The Romneys–Completely Clueless

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The Romneys are completely clueless about how most folks live. Politically, they are as stupid as any campaign I’ve ever seen. Their advisors must want to muzzle them. And that little laugh she gives out with–it just disgusts me.

Late Update: Now there’s a big pushback coming from the Romney camp where they claim “out of context, out of context” about this Ann Romney clip. Well, aside from the fact that they already ran an ad against Pres. Obama where they bragged about the fact that a McCain spokesman’s words were put in Barack’s mouth (talk about out of context), I listened to the whole .52 second clip of Ann Romney today and my reaction is that this is worse than the .12 second segment alone. She begins by talking about her illness, but as I wrote in a blog essay last December–good for her that she can afford equine therapy and expensive horses for her MS, but what about folks who can’t avail themselves of those things, and don’t have the health care and insurance she has. The policies of her husband and his party would make it that much harder for those less fortunate to ever be able to do so.

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A Personal Encounter with Writer Jennifer Homans

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Yesterday, my wife and I attended a Scholastic writing awards ceremony with our teenage son Ewan where he was given a medal for a humor sketch he’d written (posted here). The program included a keynote speaker, Jennifer Homans, who was introduced as the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. I knew of her book, which had won awards and been named to many best book lists in 2010, but I knew nothing else about her. She offered good advice to the many young writers assembled in the high school gym, like find a place “inside” yourself to write from and, even while relying on stimulation and information from the outside world, turn off the input, such as Twitter and Facebook, and don’t hesitate to go into yourself. Then she turned to a personal matter. She revealed that her husband, also a writer, had died less than two years earlier, and that she had just written and published an account of his passing, which required her to emerge from her quiet place, not a comfortable place for her, but one that she felt obliged to occupy for a time. She didn’t mention her late husband’s name, and I made a mental note to find out who he was. Before I had a chance to look it up, the essay by Homans on her late husband jumped out at me, in the New York Review of Books. He had been Tony Judt, the prolific author and intellectual historian of modern Europe. Stricken with ALS in 2008, her piece chronicles his last two years, when he maintained many of his intellectual and writerly pursuits, most significantly  ‘talking’ out his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, in regular two-hour conversation with collaborator Tony Snyder. He was editing passages of it just before his death in the summer of 2010. The book was published posthumously last month. Homans personal essay is a moving tribute and I’m grateful for having had the chance to hear her speak about her writing life and that of her brave and brilliant husband.

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Rose Cousins & Band–Catching a Spark at The Living Room

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One of the first musical artists I chanced upon when I discovered the terrific Canadian indie music scene on CBC Radio 3 was the spellbinding Maritimes-born singer-songwriter Rose Cousins. I put her classic, “White Daisies,” a poetic tale of love and loss, in one of the first personal playlists I made on the Radio 3 website and have listened to it many times with its great vocal and concluding verse,

“You sent me flowers when you were strong/You were my baby, a whole year long/All you could tell me is how I’d done you wrong/Now I’ve got white daisies and a lonesome song.”

I was excited last month when I heard Rose would be performing in New York City at the Living Room, a great venue to enjoy acoustic and roots music and lightly amplified rock ‘n roll. When I arrived breathless last night, cutting it way too close for the announced 8:00 start time, I saw a very full room, and wondered where or if I might find a seat. When I saw there was no one at the door taking cover charge money, I realized that the gig was actually a release party for Rose’s new album, “We Have Made a Spark.” Someone was already saving the first seat I tried, but on my second attempt found a chair right in front of the low stage, closer to Rose and her mic than anyone else’s in the room. She was only moments from beginning her set when I shrugged off my coat and settled in to my seat.

The stage at the intimate Living Room was crowded with the excellent band she’d gathered around herself in Boston where the new album was recorded–with Charlie Rose on banjo and pedal steel; album producer Zachariah Hickman, plucking and bowing an upright bass and sporting a handlebar moustache; Sean Staples seated, on a battery of acoustic guitars; Billy Beard on drums and other percussion, playing great thumping beats; Austin Nevins on a big, gorgeous hollow body Gretsch electric guitar making tasty licks; Dinty Child, on an eight-string (!) acoustic guitar, banjo, and piano; and Ana Ege singing backup vocals, who was seated at the same table as me when she wasn’t singing. Rose sang beautifully and feelingly, moving between her Martin guitar and the piano tucked in the far corner of the stage. In her songwriting she boldly knits her heart to her sleeve, and in her vulnerability asks her listener to do the same. “Spark’ is a very intimate and personal set of new songs that began growing on me instantly. I had heard Radio 3 hosts Grant Lawrence and Lisa Christiansen say that she also has a great stage presence, often engaging in witty and self-revealing banter. This reputation is deserved, as she introduced virtually every song with a bit of story and a personal truth.

After the gig it was a treat to introduce myself to Rose, and tell her that I love her home province of Prince Edward Island. I mentioned that my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, painted gorgeous watercolors when we vacationed there a few years ago, and she replied that her grandma had also painted PEI’s lovely shores and red sand beaches. One of Kyle’s pieces is below, a PEI scene titled, “Doyle’s Cove, North Rustico, 2008.” 

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Men in Trees

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Riding my bicycle uptown on Riverside Drive in Manhattan on Wednesday, parallel to the Hudson River at around 119th Street, I was surprised to see a convoy of vans all parked on the sidewalk adjacent to the road, where one usually sees dog walkers and strollers. I pulled over to ascertain why this posse of vehicles might be there, and then heard voices and shouts from overhead. I looked up and saw men in hard hats with ropes tied around their waists way up in the high limbs of the trees. There must have been ten of these guys, all a good 40 to 50 feet above the ground. They were wielding handsaws and trimming limbs which then fell to the earth below. Over the past couple years, New York City has suffered some tragic incidents where tree limbs have fallen on pedestrians and killed them, so I figured I was witnessing the trimming of dead limbs for public safety. The amazing thing was there was no cherry picker at hand, or FDNY vehicle that had helped them attain those heights–these guys all looked as if they had rappelled up in to the trees, or somehow hauled themselves up to where they could stand on those distant limbs. I took out my IPod Touch and against the backdrop of the late afternoon sky, took a couple pictures, hoping I would be able to view them later and assure myself that I had not just seen a New York apparition. After taking those shots, I got back on my bike, marveling that the New York City I love is always capable of presenting me with another unexpected sight. I never know where the next one might come from, right in front of my eyes, or up above me in the trees.

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#Fridayreads/March 2

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#FridayReads Misogyny, the late Jack Holland’s modern classic, a thorough study of what he calls “The World’s Oldest Prejudice,” to help me understand current events. Just starting If The Dead Rise Not, an electric Bernie Gunther WWII-era thriller by Philip Kerr.

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Lonesome Death of a Teen Actor

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I never watched the Canadian TV show “Degrassi Junior High,” which the CBC broadcast from 1987-91, but I’ve been very touched by two recent articles about the strange, sad death of one of its teenage stars, Neil Hope, who played the character “Wheels.” Hope died alone in a Hamilton, Ontario rooming house in 2007, and was buried in an unmarked grave; surviving family members only recently learned of his lonesome passing at age 35.

In a piece for Newsweek/Daily Beast, Glynnis MacNicol, a Canadian writer living in New York, writes

“It’s painful to imagine anyone’s life ending on such a sad, unobserved note—but doubly so when one considers how deeply Hope’s TV persona resonated with an entire generation of Canadians. . . . Unlike their American counterparts, Degrassi kids were not a pretty or polished group. They looked pretty much like any other group of kids at that age at that time. They looked like the kids you went to school with. And they might have been; for the most part the producers of the show cast regular kids with no acting experience. As one of my Canadian friends put it to me when I broke the news to her, ‘Nobody on Degrassi was perfect. Everyone was ugly, full of embarrassing hair, zits, glasses. The girl in the wheelchair was really in the wheelchair. . . . It was honest.’”

MacNicol explains that the program was a realistic, veritable docudrama, about a group of Toronto adolescents struggling with the rites of passage that young people sometimes experience–substance abuse, pregnancy, and alienation from their families. In a New York Times obituary published this week, five years after the death of its subject, reporter Paul Vitello writes

“‘Wheels’ was a boy who stumbles through misfortunes before drifting into alcoholism, [drawn] broadly on the life of Mr. Hope, who never had formal acting training. . . . After the show’s end in 1991, [he] spoke openly about the wages of alcoholism, revealing that he was the child of alcoholics who had virtually abandoned him and had fed their drinking on his TV earnings. He said he wanted to convey a message to other teenagers whose parents were substance abusers: ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Because it’s not your fault.'”

He was 19 when the program’s run ended.

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From the Annals of Religious Intolerance & Chutzpah

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Wow, what a toxic mix.

In Gaithersburg, MD, Marcel Guarnizo, a Catholic priest officiating at the funeral of an 85-year old Catholic woman refused communion to Barbara Johnson, the late woman’s daughter, after learning that 51-year old woman is gay. Johnson was a guest Wednesday night on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” Appearing on the program, only days ago having buried her mother she explained to O’Donnell that after denying her the sacrament, as Johnson began eulogizing her mother before the congregation, Guarnizo rose from his seat near the altar and left the sanctuary. She added that later he failed to attend the burial or arrange for another priest to be present at the graveside. She was grateful to a funeral director who at the last minute found a willing cleric to officiate over the burial.

The Boston Globe, with research assistance from former Mormon Helen Radkey, reported today that Daniel Pearl, the Wall St. Journal reporter who was murdered in Pakistan in 2002, was posthumously baptized in a Mormon church earlier this year. The revelation is the latest in a litany of similar discoveries made over the past few weeks, including so-called conversions done for the parents of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and even Barack Obama’s late mother, Stanley Anne Dunham.

As discussed earlier on this blog, in Hitchens’ Book of Mormonism and  “‘A Crass Attempt at Mass Identity Theft’,” Mormon officials in 1995 had agreed to end this bizarre and unwelcome practice, but they now have told the Globe “it is difficult to police 14 million members worldwide.” And yet, it seems they have also declined to condemn these freelance baptizers. I first read about this issue, also in 1995, when I republished Alex Shoumatoff’s excellent book The Mountain of Names, a study of kinship and the history of the human family.

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Netanyahu & the Right Wing vs. President Obama

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Trenchant and disturbing analysis by Andrew Sullivan, who sees a disturbing strategy by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in concert with right-wingers in the U.S., to depose President Obama. From Sullivan’s piece, “Obama’s Most Dangerous GOP Opponent.”

I don’t think you can understand the Republican strategy for this election without factoring in a key GOP player, Benjamin Netanyahu. He already has core members of the US Congress siding openly with him against the US president. . . . Netanyahu’s war would be designed to rile up not only his own neo-fascist base, but also encourage American evangelical voters to turn out against Obama, the “anti-Christ”, while other Greater Israel fanatics, like Sheldon Adelson, keep bankrolling as many Greater Israel GOP nominees as they can. A global war which polarizes America and the world is exactly what Netanyahu wants. And it is exactly what the GOP needs to cut through Obama’s foreign policy advantage in this election. Because it is only through war, crisis and polarization that extremists can mobilize the emotions that keep them in power. They need war to win.

It should be noted that Majority Leader Eric Cantor has already made clear he will side with the PM in a confrontation with President Obama. Following the midterm elections, in November 2010, after a one-on-one meeting with Netanyahu, Cantor said “The new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration.” About this, veteran correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Ron Kampeas wrote, “I can’t remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president.”

So, if Israel attacks Iran, and Cantor and the Republican presidential candidates are all watching Netanyahu’s back, who’s going to be in the President’s corner?
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A late add-on to this post: TPM is reporting tonight on a poll conducted of Israeli citizens regarding their attitudes about Iran.
  • 19% of Jewish Israelis support a strike against Iran even without the backing of the United States.
  • 42% say they support only if there is US support for the move.
  • 32% say they don’t support it under any circumstances.

A clear majority, 74%, either don’t support attacking Iran or would do so only with the support of the U.S. Yet, Netanyahu is showing signs of going it alone. His unilateralism is reminiscent of George W. Bush’s prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Meanwhile, as Peter Beinart has reported that Israeli intelligence officials and military officers have urged that their country refrain from attacking Iran, also reminiscent of the stance that prevailed in much of the U.S. intelligence and military community before 2003. Unfortunately, it turned out that even their opposition couldn’t stop Bush’s war. In the current situation with Israel, a dangerous situation is only made worse by members of the U.S. Congress who would enable Netanyahu’s war.

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