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My Contribution to “Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology”

September 12, 2012 /11 Comments/in , /by

Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology is officially published now and available for purchase, as a trade paperback and an ebook. This is the book readers and friends may have noticed me, and others, blogging about over the past couple months. I posted about it on July 13, just after I’d submitted my completed essay, “Remembering Mr. Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern,” on a venerable Cleveland bluesman and the nightclub where he and his excellent band played for many years, both of which proved personal gateways to my lifelong enjoyment of live music.

Before making way for my piece, I want to add that Rust Belt Chic is a unique community publishing project, spearheaded by co-editors Anne Trubek and Richey Piiparinen, who pulled the whole project together, with more than 35 contributors, in under 3 months. It comes at a propitious moment, a time to appreciate and re-appreciate what weathered cities like Cleveland offer the country–creativity, resiliency, new hope, authenticity, and less bullshit than other environs. After seven years of running Undercover Books in Cleveland, I left my hometown, moving to New York City in 1985. Even here in the metropolis, I note the mall-ification and mass-ification of the city, where it seems every corner has a Duane Reade, CVS, Walgreen’s, TD Bank, HSBC, Chase, or Citibank. What ever happened to stores run by local owners? Well, they’re around, just a bit harder to find, in NYC, and many in Cleveland. This is the sort of new world that Rust Belt Chic explores and chronicles.

As a sign of just how community-oriented the book really is, editors Trubek and Piiparinen asked all the contributors, in the event that the book sells well enough to make back its expenses and reaches into profitability, would we want an honorarium payment, or would we choose to plow our earnings into another indie project to be chosen first from among book ideas presented by us contributors, with one (or if we’re really fortunate, more than one) project being chosen for funding. I have a ready book idea–a new volume to be culled from the Guinness Book of World Records-recognized diary of Edward Robb Ellis, whose A Diary of the Century: Tales from America’s Greatest Diarist, I edited and published in 1995. I was happy to choose the second option offered.

With all that said, I’ll close this preamble by saying I hope you buy the book as a print or a digital edition, or one of each, not because of charitable intentions (though that’s okay too) but because it offers thirty-five fine examples of narrative journalism, chronicling a distinctive part of the country that is too often overlooked on the literary and cultural map. I also urge you to follow the book’s Twitter feed, @rust-belt-chic. On my own Twitter feed, @philipsturner, I’ve started a hashtag, #MrStress. You may also ‘like’ the Rust Belt Chic Facebook page. Thank you in advance for supporting this exciting experiment in cultural urban renewal.

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Remembering Mr. Stress, Live at the Euclid Tavern 

Growing up in the hotbed of rock n’ roll that was Cleveland in the 60s and 70s, I began going out to hear live music even before I had turned fourteen. Music Hall, with its fixed rows of seats trimmed in maroon velvet was a regular venue for bills such as Cream with Canned Heat; the Grateful Dead with the New Riders of the Purple Sage; Traffic; John Mayall; the Allman Brothers; and The Band, among many other acts. In 1972, just after turning eighteen, then Ohio’s legal drinking age, I began to discover live music venues that were even more fun as a hang-out than Music Hall.

On the eastern edge of University Circle, near Euclid Avenue and Ford Road was a squat brick building known as the Brick Cottage, where I found that a venerable Cleveland bluesman, Mr. Stress and his band often performed. Stress dubbed this club the “sick brick,” a rueful yet fond homage to the many nights of alcoholic excess committed within its walls. Mr. Stress was the Paul Butterfield of Cleveland—a white bluesman who sang and played harmonica and led his band with an unerring sense of what made the blues so entertaining and so sustaining for live music lovers. He was always comfortable on stage with a cohort of diverse sidemen, young and old, black and white, tattooed players and professorial pianists.

In 1973, I went off to study at Franconia College in New Hampshire. By 1978, when I returned to Cleveland full-time, Stress and his band had moved down the block to the Euclid Tavern, at 116th Street where they would join forces every Wednesday and Saturday night for what became a long-running residency. This club, quite a bit larger than the “Brick,” included a central music room with a low stage for the band and a dance floor, an outdoor area in back, plus a basement bar. It was a veritable cruise ship of nightlife. During breaks between sets I often made new friends in my ambles around the lively deck. In the room opposite the stage was the main bar, a long hitching post of a drinks station where multiple bartenders pulled beer taps and poured liquor. Behind and above them was a sign that became a watchword in my life: “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re on the ground with the turkeys.”

Mr. Stress—real name Bill Miller—was a TV repairman by day. “Stress,” as most people called him, was a big reader, a history buff who avidly consumed books, including many on the Vietnam War. In 1978, when my family and I began running Undercover Books, a bookstore in Shaker Hts., I’d order Nam books that Stress asked me about and bring them to the club for him. (Sometimes he paid for them, sometimes I just gave them to him—my personal payback to Stress for the generous enrichment he always lent to the Cleveland music scene.)

Like me, many Stress fans came to the Euclid Tavern every week. I was friends with Danny Palumbo, who got around in a wheelchair. Danny worked for the State of Ohio in workplace compliance for accommodating the disabled. Never hindered in his enjoyment of the fine blues that Mr. Stress and the band played, Danny would dance in his chair along with everyone else crowding the wooden dance floor, boogieing to up-tempo numbers like “Crosscut Saw” and “Firing Line,” or swaying to laments such as the mournful “Black Night,” when a guest sax player, Mal Barron, would sometimes sit in. Danny had a colorful way of talking about the female friends he’d meet each week at the bar, and I recall him once saying of a certain Tanya, a particularly cute and curvaceous regular, that given the chance he’d eagerly “drink her bathwater.”

Another Stress fan I saw just about every week was Michael Lloyd, an African-American friend who like me had for a time worked at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. We met when we were each vendors for Cleveland Indians baseball games. I sold beer, Michael sold hot dogs. I did it for only one summer, he did it for a few more and then moved in to the season ticket office. He was a tall, handsome fellow, with a smooth manner and sweet speaking voice. I thought of him as the the Euclid Tavern’s Smokey Robinson. He was a sharp dresser and a great dancer, and always drew to himself the prettiest, most statuesque new female visitors to the club. They would walk tentatively into the place, clearly wondering what this rough and raw place was all about; Michael would spot them and deftly take them under his wing for the night. 

Stress enjoyed bantering with his bandmates and regulars got to know his comic repertoire very well. As Stress would reach the punch line to one of his hoary gags, a bartender would chime the tip bell, a badda-boom underlining the corny humor. The exterior of the building that housed the Euclid Tavern was as weathered as the nearby streets. One of Stress’s favorite lines was, “The more you drink, the better we sound.” 

Sometime in the early 80s, Stress put out an album, “Mr. Stress Live at the Euclid Tavern.” I still treasure my vinyl LP, and listened to it while composing these recollections. After moving to New York City in 1985, I would sometimes return to the club when visiting family back home. Except for Stress, I never saw the old crew. As years passed, I occasionally wondered if he was still playing at the Euclid Tavern, or playing in Cleveland at all. I also wondered if the Euclid Tavern was still standing at 116th Street, even as the rest of University Circle underwent many makeovers and Cleveland picked itself up off the mat of urban decline time and again. My sister Pamela Turner still lives in Cleveland, and in July she found it for me, taking the photo of the sign posted here. While reporting this piece I found a phone number for the establishment and asked a bartender who answered if Mr. Stress still plays there. Sounding a bit surprised, he replied, “No, he hasn’t played here for a couple years.”

I later spoke with Plain Dealer reporter John Petkovic who’d written a 2011 story about Stress, reporting that in 1993 the musician had had a heart attack. In the story, Stress also told Petkovic, ““I woke up one morning and. . . I had lost a third of my vision. I’ve heard it comes from blowing so hard, you pop blood vessels. I can’t drive or get around as well. But it ain’t stopping me from playing the blues.”

Petkovic referred me to Alan Greene, a Cleveland musician who played gigs with Stress as late as 2010. Alan said Stress now considers himself in “semi-retirement.” Alan also mentioned that next New Year’s Day Stress will turn seventy, which brought back a flood of rich memories from great New Year’s Eve shows when Stress and revelers raucously marked a new year and Bill’s birthday. Alan also mentioned that when Stress was born a minute after midnight on New Year’s Day in 1943 he was feted as Cleveland’s firstborn of the new year—a fitting birth for a bluesman when you think of Muddy Waters singing about fabled characters who were ‘born the seventh son of the seventh mother on the seventh day.’ Clearly, Stress was born with an auspicious pedigree for what’s turned out to be a great life and musical career.

I will always fondly recall the many nights of fine blues and camaraderie I enjoyed thanks to Mr. Stress and the talented bandmates he played with. During the years I followed them at the Euclid Tavern his sidemen were Mike Sands, keyboard; Tim Matson, lead guitar; Ray DeForest, bass; and Nick Tranchito, drums, who Stress invariably introduced as “the Mediterranean metronome.” Living in New York City today I remain a devotee of going out to hear live music, a happy habit I began forty years ago listening to Mr. Stress. I must add that after RBC was published, Mr. Stress read my essay and we’ve been reunited via telephone and the Internet after more than 25 years being out of touch. Even with macular degeneration, he still reads voraciously with aid of voice-enabled software. We were in touch on his birthday New Year’s Day and he knows I’m presenting his story here tonight. He’s very glad to see his career remembered in Rust Belt Chic.

Philip Turner is a longtime bookseller, book editor and publisher. He lives in New York City and blogs daily at The Great Gray Bridge, where he writes about music, books, publishing, media, culture, and current affairs.

November 2012 Update: At the time I submitted the above essay for inclusion in Rust Belt Chic I had not spoken with Mr. Stress, the subject of the piece, for more than twenty-five years. Now that the book’s been published I’ve had the privilege of sharing the essay with him and being in touch once more. This has proved a real joy, truly the best benefit of having written the piece. Speaking with Stress, I learned I had made some errors in my first draft, for which I apologize. Stress has graciously helped me correct them, patching up some key gaps in my memory. One of these was the facts about the predecessor bar to the Euclid Tavern, the Brick Cottage, where Stress was regularly playing in 1972, when I first heard him. Also, I now liken him more accurately to Paul Butterfield, rather than Charlie Musselwhite, as I’d done earlier. As well, photographs not in the book are included here with the piece for the first time.

January 4 2013 Update: On January 3 in Brooklyn at a venue called Public Assembly, Rust Belt Chic was feted with readings by six contributors, and one Detroit-bred guest not in the Cleveland collection. The version of the essay posted above is pretty much as I read it last night, with some slight variations to the expanded version published on this blog in November. I’m hopeful that at some point the ebook edition of Rust Belt Chic will be updated so as to reflect the latest version of the essay. It is not dramatically different from the version published in the print edition of the book, just a bit longer. I’m grateful for your understanding.

Please click through to read the entire post and view all photos.
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Remembering 9/11/01–Running through a Dust Cloud in Lower Manhattan

September 11, 2012 /7 Comments/in , /by

In May 2001, Avalon Publishing Group–the Berkeley, California company I worked for as an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers–moved all its New York employees to new offices on 161 William Street in lower Manhattan, near City Hall Park, behind Park Row and the J&R Music World stores, 2-3 blocks east of the World Trade Center. I had enjoyed our original space on W. 21st Street, and didn’t appreciate the longer commute from my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but soon got used to the new neighborhood, new restaurants, new sights and sounds.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I rode the #1 train downtown and emerged from the Fulton Street subway station, at the corner of William and Fulton, with a customary single earbud stuck in one ear, tuned in to local public radio station WNYC, alert to what might be going on at street level. I detected uncharacteristic alarm from the on-air voices of host Brian Lehrer and correspondent Beth Fertig. Before I could comprehend the source of their concern, my gaze turned west and up in to the air toward the World Trade Center towers, startled to see flames, smoke, and debris pouring from the structures, against a backdrop of a California-type deep blue sky. The air around me was palpably hot, a weird sensation I couldn’t account for, even after seeing the flames above me in the sky.

What in the world?

Turning the corner and hurrying toward my office building, I focused again on the radio voices, hearing something about an airplane having crashed into one of the towers, and then, that a second such crash had occurred, evidently only moments before I came out of the subway. Lehrer’s and Fertig’s alarm was in real time. Any idea I had momentarily entertained that associated this event with the incident in the 1940s when the Empire State Building was struck by a light plane, was dashed. I ran in to 161 William, took the elevator to our upper floor and found a handful of Avalon colleagues who’d arrived before me. I hustled over to the western side of the floor, joining them as we all took in a clear view of the twin towers, with a valley of lower buildings below and between us and the conflagration. The volume of flame, smoke, and debris were all much greater than when I’d first seen them from street level. The debris included a fluttering cascade of myriad loose sheets of white paper. Midway between our building and the two towers I noticed a lone man on a rooftop across the way and below our floor. The figure seemed to be in a prayerful pose, kneeling on a rug, wearing a white skullcap. I never learned what he was doing there, and have in the years since pondered it with colleagues such as Keith Wallman who saw the man with me that morning.

In those days, neither my wife nor I owned a cell phone. I rushed into my office, on the east side of the building, and used my phone there to call Kyle. The lines worked the first time I tried our home line. She’d just gotten in from taking our son Ewan to kindergarten, where he was in his first week as a student; on her way home she’d heard about the events downtown. I told her what I’d seen and she said she had the TV on and warned me to leave the office building right away. I said, yes, but I don’t know what’s going on at street level. What if the buildings fall, and topple in the easterly direction? What if people are panicked or trampling each other? Maybe I’d be safer upstairs.  These were some of my thoughts. Kyle said she was going to go out and get cash and drinking water for our apartment, then go back to school and bring Ewan home. We talked a few minutes more and I told her I was going to go back to the other side of the office, the west side of the floor, to see the latest developments. I stayed a few minutes and finally decided, yes, it’s time to leave. I tried my home line again but now couldn’t get a call through. I would’ve left a message, telling Kyle I was leaving and that I would try to call her again later, but couldn’t get through at all. A colleague and I decided to descend in the elevator together, and then make a run for it when we got out on William Street. My companion was my fellow editor Tina Pohlman. As we were rushing from the western windows in to the open elevator car—I know now it was at 9:59 AM—we heard one of the weirdest sounds I’ve ever experienced, made by what I learned later was the collapse of the first tower. First, came a deeply guttural bass sound, created probably by the tremendous downdraft of air from the vertical collapse—something almost felt more in my belly than heard in my ears. The next instant, I registered a high, trebly, tinkling noise made up, I think, of breaking glass and splintering metal.

Tina and I descended in the elevator without a problem, but outside the lobby’s revolving door saw hundreds of people running past our building front, engulfed in a dusty, smoky cloud. Without hesitating more than a few seconds, we pushed out the door and joined the massing throng pushing north and east, toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Tina hoped to head over to the lower East Side, where she lived, if permitted by police. My direction was uptown, all the way to West 102nd Street, my home block. We were immediately surrounded by the cloud, a murk that wasn’t pure gray or black, examples that TV footage would later show; this cloud actually had a few shafts of sunlight in it. It was more ochre than gray. Still, it was pretty opaque and a specific fear registered that if debris were flying in it, we might not even see it heading at us. We made a right turn on Beekman Street, past New York Downtown Hospital, then turned left on Pearl Street, running together for several blocks until we were actually under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Though still surrounded by the blanket of dust, and impelled to keep running till I was clear of it, I was beginning to fear that I couldn’t keep up the pace. I wasn’t so much out of breath, the problem was the shoes I had worn that morning—a pair of newish ankle-high boots. With the beautiful fall weather that morning, I had considered them appropriately autumnal and so decided to don them. But I hadn’t broken them in yet, and they proved terrible to try to run in, or even to try walking fast. I would regret my choice of footwear for many months that followed.

I tried to ignore the nascent pain and resumed my nervous, awkward jog, continually hitching and hauling up the tote bag slung over my shoulder. Surrounded by earnest and fearful strangers, all of us still shrouded by the murk, my route passed through unfamiliar parts of Chinatown. Approaching Canal Street the cloud began to thin a little. Finally, we crossed Canal and burst into patches of clear air. Tina and I said goodbye and wished each other well as we headed off in our separate directions. I was relieved to be in clearer air and thought, Now I just have to get home. Problem was, I still had a long way to go. Any city buses that passed were insanely overcrowded, and moving at a crawl anyway. Yellow cabs and livery taxis were also full and barely moving through the dense surface traffic. Continuing to listen to the radio, I learned that the second tower had fallen, at 10:28. With both towers down, I was now confirmed in my horror that thousands of people had already died this day. Meantime, the subways had been halted, and it was unknown when they would resume operation. I had no choice but to walk all the way home, about eight miles.

I pushed up Broadway, through Soho, past Union Square, the Flatiron Building, Madison Square, Times Square, the Theater District, Central Park, Columbus Circle, and Lincoln Center. Every now and then on this odyssey I’d stop and try Kyle on a pay phone. The lines were all dead. She didn’t know when or even for sure if I had left my office. At last, I hit 72nd Street and was on the Upper West Side. It felt good to be back uptown, but I still had thirty blocks to go. I kept pushing, increasingly hobbled, eventually ringing our bell and announcing I was home. It was around 3PM, about five hours since I’d left William Street. Kyle and Ewan were waiting for me and I collapsed into their open arms. I sat down and removed my shoes and socks. Both feet were raw and blistered, from ankles to toes. I tuned in to TV for the first time all day and saw with my own eyes the enormity of the loss that everyone else had been viewing all day via the visual medium. Not wanting to disturb Ewan any more than he might be already, we shut off the set until he went to bed.

Avalon’s offices would remain closed for about a week and a half. I tried to stay off my feet and let them heal, but the need to be ambulatory prevailed and I resumed walking around. Unfortunately, my gait was much altered by what I’d endured, which led to a series of foot, ankle, calf, hamstring, and leg injuries over the next couple years. Damage to the #1, 2, and 3 subway lines in lower Manhattan was so serious that my longer commute was lengthened further; a trip that used to take 30-40 minutes often ran to 90 minutes or longer, with a lot more walking required every day. It was a horrible burden every day to come to work in the same neighborhood with the toxic brew a few blocks west that was already making recovery workers on the pile ill. For some reason, cold air seemed to magnify the odor that drifted eastward in the neighborhood. On winter evenings, I would leave the office and rush down in to the subway station, covering my mouth with a handkerchief to cut the horrible, vile crippling smell that I knew contained a mix of plastics, circuit boards, burnt upholstery, carpets, and human remains.

A new normal kind of took over, but nothing really seemed normal anymore. I read about and followed the 9/11 Commission and was appalled at what had been the Bush administration’s failure to heed urgent warnings from counter-terrorism officials, as we were reminded again this morning with Kurt Eichenwald’s NY Times Op-Ed, The Deafness Before the Storm. I was deeply and personally offended when Bush held his 2004 convention in NYC, using the still-healing city as a backdrop for his bogus triumphalism. He and Dick Cheney claimed to have kept us safe–except I always hastened to add–when they had failed, “big time,” to borrow a phrase of Cheney’s. I was enormously relieved when Avalon moved offices again, back into Chelsea, a welcome removal from the still-stricken neighborhood downtown.

I didn’t suffer personal loss that day, but the mundane insults that many denizens of Gotham did endure—my leg injuries and lengthened commute standing for the ordinary pain of so many—were deeply hurtful, especially knowing that so many had lost so much more. Then came Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and the recession only seven years after 9/11—that’s some string of national bummers, as our politics became more and more corrosive. It’s hard to overcome feeling sad, but I do, mostly.

Each year on 9/11 our UWS neighborhood welcomes mourners, firefighters, police, and families to the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive at 100th Street, a civic monument originally erected in 1913. Last year, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the day’s observances drew firefighter crews from all over the U.S., anglophone and francophone Canada, Scotland, France, and Australia. I’ll conclude this personal remembrance of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath by sharing nine of the photographs Kyle and I took at the special day last year. I will close by saying I hope your 9/11 anniversary this year, 2012, has been a soothing day. Shalom.

What Were Editors & Execs at Dutton & Penguin Thinking?/Part III

September 9, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

A few new developments with No Easy Day, the book on the Bin Laden raid by the ex-Navy Seal, whose pseudonymous cover of Mark Owen was blown by FOX News in the early days of this controversy:

  • Owen will have his first, and maybe only, broadcast interview tonight, on 60 Minutes. According to the book’s publicist at Dutton “security concerns” will make it impossible for him to do more media, at least for now. (Though his real name is being used in most media, I will not name him on this blog.) Update: I watched the 60M interview and will write about it more length later on.
  • The NY Daily News reports that the Navy Seal foundation to which Mark Owen has claimed he’ll donate proceeds from his book has announced they will refuse any money from him.
  • The Pentagon pushed back against what seemed to me a ludicrous claim made by Owen’s attorney Robert Luskin, that the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) Owen signed with the Navy didn’t require him to have the manuscript vetted by the government, and that the NDA only “invited” him to do so. Reuters’ Mark Hosenball reports that a Pentagon spokesman told reporters the former Navy SEAL’s actions appear “to potentially violate his obligation not to disclose ‘the contents of such preparation to any person not authorized to have access to SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) until I have received written authorization from the Department or Agency that last authorized my access to SCI that such disclosure was permitted.'”

Hosenball adds that the spokesman said this was a passage from “a standard Pentagon secrecy agreement which . . . was ‘identical’ to one [the author] had signed.” The spokesman pointed out “a paragraph in the secrecy agreement in which the signer acknowledges that the purpose of a pre-publication review was ‘to give the United States a reasonable opportunity to determine’ if any manuscript contained any sensitive classified information.” He highlighted a third section paragraph “which said that if the person signing the agreement was “uncertain about the classification status of information” they were “required to confirm from an authorized official that the information is unclassified before disclos[ing] it.”

In earlier posts, here (1) and here (2), I had written that editors and executives at Dutton and Penguin messed up badly by seemingly just accepting the opinion of an attorney hired by the author, who said that the manuscript did not disclose classified information. This shortcut meant the book went to press without complete vetting.

Even though No Easy Day has been on sale since September 4, the Pentagon has since ruled that the author’s in “material breach and violation of the non-disclosure agreements,” and that his book contains “classified” information, and they may still take legal action against the author. They had earlier warned him about possible seizure of “royalties, remunerations, and emoluments.” Penguin could also suffer a loss to its reputation or even financially, having brought out a book deemed harmful to national security. As I wrote in my first post on this situation, Penguin already had plenty of trouble with the Department of Justice, in the ebook agency pricing lawsuit, they could’ve done without this additional legal problem.

Reuters concludes its report: “Dutton said the review by the ‘former special operations attorney’ concluded the contents of No Easy Day were ‘without risk to national security.’ The publisher has not released further details regarding who reviewed the manuscript.”

I find this statement hard to believe, and so have a handful of questions:

1) Was Dutton on such a crash production schedule that they failed to build in adequate time for government review, and so decided to wing it with the one attorney? 2) Or, were Owen’s editors inexperienced and incurious and so failed to ask him if he had signed an NDA? 3) Did they know he’d signed one, but never read it? 4) Did Owen’s reported animus toward the Navy over his discharge from the service motivate him to bypass the vetting, and leave them little time to review the book? 5) Was Dutton hopeful that the whole flap would draw the Pentagon’s condemnation and provide them with a lot of free publicity?

I will close by saying that if anyone reading this blog believes they know what happened in the editing of Owen’s manuscript–why vetting was limited to the lone attorney–or has other information relevant to this story, I would like to hear from you through the contact button at the top of this website.
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“Blood Sport”–Reflections on a Key Phrase in Bill Clinton’s DNC Speech

September 8, 2012 /0 Comments/in , /by

Bill Clinton’s DNC speech Wednesday night was such a barn-burner that a few things just whizzed by me as he delivered it. Reflecting on them later, this line jumped out at me.

“Democracy does not have to be a blood sport.”

I’ve been thinking about this since, and today I realized why the phrase has stuck in my mind–they are the same words as the title of James Stewart’s 1997 book, Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries. Published just as Special Prosecutor Ken Starr was jailing Susan McDougal for 18 months on contempt charges* and targeting the Clintons; it was especially critical of Hillary who declined to cooperate with Stewart on his book. It’s significant to me that Bill chose to utter the phrase in this week’s speech, so many years after the Starr investigation and the impeachment by the House of Representatives, which was followed of course by the acquittal in the Senate trial that followed. I surmise he still views that toxic period as the nadir of the politics of personal destruction, and so knowingly used the phrase for the millions listening, to characterize the way President Obama has been demonized by his foes. The two words created an equivalence between the rampaging campaigns of hate toward each man and disdain for the office.

I should add that it was evidently an ad-libbed phrase, since according to the Atlantic‘s Dashiell Bennett, in his analysis of the prepared text vs. the transcript of what Bill Clinton actually said, the two words were not in the former.  It’s also fascinating to juxtapose the prepared text with what was delivered. The word count of the former was 3,136, whereas the latter was 5,895, meaning Bill Clinton extemporized with 2,759 words, or nearly the length again of the prepared text.

The title of Stewart’s book may itself have been inspired by the ripped-up letter found among Vince Foster’s personal effects after his 1993 suicide, in the early days of the Clinton administration,

“I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”

I don’t own a copy of Stewart’s book, but when I find a copy I will check to see if Stewart provides the origin of his title anywhere in the book.

At the end on Wednesday night, when President Obama came out and the two men embraced like brothers, I saw a vulnerability in Bill Clinton. As he grasped the binder with the printed text he’d riffed on for 49 minutes, he was still holding on to the words, looking almost unsure of what to do with his hands. It was a very human moment.

* With Carroll & Graf Publishers in 2001, I edited and published Susan McDougal’s book, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Refused to Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail. One of the two times I met President Clinton was at a dinner given in New York City in 2002 by the directors of a documentary, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, based on the book of the same name by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. Joe was there and Susan was an honored guest. I was pretty stunned when after the meal, Bill Clinton walked into the private dining room of the hotel restaurant. This was after his heart surgery–he’d lost a great deal of weight and he seemed smaller (I had something to compare with, since I’d also met him in 1992, when he was not yet the Democrats’ nominee for president, an encounter I wrote a few days ago on this blog). He put his arm around Susan, whom he’d pardoned before he left office, a noble pardon, I will add. She introduced me to the president, explaining I had been the editor of her book. He looked me in the eye, and said, “Well, you did a good thing, publishing her book. Thank you.”

 

#FridayReads, Sept. 7–Tony Hillerman’s “The Dark Wind” & Jonathan D. Moreno’s “Mind Wars”

September 7, 2012 /3 Comments/in , /by

#FridayReads, Sept. 7–The Dark Wind, one of Tony Hillerman’s early mysteries featuring Jim Chee, the Navaho policeman. I’ve loved these books for many years, and was happy to find this secondhand copy of the 1982 book from a sidewalk seller on Broadway last week. If you love mysteries and haven’t read Hillerman, what are you waiting for?

Also, I’m still reading a book I’d blogged about last week, Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century by Jonathan D. Moreno, on the attempts of US defense and intelligence agencies to develop enhanced human capacity for soldiers and agents in the field.  This work, much of at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where the Internet originated, is shrouded in secrecy. However, Moreno–a medical ethicist whose father was a prominent psychotherapist who at one time worked experimentally with LSD–reveals a great deal of fascinating information. By the way, googling Moreno’s name and “Mind Wars” yields articles like this one from Wired magazine relating this field of scientific research to the Jason Bourne movies

What it Takes*

September 7, 2012 /1 Comment/in , /by

Terrific essay by fellow blogger Lance Mannion at his self-named site. It’s called Shake Every Hand, Kiss Every Baby, and it’s a very readable analysis with much humor of the one-on-one people skills that successful politicians employ in connecting with voters.

His post reminded me of when Kyle and I met Bill Clinton in April ’92, prior to the NY primary, weeks before he had wrapped up the Democratic nomination. This was in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street. First Hillary, then Bill spoke standing on the open bed of a pickup truck, and when they were done, climbed down into the crowd. They met and conversed with everyone there, shook every hand, and campaigned like he was trailing in the polls, not leading. Bill’s hands were soft and big–it felt like shaking hands with a pillow. He looked me in the eye and asked for my vote in the upcoming primary. I then volunteered for his fall campaign against President Bush, joining an ad hoc group in Manhattan called Street Corner Speakers for Clinton. That was a great campaign year.

In considering what makes a successful politician, Lance’s references run the gamut from Dickens’ Hard Times to George McGovern’s early days as a hopeful South Dakota pol. I was glad to see that Andrew Sullivan linked to it this morning at The Dish on the Daily Beast in a share of Lance’s post Andrew called The Handshake Factor.

I recommend you read the whole piece. Here’s a taste of it, the same excerpt as on The Dish.

“You get out there and you shake as many hands, kiss as many babies, ring as many doorbells as there are minutes in the day every day.  Ideally, before the campaign’s over you’ll have met every voter and asked them for their vote personally.
“Of course the higher up the ladder, the larger the constituency, and the more that ideal becomes an impossibility. So you’re forced to do a lot of it by proxy.  Instead of meeting voters one at a time, you meet them in crowds. Instead of showing up on their doorsteps, you show up on their TVs and computer screens and mobile devices. You spend more time with big donors than with small business owners. And what used to be a matter of just doing your job, going out to listen to constituents tell you their troubles and ask for your help, becomes a photo op. If you worked your way up the political ladder, and you know what’s good for you, you remember what the point was and you keep in mind who deserves your attention when you’re out on the stump. And when you stop standing in front of the crowd and dive into it instead, all the old skills come back.”

* In borrowing this post’s title from Richard Ben Cramer’s great book of the same name, I say thanks to Mr. Cramer.

Great Content from the Public Domain Review

September 6, 2012 /0 Comments/in /by

I’m enjoying a website I recently discovered, devoted to sharing works of all kinds in the public domain, from the historical, visual, literary, and musical worlds. It’s called the The Public Domain Review. Here’s a screenshot of what their front page looks like today. H/t Shaun Usher of the great site Letters of Note, who brought the Public Domain Review to my attention.

Michelle’s Dress of Many Colors

September 5, 2012 /1 Comment/in /by

Interesting comment by Eric Wilson in the Times on the dress Michelle Obama wore at the DNC last night.

Like the fool he is, Romney surrogate John Sununu is in the media trying to stir up some issue about the cost of the dress, which I’ve tweeted about below. FWIW, Eric Wilson reports that the retail cost of Michelle’s dress is approximately 1/4 of the garment Ann Romney wore the night she spoke at the RNC. Sununu’s accusing the Obama camp of ‘lying,’ when it’s news orgs reporting the cost.