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545

Metric Storms the Stage at Radio City Music Hall

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Had a great time Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall, where I was the guest of Steve Conte, a friend I’ve made through CBCRadio 3, the great Internet radio station that plays indie rock n’ roll by Canadian bands, some of the best contemporary music being played and recorded nowadays. Steve, who is a comic book artist and writer who also operates FunnyBooks, a comics shop in Lake Hiawatha, NJ, had tickets for a bill headlined by Metric, a Montreal quartet fronted by fabulous lead singer Emily Haines. They play a high energy kind of doomsday pop–big chords and heavy sounds, veering toward the apocalyptic, yet infused with plenty of tuneful hooks that keep you remembering their melodies. Haynes sings fiercely, moving, prancing, and running around the stage like a big, lithe cat.

Having been to many club shows at small venues on the Lower East Side over the past couple years, I was unprepared for how comfortable, even opulent it felt to take in a rock show at Radio City. Art Deco splendor everywhere your eye falls, both in the auditorium and out in the lobby; suited and uniformed staff serving at a nice bar, where I bought us each a pre-show Johnny Walker cocktail; and superb acoustics with great lighting effects.

The opening act was Half Moon Run, also from Montreal, and they also played a beautiful set, later making a return to the stage at the end of Metric’s 90-minute set. Before that event, we were startled to hear Emily Haines welcome to the stage one of her musical heroes, Lou Reed. He came out for two songs, standing side by side with Haines.

If you don’t know Metric at all, here’s one of their band videos, the song “Gimme Sympathy.”

Here are photos I took from the terrific mezzanine seats Steve had gotten, which gave us a great view of the wide stage and handsome auditorium. I hope to go back to Radio City for another rock show–this one was excellent in every department. Thanks, Steve, for reminding me what a great venue it is! Please click through to see more than 20 photos from Metric’s performance.

546

“Life is a Carnival”*

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The Bard Graduate Center on West 86th Street is a gem of a small New York museum. On my birthday last Saturday, Kyle asked me what I wanted to do for fun. I suggested we go view Bard’s current exhibit, “Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010.”

I’ve loved the circus for years, and have even collected artwork on it, like the print below of high-wire artists on a bike, by Dame Laura Knight. I bought it  in 1987 from my late art dealer friend Robert Henry Adams when I was editing and publishing the splendid circus novel, Suite for Calliope: A Novel of Music and the Circus, by Ellen Hunnicutt, who won the Dru Heinz Literature Prize that same year for her short fiction collection, In the Music Library. Ellen’s novel centers around a young female protagonist who’s a runaway from a bizarre custody battle in her family. Holed up in the safe harbor of the Florida winter quarters of a circus troupe, throughout the novel she’s using their calliope to compose a musical work in memory of her late mother. The novel’s theme is how we may turn our mourning and loss to the service of art and creativity. For the record, Ellen passed away in 2005. I hope some day to republish her novel.

Much as I’ve read about circus lore, I had not understood a key aspect of the historical record as documented by the exhibit: the central role that NYC played in the growth and development of the circus throughout North America. Many of the biggest promoters were headquartered in Manhattan, the continent’s entertainment capitol. Once the circus began moving from town to town via train cars, Gotham’s status as a rail hub, as well as its large, diverse population, made it the essential city for promoters and performers alike.

The 20th century was covered on the third floor of the exhibit, with great photographs by Weegee, best known for his lurid crime scene photography, here depicting circus audiences enthralled by performances. There was also a video monitor showing a film of female stunt artist Tiny Kline performing the “Slide for Life,” in which she clamped down on a kind of leather bit she’d placed in her mouth, then slid on a cable for a 1,000 feet hanging above Times Square.

Along with the exhibit, which comprises more than 200 works displayed on three floors of the museum, there will be nine public talks given beginning October 11 and stretching into 2013, ending on January 31, discussing female equestrians; performance photography; the design and typography of circus posters; P.T. Barnum and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Alexander Calder; clowning; and the circus of the future. I hope to be there for one or more of these presentations. Meantime, here is a gallery of images from the exhibit. Please click through to view art and images from the exhibit.

*Thanks to The Band, for use of the title of their song, “Life is a Carnival, written by Rick Danko, Levon Helm, and J.R.R. Robertson, from their 1971 album, “Cahoots.”

547

Nov. 6 Can’t Come Soon Enough–for Republicans

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Ordinarily, the leading candidate in a campaign wants election day to come as soon as possible. In most years, this axiom would suggest the DEMs and President Obama wish November 6 were tomorrow. While that may still be the case, to a degree, I see another dynamic possibly at play right now.

Judging by the way several Republican Senate candidates–think of Tommy Thompson (WI), Richard Mourdock (IN), Connie Mack (FL), and Josh Mandel (OH)–are seeing their support collapse and/or remain anemic, I think the Repub establishment wishes the big day were this Tuesday, instead of the Tuesday six weeks from now. They would almost certainly lose the presidential election if it were held this week, but this would at least limit their congressional losses. Instead, with Mitt Romney currently veering from bad to worse in national and state polling, there is an increasingly probability that DEMs will retain or increase their Senate majority. Lurking behind this scenario is the one that until now has been spoken of by only a few pundits, while remaining unmentioned–if not unthinkable–for national Republicans: they could also lose their House majority.

I know that the 2010 congressional redistricting done in many states was designed by Republican partisans to make the possibility of losing their House majority extremely remote, but if Romney does poorly in the debates and if his support tops off in the mid-40%s, and if Republican voters see him as a national embarrassment and become demoralized about voting, a big DEM wave really could build over the next month.

All of this is conjecture, of course, and I’ll quickly concede that the outcome of the presidential election is itself far from certain. Still, with many observers pointing out that pressure is growing on Romney and his advisors to try to force a ‘game-changing’ moment in the first debate, it strikes me at least as probable that clumsy Mitt may over-step or over-react to something said by  President Obama or the moderator. Remember how they over-reacted to the tragic news from Libya a few weeks ago? Mitt thought he had a political opportunity there too, and look how that turned out in political terms–a disaster for Mitt and Republicans.

As to the current polling mentioned above, click on the adjacent screenshot of a Sept. 24th blog post from Taegan Goddard’s politicalwire.com, with six swing state polls, or visit Taegan’s site for more of his comprehensive coverage:

548

Best Feel-Good Story in Ages

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Lovely story here: Kris Doubledee is a bus driver in Winnipeg, Canada. This past Tuesday, just a day after he’d seen a desolate man in bare feet along his route, saw the man again. This time he stopped his vehicle, got out from behind the wheel and approached the stranger. According to an interview Doubledee did with CBC TV, the two had an exchange that went like this:

“‘I said to him, ‘Do you have any shoes?’

The man answered, ‘No, I don’t.’

‘If I give you a pair of shoes [will] you keep ’em?

He said, ‘Yeah.’

‘I took off my shoes and gave ’em to him.'”

Doubledee got back on the bus and continued driving down Portage Avenue, now in his stocking feet. Later that day, Denise Campbell, a passenger of Doubledee’s who’d observed the exchange between the two men, began telling her office colleagues about this unusual act of kindness. Later, she posted an account of what she’d seen on a community news site, under the headline, Winnipeg Transit Driver’s Act of Kindness Stuns Passengers. She wrote,

“I realized that the man the driver was chatting with was barefoot.  The bus was dead silent.  I think we were all stunned and speechless.  As we proceeded to our next stop, one of the passengers got up and said to the driver, that was the most amazing thing she had ever seen; and then she asked him, why did he do that?
 
The bus driver answered[,] because he couldn’t stand the thought of that poor man walking without shoes.   Wow!  No judgement; it was just, ‘Here buddy you need these more than I do.’ There wasn’t a dry eye on the bus. All the passengers were moved by this bold and selfless gesture. Now, a homeless man will have shoes for his feet because of a bus driver’s random act of kindness. Not bad for a Tuesday morning in downtown Winnipeg.”

Campbell’s blog went viral and soon news crews were looking to interview Doubledee. Eventually he was located and just below is one of the interviews he gave. (He was also contacted by CBS News in New York and he appeared on their morning show today with Mayor Sam Katz of Winnipeg–when I find that link I’ll share it, as well.)

Doubledee’s fateful stop came at the corner of Portage and Main. It so happens that one of the Canadian indie music groups that I heard this summer during the North by Northeast Festival (NXNE) is called Portage & Main, so here is a link that includes their song, “What Have I Done,” a moving ballad about trying to do better in one’s life. I offer it here as a feel-good bonus for all my kind readers. You’ll find it at the top-right corner of their band page at CBC Radio 3.

549

#FridayReads, Sept. 21–“500 Days” and “Night Strangers”

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#FridayReads, Sept. 21–500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald, a carefully researched and meticulously documented narrative history, encompassing much new information about the events of September 11, 2001, going well beyond what has been known before in many areas. Eichenwald made news when on September 10, he published a NY Times Op-Ed, The Deafness Before the Storm, detailing with unprecedented specificity the degree to which the Bush Administration failed to heed numerous warnings from intelligence officials about signs of an imminent attack, a column drawn from this book. This is all personal to me, since I was a lower Manhattan office worker on the day of 9/11, and have recently written, Remembering 9/11/01–Running Through a Dust Cloud in Lower Manhattan, about my own experiences that day, but even if it weren’t I would want to be reading 500 Days, the sort of book that people eager to understand the early days of the 21st century will be reading 100 years from now.

The fiction I’m just picking up, a kind of counterbalance, is Chris Bohjalian’s Night Strangers, a New England haunted house novel. The author comes from the North Country, near where I went to college in Franconia, NH. I’ve been hearing about Bohjalian for years, and am excited to finally read him.

550

Why Mitt’s Tax Summary Doesn’t Cut the Mustard

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The Obama campaign views Mitt’s 2011 tax return, and the summary of returns from 1990-2009–released late this afternoon–quite skeptically. That’s no surprise, of course.  But, by providing only a summary for the bulk of years included, with a total average about what tax rate he paid over those 20 years–the Romney camp claims 20.20%–we can’t  determine how the number was arrived at. As Greg Sargent points on the Plum Line,

“The way [the Romney Camp did it] obscures the fact that [his] income may have fluctuated quite markedly from year to year. If Romney paid his lowest rates in a number of the higher income years, the overall 20 percent figure would overstate the rate he actually paid over the whole period. [Roberton] Williams, [a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center], provided the following purely hypothetical example:

‘Let’s say you have 10 years in which you paid 13 percent in taxes, and 10 years in which you paid 27 percent. . . . If you average those rates, you’ll get an overall rate of 20 percent. But if the 13 percent years were high income years, and the 27 percent years were low income years, then his total taxes paid as a share of total income over the 20 years would be less, perhaps significantly less, than 20 percent.’ 

Yet in that scenario, the Romney campaign would be claiming, by its chosen metric, to have paid 20 percent. How realistic is it that Romney could have had far higher income some years than others?

‘You can be a person like Romney and have a highly fluctuating income year to year,’ Williams said. ‘Some years Romney’s income could be much lower than in other years. When you average just the rates, you can distort the rate you’ve paid relative to your income over the whole period.’

Williams concluded: ‘The only way we can know for sure what rate he actually paid is to see what his tax payment and his income was for each of the 20 years.’”

With that truth for context, I suggest the Obama campaign’s statement packs a potent punch, one that DEMs and the media ought to ask on the Romney tax issue (italics added are mine):

“Today’s release of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax returns confirms what we already knew – that people like Mitt Romney pay a lower tax rate than many middle class families because of a set of complex loopholes and tax shelters only available to those at the top. Yet, Mitt Romney still wants to give multi-millionaires an additional $250,000 tax cut at the expense of middle class taxpayers who will see their taxes go up. While the tax return for the one year released today continues to mask Romney’s true wealth and income from Bain Capital, leaving the American people in the dark about critical details about his finances, it does confirm that he continues to profit from millions of dollars invested overseas. These types of investments, the use of tax loopholes, and the resort to foreign blocker corporations enabling him to reduce his U.S. tax obligations, all raise basic and still unanswered question – why does Mitt Romney not just release the full returns, instead of the bare summary he has provided of the last 20 years, so voters can make their own judgments about Mitt Romney’s finances? As Mitt Romney’s father said, candidates should release several years of returns, because one year could be a fluke. President Obama, Vice President Biden and nearly every other candidate in recent memory has met that test, but Mitt Romney continues to fail it.”

551

Seminal Online Community, The Well, Lives On

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In 2001 when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers I edited and published an excellent book by journalist Katie Hafner, The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community, a narrative and oral history, which included verbatim posts and original group discussions on the early online platform and other exchanges written by founding members of the first online community. It is  an exciting reading experience because it combines all those different kinds of material, making it a very modern sort of epistolary work, one of my favorite narrative forms. That holds true for me, whether in fiction, where it’s seen in exceptional novels such as Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary, or in nonfiction, which often means diary books, like the epic A Diary of the Century, which I edited and published with Edward Robb Ellis (Kodansha America, 1995), the most prolific diarist in the history of American letters.

Subject-wise, reading Katie’s book is like observing the birth of the Internet, an ur-moment, one which even involves the beginnings of social media, before the latter was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. The manuscript grew out of a cover story on The Well that Katie had done for the Wired magazine issue of May 1997. I’d bought the print magazine off a newsstand when I saw the intriguing tag line—what was this “seminal online community”? I still have my copy of the magazine. I hung on to it, and three years later, when I was leaving Kodansha America and starting a new job with Times Books at Random House, I looked Katie up, invited her to tea, and asked if she’d like to do The Well story as a book. I recall that Katie expanded the 40,000 word article a bit, I then edited that updated manuscript and we published the book a year later. It was one of the books I really relished being involved with.

I’ve read tonight in a NY Times story that Salon.com, which had acquired The Well in the late 90s, has now sold The Well to an investment group made up some of its current members.

Among The Well’s founding members were such countercultural stalwarts as Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, Larry Brilliant, Gail Williams, and a host of comparatively unsung but pivotal Internet pioneers. These people are all characters in Katie Hafner’s sleek and moving book.  I admire The Well’s legacy and hope its new owner-members will make something special of it once again.

2013 update: Katie Hafner has a newer book, as well, a family memoir titled Mother Daughter Me. I really liked it and wrote about it on this blog.

552

Whoa, Don’t Get So Testy!

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From a media outlet friendly to the Romneys called Radio Iowa, here is Ann Romney’s response to fellow Republicans who’ve been criticizing her husband’s candidacy over the past few weeks.

“’Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring. . . . This is hard and, you know, it’s an important thing that we’re doing right now and it’s an important election and it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country.’”

I’m sure it’s hard to listen to your spouse be criticized so much, but really, the sting in her words, and tone in her voice are very unappealing. When she barks, “Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it. Get in the ring,” I practically shrunk back into my seat. You can hear her words for yourself via this audio link.

Elsewhere, in a Washington Post profile of D.C. Repub socialite sisters Georgette and Lyn Mosbacher, there are these gems:

Both sisters wear gold Eagle pins on their lapels, identifying them as Romney mega-donors, and a stack of VIP credentials around their necks. At the convention, they could be seen bickering outside exclusive donor powwows (“Don’t be upset,” Georgette pleaded with Lyn outside a brunch organized by billionaire Paul Singer. “It was an honest mistake.”) or giddily relaying how Ann Romney, for whom Georgette has served on the host committee for several fundraisers in New York, privately reacted to Democratic attacks on her dressage-competing mare. (“My horse has more style and more class in its hoof than they do in their whole deal,” Lyn recounts.)