
loomed much larger in the zeitgeist of the era.
I can imagine that the new generation is a bit
confused by this film. They must be wondering:
Was Frost the guy who brought down Nixon? They
must be wondering: Was this an important moment,
mom and dad, when everybody in the post-Watergate
era was glued to the TV set to watch Frost
snare Nixon? I think the film makers are
guiding young people to the false impression
that this was a larger event than it actually
was (a reviewer at TNY touches on this
aspect, too).
You know what Watergate-related event truly scared
and charged everybody contemporaneously? The so-called
"Saturday Night Massacre," in which Nixon got rid
of the top guard of the U.S. Justice Dept. and
the Watergate special prosecutor, who
the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General
both courageously refused to fire at Nixon's behest.
On that night, on an autumn weekend in 1973,
with a succession of alarming news bulletins
interrupting that Saturday night's television
programming, you really got the horrifying
sense that the federal government
was truly collapsing and that we weren't
being told the whole story of what was
going on at the White House.
Now there's a moment in Watergate history
ripe for cinematic dramatization.
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 7, 2009
Don't Seat Burris
Anyone appointed to the U.S. Senate from
Illinois can't assume office until his
certificate of appointment is signed by
the Illinois secretary of state. Why
should Roland Burris be an exception?
The signature of the secretary of state is a
de facto (if not intended) check on the unchecked
power of the governor. Should the governor make an
appointment that is clearly irresponsible or make
a rash appointment when he is in his political
death throes, the secretary of state can, in effect,
check that power by not signing on.
I don't know what's gotten into Dianne Feinstein
lately. Once admirable, she's fast turning into the
next Joe Lieberman, what with her apparent opposition
to Panetta and her backing of Burris. Filibuster
proofing the Senate seems further away than ever.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 6, 2009
He's good enough, he's smart enough, and, doggonit,
the people just elected him Senator!
Now that Al Franken has been certified
the winner of the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota
(though there will certainly be a legal challenge
from Coleman), all the Senate contests have now
been resolved (even if the appointments have not).
As you may recall, there were 11 Senate races that
were considered highly competitive back on election
day, and I offered my own predictions on who would
win each one (which I published in my November 4,
2008, Digression (see below), and posted at
4:15am on Nov. 4).
How did I fare? I predicted 11 of the 11
Senate contests!
* * *
Frankly, Leon Panetta may be just the right guy
to head the CIA. Some criticize him for not having
specialized experience in intelligence, but let's
be real: it was all those so-called intelligence
professionals who didn't see 9/11 coming. Maybe we
need someone (like Panetta) who can bring a fresh,
smart approach to the spy agency. He couldn't possibly
do worse than the team that ignored the red flags
about bin Laden in '01.
* * *
One of my favorite xmas presents this year was a
marvelous book of photographs of R.E.M. by David
Belisle, "R.E.M. Hello" (Chronicle Books) (thanks
to H!). It's packed with fascinating and often
revealing pictures of the band in the 2000s.
Anyone who loves this band the way I do will want
to see these pics.
Yorke and Stipe: melancholic genius overload.
[by David Belisle]
But I digress. Paul
________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for January 4 - 5, 2009
And the Best Picture Oscar Goes to..."The Wrestler"? Probably.
Finally saw "The Wrestler" this afternoon and must
confess I came out of the Metreon crying like a
wuss (to use the trade parlance of the film). Not
only is "The Wrestler" almost certainly the best
picture released in '08, but I'm trying to
figure out how many years I'd have to go back
in order to find a movie as poignant or moving
(though, admittedly, I've not yet seen all the major
movies of last year).
It is certainly comfortably in league with such
first-rank classic films about pugilists like
"Raging Bull," "Million Dollar Baby" and "On the
Waterfront," no doubt about it.
At times, it's like a top-grade episode of "The Sopranos"
and, at other times, achieves something close to the
brilliance of films by De Sica and other Italian
neorealists. (Director Darren Aronofsky and
screenwriter Robert D. Siegel should
definitely find some way to collaborate again.)
And what a resurrection this is for Mickey
Rourke, whose career had been left for dead years
ago by both critics and the movie biz. (Doesn't
it seem like not long ago when Rourke was playing
pranks with a popcorn box in "Diner"? ) Now he's
very likely to be nominated for a best actor
Oscar in a few weeks and seems the
favorite to win in a category that looked like
a lock for Sean Penn just last month.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if "The Wrestler"
were to win the best picture Oscar in February.
In my Digression of December 7, 2008, I wrote
that "Wall-E" was probably going to be
nominated for best picture -- and I think
that's still the case, though I also believe it has
far less of a chance to win than it did several
months ago. After seeing "The Wrestler," it's
obvious that "Wall-E" is soo pre-recession
in spirit, packing all the emotional wallop of a
brand new Subaru. And the buzz has also drifted
away from Penn and "Milk," which seems to have
peaked a bit too soon, and moved unmistakably
toward "The Wrestler," which captures the current
recessionary zeitgeist like no other major film
in release.
* * * *
Haven't yet seen "Frost/Nixon" but am surprised
Langella was cast, given that Nixon was the least
Italian of all our presidents (remember the bigoted
stuff about Rodino that Nixon said
on his tapes?).
* * * *
Also haven't seen "Rachel Getting Married," though
Demme is one of my favorite directors. Am impressed
with Anne Hathaway as an actress, but far less so
with her personal life, which (as she should know
by now) can easily undermine a career. How come
there's something about her that tells me she could
become the next Claudine Longet by the time
she's 40?
But I digress. Paul
__________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for December 31, 2008
Happy new year, everybody.
For today's Digression, I'm publishing an unpublished
story I wrote and reported a few years ago on J.D.
Salinger. I'm proud of this story, as it reveals
brand new details about the reclusive author's
day-to-day recent life in New Hampshire. Very unfair
that it was not published by the newspaper for
which it was written (I think my editor chickened out
because Salinger and his people are famous for getting
litigious about anything written about him; but
every fact in this story is nailed down and solid).
Anyway, here's the story that certain mainstream
papers, probably bowing to pressure from Salinger,
wouldn't publish!
Tomorrow, by the way, is the author's 90th birthday
(so the piece has been updated a bit).
Salinger Turns 90 in January
What the Townspeople Think About J.D. Salinger
By Paul Iorio
J.D. Salinger will turn 90 in January, which means he has
now lived for 56 years in the tiny town of
Cornish Flat, New Hampshire, in seclusion. By all
accounts, he’s still as reclusive as when he was when
he first moved to town on January 1, 1953, back
when President Truman was still in the White House.
The author moved there around 17 months after the release
of his first and only full-length novel, “The Catcher in the
Rye,” at a time when he was “tremendously relieved that the
season for success of ‘The Catcher in The Rye’ is over,”
as he told the Saturday Review magazine in 1952. Little did
he know the season had just begun.
The townspeople of the Cornish Flat area seem to have grown
accustomed to him and usually leave him alone to live
his day to day life with his wife, a quilt and
tapestry designer around half his age, in a house
near a covered bridge (how fitting it's a covered
bridge!) that leads to Vermont. (He moved down the
road to his current Cornish house after divorcing
his previous wife in 1967.)
Most people in the area do not talk about him or
to him. But some do.
"People know who he is, yet he acts like nobody
knows who he is," says Lynn Caple, who runs the
nearby Plainfield General Store, where Salinger
and his wife occasionally stop in to buy the
New York Times and other items.
"Very straight-faced guy," says Caple. "I've only seen
him smile once. I've been here four years."
Other neighbors, like Jerry Burt of Plainfield, have
actually been to his house, which he says is at the
end of a long driveway and atop a hill on hundreds
of acres owned by the author. "We would
go over to watch movies in his living room and have
dinner with him," says Burt, who claims he hasn't
seen the author since 1983.
"He's got a big living room with a deck that looks out
over the hills of Vermont, way up high, very private,"
he adds.
Burt recalls one dinner party at Salinger's house
twenty-some years ago at which Salinger, who is said
to enjoy health food, served meatloaf. "No Julia
Child," he says of Salinger's cuisine. And
the conversation was rarely literary. "He talked
about movies and the gardens and his children," he says.
The books Salinger usually talked about were not novels
but non-fiction works related to “health, being your own
health provider -- and gardening."
Of course, none of the guests dared to mention
“Catcher.”
"You'd never even think to do that if you were around
him," he says. "He'd just give you a look. He's a
very tall man and stern looking. You just know not
to do that. He'd probably show you the door and
say, 'Don't come in.'"
“He never talked about his work except to say he wrote
every morning faithfully,” he says. “And he said if I was
ever going to be a writer, I would have to do that.”
He also says Salinger has a big safe -- like a "bank
safe" -- where he keeps his unpublished manuscripts. "I've
seen the safe, I've looked in it. And he told me that he kept
his unpublished [work] there....It's huge," says Burt. "You
could have a party in there."
At one get-together in the 1980s, Salinger screened Frank
Capra's 1937 film "Lost Horizon," about a group of people
who find a paradise called Shangrila tucked in a remote
corner of the Himalayans. "He liked all those old things,
those old silents, Charlie Chaplin," he says. (His
description of the Salinger party almost resembles the
scene in the 1950 movie “Sunset Boulevard” in which a
has-been screens old movies for friends in a remote house.)
Another neighbor, this one in Cornish, is much more
circumspect about what she says about Salinger and
takes great pains to defend him. “He has been a wonderful
neighbor,” says Joan Littlefield, who lives close to
him. “The minute we moved into the neighborhood, he
called and gave us his unlisted number and said,
‘We’re neighbors now.’”
Littlefield spontaneously defended the author against
some of the allegations in the memoir by Salinger’s
daughter Margaret A. Salinger, “Dream Catcher: A Memoir”
(2000). That book claimed, among other things, that
Salinger was involved in offbeat health and spiritual
practices, such as drinking urine and Scientology.
“This thing about telling him to drink his own urine
or something that I heard that somebody wrote about,”
said Littlefield. “...I think that if any of these
reporters did some research into Ayurvedic medicine
or the medicine of China or the Far East, they would
probably find out that the medicine people over
there recommend this sort of thing.” (Ayurvedic
medicine provides alternative health treatments -- including
urine drinking -- that have origins in ancient
India.)
Littlefield defends Salinger on smaller issues, too.
“Absolutely ridiculous things have been written about
him, like that they had two Doberman attack dogs,”
she says. “For Pete’s sake, they had two little
Italian hounds of some kind that looked like Dobermans,
and they were skinny and tiny as toothpicks!”
(Our requests for an interview with Salinger went
unanswered. The author is famous for not granting
interviews and has given only around six interviews,
some of them brief and grudging, to reporters since
the release of “Catcher.")
Most other people in the area see Salinger only when
he's out in public, if at all. “He’s great looking for his
age,” says photographer and area resident Medora Hebert,
who has spotted him twice. “He’s dapper, very trim.”
“It was a long time before I could actually recognize him
because he looked so ordinary,” says Ann Stebbens Cioffi,
the daughter of the late owner of the Dartmouth Bookstore,
Phoebe Storrs Stebbens.
But Salinger himself has said that he thinks others don’t
see him as ordinary. "I'm known as a strange, aloof kind
of man," Salinger told the New York Times in 1974. And
some agree with him: "He's a very strange dude," says
Hanover resident Harry Nelson. Burt agrees: “He had a
weird sense of humor,” he says.
What emerges as much as anything is that the
author is a serious book lover and serial browser
who shops at places ranging from Borders Books to
the Dartmouth Bookstore. “He was uninterrupted
during his hour or two of browsing for books,” says
a person answering the phone at Encore! Books in West
Lebanon, New Hampshire, describing his own Salinger
sighting.
“He does come in reasonably frequently,” says someone
who answered the phone at the Dartmouth Bookstore in
Hanover, New Hampshire, around 20 miles north of Cornish.
“He’s a pretty good customer here but doesn’t really
say anything to us.”
"He frequented the Dartmouth bookstore," says an
employee of Borders Books Music & Cafe in West Lebanon.
"I talked to people who worked over there one time;
they say he wasn't very nice, wasn't the most cordial
person. So I kind of keep my eye out for him
here, go my own way."
Adds Medora Hebert, "One of my daughter's friends
was a cashier at the Dartmouth Bookstore. And they warned
him, 'If J.D. Salinger comes in, don't talk to him,
don't acknowledge him.'"
And there have been many reports of Salinger
browsing the stacks at the Dartmouth College
library. “I’ve talked with people who have met
him in the stacks and whatnot,” says Thomas
Sleigh, an English professor at Dartmouth College.
Salinger is also said to enjoy the annual Five-Colleges
Book Sale at the Hanover High School gym, a springtime
sale of used and antiquarian books that raises money
for scholarships.
In Hanover, as in Cornish, he keeps to himself. "My
wife [says] Salinger always said hello to Phoebe
and no one else," says Nelson, referring to Phoebe
Storrs Stebbens, who was a year older than
Salinger (and incidentally shares the same first
name as a major character in “Catcher”).
And area booksellers say Salinger’s books are
displayed just as prominently as they would be
if he were not a local.
Then again, Salinger doesn’t have many books to
display, since he’s published only three besides
“Catcher,” all compilations of short stories or
novellas that had been previously published, mostly
in The New Yorker magazine. His last book,
“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and
Seymour, An Introduction,” was released in
January 1963. His previous books were the bestsellers
“Franny and Zooey” (1961) and “Nine Stories” (1953).
(By the way, The New Yorker magazine actually
rejected "The Catcher in the Rye" when Salinger
submitted it as a short story/novella that was
substantially similar to the novel, according to
Paul Alexander's book "Salinger: A Biography.")
In 1997, he had planned to publish a fifth book,
essentially a re-release of his last published
work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which appeared in The
New Yorker in June 1965. The book’s publication
was ultimately scuttled.
But “Catcher” eclipses everything else he’s
done -- by a mile. It’s one of the most
influential 20th century American novels, a
coming-of-age odyssey about high school student
Holden Caulfield, who wanders around New York
after being kicked out of prep school. And
it's arguably the first novel to convincingly capture
the voice of the modern, alienated, American
teenager.
"Catcher" was successful in its initial run but not
nearly as successful as it would become by the end
of the 1950s, when it started to turn into a
freakish cult phenomenon. To date, it has
sold more than 60 million copies worldwide and
continues to sell hundreds of thousands more each year.
Over the decades, the book has appealed to a wide
range of readers that even includes certified
wackos (John Lennon’s killer had a copy on him
when he was captured). So it’s not surprising that
Salinger has had to fend off obsessive
fans even at his private Shangrila of Cornish
Flat, which has a population of under 2,000.
“People approach him a lot,” says Burt. “And they
stole clothes off his clothesline. They stole his
socks, underwear, t-shirts. And they’d come up on
his deck. It’s a huge picture window that
goes across the front of the house looking out to
Vermont...And he said he’d get up and open the
drapes and people would be standing there looking in.
It really pissed him off.”
And there was also a much publicized scuffle outside the
Purity Supreme grocery store (which he used to jokingly
call “the Puberty Supreme,” according to two biographies)
in 1988, in which Salinger reportedly mixed it up with
a couple photographers who tried to take his picture.
But for the most part, people in the area don’t bother
him.
“People in Cornish are quite protective of him,” says
Cioffi. “I can’t think of anyone who will tell you
a word about Salinger,” says a woman who answered
the phone at the Hannaford Supermarket in Claremont.
Apparently, Cornish is the perfect place to go if you
vant to be alone. “This is also a part of the country
where [writer Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn lived in his
enclave -- and his kids went to public
schools,” says Bob Grey of the Northshire Bookstore
in faraway Manchester Center, Vermont, referring to
the Nobel laureate’s former home in Cavendish,
Vermont, which is around 20 miles from Cornish.
“It’s the kind of place where, if you’re going to move
to be left alone, it’s not a bad place to be.”
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for December 23, 2008
Almost 30 Years After "All in the Family" Went
Off the Air....
Excerpts from my exclusive interview with Carroll
O'Connor -- unpublished until now.
"Archie Bunker...never laughed."
I was lucky enough to have interviewed Carroll
O'Connor a few times in the 1990s, most memorably in
1997, when he talked about (among other things)
"All in the Family," which went off the air
thirty years ago this April.
That conversation, which lasted a couple
hours, took place in a church in the
Westwood section of Los Angeles on Labor
Day weekend of 1997 -- Saturday, August
30, 1997, to be exact, a few hours before
Princess Diana got into a car wreck in Paris.
Most of the conversation was about a play he had
just written, "A Certain Labor Day," though he
also talked about "All...," adding previously
unreported backstage details about how the series
came into existence every week. Here are excerpts,
which haven't been published -- until now (except
for a few lines, which I first included in one
of my newspaper articles of 1997):
CARROLL O'CONNOR: Yeah, we used to sit
and talk about making lines funnier or inserting
something. But I always used to make sure that these
jokes were not just jokes, they were characters's thrust
and parry. And I wouldn't play a pure unadulterated
joke. I could do it. But I always thought
we were doing these little plays on "All in the
Family." And there was a little crisis every week.
Archie Bunker, for instance, he never laughed.
He came in bothered every night about
something that went on in the day. He had a
crisis a day. And then he had a crisis at home
with his son-in-law and his daughter. And crisis
is what people understand. From a purely pragmatic
point of view -- forget art for a moment -- crisis
is what the ticket buyers understand. Everybody out
there has a crisis. I take credit for being the
one who was driving every week towards a little
play. I'm [not saying] everybody else was going
the other way. But I was the principal -- I used
to sit around the table and say, "Why should anybody
want to see this?...What is in this little play
we're doing that makes it worth watching?"
IORIO: HOW DID YOU GET THAT CONSISTENT
LEVEL OF QUALITY EVERY WEEK?
O'CONNOR: ....Let's go for the crisis.
Let's put a crisis in. If putting a crisis
in means losing a few jokes, let's put the crisis in.
Every single week, we improvised something on the set.
And we used to have a script going upstairs [at CBS].
We used to use computers, the big Xerox computers -- I
mean, they were monsters in those days, those Xerox
things -- so we could send [dialogue]. The minute we
made changes, they rushed up and put in the new pages.
They'd come down with three, four new scripts every
day. We went through all kinds of paper! And Xerox
machines kept turning them out for us. We'd
improvise and...we'd have to go up and get the script
changed.
IORIO: DID YOU EVER HAVE PROBLEMS WITH
THE CENSORS?
O'CONNOR: The time when Archie
changed the baby's diaper, and there was
frontal nudity on the little boy ["Archie,
The Babysitter," aired Jan. 12, 1976]. They
decided they wouldn't do it. I must say
Norman Lear went to bat for us. He won the
day on that one. But I think that even then,
they fudged it. They let us do it and then
they...did a very fast shot.
IORIO: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE EPISODE?
O'CONNOR: There was one very important
episode when Archie and Mike get a little boozed and
discuss the origins of racism and Archie explains why
he thinks what he thinks ["Two's a Crowd," aired Feb.
12, 1978]. Locked in a liquor room, in
the storeroom. And Archie opens up. He doesn't
forswear racism, he just explains why he believed his
father about [assuming Bunker's voice] Jews
and niggers."
* * *
As it turned out, while O'Connor and I were chatting,
the world had suddenly changed in a tragic way,
unbeknownst to both of us. On my way home from
the interview, I heard the breaking news that
Princess Diana had been involved in some sort of
car crash. (But I digress.)
As I mentioned, O'Connor's show went off the air
30 years ago this April, though -- of course -- it's
still very much available on DVD, even if it's
(oddly) somewhat scarce in syndication.
I recently watched the entire fourth season of
"All in the Family" and was struck by how modern
most of it seemed. Some of the dialogue sounded
like it was written in 2008 -- like this passage,
which first aired on October 20, 1973:
HENRY JEFERSON: How come we don't have a black
president? I mean, some of our black people are just
as dumb as Nixon.
ARCHIE BUNKER: You ain't got a black president,
Jefferson, 'cause God ain't ready for that yet.
MICHAEL: Wait a second. What?!
ARCHIE: That's right. God's got to try it out
first by making a black pope, which he ain't done yet.
LIONEL: Maybe that's 'cause God ain't Catholic.
. . .
GLORIA: Is that all you can talk about, whether a
black man or a white man should be president?
ARCHIE: Well, what do you want to talk about, little
girl?
GLORIA: How about a woman president?
ARCHIE: Oh, holy cow!
HENRY JEFFERSON (aghast): A woman president?!
GLORIA: Mr. Jefferson, this may come as a big surprise to
you, but women are much more oppressed than blacks.
HENRY JEFFERSON: I don't see no ghetto for women.
GLORIA: What do you call a kitchen?
LOUISE JEFFERSON: I call it a prison.
HENRY JEFFERSON: Stay out of this, Louise, you're
talking foolish.
LOUISE: Do you know what Shirley Chisholm said?
Shirley Chisholm said that she ran into more
discrimination because she was a woman than because
she was black.
HENRY JEFFERSON: That's why she didn't get elected.
LOUISE: Right.
HENRY: Because she was talking foolish.
......
GLORIA: Mr. Jefferson, you've come a long way,
baby. But from now on it's we women who have
to overcome.
...
Sounds like vintage 2008 dialogue, eh? Right out
of the Obama-Hillary headlines, right? Ahead of
its time, no doubt.
But it was also very much of and about the 1970s,
too. The fourth season was the last one of the
Nixon era, coming at a point when the show had
accumulated enormous momentum and was knocking it
out of the proverbial ballpark every week with
an astonishing level of consistency. And it also
includes some of the most frequently syndicated
episodes (e.g. Archie takes a bribe from a
corrupt lawyer in exchange for dropping charges
against a mugger from a prominent family; a
seemingly washed-up unemployed colleague
visits the Bunkers and ends up landing a
job as Archie's boss; Archie celebrates
his 50th birthday (though it's hard to believe
Bunker was as young as 50 in '74; he could've
easily passed for 64).
Still, it's hard to call it the best season, because
the first four were really almost equally brilliant,
with the consistency starting to lag only in the
final four seasons, though it's also true that
some of the very best episodes were in the later
seasons (particularly the sporadically
inspired eighth season).
The best way to define the prime of "All in the
Family" is to recall favorite episodes from
memory. Let's see, there was that one that
everybody remembers in which Sammy Davis Jr.
kisses Archie (second season); the one where
right-wingers paint a swastika on the Bunkers's
front door (season 3); the show in which Archie
gets addicted to speed (season 8) -- among many,
many others. Generally, you're naming stuff
from the first four years.
The first season had a fresh, almost shock-jock
quality.
The second was dominated by Maude, who really
sort of overwhelmed the show (she soon had
her own spin-off series).
The third and fourth seasons were almost a
"Rubber Soul"/"Revolver" peak, with the 4th
introducing neighbors Frank and Irene Lorenzo
(amazing that Vincent Gardenia was given the
role, given the fact that he had played a
completely different (and unforgettable) character,
a wife-swapping swinger who Edith naively
invited to the house in the previous season;
and George Jefferson and his family (who, like
Maude, also got a solo series).
The 4th was also arguably Rob Reiner's best season
though Reiner, creatively, will probably be
remembered by future generations less for
his role as the blustery Michael Stivic than
as the film maker behind one of the funniest
films ever made, "This Is Spinal Tap."
And the crazy energy of Frank Lorenzo truly
spices up things, though one gets the sense
that he was originally written as a gay
character but was instead converted into
something more mainstream: an Italian
husband who loved to cook and sing
(just as the core ensemble characters
of "Seinfeld" seem as if they had been
initially written as roommates).
As for Archie: if you watch footage of former
Chicago mayor Richard Daley Sr., you'll see such
a remarkable resemblance between Bunker and
Daley that you'll swear the former must have
been modeled on the latter, and in fact he
might've been. Today, Bunker almost seems
like a dead-on caricature of Daley, right
down to the mayor's famous malapropisms.
(The Bunker character was fully created in
1970, only a couple years after Daley became
a villain to many for orchestrating the
"police riot" of 1968 in Chicago.)
Other times, Bunker is played as Willy Loman
for laughs (sort of).
It's interesting that O'Connor plays Bunker in
such a way that a right-winger could watch the
show and say, "What's so funny about that?"
His non-punch line punch lines were that straight.
Also, you can see Bunker's influence on the
Tony Soprano character in "The Sopranos,"
particularly in the mob series's later
episodes. (David Remnick, writing in
TNY last year, showed a fine ear for
dialect when he once wrote that Tony
Soprano "sounded more Summit than
Newark" in the first season.
Very true, though I would add that
his accent and manner actually shifted
from Summit to near Hauser Street in
later episodes.)
Things began to decline on all fronts for
the series during the fall season
xxxxxxxxxxxin which Jimmy
Carter was elected president. By late '76, the
landscape, culturally and politically, had
shifted. Nixon the dictator had been
overthrown. The revolutionaries were victorious.
Liberal paranoia, which had given the series
some of its tension, had dissipated. And
"All in the Family," which had had a lock on the
number one spot for most of the decade,
dropped out of the top five for the first
time -- and permanently.
Today, you'd have to be at least thirty-six
years old to even vaguely remember a first-run
episode of "All in the Family." But I'd find it
hard to believe that someone unfamiliar with the
show wouldn't find any episode from the first
four seasons hilarious in a meaningful way.
But I digress. Paul
[above, photo credit: photographer unknown]
__________________________________
THE DAILLY DIGRESSION
for December 19 - 21, 2008
Regarding the Rick Warren Invocation
I took a job at the San Francisco Chronicle
as a staff writer in 2000, and one of my first
assignments was to write about TV coverage of
the upcoming presidential election and the
candidates. At the time, televised debates were
being scheduled and Reform Party candidate Pat
Buchanan wanted to be included in them. So I
contacted all the major and minor presidential
candidates and asked if they would comment for
my article, and the only one who responded was
Buchanan, who phoned to talk about why he thought
he should be allowed to participate in the
debates. Great, I thought; I can use the
interview for my story.
Ran into my boss at the water cooler around
an hour later and told her the mildly good news
that I had landed an interview with one of the
presidential candidates for my article.
"Which one?," she asked
"Pat Buchanan," I said.
She looked horrified and talked as if I
had committed some terrible faux pas.
She was the top features editor at the paper,
a mostly terrific editor who could sometimes pull
magic out of the air during deadlines (in contrast to
some of the lower-level editors, who
ranged from plodding to downright
dishonest, to be honest, though almost all
of 'em were very nice people. But that's another
story.)
Anyway, she was disappointed because she
didn't like Buchanan and didn't want to give him
any ink.
I explained to her that I, too, despised Buchanan's
politics (probably more than she did) and that I was
personally to the left of Nancy Pelosi on some issues,
but thought Buchanan should be heard, particularly
at a paper where predictable liberalism was rampant.
This was journalism, after all, not advocacy, and I
was writing a news story in which Buchanan was a
player, so it was important that I include
him, no matter what my personal feelings about
his politics were.
She, on the other hand, likely came away from
the discussion thinking, ohmygod, I just hired the
wrong guy; he's been on the job for only a few weeks
and already is giving podium to guys like Buchanan.
(My previous journalism experience, by the way, had
been entirely in New York and Los Angeles, not in
S.F., so maybe that had something to do with it. You
see, I was taught at Spy/Washington Post/Los Angeles
Times, etc. to follow the story where the facts
led you, without fear or favor. But they had a
different way of doing things at the Chron, where
editors openly gave preferential and biased
coverage to personal pals, which sort of made
me nauseous. What made me more nauseous is
that top editors there were well-connected
enough to spin the situation into a narrative
that favored them, not the truth.
To digress further for a moment, here's an example
of how the Chronicle would give favors to personal
pals in its reportage. Context is this: a publicist
wanted to control coverage of a story I was writing, and
I politely but firmly refused his request. Publicist,
it turned out, was a personal bud of a top editor
(which wouldn't have changed my response even if I'd
known that fact). My editor(who is still at the paper, by
the way) criticized me (in a written evaluation, no
less!) for not doing a favor for that publicist
pal of a top Chronicle editor. And he was completely
open about it, too! Here's the evaluation, written
by my editor:
This S.F. Chronicle evaluation left me wondering:
gee, I thought you weren't supposed to do favors for
personal pals in journalism. (Yes, my editor actually
said I shouldn't defy publicists!)
[click to enlarge]
Anyway, I've over-digressed here. But I'm telling
this story because I identify strongly, in my
own microcosmic way, with Barack
Obama's decision to let Rick Warren give the
invocation at the inauguration. It's like something
I would do (and, as I just said,
like something I did do -- in an analogous way,
on a far smaller scale -- shortly after being hired
as a writer for the Chronicle). In politics (as
in journalism), a real pro puts aside his own
personal beliefs and allows someone with whom
he disagrees to be heard.
And in politics, there's practical value to that.
Because the worst thing you can do for your own
cause is to muzzle the opposition, to make them
feel as if they're powerless and have
no voice, to make them scared of the new power
structure. Because that's when they'll lash out
the most, that's when they'll gather in church
groups in huge numbers and bury you
in the next election.
But if you bring them into the dialogue, make them
feel like they're not invisible to the new regime,
you stand a better chance of convincing them to
compromise on certain issues later on.
Like gay marriage. Hey, I voted against Prop 8 and
thought it was a real tragedy that it passed, and I
also think that opponents of gay marriage like
Warren are despicable and, frankly,
backward-thinking. (And I'm a hard-core hetero!)
But let's let the man speak. Because if we hear
him, there's a better chance he may hear us in the
future on issues like gay marriage, a better
chance we might be able to convince him of
the wisdom of our point of view.
However, if there is no dialogue, there can be no
persuasion, or little chance of it. Which is why
I also advocate sitting down and talking with Hugo
Chavez, Mamoud Ahmadinejad and the Castro brothers
(but not with an irrational, homicidal fanatic
like bin Laden).
Proponents of gay marriage: get shrewd. Bringing
Rick Warren to the party is probably the most practical
way to convince him and his people to soften their
opposition to gay civil rights.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for December 17, 2008
Poor sweet Caroline. Prior to today, she
had more mystique, breathed a more rarefied air,
exuded a more untouchable grace. Now she has
to lunch with non-entities like the mayor of
Schenectady. Sort of like J.D. Salinger deciding
to come out of seclusion to do in-store promotion
for his new novel. The enigma becomes diminished.
The legend becomes too accessible, familiar.
Suddenly the person is no longer a "get" interview
or a rare thrill to meet.
Interesting that her mom, at around the same age,
also decided to take a relatively conventional job,
book editor at Doubleday, where she -- believe it or
not! -- came into the office on Park Ave.
on a regular basis to work (that's where I actually
saw her once, in the editorial offices there;
Jacqueline Kennedy remains the only Kennedy I've
ever seen up close and in person).
Not that the U.S. Senate is a "conventional" job,
though lots of conventional or at least politically
unremarkable people have held the position, among
them: Jean Carnahan (qualification: wife of a
governor), Hillary Clinton (qualification (at the
time): wife of a president) and Liddy Dole (qualification:
wife of a senator). So, in that context, "daughter
of a legendary president" makes her as qualified
as many who have recently served.
Let's face it, as I've written before (to quote my
Digression of November 16, 2008, posted below):
"Truth be told, the Senate has always been an easy
job. Anybody can be a Senator (though it'$ very hard
to actually be elected to the post). Politicians'
relatives without any experience in government have
ascended to the job and performed well. Because it's
a position in which your main responsibility is
to simply vote the party line (unless you're in the
leadership, where you're co-creating the party line).
Is there any other position in which you can
be away from work for years and have nothing
go awry?"
Yeah, Caroline may not be an arm twister or
wheeler dealer like lots of powers of the Senate
have been, and she's seems a bit too private for
politics, but she does bring a personal clout
and a powerful name to the table, which can go a
long way toward making her an effective member
of the legislative branch. Plus, she's exactly as
progressive as outgoing Senator Clinton has been
and enjoys an excellent working relationship with
president-elect Obama.
Senator Caroline Kennedy? We could do (and have
done) a lot worse, and it would be difficult to
do much better.
But I digress. Paul
______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for December 14 - 15, 2008
One of the Problems with the Car Business
Ah, remember when car designs were memorable?
I know almost nothing about cars or the car industry,
but couldn't help getting caught up in the discussion
on this morning's Chris Matthews television show,
when everyone talked about their favorite cars.
I must admit I'm in solidarity with Andrew Sullivan of
The Atlantic, who, like me, doesn't drive and doesn't
know or care much about cars.
Oh, I used to drive, and still can, but don't, largely
because I didn't need a car when I lived in and around
Manhattan in the decades after graduating from college
and so got into the habit of not being dependent on
a car. Today, as a Bay Area resident, I'm perfectly
content with BART and its various forms of connecting
transportation, thank you very much.
But I'm certainly not oblivious to the vehicles
around me every day and suspect that one of the
problems with the car business today is its
lack of imagination.
When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, there used
to be really snazzy cars. When friends and neighbors
would visit, our suburban driveway always seemed to
be packed with lively MGs and Triumph Spitfires and
Fiats and even an Aston Martin or two. They had
style, character, personality, pizzazz, a sense
of fun. (And some even had that great lost
guilty pleasure: a fifth gear!)
And now everything is a Toyota. Not to knock
Toyotas, because If I were in the market for an
affordable car, I might end up with a Toyota, too.
(Because good luck getting parts
or repair service for an Aston Martin in this
part of the world in the 21st century.)
But cars today seem to look the same: generic,
bland, utilitarian, un-fun, with almost
interchangeable designs.
What happened to exciting design ideas? In the
1960s, even American cars had a sense of conceptual
daring, in their way. I remember when one of our
neighbors of the 1960s drove up with a brand new
Corvette (with retractable headlights) for the first
time, and all the kids (and adults) crowded around
it as if it were a UFO that had just landed on
Courtney Drive.
What happened to the wow-factor?
The only vitality I see out there in mainstream cars
is in the VW Beetle, whose semi-circular shape
is almost pop art in spirit. Even though they've been
around for awhile, they still look innovative
in contrast to the blandscape on the highways.
In the current homogeneous environment, even French
cars, once widely derided, are now a welcome contrast
to the vehicular sameness out there.
At least when you see a Citroen or a Deux Cheveux,
you're seeing something unusual and memorable
and quite unlike anything else, even if its design
doesn't quite fully work. (As writer Henry Biggs put
it on the MSN website: "...the French do occasionally
build cars if only to have something to burn next
time they decide to riot").
Look, I'm certainly not saying American car
makers should emulate the French, but if you were to
combine the U.S. utilitarian spirit with
Japanese efficiency and a European sense of
innovation in design, Detroit might actually come up
with something people want to buy. (Nowadays,
it's easy to spot an American car; just look
for a bulky vehicle that overdoes the steel and
chrome.)
Me, I prefer daring to safe mediocrity anyday.
Until the industry puts some inspiraton and
surprise back into its cars, I'll continue
to take the BART.
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for December 12, 2008
Kudos to that Reuters reporter for being the only one
at yesterday's Obama press conference to ask the
president-elect about his health care plan.
The other esteemed journalists -- all fully insured,
I'm sure -- asked about Governor Milosevic, or whatever
his name is. Perhaps uninsured reporters, who more
fully understand what a callous horror the U.S. health
care system has become, should be assigned to ask
questions at the next Q&A session, because the
insured might not completely appreciate what a
five-alarm crisis this is for millions of Americans.
Yeah, I fully understand that the question from
the CBS reporter needed to be asked, but it's hardly
a tell-tale detail that Blagojevich somehow knew
that Obama wouldn't play ball in the governor's
nefarious game. The governor, like the rest of
us, knew Obama's reputation for honesty and, hence,
knew not to ask him to engage in horse-trading.
In any profession, in politics or elsewhere, a
person sets an ethical tone that tends to either
invite or discourage certain solicitations and
associations. And smart staffers can easily see
where a conversation is going and stop it before
it goes there.
In any event, the Blagojevich tapes are
exculpatory toward Obama. The real wonder -- and
it's damn near a secular miracle to anyone who
has been an honest professional in the midst
of corruption -- is how Obama managed to rise through
the ranks of Chicago politics and come out as
a genuine model of high-minded ethics. Amazing.
Less amazing is the shameful behavior of Jesse
Jackson, Jr., who seemed to go along to get
along, which is what most people do, unfortunately,
in such circumstances, because whistleblowing
requires enormous courage and risk. My own
hard-earned experience tells me that
when you blow the whistle on someone powerful --
whether in politics or journalism or anywhere
else -- the following generally happens: you
get fired, then smeared, then blacklisted in
your profession, and then the real bad luck
begins.
But I digress. Paul
________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for December 7, 2008
Does "Wall-E" Deserve a Best Pic Oscar Nom?
Wall-E: a star is boring? (photo from Pixar)
I'd really like to like "Wall-E." A lot of critics
I respect rave about it. But after watching it
two-and-a half times, I still find it a
bona fide bore.
The first time I viewed it, I fell asleep around forty
minutes in. The second time, I saw the whole thing
and got into it a bit more, but was still astonished
by how uninteresting it was for such a highly-praised
film.
Maybe it's me, I thought. Maybe I wasn't in the
right mood for it. So I tried it a third
time -- with 10 minutes of deleted scenes -- and
was still yawning throughout.
Problem is its occasionally flat visual effect, a
constricted style that looks like a computer screen
for much of the film. I don't care what novel
storyline or earnest message a film maker
intends, because intention and concept scarcely
matter, if there is no visual magic on the screen
(and there's very little here).
To be sure, there are some inspired moments, around
an hour in, during the space sequences, which soar
like no others here. But otherwise, it's just a
lot of mechanized stop-start motion that expresses
little except an overall lack of flow.
As for the love story, it's less Chaplin-esque than
"E.T."-esque, and hard to praise because it consists
mostly of Walle-E screaming "Eve" and Eve yelling
"Wall-E" (the name Wall-E is shouted at least a
hundred times or so, or so it seems).
The good news: if you cut the visuals and just
listen to the audio portion, with all its whirs
and beeps and musical loops and repetition,
it sounds sort of like a fascinating piece of avant
garde music, which makes it more deserving
of a Grammy than of an Oscar, though the
film will probably be nominated for best picture
on January 22nd.
But I digress. Paul
__________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for December 4, 2008
I was just in San Francisco a few hours ago and
shot a few photos. Here they are:
Light through stained glass windows falls on columns
in Grace Cathedral in S.F.
* * *
A cat sleeps on a snoozing dog on Powell Street in S.F.
-- something you don't see every day! (Almost lost in the
cropping: a mouse is actually atop the cat.)
* * *
This is what the holiday season looks like in S.F.'s
Union Square.
* * *
And here are a few photos I shot several weeks ago:
A squirrel feasts on Halloween leftovers.
* * *
A voter (with child) on presidential election day,
at a polling place in Berkeley, Calif.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 28 - 29, 2008
If you're looking to watch some DVDs over
this Thanksgiving weekend, here are my
reviews of a few movies I've seen (or re-seen)
recently:
Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist"
I tend to watch Bertolucci's films primarily for
their visual beauty.
Is there a more seductive light blue anywhere in the
world, offscreen or on, than the one in "The Conformist"?
It's slightly darker than powder blue, like a
light twilight snow in Central Park, or the comic book
blue of "Ghost World," an almost blue white (just
look at the scenes in the Paris store).
For deep blue, I go to Coppola, particularly the first
"Godfather" film, which looks the way it does largely
because Bertolucci (and ace cinematographer Vittorio
Storaro) led the way years earlier with "The
Conformist." Coppola's dark blue is that of the sky
at 30,000 feet, or of Frank Sinatra's eyes up close
(which I was lucky enough to have seen in person, from
around a foot away, on a movie set in 1980). But
I digress.
I'm more impressed with "The Conformist" as a fest of
shadow and color, that by-product of light, than as a
character study of a conformist. The film is remarkable
for, among other things, the way it makes shadows look
like they seemed in childhood, as huge mysterious things
that you could get lost in. His style of manipulating
shadow and light, later used so revealingly
by Coppola in the opening sequences of "The Godfather"
to suggest a contrast between good and evil, furthers a
stylistic throughline that appears to come from no less
than Caravaggio.
The film is also about the low angle of the sunlight
through the fog in the forest during the climactic
murder scene (even if that sequence has a continuity
gaffe; the snow disappears just as the professor
gets out of the car), a setting that is remarkably
similar to the "Pine Barrens" episode of "The Sopranos."
As a portrait of a conformist, however, it is lacking. If
Bertolucci, revising the Moravia novel, is trying to draw
a character who goes along to get along, who blends in
chameleon-like with whoever he happens to be with, who
takes the path of greatest agreement and least
resistance, then the title character, Marcello Clerici,
is not such a person.
Clerici is actually a sometimes contrarian and
contentious sort of guy, deeply committed to an
evil political ideology. He may be callous,
conscienceless and amoral but is far from chronically
malleable; after all, he argues with a priest during
confession, debates politics with his former
professor at dinner, and refuses to join in a group
dance even when surrounded by dozens
of dancers in Paris. Leonard Zelig he ain't (in
fact, "Zelig" could have easily been titled
"The Conformist").
Remember, the premise of the film is this: because
Clerici killed someone when he was kid (or he thinks
he killed someone), his life is shaped by his desire to
be normal and to fit in amongst non-homicidal regular
people. But the main problem with that premise is
that it doesn't follow that he would then commit
himself to a political organization that orders him
to kill political opponents. If the concept is that
Clerici wants to show how much he is an average
everyman non-killer, then wouldn't killing someone
be exactly the opposite of the conformity he's
supposedly trying to achieve?
Still, it's always welcome to see a great film that
exposes the cruelty and savagery of Nazi and
Nazi-associated fascists of the thirties and forties.
But for all the talk in the film about Mussolini's
people forcing dissidents to drink castor oil -- sort
of an execution by diarrhea, in some cases -- there
is not much shown onscreen of the imaginative
sadism of the blackshirts (the way there is in
Wertmuller's films or in Pasolini's scalding "Salo,"
which not only shows the trauma of torture but actually
traumatizes anyone who dares to view that film).
Dominique Sanda's portrayal of someone who
knows she is about to be murdered may be traumatic
enough for most viewers. Still, the most salient and
memorable imagery in "The Conformist" relates to light,
shadow, blue.
P.S. -- How telling that Bertolucci uses the E.U.R.
subdivision in Rome as the setting for a mental
institution, which is what it looks like today, for
the most part. Rather than the ultramodern city
of the future, the E.U.R. now looks clinical, cold,
sterile, like that odd building in Columbus Circle
(2 Columbus Circle) in Manhattan that nobody has
ever seemed to find a use for. (I was more
impressed with the E.U.R. as a kid than I am now.)
Also, the Vittorio Emanuele monument appears in
the picture, making me wish the Italian government
would dismantle it, piece by piece, and bury
it in landfill off the coast of Ostia Antica.
Look, I love most of Rome but can't think of
another major monument in a western European
city as overstated, pompous and arrogant.
(It would be impossible to imagine it in Florence.)
P.S. -- Some DVDs of "The Conformist" include
interesting interviews with both Bertolucci and
Storaro that are well worth checking out, if only
because of Bertolucci's characteristic wisdom and
insight. Here's what he says about directing actors:
"I always tell my actors, 'Please surprise me.
I need to be fed with surprises. Surprises are
nourishing.'" Very refreshing (particularly in
contrast to a dim editor I once worked with at
a Bay Area newspaper who used to tell me and other
writers to try to do the opposite -- "no surprises"
was his motto).
* * * *
Woody Allen's "Scoop"
I'm certainly thrilled with the unexpected
resurgence of Woody Allen's career in the
2000s and loved "Match Point" and am looking
forward to "Whatever Works." But "Scoop" falls
into the lower tier of Allen films
that are well-crafted but not really very funny.
I can't imagine that any serious critic would
recommend this one for its hilarity. It's sort of
like a U.K.-based re-make of the slight "Manhattan
Murder Mystery" with recycled bits from "Broadway
Danny Rose" and "Small Time Crooks." Sure, there
are some suspenseful moments -- the scene on the
boat is chilling -- but not all the movie's supposedly
tell-tale details hold up to scrutiny (e.g., why
would the murderer have hidden the key in a hiding
place that he knew Scarlett Johansson
had already discovered?). But I loved the Camusian
death at the end.
* * * *
"The Devil Wears Prada"
One of the great things about "Prada" is that
the audience becomes educated, along with Anne
Hathaway's fashion neophyte, about haute couture.
For example, in the beginning, I looked at
Hathaway's blue sweater and, with her dark hair
against it, thought it looked very pretty. But
Meryl Streep's character, with a rarefied
level of refinement in high fashion that Hathaway
and most people in the audience don't have, sees
right to the core of her fashion flaw, calling it
that "lumpy blue sweater." And gradually, Hathaway
(and moviegoers) realize that Streep
is...right. It is bulky. After Streep's description,
I couldn't see that sweater the same way for the rest
of the film.
Streep truly tops herself here, perfecting the
throw-of-the-jacket at either an assistant or a chair,
both of which she treats with equal disregard, and
the dry slicing put-down ("Is there a reason my coffee
isn't here? Did she go to Rwanda for the beans?").
"Prada" is entertaining and satisfying throughout, and
some of the deleted scenes are as terrific as the ones
that made the cut.
* * *
"TV Classic Westerns"
For those curious about the westerns that began
to sprout on television around fifty years ago, a
variety-pack of episodes from four series of that
era is available on DVD. Though there's no
"Gunsmoke," "Rawhide" or "Bonanza," there are
"Death Valley Days," "The Rifleman," "Bat Masterson"
and "Wagon Train."
The latter was the most popular of those included here,
or at least it was until ABC Entertainment, in an
incredibly boneheaded decision, decided to expand
it, a la "The Virginian," to 90 minutes, thereby
inadvertently killing it. (In one of the most
spectacular falls in ratings that I'm aware of, it
went from #1 to unranked in the top
twenty in a matter of months.)
"Death Valley Days" is probably the worst of them,
a series so old-fashioned it could pass for what
television might have looked like in the 19th
century, had there been TV in the 19th century.
"Bat Masterson" was the most eccentric and stylish
of them, what with Masterson's cane and dapper duds.
But the problem with the cane gimmick was that all
the bad guys always had guns, so showdowns inevitably
devolved into traditional gunfights in which the cane
was irrelevant or merely ornamental.
"The Rifleman," a succinct (half hour) weeknight series,
had a welcome punk edge to it and was almost, but not quite,
Eastwoodian in sensibility.
I never watched any of this stuff when I was a kid, which
explains my current curiosity, now satisfied enough to tell
me I didn't miss much back when.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 25 - 26, 2008
Season 7 Starts Shooting in a Couple Weeks
Reading "Mondo Freaks."
Two reasons to be cheerful in 2009: there'll
be a 7th season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
and a new Woody Allen movie, "Whatever Works,"
also starring Larry David.
Shooting starts on the next ten episodes of "Curb" in
a week or two, though there are no credible leaks on
whether Larry and Loretta become a permanent item or
if Cheryl remains estranged from her ex.
Those who have yet to check out the 6th season have a
treat awaiting them, because it may be the best so far, or
at least it includes the (arguably) funniest "Curb" episode
ever, "The Freak Book," which makes me laugh just thinking
about it. Yeah, I know, there have been plenty of other
contendas for best episode, to wit: "Lewis Needs a Kidney,"
which actually may be better and more resonant than
"Freak Book"; and such slighter, but only
slightly slighter, episodes like the hilarious "Krazee-Eyez
Killa" and "The Car Pool Lane" (and "The Car Salesman"
and "The Wire" and "The Larry David Sandwich," in which
Larry, while inside his wife, interrupts sex with her
because he can't resist taking a phone call
from his overweight manager Jeff, with whom he
seems to have better chemistry).
I vote for "Freak Book" because of the seemingly
genuine enthusiasm that Larry and Jeff have for
"Mondo Freaks," an exploitative coffee-table book
full of pictures of physically deformed people.
The second disc of Season Six, with only four
episodes, may seem skimpy at first, but it packs
a bigger wallop than most "Curb" double-discs.
Only problem with "Curb," which is otherwise close to
perfect, is its occasional plot deficiencies, storylines
that are often jerry-built, a weakness it shares with
"Seinfeld," which, as hilarious as it was, could never
really carry an adequate plot over the span of even
two episodes (remember the contrived mail truck/golf club
bit?). And that same sense of contrivance is apparent
in, say, the story in which Larry stages the mugging of
his wife's shrink, which leaves the viewer unwilling to
suspend disbelief -- and wondering why the police wouldn't
want to talk with the mugging victim and the main witness.
And then there are promising plots not taken, like
the one in which Leon robs people of their
jerseys, thinking they're Larry's jerseys; that
story could've easily bloomed into one in which Larry
winds up in a legal mess, accused of conspiracy to
commit strong arm robbery, because of Leon's
well-intentioned overstepping.
But "Curb" isn't primarily about plot but about
a set of tangled, complicated relationships that crash
and burn and recombine and uncombine and resurge
-- and sometimes resurge and disintegrate at the
same time, which is to say it's as close to life itself
as a great sit-com can get.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 20, 2008
Well, it's official. The only ones who don't love
Barack Obama are the religious right of America and
the religious right of Islam. Al Zawahiri
just sent his latest right-wing rant from the
15th century and -- surprise! -- he doesn't like the
progressive modern policies of Obama.
For those who don't remember al Zawahiri, he's
bin Laden's number two, a physician (albeit a
physician who hasn't yet learned that being overweight
is a big health risk). And I don't think he fully
understands that his and bin Laden's medical prognoses
have, with the election of Obama, just taken a
turn for the far worse.
You see, al Zawahiri, the president-elect has said
repeatedly that if his soldiers catch you guys in
their crosshairs, they have orders to shoot to kill.
And Obama is way smarter than Bush and more likely to
figure out where you're hiding. So get your cave in
order, because your reactionary ways are a-comin' to
a close.
As I've said before, I've got a bottle of marvelous dry
Tuscan red all ready for the great day when bin Laden is
declared dead. Can't wait.
Sure, we should and can negotiate with a lot of
despots we disagree with (e.g., even Ahmadinejad,
Chavez, Castro, etc.). But not with bin Laden or
al Qaeda.
The reason? They targeted apolitical civilians, Muslims
among them, in a non-wartime context. Civilians.
Deliberately. I still can't get my mind around what
those guys did in '01. Even in wartime, when
civilians are killed, they are killed by accident, not
by design.
And by the way, al Zawahiri, you have your facts
wrong about Obama's father. Yes, his dad did begin
life as a Muslim, but as soon as he got a first-class
education, at Harvard and elsewhere, he quickly learned
that all that religious stuff was just bullshit and
soon abandoned theism. Smart guy.
In any event, his son is obviously his own man and
was not raised by his father but by people who
were Christians, which accounts for his Christian
faith.
But I digress. Paul
____________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 18, 2008
Here's the best (and funniest) lede paragraph I've
seen in a long, long time. It was written
by Burkhard Bilger and appears in the new issue of
The New Yorker:
"Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage
when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years,
herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer,
drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken
rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers;
the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted
themselves.)"
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 17, 2008
Mean Girl
It's hard to believe some can't see the fact that
Sarah Palin's national political career is sooo over.
She may be a presidential contender in 2012? Are you
joking? You think she might team up with Dan Quayle?
Honey, she just came off a stint as America's newest
National Laughingstock. People tune in to watch her
only because they want to see her screw up on camera.
They watch her the way they watch TV Bloopers.
For cheap kicks. To feel good about their own
failings. Her legacy -- forever -- is as Tina Fey's
sidekick (and, man, has the bottom dropped out of the
Palin-related humor industry, no?). Sarah,
we're not laughing with you, we're laughing at you.
Further, your meanness toward uninsured sick people
who need to see a doctor makes you an unsympathetic
figure. Go back to teaching creationism or
whatever you were doing before.
But I digress. Paul
______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 16, 2008
A Sea of Udalls
Nobody's noticing it, but the U.S. Senate is
gradually being depleted of its
greatest talents.
Many of the leading lions will be gone in the next
Senate. Our best Senator, Barack Obama, has
found another job. Congress's greatest foreign
policy mind, Joe Biden, has also found employment
elsewhere. Ted Kennedy, sadly, has cancer and
is not expected to live far into the new year. Hillary
Clinton is in negotiations to leave her job, and so
is John Kerry. Even Dianne Feinstein is seriously
considering a gubernatorial run. (And since his
political sex-change operation, Joe Lieberman has
been of little use to either side.)
So who's left to perform before the C-Span cameras?
Two new Udalls and a Stuart Smalley (if we're lucky).
The Senate is now officially 2% Udall.
Truth be told, the Senate has always been an easy
job. Anybody can be a Senator (though it'$ very hard
to actually be elected to the post). Politicians'
relatives without any experience in government have
ascended to the job and performed well. Because it's
a position in which your main responsibility is
to simply vote the party line (unless you're in the
leadership, where you're co-creating the party line).
Is there any other position in which you can
be away from work for years and have nothing
go awry?
Still, there's at least one lion left, John McCain,
and here's my suggestion: appoint McCain Secretary
of Defense. No, hear me out. Do what some businesses
sometimes do. Appoint your main rival to a post
that you know he could not turn down. And then, a
year or so later, replace him with someone else, saying
that you and McCain don't see eye-to-eye with regard
to, say, the Kurdistan separatist crisis, or
whatever the crisis du jour is in a year. By so
doing, you've effectively fired McCain from the
Senate and put him into early (or earlier)
retirement. (Sort of like what Eisner did to
Ovitz on a different playing field.)
Remember, cabinet officials do not get tenure. This
is not a post at the Kennedy School of Government.
And this ain't a luxurious six-year Senate stint
from which you cannot be fired (even if you're caught
in a restroom trying to kiss an undercover dick, so
it turns out). Look at how long cabinet officials
have lasted in previous administrations. Mere months,
in some cases. A best case scenario -- and this is
stretching it -- is eight years, though most don't
last that long at all. And if you think the position
will bring immortality or household name recognition:
anybody remember William P. Rogers? George von L.
Meyer? Cornelius N. Bliss? (I think Cornelius
used his middle initial in order to distinguish
himself from the many others named Cornelius Bliss.)
On the upside, an Obama cabinet official does get
the satisfaction of serving someone who may turn
out to be the greatest president since Lincoln
himself. Or you can stay in Congress and risk
getting lost in a sea of Udalls.
But I digress. Paul
_________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 12 - 13, 2007
The Ten Commandments have some new competition.
A religious group in Utah has been promoting its
own alternative to the Commandments, called The
Seven Aphorisms, and wants to erect an Aphorisms
monument on public land, which is now the
subject of a hot new case before the U.S.
Supreme Court.
I, too, have my own alternative to the
Commandments, or rather an edit of the
Commandments that I'd like to share.
After all, the Commandments must have been
tough to edit back when they were first written
on stone tablets, which are nothing like the nifty
word processors we have today. If laptops
had been around in Moses's time, here's what a
good editor might have done:
1. I am the Lord thy God: Thou shalt not have false gods before me.
This is your lede commandment?! Wording this
in the first person makes God seem immodest -- and
as if it's a pick-up line at an orgy ("Hey, baby,
you can't worship anybody but me"). If you're
going to keep this as a commandment, find a way
to re-word it in the third person, even if you
have to quote someone else saying it
(e.g., "Thou shall not have false gods before
Him").
---
2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Look, if you're going to be The Lord, you've
got to learn to take some heat and nasty words every
now and then. Scrap this Commandment.
---
3. Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath.
Awkward wording, to say the least. Also:
by "holy," I assume you mean "suspend all activity."
You're essentially giving everyone a license to be
lazy on a particular day and feel good about it.
No can do. Schedules are too tight in the modern
age. Scrap this one, too.
---
4. Honor thy father and mother.
Generally a good idea. But what about
the millions of people whose mothers and fathers
are not worthy of honor, who are
Nazis and rapists? Re-write.
---
5. Thou shall not kill.
In all instances? Thou shall not kill Hitler?
Thou shall not kill bin Laden? Thou shall kill in
wartime? Thou shall not kill in self-defense? Too
many exceptions to the rule. Go back and make it more
specific.
---
6. Thou shall not commit adultery
What if it's an open marriage and the husband
doesn't mind if you have relations with his significant
other? Too broad.
---
7. Thou shall not steal
Again, generally a good idea but too vague.
It's legal, for example, to steal something that
was stolen from you. During the French and
American revolutions, revolutionaries stole
almost all the property of the ruling elites.
Keep but modify.
---
8. Thou shall not bear false witness against a neighbor.
It's hard to disagree with this one, though
Ben Franklin said it better with "Honesty is the
best policy."
---
9. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife.
What's wrong with a little coveting now and
then? I know, coveting can lead to harder things
(which is what I've been hoping for lately!).
Also, does this apply to thy neighbor's husband?
Ditch this one.
--
10. Thou Shall not covet thy neighbor's goods.
This commandment gets outshone by the much
kinkier "neighbor's wife" commandment. Lacks pizazz.
Try combining this one with the 9th commandment.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- Tuned in to the CMAs earlier tonight, hoping
to catch a performance by Alison Krauss, but, alas,
she wasn't scheduled to play. I did hear Martina
McBride, who sort of swept me away. Every time I hear
McBride, I think, what an amazingly natural singer she is,
natural as a gale.
* * *
P.S. -- With the regard to the case of possible
plagiarism by Neil Halstead of my work (which I wrote
about in the November 10th Digression, below), let me
make this clear. If I sense that he or his people are trying
to reverse this situation and make it look like the
opposite is true, then I will definitely take this
dispute to a more formal venue so that the record
will be clear about this. (Hard drives and copyrights
don't lie.)
__________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 11, 2008
Now that the election results have been
mostly finalized, how did the Daily Digression
do with its pre-election predictions?
Let's see, I speculated about several possible
scenarios but wrote that the most likely outcome
would be 353 votes for Obama, 184 for McCain. The
final tally was 365 to 173, so I was close.
I also tried to predict the outcomes of the 11 main
competitive U.S. Senate races, and I was correct
about nine of them (though Chambliss still has to face
a run-off), and wrong about only one of the 11. (The
Franken-Coleman contest is still in dispute.)
And at what time did I call it for Obama on
election night? Well, I didn't post anything on the
Digression last Tuesday night, but I did phone a good
friend, an Obama supporter, to tell her that Obama
had just won the election. According to my cellphone
records, I made that call at 9:31pm (ET) Tuesday, more
than a half hour before the tv networks projected his win.
It was obvious Obama couldn't possibly lose once he'd
won Ohio.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 10, 2008
Last night someone made me aware of a new song,
"Witless or Wise" by a guy named Neil Halstead,
that seems to appropriate the melody of one
my own original songs. And sure enough, his song
does appear to be way too close in melody to one of my own
songs, "I Don't Know If I Know You No More," which
I posted on March 22, 2008, on the vibecat website
and kept up on the site for several months. It's
now on my album "75 Songs (Part 3)." Halstead's
similar song was released many months afterwards.
(I sent an MP3 of it to myself on 3/22/08 by email,
so that's its copyright date; registered copyright
was slightly later.) If anyone has heard both
his track and mine, I'd like to hear what you think
(at pliorio@aol.com).
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 9, 2008
The Rise of Self-Interested Progressivism
Look, I don't want to ruin anybody's Kumbaya moment,
but the stats are in: 70% of black voters in California
voted for a proposition banning gay marriage last
Tuesday, according to exit poll research by Edison Media
and Mitofsky International. And that means that the vast
majority of black supporters of Barack Obama in the
blue Golden State support their own civil rights but not
necessarily the civil rights of other groups.
There has been a lot of self-interested progressivism
in the last couple decades. When was the last time
gays marched for Chicano workers' rights
in the Castro? When was the last time blacks marched
for gay rights in Harlem? When was the last time
Hispanics demonstrated about environmental issues
in L.A.? When was the last time eco-activists
demonstrated for the single-payer health plan?
When was the last time black men marched in favor
of abortion rights?
It's almost comic to think those groups would do
any of that.
And it wasn't always that way. Back in the 1960s, Martin
Luther King used to speak out against the Vietnam War
almost as much as he spoke out on racial issues. Student
anti-war activists would march in support of
Cesar Chavez's farmworkers union in those days.
And Chavez's people would join the black civil rights
struggle.
There was a lot of welcome cross-pollination among
activists then. And people were not as concerned
with their own demographic groups as they were
with...justice.
And that just ain't the case anymore.
A contrast. When Rubin Carter was falsely accused of
murder in the 1970s, I and other whites supported
his struggle for justice. Sure, Carter was no saint,
but he was clearly falsely accused.
When Reade Seligmann was falsely accused of having
committed a monstrous assault in 2006, I similarly
supported his struggle for justice. But because his
accuser was black, most blacks at the time sided with
the persecutor -- Crystal Mangum -- not with the
persecuted in that case. (Yeah, the Mangum case is
a divisive issue -- which is all the more reason to
bring it up, so that all its associated issues can be
properly resolved. By definition, virtually every
struggle against injustice has been divisive.)
What happened to the thirst for justice in that
instance? What happened to the quest for truth?
One of the main illnesses in this country is the
attitude of my-ethnic-group-right-or-wrong. If an
Italian-American mafioso is accused of murder,
some Italian-Americans in certain neighborhoods will
not only stand up for the guy, whether he did it or not,
but they'll cite his prosecution as a case of ethnic
prejudice. He's one of us, they'll say.
Similarly, if a common black thug robs some guy
at gunpoint, some blacks will not only back the
criminal, whether he did it or not, but they'll actually
try to turn it into a political cause. He's one of us,
they'll say.
That tendency must stop. Period.
Instead of blindly siding with your own ethnic or
demographic groups from now on, why not try siding
with the person who is in the right, whose cause is
just? Instead of supporting the person
whose skin color most resembles your own, why not
back the person who is actually telling the truth?
That's the revolution that needs to happen next.
I don't think the gay guy who was just un-married
by Obama supporters -- who told him, "No, you
can't" -- wants to sing "Kumbaya" just yet.
But I digress. Paul
________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 7 - 8, 2008
Loose Thoughts on the New Era
1. If the current tableau out there were
"The Godfather": Bush would be Sonny Corleone;
Obama would be Michael Corleone; Lieberman
would be either Fredo or, more accurately, the
Abe Vigoda character at the end of the first film
("For old time's sake, Tom?"); Joe Biden would
be consigliere Tom Hagen; Rahm Emanuel would
be Clemenza; Oprah would be Johnny Fontane; Bill
Clinton would be Moe Green ("talking loud, saying
stupid things") or Jack Woltz; John McCain would be
Capt. McCluskey; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be Virgil
Sollozzo ("I hope you're not a hothead like Sonny");
Hyman Roth (the good side of Hyman Roth) would be
Warren Buffett; Jeremiah Wright would be Frank
Pentangeli ("an old man and too much wine");
Jesse Jackson would be Johnny Ola; Eliot
Spitzer would be Pat Geary; and the Talia Shire
character would be Hillary Clinton at the end
of the first film when she suspects
Obama had something to do with the death of her
husband's political reputation ("she's hysterical").
2. Joe Lieberman should not be let back in, and not
just because he was a traitor. If his seat had been up
this year, he would have been soundly defeated, so his
views do not reflect the current will of the people.
(Harry Reid is one steely guy, eh? Exactly what the
Dems need right now.)
3. Bob Dylan should be the poet selected to read
at the inauguration. Or Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
(Or maybe Melle Mel.)
4. Whenever possible, we should ditch the term
African-American and instead refer to the nation, not
the continent, from which the person's ancestors came.
Obama is a Kenyan-American. Most "African-Americans" are
actually west African-Americans (very few came from
Kenya centuries ago). The diversity on the African continent
is the same as the diversity on the European one. I'm not
called a European-American, but rather
an Italian-American (or someone with an Italian-American last
name), and those who came from the African continent should be
given the same level of individuality.
5. If a universal health care bill is not passed within
the first six to nine months of the Obama administration,
citizens can fairly assume that the same gridlock of '93
is in effect, that the revolution is stalled in traffic.
People should then start taking extreme civil disobedience
actions, e.g., by going to the primary residences of the
top executives of pharmaceutical and insurance companies
(and others who make profits off the sick) and staging
raucous demonstrations in front of their homes on
a regular basis. For starters.
6. The White House family dog should be a...beagle.
7. The rich bums who have run major financial services
firms into the ground should either be fired or be forced to
work at the federal minimum wage without health benefits,
pensions or bonuses -- if their companies want to see a
dime of bail-out money. That should be one of the
conditions. Let them work as their workers work. These
executives obviously have no special skills worth paying
for; if their MBAs and business experience led to
the collapse of their companies, then we can conclude
that even an unskilled, rank amateur could've
taken the CEO's job and done at least as
well. Start paying those guys what they're really
worth, not what they can unfairly leverage.
8. Maureen Dowd, we love you, but please, stop
flirting with Obama. He just don't dig you, babe.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- I'm a big fan of the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM)
and highly recommend the "Mahjong" exhibit currently
on display there, but I did ridicule their
Mao-era propaganda exhibit in a previous Digression
(see column of October 9), so I wondered idly whether
I'd be hassled by some disgruntled staffer
when I visited there yesterday.
Sure enough -- and it might be sheer coincidence -- I was.
While strolling slowly through the gallery, some
diminutive security person, who didn't identify herself
as a staffer, stood in front of my path, and I walked on
anyway, and she stood in front of that path, too, as
if she were a crazy person. So I walked on anyway
again, but she stood in that path, too, before
she finally identified herself as an usher or whatever
she was and asked that I check in my bag at the front
entrance, which I promptly did. (I bring this up
only because these sorts of things tend to get
distorted in the re-telling, don't they?) Note to
BAM: in the future, you guys should consider handling
such requests from a distance, clearly identifying yourself
as a staffer -- and not by standing in the way of
a patron.
______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 5, 2008
So You Say You Want a Revolution!
It takes a nation of millions... [photo by Paul Iorio.]
But I digress. Paul Iorio
[above, photo by Paul Iorio of Obama speaking in Oakland in early 2007.]
P.S. -- Now that a racial barrier has finally
fallen, it's time to move toward taking down other
barriers -- for example, creating a climate in which
there are political candidates who don't think the
concept of god makes a whole lot of sense. (Oh, yeah,
and you also said an African-American could never
be elected president in this generation!) That's
the direction the human race is going, after all. The
defeat of Liddy Dole is a really good sign. She
called her opponent godless, and some voters said,
even if that were true, what's wrong with godless?
There's a tendency among some progressives to say,
let's liberate every unpopular or minority group
EXCEPT this one, the non-theists, because they're
too unpopular. If the black and gay civil rights
movements have taught us anything, it's that there
are always new brave stands to take, new mountaintops
to climb, new resistances to overcome in each new
generation. Let's start by taking "under god" out
of the Pledge, so that non-theist school kids don't
have their rights trampled.
* * *
P.S. -- One point that obsververs haven't brought
up is that the election of Obama is more a triumph
of the immigrant narrative than of the dominant
African-American narrative in this country. After all,
Obama was the son of a father who was born in another
country -- Kenya -- and came to the U.S. relatively
recently (1960s), which puts the president-elect in the
tradition of other first generation politicians
who attained high office. His late father was,
effectively, an immigrant to the U.S. -- at
least for the six years or so in which he lived
here as a student. (Or you could see him as a
Kenyan who briefly lived in the U.S.) Further,
Obama's dad and paternal ancestors did not live
through the various liberation struggles in the
United States over the centuries and decades and
never suffered as slaves here. So Obama's narrative
is quite different from the main African-American
storyline in the U.S.
______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 4, 2008
Predicting Today's Presidential, Senate Races
My best prediction, based on all the major polls
and my own research, suggests there
will be a closer race in the electoral college
than most analysts now think. One clue is the
Kentucky Senate race, where Mitch McConnell is
now widening his lead over Bruce Lunsford,
suggesting that disenchantment with Republicans
in red states is not as intense as first thought
following the financial collapse last month.
If Florida and Ohio end up in the McCain column, as
they well might, the pressure will be on Obama to
find substitutes -- and the electoral
logic makes that difficult. I mean, if Florida is
not locked up for Barack, how can North Carolina or
Virginia be?
In the last analysis, I'm comfortable making a
prediction only about the likely range of results,
which I think will be between a 353/184 Obama win
and a (less likely) 274/264 McCain upset.
In the U.S.Senate, I project that at least eight of
the 11 main competitive Senate seats will go to the
Democrats. Here's the scorecard:
ALASKA: Stevens loses to Begich.
GEORGIA: Too close to call, but Chambliss has an edge.
NEW HAMPSHIRE: Shaheen beats Sununu.
KENTUCKY: McConnell wins another term.
MINNESOTA: Live, from Minnesota, it's Senator Franken!
OREGON: Merkley over Smith.
NORTH CAROLINA: Dole is defeated.
MISSISSIPPI: Too close to call, but Wickers looks likely to win.
VIRGINIA: Warner by a mile.
NEW MEXICO: Udall beats Pearce.
COLORADO: Udall beats Schaffer. (What's with all these
Udalls, anyway?)
[posted at 4:15am, Nov. 4, 2008.]
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- Tomorrow morning, if Obama wins, I bet
newspapers all over the country will use the banner
headline: "Yes He Can!"
______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 3, 2008
Yesterday's Jason Mraz Concert
"Can I ask you to vote no on Proposition 8?!," Jason
Mraz said from the stage last night to wild cheers
from the crowd, at his show in Berkeley, Calif.
This was, of course, around 48 hours from election
day, so politics was on everybody's minds, even if
Mraz's blend of pop, rap and reggae transported
his fans elsewhere for most of the concert. (By the way,
out here, in California, the debate about
Prop 8 -- which would ban same-sex marriage, and
is backed by one of the ugliest television ad
campaigns in recent memory -- is actually
eclipsing the presidential race in some quarters,
particularly in Berkeley, where Obama might as
well be running unopposed.)
Anyway, after Mraz's condemnation of Prop 8, he
launched into "Live High," a song from his new
album, "We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things,"
released around six months ago and already
certified gold.
But the audience's most intense enthusiasm was
reserved for "I'm Yours," his latest hit (currently
a number ten single, and one of the few songs in the
top ten that's not a Def Jam release), a reggae
tune that fans greeted with shrieks that must have
been deafening inside the open-air theater
(I heard the show from the hills above the
Greek, and the crowd was loud even there).
Near the end of the show, Mraz decided to have some
pure fun, shouting out, "Let's make this place a
party!," as the opening piano notes of The Foundations's
"Build Me Up Buttercup" rang out. Marvelous cover
(complete with "overdubs" from the crowd) of one
of the most perfect pop songs ever made.
Opening were an impressive British band from Brighton,
Two Spot Gobi, and Irish singer Lisa Hannigan (Damien
Rice's ex), whose music occasionally suggested
the aura of an enchanted forest.
* * * *
Andy Rooney had a funny one last night about the
predictable tradition of defeated presidential
candidates being gracious to their victorious
opponents. He quoted what the late, great
Henry Wallace said when Wallace was asked
to praise Harry Truman, who had just defeated
him in the '48 election: "Under no circumstances
will I congratulate that son of a bitch!"
(Ah, Henry, integrationist decades before
everyone else, universal health care supporter
decades before everyone else: if only
you could've lived to see the day that
might be coming tomorrow.)
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 2, 2008
OK, at ground level, the Sunday before Tuesday,
here's what I'm getting:
Even in noncompetitive California, where I'm based,
there are nasty TV ads that have cropped up like
poisonous mushrooms from the GOP Trust PAC
(goptrust.com), juxtaposing images of Jeremiah Wright
with Obama, resurrecting a controversy that had been
satisfactorily explained and resolved months ago.
I don't know if the spots are running in purple states
like NC, VA, MO, etc., where they could gain traction
and become a problem for the Dems.
Plus, the latest major polls in the big swing states
show an Obama lead of merely a point or two, which -- given
the wind chill factor of the Tom Bradley Effect -- translates
into a likely McCain edge in some of those states.
A 274 to 264 McCain win is not hard to imagine on Tuesday
night (even if a 353 to 185 Obama win is easier to
picture). Pundits who say Pennsylvania has to be in the
McCain mix for him to win: where do they get that?
My calculations show he could lose Penn and New Mexico
and New Hampshire, and still make 274.
To those who think 274 to 264 is out of the question,
I have 13 words for you:
Remember the evangelicals who were invisible to exit
pollsters in Ohio in '04.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- The lines for early voting are quite stunning, aren't
they? I haven't seen voting lines that long with my own
eyes since July 2, 2000, when I was in Mexico on election
day (I was there to cover another story for the Washington
Post), and Vicente Fox was in the process of turning out the
entrenched PRI and being elected president.
___________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for November 1, 2008
"After voting for Obama on Tuesday, come join our godless,
socialist jam session, and frug to the latest fad!"
* * * *
To John McCain's supporters: remember to vote on Wednesday!
* * * *
Obama supporters should heed these words from the Bible:
"Don't get overconfident." (Is that from the Bible?)
* * *
A very possible electoral vote scenario on Tuesday:
According to my calculations, it's possible McCain
could win 274, Obama 264.
By the way, check out the brand new Zogby numbers,
which now show Barack's margin within the margin of
error. Those who are in the lead in the final stretch
should always watch tendencies toward overconfidence,
implicit immodesty and ingenerosity to long-time
loyalists.
* * *
For the record, I was the first person anywhere to have
coined the word "Barack-a-docious." Granted, the word
hasn't exactly caught on anywhere, but if it ever does,
it started here.
But I digress. Paul
[Jam session photo above from ABC-TV.]
________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 30, 2008
Not sure whether Tina Fey's much-deserved newfound
surge of success on SNL will transfer to her
series "30 Rock," which is just too insiderish
to gain a big audience. It's sort of like the
meta-episodes of "Seinfeld" that featured a
television show within a tv show -- the least
effective episodes of that otherwise
almost flawless series.
Fey's Palin is an instant comedy classic, but
too bad she's wasting her genius on a character
so topical. Palin's 15 minutes will likely end
on Tuesday, and I bet she doesn't return to the
national stage in any substantive way (look at
how her poll numbers have dropped since voters
have gotten to know her). And her roguish
behavior in this final week -- "my daddy McCain
isn't going to tell me what to do!" is the way
she's been coming off -- will likely ensure she
remains a phenom -- in Alaska. Fey's impersonation
will probably seem as obscure and dated in 15 years
as SNL's Ross Perot does now.
The inspired spontaneity of SNL is often a thing
of wonder, but keep in mind that, even in its
golden years, it had as many misses as hits. Even
in its classic first season, entire episodes were
duds (check out the one hosted by Louise Lasser,
and the first one hosted by Elliot Gould, etc.).
Great artists from J.D. Salinger to Stanley Kubrick
have taught us that we should always aim for the
illusion of spontaneity, not spontaneity
itself, in works of art and entertainment. (I mean,
how many dozens of drafts did Salinger write of
the opening of "Catcher in the Rye" in
order to make it sound like it just rolled
off his tongue? And if you look at Bob Dylan's
recording studio logs, you'll see that his worst
albums were generally those he did in a day or two,
and his best were usually those he
recorded and re-recorded over a period of months.)
Keep in mind that the funniest movie ever made -- Kubrick's
"Dr. Strangelove" -- was the result of take after take
after punishing take. As a result, we have a work that
resonates down the decades, fresh as ever.
Even if Palin does become vp in January, it still
doesn't grant immortality to Fey's version of her. Remember,
Chevy Chase's Gerald Ford resonates today because it
was great comedy and because Ford was a president -- and
almost all presidents are remembered forever in the U.S.
Veeps don't have that sort of historical heft. (Quick -- who was
Ford's veep? Who was Goldwater's running mate? And,
while we're at it, who played Perot on SNL back in the day?)
No doubt, SNL is on a roll these days, but the stock in
Palin-related humor is very likely to dive precipitously
in a matter of weeks if not days. (I bet some of Kristen
Wiig's wildly funny characters out-survive Fey's Palin.)
Then again, I may be wrong about the durability of
Palin and Palin-related humor. If someone held a gun to
my head and said I had to predict a winner this Tuesday,
I'd say I can't. If the gunman insisted, I'd say,
"Probably McCain." Despite the polls. Why? Too
much racism in Florida and Ohio.
* * *
I was sitting around in Marin some time ago with some
friends when the talk turned to Stanford University,
where one of them used to teach. And I had just been
over there (to see the Cantor, a terrific art museum,
by the way) and was wondering why so many buildings
on campus were named after Herbert Hoover, a name
synonymous with disgrace, abject failure and
discredited theories. I mean, this fellow Hoover
brought such misery to millions of people because of
his wrongheaded ideas about unregulated capitalism.
So why is he now rewarded by having buildings at
one of the world's great universities named
after him? Unsuspecting or uninformed Stanford
students might get the wrong idea about this presidential
malpractitioner, second only to Nixon on most lists
of lousy presidents. Seriously, of the
43 presidents we've had, Nixon ranks 43rd and Hoover
ranks 42nd, in my estimation.
Anyway, the Stanford prof -- a very nice and smart guy,
incidentally -- offered an explanation, saying Hoover
had done some work earlier in his career that was
laudable and notable. (Though I must say that even if
that were true, it hardly eclipses his failures.)
I mention this because Hoover's name has been ubiquitous
lately in the presidential race, with both Obama and
McCain trying to make the other look like the 30th
president. Obama has a point in saying that McCain
resembles Hoover; McCain, after all, has been a huge
supporter of the sort of unregulated capitalism that
Hoover championed and that has gotten us in the current
financial mess. But I'm still trying to figure out how
on earth McCain can get away with calling Obama both
a Republican Hooverite and a socialist. That's
not only a stretch. It's almost surreal.
* * *
Out here in California, there's a ballot proposition
called Prop 3, and, frankly, I haven't really checked
it out, though if I did, I'd probably be for it.
Unfortunately, on heavy rotation on Bay Area TV
stations is a syrupy, annoying commerical
in which an "adorable" Jamie Lee Curtis "conducts"
an "adorable" chorus of children singing an "adorably"
off-key rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine."
Too adorable for my tastes. If I see that ad
one more time, I might just vomit from
sugar overload. (And I'm not the only one.)
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- There are some actors and musicians who
do come off genuinely adorable and irresistible
in settings with children, but Curtis, alas, ain't
one of 'em, at least not here.
________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 29, 2008
Great to see so many stars come out to
honor the late Paul Newman (and the Painted
Turtle)the other night in San Francisco. And
isn't it amazing how Julia Roberts can eclipse
everybody by simply walking into a room? As
dazzling as ever after all these years.
* * *
As brilliant as Patti Smith's "Horses" is, her
2005 live version of that album is superior to
the original in almost every way. I finally
got around to listening closely to it -- on the
double-disc legacy edition of "Horses," released
a few years ago -- and kept thinking the live one
should replace the original. (I was also reminded
how ballsy a track "Birdland" is.)
* * *
And I've been listening to The Rolling Stones'
"Singles: 1965 - 1967," which compiles each Stones
single from those years, with its b-sides, on
individual CDs. Great concept. Interesting
liner notes, too. They say Mick and Keith initially
didn't want "Satisfaction" to be released as a
single but were (thankfully) overruled
by the rest of the band. (Look how wrong you can be!)
I didn't know until last night that that was Nicky Hopkins
playing piano on the Rolling Stones' "She's a Rainbow."
Sure, everyone has heard that tune many thousands
of times by now, but think of how magical, unusual
that piano work is, dancing in and out of the
arrangement like a miniature toy ballerina, or
sounding like a child's music box. (By the way, am
I the only person who was an admirer
of Nicky Hopkins' solo album "The Tin Man Was
a Dreamer"? Don't know if it's even in print
anymore, and my own vinyl copy is long gone, but
"Waiting for the Band" and a few others are
terrific tunes.)
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 26, 2008
A Worst Case Scenario for Obama on Election Night
Oh, yeah, I see the poll numbers, but I also
remember the New Hampshire primary. Remember
New Hampshire? Obama up by double digits in
the pre-primary polls but losing by double-digits
when the voting actually happened. And
nobody could quite figure out why there was
such a disparity between the polls and reality,
though some thought the Tom Bradley Effect
might have had something to do with it.
Just in case you don't remember January 2008,
here's a news story posted on the CBS News website
just before the New Hampshire primary:
"Obama leads Clinton 35 percent to 28 percent with
Edwards getting 19 percent in the poll....The polls
had a margin of error of five percentage points...'It's
unimaginable to me that Obama won't win, and win by
double digits,' said CBS News senior political
correspondent Jeff Greenfield this morning
on The Early Show."
If the current crop of polls are as wrong as the
New Hampshire primary polls were, then here is how
election night might play out on November 4th:
ABC News begins its coverage on election night
this way:
CHARLES GIBSON: At this hour, the polls have
now closed on the east coast, and ABC News is ready
to project a winner in two swing states that
Senator Obama thought might fall in his
column: Virginia and North Carolina. In the state
of Virginia, we project its 13 electoral votes will go
to John McCain. This one was hotly contested, Sen. Obama
thought he had a shot at it, it was the key to his
theory of a changed electoral map, but tonight, ABC
News projects that Virginia falls to the GOP.
And in the state of North Carolina, same story.
Obama had campaigned vigorously there, had a lead
in the polls, but tonight it is going solidly for
McCain by a comfortable margin.
There is some good news for the Democrats at this hour
in that some of the traditionally blue states are, as
expected, staying blue tonight. New York, with its
31 electoral votes, and New Jersey, Connecticut and
Vermont, all projected to go to Obama, no surprise
there.
AN HOUR LATER:
CHARLES GIBSON: Polls have now closed in
the central time zone, and in all parts of Florida,
but ABC News is not yet ready to name
a winner in the Sunshine State, which, as everyone
knows, is a crucial part of both the McCain and Obama
strategies. But it is too close to call in Florida
right now, with early returns almost evenly
split between the two candidates, with a slight
edge for McCain, though we don't feel ready to name
a winner there quite yet.
And in Ohio, with around 10% of the returns in,
you can see McCain jumping to an early lead, 53%
to 47, though it is far too soon to call that
state for either candidate. Our exit polling is
showing McCain with surprising strength in the
Akron/Canton area, south of Cleveland,
where Obama had high hopes.
This cannot be good news for the Obama campaign
which has said it must win either Florida or Ohio
in order to win the White House, and at this hour
he is trailing in both states, though again, we
are not ready to project a winner in either.
Alright, big win at this hour for Barack Obama.
In the state of Pennsylvania, with a hefty 23
electoral votes, we project the Keystone State
will go for Obama, though the margin is much
slimmer than initially expected by our
exit pollsters. And in Michigan, also a must-win
for the Democrats, a healthy margin for Obama.
Polls are now closed in Missouri, a state Obama
thought was in play, so it can't be encouraging
for him to hear that it is leaning heavily for
John McCain. And in Iowa, where polls had shown
a big lead for the Democrats, it is too close to
call, with an almost 50:50 split of the vote at
this point.
OK, a bit of breaking news here, and it's big.
Our analysts at ABC think enough votes have been
counted in Florida to call the state, and to call
it for John McCain. So, George, it appears that
at this early part of the night -- and
remember, polls have not yet closed in the Mountain
and Pacific zones, so this is not over yet by a
long shot -- but it appears as if John McCain is
having a much better night than expected.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, Charlie, far better.
This can't be good news for the Obama campaign. The Florida
win now puts the pressure on Obama to prevail in Ohio
because he knows he has to win there if he is to stand
a chance of reaching 270 electoral votes. He simply
can't lose both Florida and Ohio and expect to make it,
particularly now that McCain has already picked
up Virginia and North Carolina.
CHARLES GIBSON: In Ohio, McCain currently
has a two-point edge, which he has maintained all
night, but it is still too close to call,
especially since results in Cuyahoga County, an
Obama stronghold, have not been fully counted.
Shades of 2004, there are already allegations of
voting irregularities in that county that
will surely be investigated by the Secretary of
State in that state. So this is a developing
story.
AN HOUR OR SO LATER:
CHARLES GIBSON: It is now 11pm in
the east, 8 pm in the west, where polls have just
closed, and we are ready to project a
solid win for Sen. Obama in the state of
California, where he had been expected to prevail.
And in the GOP column, Arizona, home state of John
McCain, obviously, going for McCain by a wide
margin.
But the western swing states we're looking at -- New
Mexico, Colorado, Nevada -- are clearly trending
McCain in early returns.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Without those
three, Charlie, I really don't see how Obama could
possibly get to 270. And frankly, with those three it
still may not be possible for him to pull out a win
tonight. Looks like we're seeing the Tom Bradley Effect
in effect, as we suspected might be the case
all along, and trumping the economy as a
factor among voters. And already there
is anger in the Obama camp, particularly
about voting disputes in parts of Ohio,
with one senior staffer saying, "A second election
is being stolen from us, and we're not going to let
that happen," referring, of course, to the 2000 election.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 25, 2008
Imagine if someone had gone into a coma one year
ago and came out of the coma just this morning with
a full memory of everything that had happened before
his deep sleep. Imagine the awakening, with family
members filling him in about everything that had
happened in the past year. The news would
probably freak him out. Doctors might suggest
some valium.
Family members would start to tell him about the course
of the presidential election, and the former coma victim
would say, "Uh, let me guess: the nominees are Hillary,
of course, and Romney."
"Not exactly," a relative would say. "Things took an
unexpected turn."
"Oh, Huckabee got the nod, right?," the coma victim would
say.
"No, it's actually McCain versus, uh, Barack Obama."
And the coma victim would laugh and laugh. Oh, that's a
good one, he'd say. Barack Obama! Ha, ha.
"No, we're serious. It's Obama and McCain."
"But Hillary was a sure thing."
"Until people started voting, it turned out."
"So It's McCain/Romney?"
"No, McCain/Palin."
"Who's Palin?"
"That's what everyone's asking."
"Look, I've just come out of a coma and I don't
appreciate that you're messing with me."
"We're not joking."
"Then McCain has it locked up, right?"
"No. You're not going to believe this, but
Obama has a considerable lead and is widely
expected to win."
"How did this happen?"
"While you were asleep, most of the capitalist
system fell. Like the Berlin Wall fell."
"Oh, now you're making this up. The economy was going
great guns when I went into a coma. So unemployment's
a bit up?"
"More than that. Remember the capital markets sector
of the economy?"
"Yeah."
"Well, it's been nationalized."
"What? Did Hugo Chavez take over the government?"
"No, Bush did it all by his lonesome."
The coma victim starts sweating, turns red in the face.
"Doctor," says a relative. "I think you need to double the valium. "
* * *
If Barack Obama becomes president in January, and
that looks extremely possible at this point, all
the assumptions about power and prejudice and
progressivism will suddenly change in America. When
activists protest, as they surely will, in March to
commemorate the sixth anniversary of the start
of the Iraq War, they will be protesting a war run
by a black progressive president, Barack Obama.
"Stop Obomba's Bombs," the placards might read.
When leftists talk about how they want to "fight the
power," they'll be talking about fighting a black
progressive. When they talk about speaking truth
to power, ditto. When they talk about "The Man,"
ditto again. Likewise, when they talk about the person ultimately
in charge of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the Justice
Department. And they'll have to re-think their
thoughts about America being a racist nation.
The whole idea of being disadvantaged in America will
also have to be re-thought if an African-American is
actually running the country. Some will inevitably say:
how oppressed can a black person be in the U.S. if
the most powerful person in the country is black?
Jokes about the White House being too white,
about a bunch of white men being in charge -- all
those perceptions and cliches and images (and t-shirts)
will be out the window if Barack is in charge.
But I digress. Paul
__________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 23 - 25, 2008
Do Mess With Moody's
So satisfying to see executives from the main credit
rating agencies -- particularly Moody's, which has
had a lot of questionable dealings over the years -- taken
to task by Congress for giving triple A ratings to junk,
thereby helping to facilitate the current financial
crisis.
Moody's has been a bad actor for a while; it was
formally accused in the 1990s of essentially saying
to some companies, "You can either pay us to rate
your credit or we'll rate your credit for our own
amusement and spread the word through the industry."
Great to see them get their just desserts.
* * *
Liar Crystal Mangum has a new book out, "If I Did It"
(I think that's what it's called).
Question to the D.A.: Why didn't you prosecute that
bitch for filing a false police report?
* * *
Hey, people in the media and in the Pittsburgh PD:
the reverse B shoulda been a tell-tale clue for
y'all.
Let me make sure I understand this: a young woman comes to
you, saying someone carved a reverse B on her face. I mean,
was the mugger Leonardo da Vinci? Or maybe some dude who
carried a mirror with him when he defaced his victims. That
sounds believable on its, uh, face. I'm surprised some
tab didn't immediately dub him The Mirror Mugger!
Of course, a society that believes the tall tales of the
Bible -- love that one about rising from the dead! -- all too
easily falls for such stories like the one about the
woman with the reverse B on her face. Or the Jennifer
Wilbanks story. Or the Crystal Mangum story. Or the
Tawana Brawley story. Or the McMartin story.
Thing is, nobody in the media or in law enforcement
seems to get fired after falling for such obvious
lies. (And they're often way too skeptical about
tales that are actually very true! I once spent
a long time explaining to a friend, who was not
being very smart about a story I was relating, that
one can have massive internal bleeding from
blunt-force trauma (say, a speeding baseball
to the chest) without ever shedding a drop
of blood externally. But she was familiar only
with the cinematic version of injuries.)
So let's see who was gullible this go 'round. First of
all, the Pittsburgh PD, including (but not limited to)
one Diane Richard, spokeswoman for the
department.
Also, John McCain, U.S. Senator, who reportedly phoned the
woman, Ashley Todd, to express condolences. And Sarah
Palin, beauty pageant finalist, who also called
the woman with the reverse B on her face. And, crossing
party lines, Allison Price, spokesperson for Obama, released
a statement about "our thoughts and prayers" and all that crap.
And lots of reporters -- Ramit Plushnick-Masti of the AP,
among them -- also couldn't see through that reverse B.
I'm sure some dope out there still believes her
initial claim, saying "the photographic
evidence -- she does have a B on her face, after
all -- contradicts the official report."
And I'm sure Geraldo was in the process of setting up a trust
fund for the poor woman before she was exposed as
a liar. I'm all choked up.
* * * *
Thanks to those who emailed me about my recent
column, "She's Blaspheming as Fast as She Can,"
(see Digression, below). Glad you enjoyed it.
To those who found it offensive, let me just say,
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" (to coin a
phrase!).
Let me tell you what I find offensive:
An Iraq war vet sees combat that convinces him there
could not possibly be a god, at least not a benevolent
one. He raises a son and sends him to a public school
that he helps to finance with his tax dollars. He
tries to raise his kid according to his own private
spiritual values, making sure not to indoctrinate his
son into any religion, making sure he can choose
his own philisophical beliefs when he grows up.
But one day his son comes home and tells his dad
that they force him to participate in a group
religious chant at school every morning -- that's
precisely what the "under god" part of the Pledge
of Allegiance is -- and he doesn't feel right about
that. The dad is angry, tells school officials that
that's not how he wants his kid to be raised, that
in the U.S. the separation between church and state
also applies to tax-payer funded schools, that
public schools should not be taking sides on the religious
debate about whether there is a god or not.
Of course, school officials and others don't care a
bit about his complaint and continue to coerce his son
into joining a morning religious chant.
Now that's offensive.
Politicians and pundits who step on eggshells in order
to make sure they don't say or do anything at all to
offend Muslims, Jews and Christians, somehow leave their
manners at the door when it comes to treating non-theists
with a proper level of respect. Evidently, it's ok to
offend and disrespect non-theists, who are then asked
not to say or do anything that might be objectionable
to people of other religions.
Well, until that double standard is corrected, I will
continue to treat the world's great -- and not so
great -- religions with the the same level of respect
that is accorded non-theists in the
U.S. (if I feel they're so deserving).
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- If "under god" has no significant religious
meaning, then why include it?
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 22, 2008
If Early Voting Trends Continue, The Electoral Map
Will Look Like This On November 4:
Obama's on track to win 353 electoral votes to
McCain's 185.
Quinnipiac and Gallup, take a hike. Exit
pollsters, find the exits.
Early voting data has now arrived, and such info is much
harder and more reliable than mere polls, making
traditional polling seem sort of obsolete right about now.
And the results, in state after state, are astonishingly
blue. North Carolina's early voters, for instance,
have been Democratic by a healthy margin so far, which
would suggest an Obama victory may be in the offing
in this traditionally red state. But before Barack fans
get too excited, keep in mind that early voting
in N.C. in '04 was mostly Democratic, too,
and Bush ended up winning there.
Still, these '08 numbers are waay beyond '04. As of
yesterday, 56% of the early voters in N.C. were Dem
and 27% Rep (in '04, it was 48 Dem to 37 Rep, according
to a prof at George Mason U). In Florida, 56% of the
early voters have been Dem., 29% Rep. (I couldn't
find comparative data for '04). Nevada results are
also said to be trending Democratic.
If this continues, Obama will be on track to win
around 353 electoral votes, according to my own
calculations (see map, above).
Then again, there are still 13 days before the actual
general election, and events could create a whole new
political climate. If, for example, some foreign
policy crisis were to take centerstage, or if
black-o-phobia were to set in among voters, the map
could end up looking something like this
on November 4:
Obama's worst-case scenario: 283 for McCain, 255 for Obama.
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 21, 2008
She's Blaspheming as Fast as She Can!
Well, at least it seems Sarah Palin isn't an
advocate of blasphemy laws, or we certainly
would've heard objections from her to a lot
of the humor on "Saturday Night Live," birthplace
of the Church Lady, where Palin appeared
last Saturday.
Still, it's hard to believe that her chumming around
on SNL is fine with people like Donald Wildmon
and his American Family Association, which
seems to have a fetish for boycotting all sorts
of companies and sponsors of TV programs it
deems un-Christian.
Maybe the religious right feels it has to keep quiet about
its kooky beliefs during this campaign season, or else
risk the election of a "Muslim" named Obama.
So I guess we can assume that Sarah Palin, the
American Creationist, thinks it should
be legal to blaspheme or mock the so-called Lord?
And she must think free speech covers -- oh, I don't
know -- the right to say that, say, the virgin birth
was a ruse by Mary to deceive Joseph into believing she
hadn't had an affair with another man? Might
make an interesting novel. And thanks to
the absence of blasphemy laws in the
USA, we're free to speculate about such things
without fear of prosecution.
Palin evidently -- i.e., she's not speaking out
against SNL, which has mocked religion since
its early days, and she was actually swaying with those
late night infidels! -- is ok with that sort of free
speech. Maybe she's more free-thinking than
we think!
Let's hope she's more liberal about blasphemy than other
religious fundamentalists, like those in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, who advocate -- and enforce -- a strict
set of very backward blasphemy laws.
Latest example is in Afghanistan. A 24-year-old student,
Parwiz Kambakhsh, simply distributed some info about
women's rights under Islamic law, and he was sentenced
to death. He appealed his sentence the other day, and
it was reduced to a mere 20 years in prison. That's
what passes for progress in the Karzai era. 20 years.
Which means Parwiz will be in his mid-forties
before he sees freedom -- if he survives his
prison term.
Blasphemy laws in Pakistan appear to be even stricter.
Here's part of the Pakistani Penal Code: "Whoever
willfully defiles, damages or desecrates a copy
of the Holy Quran or of an extract therefrom
or uses it in any derogatory manner or for any
unlawful purpose shall be punishable for imprisonment
for life."
Damages? Suppose I have a copy of, ahem, That Book, and
it accidentally falls into the toilet? Life imprisonment
for that? Talk about a broadly-written
law. Sheesh!
But that ain't nothing compared to long-standing Sharia
law statutes, which state the following (and I ain't
making this up): "It is unlawful to use musical
instruments -- such as those which drinkers
are known for, like the mandolin, lute, cymbals, and
flute -- or to listen to them. It is permissible to
play the tambourine at weddings, circumcisions,
and other times, even if it has bells on its sides.
Beating the kuba, a long drum with a narrow
middle, is unlawful."
I mean, where do they come up with this Sharia
stuff? Let me get this straight. Flute and lute:
not OK. Tambourine: OK, but only if it's being played
while cutting off part of a child's penis. And what
the hell is a kuba, anyway? Any restrictions on a
Strat with a wah-wah peddle and a whammy bar?
(By the way, who the hell would play a tambourine
during a circumcision? Sounds kinky to me.)
I know, it's hard to roll back the laughably
antiquated Sharia laws in Afghanistan and
Pakistan when you're dealing with a large part
of the population that was indoctrinated at a
young age in the madrassas. But Karzai and Zardari
need to find a way to begin the process of
modernizing their legal positions with regard
to blasphemy, if only to prevent more
injustices -- like the verdict against
Kambakhsh -- from happening again.
Back to to the blasphemous Sarah for a moment.
Sarah, stand before the congregation and be
shamed, speak in tongues, repent and wash
that devil Lorne right out of your hair
with holy water. Instead of being in the
devil's lair, aka Studio 8-H, shouldn't you
have been at home, nursing Trig and a grudge
against those who took "Death Valley Days"
off the air?
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 20, 2008
Whatever happens on November 4, the outcome will
probably seem inevitable, obvious in retrospect.
Yes, it was clear all along there was too much
racism in America for Obama to be elected.
Yes, it was clear all along that Obama had the
momentum and the grassroots support to win.
Yes, I'm not surprised it was an Obama landslide.
Yes, I'm not surprised it was a McCain landslide.
Yes, I'm not surprised it was the closest presidential
election in U.S. history.
You can make a case for all the above scenarios, as
we approach the gravitational pull of election day,
now two weeks away.
Everyone is talking about the Tom Bradley Effect,
but there are two other important electoral dynamics
few are noting.
1. THE OHIO '04 EFFECT -- Ah, remember that one?
Kerry was expected to win on general election day,
according to exit polls, but -- surprise! --
evangelicals came out of the proverbial woodwork,
spooked by the idea of a liberal winning -- and
by hot button issues like gay marriage -- and streamed
from the churches to the voting booths, giving Bush
a second term.
Well, that same dynamic may be writ large with
Obama -- writ large because of the black-o-phobic
vote not just in Ohio but in the Florida panhandle,
rural areas of Virginia and North Carolina,
and in the red areas of other purple states.
Come the morning of November 4, if it looks like
Obama's going to win, an army of rednecks in
pick-up trucks with confederate flag license plates
will suddenly wake from their Pabst Blue Ribbon
hangovers to drive to the polls to stop a black
from becoming president. Black-o-phobia
is one thing the polls may not be accurately
measuring.
2. THE 2007 DYNAMIC -- Remember 2007, the Pleistocene
Era, the early throes of Beatlemania, when it was a
wow-wee thing to see Obama attract 12,000 fans in
Oakland, Calif.? How quaint, now he's attracting
100,000 in Missouri.
But anyway, remember 2007, when pundits assumed Hillary
would be the nominee because there was no way mainstream
Dems would vote for Obama? Yet, throughout '07, there was
nagging evidence to the contrary? Huge crowds for Obama,
not so much for Clinton. Lotza contributions and enthusiasm
for Obama, not so much for Clinton. Yet, until people
actually first cast their votes in Iowa in '08, the party
line was still that Hillary would win.
That same dynamic may be repeating itself now, in that
the conventional wisdom (Obama can't win because of
racism) appears to be contradicted by big crowds and
polls that say otherwise. But keep in mind an
oft-forgotten fact: Obama almost lost the
nomination to Hillary in the final reel. It
could've easily gone the other way.
* * *
Didya hear Andy Rooney last night? He endorsed McCain
and Obama, saying he was mightily impressed
by the youth of both contenders. And he's as
sick and tired of William McKinley as the rest of us!
(I think that's what he said.)
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 18, 2008
The Daily Digression Endorses Barack Obama for President.
First, the Digression is not a political advocacy
blog. It's a mostly reported online column, and when
I cover and analyze politics, I try to do so fairly,
freshly, even-handedly. Just because I'm endorsing
Obama for president doesn't mean I'm not going to be
as critical of him as I am of John McCain, if he's so
deserving.
That said, I'm endorsing Obama because he makes
sense time and again on the issues that matter,
is on the right side of history, is unusually
persuasive. America is going where he's going,
and we can get there now or we can delay
progress for another several years.
With a President Obama, we stand our best chance
of getting health insurance for all
Americans, fixing the economy, mitigating the
effects of global warming, killing bin Laden
and stopping terrorism on a long-term basis by
shutting down the madrassas cesspool
that breeds jihadists.
McCain is a relic. He's still spouting the gospel
of unregulated capitalism, even as its pillars fall
by the day. It's astonishing how oblivious he can
be to the history in the making around him.
And his decision-making is sometimes reckless and
irresponsible, as his choice of Sarah Palin has made
abundantly clear even to leading conservatives.
And frankly, I'm uneasy about McCain. To be blunt,
when I see him in the debates, I get the sense of a
guy who was never properly treated for post-traumatic
stress syndrome, which has now, decades later,
blossomed into a monster in his mind, like a case of
syph untreated for way too long.
By contrast, Obama is surprisingly
well-adjusted, post-neurotic, temperamentally
suited for the presidency -- and refreshingly
honest (any other politician with his name would
have changed it to Barry O'Bama).
Plus, with an Obama presidency, we also get Joe Biden,
arguably the greatest foreign policy mind in America.
When I see an Obama/Biden bumper sticker, it feels
completely right in a way that, say, an Obama/Kucinich
sticker wouldn't. The Obama who intersects with Biden
is easily the best the U.S. can offer in '08.
But I digress. Paul
_____________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 17, 2008
The Limits of Cool (and the Better Reason to
Back Obama)
I'm not as impressed with Obama's supposed cool
as many others are. Dukakis was cool, too, in much
the same way as Obama is, and that, it turns out,
was one of his least appealing characteristics in
the end, particularly when he was cool
when asked what his response would be if Kitty were
raped. We all learned that night that cool is not
the appropriate response in all instances to everything
life throws at you. Sometimes anger is the right
tool -- and, yes, sometimes violence is the only
proper response (if you had bin Laden in your cross
hairs, for example). Also, cool becomes complicit
at a certain point (when you're in a group of people
doing something objectionable, and you have to
stop them from doing it, for instance). And
cool becomes untenable at other points (witness
the broad-daylight mass panic on 9/11 around
the south tower when the south tower fell).
By cool, most pundits really mean unflappable, which
is even more of a Dukakasian term. Unflappable
may have been given a bad name in the '88 election, but
it is exactly the quality you need in a crisis, when, say,
someone has just attacked Washington, or
someone is trying to break down your door and kill
you. There are some people who get cooler when the
heat gets higher, and Obama is one of them, though
he has yet to show us the full range of responses he
is capable of in a crisis.
Rather than cool, the quality about Obama that
impresses me most is a characteristic common to
a lot of geniuses I've interviewed (from
David Rabe to Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Woody Allen
to Roman Polanski), and that is: radical common
sense, the keen ability to show the contours of reality
exactly as they are, without indulging in wishful
thinking or interested distortion.
As I said, cool will get you into trouble if the
right response should actually be anger (as Dukakis
discovered). But radical common sense -- that
ability to see that not all wars are bad, but the
Iraq war is, and that not all spending cuts are good,
but some are -- is what Washington has been missing
for many, many years.
Incidentally: funny thing about anger and cool;
it's much easier to be the former when you're
losing and the latter when you're winning.
George W. Bush's supporters were calm when the
2000 election results were cutting their
way -- but they had a Brooks Brothers riot
in Florida when the recount threatened
to topple their "win."
Many years ago, there was a brilliant "Saturday Night
Live" sketch in which a group of people had fallen
through thin ice on a lake and were screaming angrily
and desperately to people on the sidelines to help
them out of the ice hole. But the folks on the
sidelines, sitting comfortably in warmth, were
indifferent to their plight and openly aghast
at the rude level of rage expressed by those
freezing to death. While they were commenting
on the utter vulgarity of the anger of the
drowning people, the ice beneath those on
the sidelines suddenly broke, and they, too, became
stuck in an ice hole, and they, too, began screaming
angrily for help to anyone within earshot. As the
sketch ended, both groups were raging at the same
volume and in the same way.
Which shows that, for all of us, cool has its limits.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 16, 2008
A Second Look at the Final Episode of "The Sopranos"
I saw most of the final episode of "The Sopranos" last
year but didn't see the whole thing until yesterday, when
I rented the DVD.
So I didn't fully know how truly lousy it was. Easily
one of the five worst episodes of "The Sopranos,"
and I'm being nice.
I always thought the ultimate resolution would
be one in which Meadow became a criminal attorney
who ended up prosecuting associates of her father.
A Shakespearean clash of the generations.
But the actual final episode doesn't even hang together
in terms of basic dramatic compentency. What happened
to that plot element about everybody in the family
splitting up because of death threats? Are we to
believe that security arrangements were
all tossed aside for a casual meal in an open diner,
with all the family members gathered together without
even a bodyguard? And nobody at the table looks at
all nervous, despite the DefCon4 danger level.
Characterization of A.J. is inept. He comes off more
like a flashback of how Tony (or someone Tony's age)
behaved back in 1975. A kid like A.J., coming
of age in '07, would be into Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, not
Bob Dylan's acoustic period of 45 years ago. A.J., after
all, is not a throwback to a previous boho era in
any other way -- he's a typical, spoiled, suburban
Oughties guy.)
And in the unlikely event that a boy in '07 was
listening to "It's Alright Ma" and reading Yeats,
that would be far more laudable than someone
listening to pseudo-operatic wiseguy junk like "Cara Mia"
or reading mediocre Biblical verse (now
there's a ripe target for ridicule!).
What is obvious now on close DVD viewing is the
key clue about the ending that almost everyone missed.
Notice that Meadow runs -- frantically, anxiously -- to
the diner as if she wants to warn her family about
an imminent danger that she had just become aware of.
She looks like she knows something awful is
about to happen and wants to alert them before it does.
Why else would she be running -- and running in a state
of near panic? She's not late. They're not talking
at the table as if she were late, not saying things like,
"I wonder what's holding up Meadow" or "Where's Meadow?"
(By the way, nobody would be scrutinizing any
of this episode if it were not the very last one.)
Anyway, this one ain't "Pine Barrens." It ain't even
"The Blue Comet." It's a choke.
But I digress. Paul
_______________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 15, 2008
A lot of bruised feelings at tonight's debate.
Touchy, touchy. "You ran an ad that said the
former chair of my steering committee once sold
bad hash at Woodstock." "Your aunt once sold Nazi
memorabilia on Ebay to pay her heating bill." Etc.
And then, after sniffling, they started talking to
their imaginary friend "Joe." Dear Joe, I will
click my heels and say there's no place like a
tax shelter. Dear Joe, deliver me from this
studio and Bob Schieffer's tough questions.
And there was McCain, looking like he had a glass
left eye, "flashing [his] madness all over the
place," to quote a Steve Forbert song. And there
was Obama, looking like he hadn't gotten enough
sleep last night, probably wishing the election were
tonight, now that the Quinnipiac numbers are as
ripe as they've ever been.
Obama probably should've shown more anger when bringing
up Palin's implicit incitement of hate at her rallies,
an ugly, dangerous phenomenon. The backward-thinking
religious fanatics that attend her speeches do in
fact shout, "Kill him!," and there are also reports
that she has winked and gestured affectionately at
fans in the crowd who have yelled death threats \
about Barack.
Serious matter. She'd truly better hope that
someone doesn't take a shot at Obama,
because if someone ever did (heaven forbid), angry
citizens would know exactly who to blame for helping
to create a climate in which that could happen.
There're already enough such threats on the Internet
(just Google the words "Obama" and "Aryan" to catch
the very latest assassination plots!), and Palin
should not be allowed to stoke that stuff.
All told, my guess is this debate won't matter a bit
on November 4th, any more than the situation in
South Ossetia matters now. New crises will
erupt between now and then that will probably
supercede everything we're talking about today.
Remember: an election is not a measure of who voters
prefer. An election is a measure of who voters prefer
on a particular day.
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 9, 2008
The New Irreverence in Chinese Art
Puncturing sacred cows, post-Mao: Wang Guangyi's
"Chanel No. 5" (2001). [photo by Paul Iorio]
While traveling alone by local train behind the
Iron Curtain as a teenager in the 1970s, I saw a
lot of telling, unforgettable images of everyday
Communist life. One of the smaller memorable moments
happened after I was briefly detained in Zagreb by the
local authorities (for being an American, which was
sufficient cause for suspicion in those days). As
the train zipped along a rural area just north of
present-day Bosnia, I looked out the window and saw
hard-working, happy peasants using sickles -- as in
hammer and sickle -- to harvest crops in a vast field.
And I thought that it looked just like a Communist
Norman Rockwell painting, an almost laughably
idealized vision of collectivist propaganda -- except
it was a real-life tableau. (Of course, there were no
such soft-glow scenes once I crossed into the far more
brutal Bulgaria, where there were plenty of rifles at
checkpoints and unhappy-looking workers who had
supposedly lost their chains, but that's a whole
different story.)
I thought about those Croatian peasants with sickles the
other day, as I walked through the awesome new exhibition
of Chinese Communist propaganda art from the Mao era, on
display at the Berkeley (Calif.) Art Museum (BAM).
I wasn't in the museum for more than three minutes
before I began laughing out loud at some of the
romanticized posters and paintings depicting an always
benevolent Mao greeting grinning workers or leading
some heroic charge or posing with red icons of decades
past. A priceless collection.
Also on display at BAM, and equally fascinating, is
post-Mao, modern Chinese art that shows, beyond a doubt,
that China has been hurtling at warp speed toward not
just economic transformation but cultural and artistic
metamorphosis, too.
There are paintings that poke fun at Mao and at the
Communist traditions of his day, stuff that would have been
considered an absolute sacrilege a couple decades
ago -- and now is on open display.
There are Chinese equivalents here to Rothko, Pollock,
Klee and Warhol, and it's breathtaking to see how far
China has come in terms of aesthetic experimentation
and liberation.
The exhibition also includes one of the most inventive
and stunning installations I've seen in any museum,
Wang Du's "Strategie en Chambre" (1998), an expansive
work centered around the figures of Boris Yeltsin and
Bill Clinton surrounded by mountains of newspapers and
topped by pure magic: an uncountable number of multi-colored
toys hanging from the ceiling, giving the effect of a Pollock
painting in the air or of Klee mobiles that have multiplied
madly or of a swarm of exotic insects hovering.
An astonishing work.
The exhibition, "Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art From the
Sigg Collection," continues at BAM until January 4, 2009.
A bubbly Mao, oh-so-pleased to meet Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, in one of the dozens of pieces of
Mao-era Communist propaganda art now on display at the
Berkeley Art Museum. [photo by Paul Iorio]
* *
Detail of Wang Du's "Strategie en Chambre," featuring
dozens of multi-colored toys hanging from the ceiling.
[photo by Paul Iorio]
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 8, 2008
Last night, one presidential candidate praised bin
Laden and the other said he wanted to kill him.
It was McCain who hailed bin Laden, calling him
and his fellow Afghan warriors of the 1980s
"freedom fighters," and it was Obama
who said he wanted to "kill bin Laden."
The contrasts were stark elsewhere, too. Obama looked
comfortable, poised, Kennedyesque. McCain seemed like
he was waiting for a next round of interrogation from
his Vietnamese captors.
Obviously, McCain was coached to play it sotto voce
so as not to appear angry, but it had the opposite
effect; his idea of soft-spoken resembled a tense
prisoner talking low so the guards wouldn't hear him.
There were also failed attempts at jokes by McCain,
recalling the humor-impaired Nixon and Goldwater.
"You know, like hair transplants -- I might need one
of them myself," McCain joked at one point. Nobody
laughed.
And when Tom Brokaw asked him who he'd choose to head
Treasury, McCain responded awkwardly, "Not you, Tom."
Brokaw rolled with it in a good-natured way, saying,
"For good reason." But it was an inappropriate,
are-you-running-for-something moment.
Brokaw was right in trying to make sure
the candidates abided by the rules they had agreed
to -- but why did they agree to such lousy rules
in the first place? No follow-up questions by the
moderator and no rebuttals by the contenders made for
a constricted, repressed debate, until Obama finally
overrode the rules near the end and got the flow of
free speech going again.
Obama hit his high note with a passage that had some
of the force of a Shakespeare soliloquy. "Sen.
McCain...suggested that I don't understand. It's true.
There are some things I don't understand. I don't
understand why we ended up invading a country that had
nothing to do with 9/11..."
Obama could've made more of that, expanding it into
a real tour de force with: "And I don't understand why
McCain thinks the private sector can take charge of
our health care system when it can't even manage itself.
And I don't understand why a senator who votes
with George Bush 95% of the time thinks that he
represents a change from Bush. And I don't understand
why...." Etc.
Incidentally, at the end of the debate when the
candidates were milling among the people onstage, I
caught a camera shot on one network that showed
Obama reaching out to shake McCain's hand, and
McCain refusing the handshake and diverting him
instead to Cindy McCain, whose hand he shook.
To be sure, there may have been another moment,
off-camera, in which they did shake hands.)
Again, a bit Nixonish.
It looks more and more like McCain will be holding
a press conference on November 5th to say, "Well,
you won't have John McCain to kick around anymore."
But I digress. Paul
___________________________________
THE DAILY DIGRESSION
for October 6, 2008
Barack Obama has been taken to task
for his past associations, however remote,
with radicals from decades past. Isn't it time
the media started focusing on John McCain's defense
of right-wing extremists and outright fascists
associated with South Vietnam's Ky and Thieu
regimes of the 1960s?
McCain, of course, served in the U.S. Navy in defense
of Thieu and Ky, so one can understand his personal
reluctance to denounce the South Vietnamese leaders
who he sacrificed so much to support. He evidently
doesn't want to admit those five-and-a-half years in
a North Vietnamese prison were served for a big mistake.
Now that the passions of the Vietnam era have cooled
a bit, perhaps McCain can bring himself to say what's
obvious to most Americans today: Thieu and Ky
were neo-fascists, governing without popular support,
whose human rights violations equaled (or virtually
equaled) those of the North Vietnamese.
Ky, in particular, is indefensible by any measure of
modern mainstream political thought. Here's Ky in
his own words: "People ask me who my heroes are. I
have only one: Hitler. We need four or five Hitlers
in Vietnam," he told the Daily Mirror in July 1965.
Why does McCain, to this day, still voice support,
at least implicitly, for Ky and Thieu? At the very
least, McCain should, however belatedly, unequivocally
condemn Ky's praise of Hitler, if he hasn't already.
(My own research has yet to turn up a clipping in
which McCain has been significantly critical of
either leader.)
And why don't we hear outrage from pundits and
politicians about his support for Ky?
Yeah, I know, it was the policy of the U.S. government
at the time to back Ky and Thieu, but that's no
defense. If Nuremberg taught us anything, it's that
you can't hide behind I-was-only-following-orders or
it-was-the-policy-of-my-government when
defending your individual actions in wartime.
Maybe McCain thinks Ky is a maverick. Maybe
he thinks Hitler is a maverick, too.
Look, my dear late dad quite literally broke his
back as a U.S. paratrooper fighting against Hitler's
soliders in Germany and in Belgium. And he was among
those who busted open the gates of Hitler's slave camps
in western Germany, spring of 1945. What he witnessed
turned his stomach for the next six decades, and he'd
tell me about what he saw that day as a 19-year-old,
but only reluctantly, because it was such a bad memory.
So I know what a true patriot looks like.
A mere several decades later, we're supposed to
stand by silently as a major presidential candidate
says, "It's cool to support a guy who supports Hitler."
So now I'm nauseous -- about McCain's backing of Ky and
and about the silence, the lack of outrage about that.
But I digress. Paul
P.S. -- And don't give me that crap about Ho being
the greater evil. Ho Chi Minh had broad popular
support, north and south, and no designs
on neighboring nations, so we had no business
appointing a president for the Vietnamese
people.
[parts of my column today first appeared in my column of
June 7, 2008.]
_______________________________________
TO READ DAILY DIGRESSIONS PRIOR TO OCTOBER 7, 2008,
PLEASE GO TO:
http://www.previousdigressions.blogspot.com/II
Daily Digressions, 2009, 2008 (2nd most recent)
Monday, February 8, 2010
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