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This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

July 21, 2012 /1 Comment/in , , , /by

In the past week at this blog, I’ve written about the best TV ad of the presidential campaign thus far; a brave woman in Alaska who fended off an aggressive grizzly bear; the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, TX, which is entering the NYC market only a couple blocks from my office; the great Canadian band Library Voices; Sarah Silverman’s bawdy video that pokes fun at right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; a new album from Bob Dylan; the award-winning CBC radio host, Jian Ghomeshi; Greenland’s worryingly shrinking Petermann Glacier; a young chess master and Franconia College classmate of mine who vanished in 1978 under mysterious circumstances; the late, great baseball writer, Robert Creamer, who chronicled the life of Babe Ruth; the sweet severance deal Mitt Romney arranged for himself from Bain Capital; the moving book I’ve been reading by Rob Sheffield, my #FridayReads yesterday; and my own personal history, including the story of how during a teenage road trip my brother Joel and I happened to adopt our longtime black lab Noah, pictured here with me.

#FridayReads, July 20–“Love is a Mix Tape”

July 20, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by


#FridayReads, July 20–Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, Rob Sheffield’s wrenching account of the five-year marriage he shared with his dear wife, Renée, who died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism at age 31. Sheffield tells their tale by opening each chapter of the book by naming the playlists on the many mix tapes that he and Renée made for each other in the time they were together. Sheffield, who is an editor at Rolling Stone, narrates this heartbreak tale in a sweet and disarming voice from a world where music is always on their lips, in their ears, and coursing through their hearts.

Mitt’s Lucrative Severance from Bain Capital

July 20, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

Although this Boston Globe story on Mitt’s departure and severance negotations from Bain Capital was likely overshadowed today by the tragic shootings in Colorado, there are important revelations in it and it should be widely read. The reporting establishes that even while Romney wangled the most lucrative possible deal he could get for himself from the managers remaining at the company, he continued to be involved in many Bain duties. The last three paragraphs of the article make this clear:

“While Romney continued negotiating the terms of the severance deal, he referred to himself as CEO. In July 1999, five months after he had left for Utah, he provided a quote for a press release issued by Rehnert and Wolpow, who had left Bain to start their own firm, Audax. He was referred to as “Bain Capital CEO W. Mitt Romney, currently on a part-time leave of absence.”
In that release, Romney said of the departing partners, ‘While we will miss them, we wish them well and look forward to working with them as they build their firm.’
Those did not sound like the words of someone who had severed his ties to Bain Capital. To the contrary, it implied that Romney was still a part of Bain and its future. Two and a half years after leaving to run the Olympics, Romney finally signed his severance agreement in August 2001. Still, Romney’s name continued to appear as CEO and owner on dozens of Bain fund documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission until January 2002. No one would succeed Romney as CEO of Bain Capital. To this day, Bain is run by a management committee.”

Another aspect of this story that has gotten less attention than it should is the fact that while the Romney camp claims to have released one year’s full tax returns, for 2010, and that they supposedly plan to release the 2011 return at some point–a paltry response to the growing demand that he release his returns for a substantial number of years–there is a key element missing from even the 2010 paperwork. This was reported by Zach Carter and Ryan Grim in a Huffington Post story earlier this week, and then analyzed insightfully by Josh Marshall at TPM. The missing item is a report on the value of Mitt’s Swiss bank account. It is very likely that he did file it with the IRS–to have included the Swiss bank account on his tax return and then fail to submit the foreign holdings form, known as an FBAR, would have likely led to a hefty IRS fine. However, the release of tax documents the campaign made reluctantly during the Republican primary did not include the FBAR, and Josh Marshall wonders why so few news organizations have been asking the campaign about this missing element.

Josh also speculates on the possibility that Romney may have in 2009 taken advantage of a tax amnesty program whereby UBS account holders were offered the chance to pay their back income taxes and all penalties owed, without criminal sanction. This could explain their reluctance to share the FBAR, but until the media begin asking about this more aggressively, we aren’t going to learn more even about 2010, the year that Mitt had supposedly with the press and the public.

 

Robert Creamer, RIP–Babe Ruth Biographer

July 20, 2012 /2 Comments/in , /by

The great baseball writer, Robert Creamer died this week at the age of 90. According to the NY Times obituary by Douglas Martin, I am far from the only reader to have found his biography, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (originally published in 1974), to be among the best sports books I’ve ever read. An excerpt from a review in Sports Illustrated is printed on the cover of the Penguin Sports Library edition from 1983, the one I read: “The best biography ever written about an American sports figure.”

Two stories from the book have stayed with me all these years and I relate them here after being led to the exact page number in the book by the blog Unquiet Heart, where the proprietor is evidently also a fan of Creamer’s 1974 book. Quoting then from page 186 in my old copy of the book:

“Invited by [a] Mrs. Adler to attend a benefit she was running, Ruth dutifully put in an appearance. “Mrs. Adler, beamed on the monied throngs who gently pressed around him, and helped make the affair a smashing success.  When it was over Mrs. Adler thanked him profusely for his time and effort.  The Babe waved his hand.  ‘Oh, shit, lady, I’d do it for anybody,’ he said.
“Another time, he accompanied [baseball executive] Ford Frick to a formal dinner party.  Frick said that Babe would always move slowly at first when he was at affairs of this sort, watching, noting, finding out how you did things before doing them himself.  A rather splendid asparagus salad was served. Babe’s eyes sidled around until he saw which fork was to be used.  He casually lifted the fork, poked at the salad and then without touching it put the fork down and pushed the plate an inch or so away in dismissal.
‘Don’t you care for the salad, Mr. Ruth?’ his hostess asked.
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ he replied, his voice elegant and unctuous.  ‘It’s just that asparagus makes my urine smell'”

Creamer also wrote Stengel: His Life and Times, which I haven’t read yet, but which I hope to someday.

 

 

 

A Vanished Young Chess Master

July 19, 2012 /2 Comments/in , , /by

Last winter, publishing reporter Sarah Weinman–who works for PublishersMarketplace.com and who writes for a number of other publications–asked me if I would try to help her with a story she was working on. Having learned that I attended Franconia College in the 70s, Sarah wondered if I had ever known fellow FC student, Peter Winston. he began in ’75, I began in ’73. His name didn’t ring a bell for me, but Sarah continued and told me about more him, ultimately asking if I would put the word out among the old College community for anyone who might’ve known him. I agreed readily. Sadly, there was a dark and tragic background to her queries, and to the story. She explained that Winston, for a time a promising talent in competitive chess, burdened with a history of mental health problems, had in 1978 simply vanished, never to have been seen since. Foul play or misadventure were of course suspected by his family and authorities, but no trace or record of him has ever been found. He was a kind of modern-day Judge Crater.

I put the word out on the Franconia College Facebook page, a 366-member strong group of former students, faculty and extended community members. Unfortunately, my request for information yielded not a single lead, which I told Sarah last March. She thanked me for trying to help, and went back to reporting the story through other means, and I made a mental note to watch her byline for the piece on Peter Winston. Yesterday, the result of her efforts appeared in the New York Observer, a fascinating 3,000 word article that was the last thing I read before falling asleep last night. Sarah also’s blogged about the writing of the piece on her excellent tumblr, Off On a Tangent. The Observer article is haunting and sad–kind of a nonfiction counterpart to Queen’s Gambit, the novel by Walter Tevis*, whose protagonist is a troubled female chess prodigy. Though Sarah’s piece can answer few questions about Winston’s disappearance, it asks many and is compelling reading, folding in a portrait of the chess scene in NY in the 70s, the milieu that produced Winston, and a character sketch of him. Publication of the piece may also produce some leads for Sarah, so I’m recommending that you read her story and share it widely among your contacts. Any Franconia College people who may not have seen my earlier call for information, please take note. If you knew Peter, or remember him, please let me know and I will put you in touch with Sarah.

I must say now as I keep looking at this photo, I believe I must have seen him at the College, his face and demeanor are somehow familiar, but I know I never spoke with him.

* Tevis clearly had a gift for writing about troubled, alienated protagonists, sometimes young. In addition to the chess novel, his last book, he also wrote the SF novels, The Man Who Fell to Earth (a classic film with David Bowie) and The Steps of the Sun (which I happened to publish in 1989), and the pool hall novels The Hustler and The Color of Money, also great movies with Paul Newman in both, and Jackie Gleason in the first. In 1983, when Tevis was on tour for Queen’s Gambit he happened to stop in my Cleveland bookstore, Undercover Books and my brother and sister and I talked with him for an hour, on a blizzardy day. He died just a year later, in 1984. The Peter Winston mystery is one to which he would have definitely related–had it been reported in local news outlets, but according to Sarah Weinman, Winston’s disappearance barely registered in local media, or even with NYPD, who she writes have “no record of anyone by his name disappearing from the city.” Records for her piece were very sparse, with open requests to police and city authorities officially unanswered at this point.

Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, Calving or Caving?

July 19, 2012 /1 Comment/in /by

An AP story carried on NPR’s site reports that an enormous piece of the Petermann Glacier in Greenland, a chunk of ice twice the size of Manhattan, has fallen into the sea surrounding that far northern continent. While glaciologists can’t yet say for sure this was caused by climate change, it is of a piece with recent melting that’s been occurring all around the massive landmass. A series of maps and satellite photos from NASA shows these changes, which actually occurred in August 2010, though examination of the photos has only recently yielded discovery of the event. Scientists will continue to study this event, as they try to determine if this was a glacier calving off a large part of itself, or whether the 46-square mile chunk of ice caved in to the ocean as a result of global warming. 

In Depth Profile of CBC Radio’s Jian Ghomeshi

July 19, 2012 /4 Comments/in , , /by

July 25 Update: Jian Ghomeshi of CBC Radio’s ‘Q’ has now also been the subject of a NY Times profile, and here’s a link to it. I’m really pleased to see Jian and his program making so much headway in New York City, and throughout the States.

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CBC Radio One’s morning program ‘Q‘ is one of my favorite shows on any radio network. Though normally produced at CBC’s headquarters in Toronto, host Jian Ghomeshi and his producers occasionally take their show on the road, which allowed my son Ewan and I to attend a live taping held in WNYC’s Greene Space in 2011. That night Jian interviewed guests Joy Behar and Fran Leibowitz and the band The National played too. He was very personable when we talked afterward, and pleased to meet U.S. listeners like us. That visit to NY was a prologue as the show has a spot on WNYC’s evening schedule this summer, 10 PM on the FM frequency, 93.9. I still listen on the Internet most mornings while at my desk, but it’s also great that I can hear it in the evenings if I missed it earlier.

Last month, during the NXNE festival, when fans of CBC Radio 3, the indie rock outpost of CBC, got a tour of CBC HQs, producer Pedro Mendes and Radio 3 host Grant Lawrence brought Jian out to meet the group. He was charming, and when I (re-) introduced myself he remembered having met me and Ewan in NY more than a year ago. That afternoon I took this photo of Jian, in the soccer jersey, and Grant, in flannel. 

Today I was glad to read a profile of Jian in the Globe & Mail from last weekend. Reporter Brad Wheeler adopts a somewhat snarky tone, but overall, it’s a good article, with info like this:

“Last month, Ghomeshi won the Gold Award for best talk-show host at the New York Festivals International Radio Awards. Q, the popular daily arts, entertainment and culture magazine he hosts with aplomb and a soothing baritone, air[ing] on 120 public radio stations south of the border, including in major markets such as New York, Chicago and San Diego. . . . Q’s unprecedented American victories are explainable. The show takes pop culture seriously, attracts A-list guests, engages in lively debate and manages a rhythmic flow of its varied content. You have a host in Ghomeshi who comes with an exotic cultural background, a radio-friendly baritone, and who’s cocky and well-read enough to take on a variety of issues and interview subjects in an in-depth way. ‘The type of show Jian does draws on a lot aspects of the host’s personality,’ says Robert Harris, long-time CBC personality and producer. ‘It stretches your brain power, and the audience reacts to it.’ . . . . Some of the new listeners no doubt react to Q’s hip list of musical guests. Moreover, the artists and labels themselves are on board. Would rapper andQ guest Jay-Z have done Radio One five years ago? No chance. ‘American managers are reaching out to me, wanting to know which shows they should do,’ says Patrick Sambrook, a prominent artists’ manager whose clients include Kathleen Edwards and Sarah Harmer. ‘Q is on the top of the list for international artists coming to Canada. It’s the show that you want to be on.’”

To this I would add that ‘Q’ broadcast a nearly one-hour interview with Neil Young and Daniel Lanois, when “LeNoise” was released last year, a rare bit of media access that Neil chose to give ‘Q.’ More recently, Jian interviewed Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, who chose to appear on ‘Q’ despite continuing threats to his freedom by the Chinese government. I haven’t heard Ai WeiWei on any NPR programs. Clearly, ‘Q’ has become a go-to show for artists, authors, and many public figures. If you enjoy filling your day with intelligent talk radio, I recommend you listen to this terrific program. Being nowhere near Canadian air waves doesn’t matter, as it’s easy to listen to CBC on the Web.

Jian, whose family comes orginally from Iran, moved from England to Canada when he was fourteen is writing a book, 1982, about his teenage obsession with David Bowie, which will be published in Canada, and he told me, the U.S.

New Bob Dylan Album Due Out in September

July 17, 2012 /2 Comments/in /by

Bob Dylan’s still at, a long way from hanging up his guitar or microphone.  Timed to mark his 50th anniversary as a recording artist, Columbia Records has announced on www.bobdylan.com that in September Bob Dylan will be releasing a new album, “Tempest.” Columbia writes that it will feature “ten new and original Bob Dylan songs,” and that its “release. . . coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the artist’s eponymous debut album, which was released by Columbia in 1962.”