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"And here is Earth, a bright-blue jewel glittering in our modest galaxy, wandering in the darkness like a tourist in a bad neighborhood, about to be mugged." From "Stephen Hawking is a Peeping Tom," in Essays.

The Critical Mass

Jan 25th, 2012 by Jeff

Hello from Mom, and a room full of vampire writers

For the last few Sundays, readers of The Critical Mass have been complaining that they’ve had to read The New York Times themselves, because I haven’t had the time to do it for them. So, faced with your anger, that public service returns this weekend. And I apologize for the recent blog break. Perhaps I owe an explanation as to what I’ve been up to.

  1. I visited my mom in Ohio. She says hello.
  2. I thought a lot about Tim Tebow. Like, considering all of those Christians who defended the right of the Denver Broncos’ Jesus-fueled quarterback to give thanks to God every time a touchdown was scored, would those same Christians defend Tebow if he were a Muslim and pulled out a prayer rug and bowed down to Allah in the end zone?
  3. I re-organized my CD collection, adding a new genre: Creepy Jazz.
  4. While I was cleaning house one evening, the Republican un-presidential campaign debate from Florida was on TV. You could hear Newt Gingrich over the vacuum cleaner. At one point, when asked why the sacred “Job Creators” hadn’t created any jobs under the Bush Disaster, Gingrich claimed it would have been a lot worse if those protect-the-corporations policies hadn’t been in place. And, “I think every economist would agree with that,” Gingrich said, before fleeing the scene of that lie by changing the subject. My follow-up question would have been, “Mr. Gingrich, setting aside any conservative think-tank blowhards, can you give me the name of any reliable economist who I can call and who will tell me he actually believes that?” Once again, the media fails us.
  5. The Smokin’ Dopes barbecue team held a meeting at the quaint L&M Lanes. Four hours of bowling and beer, 10 minutes discussing secret strategies for winning the ribs and white hots competitions. But… is it normal for a grown man to roll a 43 game?
  6. I have a lot of great friends who throw really good parties. That’s where I’ve been.
  7. I’ve been reading Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
  8. I’ve been wondering what has happened to the First Amendment. According to Reporters Without Borders, the United States has dropped to 47th in the world for freedom of the press, falling 27 places after “the many arrests of journalists covering Occupy Wall Street protests.”
  9. After all these years, I finally watched Taxi Driver. What a smart, weird movie.
  10. I went to the bank a couple of times. I hear Mitt Romney had a Swiss bank account. And one in the Cayman Islands.
  11. I was at a writing conference in New York City. Hundreds of writers, 78 percent of whom were seeking agents to help sell their manuscripts of the paranormal: Vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, Newts. One writer I was chatting with was wearing a pentagram. I’m thinking, Am I at the wrong conference? All I’m trying to do  is sell a book about a 93-year-old sailor.
  12. So yeah, I’ve spent the last month with Chasing the Wind, readying it for self-publication. You’ll be hearing more about the marvelous, true story of Ernie Coleman in a couple of weeks.
  13. I went out and bought a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, because author Maurice Sendak said, “Newt Gingrich is an idiot… there is something so hopelessly gross and vile about him… so let’s not take him seriously.”
  14. Why, after Barack Obama’s magnificent State of the Union address on Tuesday, did every TV commentator insist on examining it through the lens of “election-year politics,” as though strategies addressing  unemployment, the economy, war and education have no other purpose?
  15. I’d love to see every Republican who disagrees with Obama take a transcript of the State of the Union address and underline 10 sentences that they disagree with.

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Posted in Media |

The Critical Mass

Jan 3rd, 2012 by Jeff

Give a man enough rope…

Tonight, groups of Christian evangelical, right-wing, low-information white voters will sit around card tables in Grange Halls around Iowa, stick their thumbs under their overall suspenders, suspend their belief in the obvious and help select the next Republican nominee for president.

Of course, that’s a pretty unfair generalization, isn’t it? Iowans, as you’ll find in the other 49 states as well, come in all religious practices, political beliefs, skin colors, fashion sensibilities and intellectual prowess. This remains true, despite the insistence of media outlets and conservative leaders that all of those home-spun crackers sitting around diners are the Real America (Cut to a typical political-ad video of tow-headed children eating pies and sunlit-drenched tractors crawling across a Midwestern landscape).

And it’s also an incorrect generalization that, whoever these Iowans really are, they’re going to select the next Republican nominee for president. In fact, their track record is awful. Last time out, their champion was Mike Huckabee, who soon disappeared into the fact-free zone of Fox News commentator.

As the discussion intensifies over who will be president post-2012, I have an alternative theory as to what we’ve been witnessing for the last three years. Beyond the traditional story line, which has been three years of political commentators honking over what they perceive as President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to stand up to Republicans and conservatives, eagerly working to destroy middle class America, abetted by a news media stuck on the notion that fair and balanced reporting means The Flat Earth Society must get equal time.

It’s a free country, we like to say, despite anecdotal evidence offered by police at the recent occupy movements. But if every Republican candidate for president but one, Jon Huntsman, wants to say they don’t understand the science of evolution and climate change, and prefer to take comfort in the mythology of creationism and weather patterns as a product of bad luck, that’s their right. Huntsman, the most barely logical in the fight, has since thrown up his hands in disgust and walked away. For three years, the forces of ignorance and absence of compassion have run wild.

All of this has been duly recorded.

So when Mitt Romney said that the foreclosure process must be allowed to run its course, and people must lose their homes so that more-worthy owners may take over the property, that will come back to haunt him over the next 11 months. When the Senate Republicans all voted in favor of a Paul Ryan budget plan designed to eliminate Medicare as we know and love and need it, that vote will be used against them in the coming senate campaigns. Think of all of the crazy stuff that’s been said. That the stimulus packages didn’t save any jobs. Tell that to the thousands of auto workers still on the job in Michigan. Yesterday, Rick Perry compared the Republican goal of defeating Obama to U.S. troops landing on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion. Would any real veteran who actually landed on Omaha Beach agree with that comment? Especially as Republicans introduce plans stripping vets of the benefits that they fought for? Or, remember this great quote from Romney: “Corporations are people too, my friend.” And now they’re cannibalizing each other. Just today, its been reported the Newt Gingrich has called Romney a liar and Rick Santorum has called Ron Paul “disgusting.”

Yes, Obama’s smart people are taking notes. Giddily, I suspect, after last weekend’s comment by one of Romney’s sons that, yeah, maybe Dad’ll release his tax forms when Obama releases his birth certificate. Well, Obama has released his birth certificate. And his tax forms. You can be sure there will be a call for Romney to release his tax forms, as is always done by the party nominees. Romney will fight that. I have a suspicion that Mitt Romney has hired very, very smart accountants over the years who have made sure that this very, very rich man is paying no taxes.

That’s my alternative theory, one that requires a great deal of patience and long-range vision to see through: Over the last three years, Obama has given Republicans and conservatives all of the rope that they need to hang themselves.

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Posted in Politics |

The Critical Mass

Dec 31st, 2011 by Jeff

One-reel nightmares

Perhaps my sleep patterns have changed. My Rapid Eye Movement phases may be overlapping my slow-wave sleep phases. But for the first time in years, I’ve been remembering my dreams when I wake up.

They’re not epic dreams. More like one-reel shorts. Or, from my perspective, one-reel nightmares. A couple of nights ago, I dreamed I was at my high school reunion, and my old classmates mistook me for a waiter at the restaurant. Maybe it was because I was wearing a white jacket. One of them handed me an empty plate. “Sure,” I said, “I’ll take care of that for you.”

Last night, I dreamed that I was told by the editors of the newspaper where I work that at noon every day I would have to stand on a highway overpass and report on traffic conditions.

I’m sure I’m ready for analysis.

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Posted in Philosophy |

The Critical Mass

Dec 27th, 2011 by Jeff

I hate Jackie’s new friend

My friend Jackie’s Christmas Day potato pierogies were awesome. She’d also spent the day watching a couple of the big Christmastime epics. No, we’re not talking Elf. This was Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. Jackie may be Jewish, but she’s really into the holiday. As an educator at one of our top institutions, she mused, “I wonder how many of those Bible epics they made?”

“Depends on how broad your parameters are,” I said. “Ben-Hur is about chariot racing.”

She ignored me and turned to her new friend for an authoritative answer. As she has been doing for what seems like the past year. The new friend who knows everything. You know how annoying they are.

But this time, no. “Argh!” she wailed. “I can’t get on your WiFi!”

Indeed, Jackie’s new best friend, her iPad, was at a loss for words. Finally. And I was damn happy about it. Maybe I’m jealous, but I’m getting fed up with Jackie including that thing in every conversation, as though it were a real person. It’s dominating the Saturday afternoon gatherings at Java’s at the Market. It always remembers to bring the pictures from the latest trip to Jerusalem. It always knows what goes into a classic fruitcake. It always knows where to find her husband John.

Bible epics? “Why don’t you just ask us?” I said.

“Spartacus!” Dick suggested.

“Yeah,” I said. “How about Davey and Goliath?”

But no, her old friends were not good enough. The answer had to come from a Higher Authority. The Internet.

Here’s what you can find on the Internet. Obama was born in Kenya. Death panels. The 9/11 government conspiracy. Anchor babies. Bigfoot. Archaeologists have uncovered a cemetery for extraterrestrials in Africa. The Apollo moon landings were faked. Tim Tebow is God’s quarterback. Sarah Palin’s son Trig is actually her daughter’s baby. The War on Christmas. The ACLU wants to ban crosses from Arlington National Cemetery. Jon Bon Jovi is dead. Michael Jackson is not dead. Need a recipe on how to deep fry a cat? JFK was shot by… well, at least a half-dozen different groups.  Jersey Shore’s Snooki says the ocean is salty because its full of whale sperm.

Jackie, your new best friend is a liar.

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Posted in Technology |

The Critical Mass

Dec 11th, 2011 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times so you don’t have to: Dec. 11

Today’s coffee, from Rwanda again. First music of the day: a smattering of Miles Davis.

1, Occupy Moscow has come to Russia. “Tens of thousands of Russians gathered peacefully in central Moscow on Saturday to shout ‘Putin is a thief!’ and ‘Russia without Putin,’ forcing the Kremlin to confront a level of public discontent that it has not seen here since Vladimir Putin first became president 12 years ago,” The Times reports in its lead story. “The crowd united liberals, nationalists and Communists, a group best described as the urban middle class, so digitally connected that some were broadcasting the rally live using iPads held over their heads.” The rally lasted four hours, and authorities allowed it to unfold, with no arrests made. “Today we just proved that civil society does exist,” said a Russian magazine editor, “that the middle class does exist and that this country is not lost.”

2, What does it mean that Mitt Romney “has acquired six-figure thoroughbred horses for his wife, Ann, yet plays golf with clubs from Kmart?”

3, In the sports section, found only one brief mention of Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos Christian-fueled quarterback who throws a football in much the same manner as Mitt Romney explains foreign policy – kinda wobbly. But there’s two pieces in the Sunday Review about him. A light read of an editorial warns that if Tebow insists on quoting Bible scripture to get his teammates fired up, then he’d better get the mediocre Broncos into the playoffs, as Proverbs 24:10 cites, “If you falter in time of trouble, how small is your strength. ” Another addresses the critics who bellyache over Tebow wearing his religious beliefs on his prodigious shoulder pads. As Frank Bruni writes, “the intensity of the derision strikes me as unwarranted, in that it outdoes anything directed at, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, accused repeatedly of sexual assault, or other players actually convicted of burglary, gun possession and other crimes.”  To take it a step further, if you don’t approve of football players insisting God is on their side (which explains why he doesn’t have the time to keep young boys safe from sexually predatory assistant college coaches), or you don’t approve of fans cheering men who have been arrested for beating up women (the NFL has quite a few of those) or you don’t approve of TV commentators who think attempting to curtail the violence in the game is for sissies (John Gruden), then do what I do. Don’t waste your Sundays watching pro football.

4, In an essay called “The Art of Listening,” Henning Mankell, the Swedish writer who has lived in Africa for 25 years, writes , “In Africa listening is a guiding principle. It’s a principle  that’s been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else. From my own experience, I’ve noticed how much faster I have to answer a question during a TV interview than I did 10, maybe even five, years ago.”

5, The fastest-growing religious demographic, according to an essay by Eric Weiner, is the Nones. Twelve percent of Americans – and 25 percent of young Americans – identify themselves as having no particular religious affiliation. Yet just seven percent of Nones describe themselves as atheist. “Nones are the undecided of the religious world,” Weiner writes. “We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbakah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism.” As a None, he adds, “I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t want to return to an age of raw superstition. We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this fight.” Weiner points out that the Dalai Lama “laughs, often and well. Precious few of our religious leaders laugh. They shout. God is not an exclamation point, though. He is, at his best, a semicolon, connecting people, and generating what Aldous Huxley called ‘human grace.’ ”

6, Another Times editorial criticizes Newt Gingrich for his “McCarthyist tactics to smear judges.” Gingrich resorts to the familiar refrain of “activist judges” – or, “jurists who rule in ways the right wing does not like,” as The Times calls it – who would be subject in a Gingrich administration to defending their opinions before Congress or, if President Gingrich decides a ruling on religious liberty ran contrary to his interests, specific legislation would be introduced to block the courts from making a ruling. Judges could be impeached if President Gingrich or Congress disagreed with them. Or, a court decision might simply be ignored, Gingrich suggests. “His ideas would replace the rule of law with the rule of ideology,” The Times writes.

7, It’s the magazine’s film issue. Hollywood magic doesn’t apply to making young actors look old, specifically Leonardo DeCaprio as a 70-year-old J.Edgar Hoover. “The second half of J. Edgar was flat-out ruined by Armie Hammer’s horrifying liver-spotted death mask,” The Times reports on the artificial aging of the actor who played Hoover’s constant companion. “Old-age makeup: still tragically hilarious.”

8, The book review’s “The 10 Best Books of 2011″ is here! They’re listed alphabetically, rather than No. 1 through 5, non-fiction and fiction. It’s an unexpectedly uninspiring lot. Stephen King’s novel of the JFK assassination, 11/22/63, made the list. Daniel Kahneman, “the world’s most influential psychologist,” who is not Dr. Phil, is on the non-fiction list with Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman, The Times says, postulates “irrationality is in our bones, and we are not necessarily the worst for it.”

9, The review of Condoleezza Rice’s No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington is in. Rice writes that what she admired about George W. Bush was, “What was right mattered.” Is she delusional? The president who boldly lied us into a war with Iraq? The president who allowed a great city to smother beneath the weight of a hurricane? The president who hogtied scientific research if it contradicted his party politics? The attack on civil rights in the name of patriotism? And on, and on…. Right was what mattered?

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Posted in Music |

The Critical Mass

Dec 4th, 2011 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: Dec. 4

This morning’s coffee, Rwanda freshly roasted by Java Joe. First music of the day: Three discs of jazz bassist Charlie Hayden, on load from the library of Rick Simpson.

1, The Drug Enforcement Agency does its work by making a deal with the devil. American  undercover agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in Mexican drug cartel money in their efforts to uncover where the money goes, and who’s getting it. “As it launders drug money,” The Times writes, “the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.”

2, Dan Boren, a Democratic representative from Oklahoma, is one of the biggest friends that oil and natural gas have in Congress.  “The congressman’s income has jumped in the last six years,” The Times writes, “thanks to two family businesses he partly owns that have signed more than 300 mineral leases, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Many of those deals are with Chesapeake Energy, a top donor to his campaigns.”

3, Book publishers – real books, not e-books – are experimenting with giving readers more, not less. Steven King’s novel of the Kennedy Assassination 11/22/63 includes pictures, unheard of in fiction. The cover of Haruki Murakami’s new 925-page novel IQ84 comes wrapped in a translucent sleeve through which a woman peers. The March release of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles will arrive with a textured cover, with cracks and punctures. As The Times writes, “If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning not just reading.”

4, Preservation groups have long sought to protect the old homes of New England, but now they’re turning the attention to modernist homes. Low-slung buildings filled with windows, designs which often seem poor matches for the heavy New England snow with their flat roofs. But these homes, built from the 1930s to the’60s,  match the ideals of woodsy philosophers such as Thoreau, it is argued, and should be protected from developers looking to re-purpose the land with McMansions. The Times writes that one preservationist says, “the plain, functional style of modernism, meant to blend into the landscape, echoed Thoreau’s desire to live simply and in harmony with nature.”

5, The Times sports section seems to have acquired the conscience that’s been missing in our games for some time now. Three weeks ago it devoted the entire section front, plus inside space, to the violent world in which former NFL offensive lineman Kris Jenkins lived for a decade. This week, the tragic life and death of NHL player Derek Boogaard is examined in the first of a three-part series. The kid wanted to play hockey, but from a young age all he was ever encouraged to do, even by his well-meaning parents, was play it with his fists, as an “enforcer.” Part One today details his rise through Canadian junior hockey, and even then you can see this coming: Boogaard died this spring, at age 28, of an accidental overdose of painkillers and alcohol. As we’ve seen with the child-abuse scandal at Penn State, and perhaps at Syracuse University as well, our sports institutions are fiefdoms that do not answer to anyone or anything, including decency and common humanity.

6, The Travel section makes a brief stop at the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.,  “the ambitious pet project of Alice Walton, 62, who, as the daughter of WalMart’s founder Sam Walton is the third richest woman in the world, according to Forbes,” The Times reports (No.1, L’Oreal heiress Lillian Bettancourt; No. 2, Alice’s sister, Christy). “Before the museum opened, The Times writes, “the biggest tourist attraction in Bentonville was the Walmart Visitor Center.”

7, The Sunday Review section opens with “The New Digital Divide,” exploring how Americans with high-speed wired Internet (200 million now) will have all the best in quality of life access, while a second class of citizens (100 million) are limited to restricted wireless Internet. Unregulated cable companies, free of competition, will be charging whatever they can get away with, and that will leave the poor at a disadvantage for many on-line benefits, which increasingly includes access to the best jobs, health insurance and education opportunities. “The new digital divide raises important questions about social equity in an information-driven world,” writes Susan P. Crawford, a law professor and former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation policy. “But it is also a matter of protecting our economic future. Thirty years from now, when African-Americans and Latinos, who are at the greatest risk of being left behind in the Internet revolution, will be more than half of our work force. If we want to be competitive in the global economy, we need to make sure every American has truly high-speed wired access to the Internet for a reasonable cost.”

7, The Times can’t seem to find any conservative columnists with a grasp of reality. Ross Douthat’s unbalanced and weightless “The Decadent Left” praises Tea Party and Glenn Beck rallies while dismissing the voice of Americans as “left-wing street theater” when it’s “union-organized rallies across the Midwest,” “the environmentalists protests, complete with arrests outside the White House” or Occupy Wall Street. The last, Douthat insists, “earned by far the most attention while achieving the least in terms of actual policy.” He’s oblivious to the fact that it was OWS that changed the national debate from the conservative red herring of national debt to where the real problem lies, the vast disparity between the haves and have-nots in America. Douthat seems completely blind to his contradictory points that, while criticizing OWS with the dried-out attack dog of not having “settled on concrete political objectives,” he admits the protesters “at least picked a deserving target… Wall Street’s and Washington’s betrayal of the public trust.”  What we’re seeing now, and what will emerge stronger than ever when the spring weather returns, is what critics such as Douthat are missing: The American Occuoy movement understands that the enemy is huge, multitudinous and complex.

8, Columnist Thomas L Friedman praises the Obama administration’s deal with automakers to slowly improve their vehicles’ gas mileage until their total fleet average – trucks, SUVs, sedans – will reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The current fleet average is 27.5 mpg. It will spur innovation and push U.S. car manufacturers to reach levels already planned for by European and Japanese car builders, Friedman writes, with a higher cost in cars (estimated at $2,000) more than offset by the savings in gas purchases over the life of the car (estimated at $6,000). It will cut oil and gas consumption, and cut greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a win, win, win! Except Republicans, lead by California’s Darrell Issa, “are fighting a last-ditch effort to scuttle the deal,” Friedman writes, just as they did during the Reagan administration, “and ultimately helped to bankrupt the American auto industry and make sure the United States remained addicted to oil.”

9, The Book Review’s Holiday Reading issue is too big to consume in this sitting. But the back-page essay, “Read It Again, Sam,” has caught my eye: So many writers confess to reading the same books over and over. Stephen King says he’s re-read Lord of the Flies eight or nine times, and lists multiple books that he’s re-read. And I so I think: Have I ever re-read a book? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one I read once, and then picked through here and there over the years, never re-reading from cover to cover. I honestly can’t think of a book I’ve re-read, even though so many have grown a little dim in my memory. “I have never fallen in love with a book that I have not loved all the more the second time,” says Patti Smith. “With each reading, more is revealed. One builds a beloved relationship, adding layers of associative memory and visual impressions. I’m like Gumby, excited to re-enter the atmosphere.”

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Posted in Music |

The Critical Mass

Nov 27th, 2011 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: Nov. 27

The coffee is Guatemalan. First music of the day: The very hip jazz singer Mark Murphy.

1, Today’s lead story details how the heirs to the Estee Lauder fortune use the United States tax code to protect their fortune. Ronald S. Lauder owns a collection of German and Austrian art worth an estimated $1 billion. By donating his art to a private foundation, which he has control of, “Mr. Lauder has qualified for deductions worth tens of millions of dollars in federal income taxes over the years…,” The Times writes. It’s just one example of how the world’s 362nd-wealthiest person, according to Forbes magazine, “has for decades aggressively taken advantage of tax breaks that are useful only to the most affluent.” Throw another log on the Occupy Wall Street bonfire.

2, This is good news only if you’re a TV advertising exec. “Republican presidential candidates and conservative action groups are already spending heavily on television advertising aimed at casting Mr. Obama as a failure,” The Times reports. They are employing aggressive and sometimes misleading tactics as they exchange fire with the White House and its allies in what is shaping up to be the most costly general election advertising war yet.”

3, Meanwhile, here’s what North Carolina Republicans say about the fall elections in which Democrats won the mayor’s offices in Charlotte and Raleigh, “and even wrestled control of the Wake County school board from Republicans associated with the Tea Party,” The Times writes. ” ‘It was very scary,’ said Chris Sinclair, a strategist for Billie Redmond, the Republican candidate for mayor in Raleigh. ‘You don’t know what’s going on until you wake up after election day and go, “Oh my gosh, what happened?” ‘ ” What happened was Americans voted: thousands of Obama for America volunteers went door-to-door through the state, getting out the vote.

4, One news story details how across the country, states embroiled in political arguments are cancelling high-speed rail, highway and other infrastructure projects, ideas that some people argue are wasteful, others claim are job creating. Several pages away, another news story details how this weekend a rocket carried a new rover into space. If the flight is successful, the Curiosity rover will reach Mars in 8 1/2 months and begin exploring for signs of life. “The world has launched more than three dozen missions to Mars, the planet most like Earth in the solar system,” The Times writes. “Yet fewer than half those quests have succeeded…. ‘Mars really is the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system,’ ” says Colleen Hartman, assistant associate administrator for science at NASA. ” ‘It’s the death planet, and the United States of America is the only nation in the world that has ever landed and driven robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, and now we’re set to do it again.’ ” It’s kind of sad, that politics is taking this can-do nation that’s lead the way into the universe and reduced it to a squabbling nation that can’t agree to build a highway.

5, Sergio Scaglietti, who built Ferrari sports cars, has died in Italy at age 91. Unlike many “builders,” Scaglietti literally did build them, declining to use drawings in favor of simply sculpting aluminum fenders on bags of sand, using his eye and a hammer. He created many of the design innovations for cars like the 250 Testa Rosa, whose pontoon fenders, created by Scaglietti’s intuition, are a beautiful example of human artistry applied to technology. “Ferraris, with their hair-raising acceleration and sleek lines,” The Times writes, “bespoke postwar modernity in the manner of the Color Field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko or he architecture of Eero Saarienen.”

6, In Arts & Leisure, essayist Neil Genzlinger laments “The End of Comedy.” The new TV shows, he says, citing a handful of situation comedies, simply aren’t funny. “It means that television comedy has ceased evolving,” he writes. “It’s not that the new series are going places I’m not willing to follow; it’s that they are going places I’ve already been.”

7, In the magazine, Noel Gallagher thinks highly of his now-deceased English rock band Oasis. “Under influence of alcohol,” he once ranked it No. 7 of all time. Sober, “I’d probably stay with 7,” he says. “It would go The Beatles, The Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones, The Who. I can never remember No. 5. Maybe The Kinks. I can’t remember No. 6, then Oasis.” Despite Gallagher’s delusions, I could spend all day naming rock bands better and more influential than Oasis, and perhaps Gallagher would as well if he considered American rock bands.

8, The Blasters, Buddy Holly & The Crickets, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, American Music Club, Los Lobos, The Jimi Hendrix Experience….

9, And So It Goes is a brilliant book title, copping a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. In his review of  And So It Goes, the new Charles J. Shields biography of Vonnegut, Christopher Buckley muses over whether anyone ever reads Vonnegut after they graduate from college. Interesting… I haven’t either. “It’s a truism that comic artists tend to hatch from tragic ages,” Buckley writes. He notes that both Slaughterhouse-Five and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 were books set in World War II, but belonged to the Vietnam Era. Vonnegut, whose greatest book is based on his experiences as a prisoner of the Germans during World War II, seems to have been oddly lacking in self-examination. Buckley notes that as “an avid purchaser of stocks,” Vonnegut “had no qualms about investing in Dow Chemical, maker of napalm. At the least, it seems an odd buy for a survivor of the Dresden firebombing.”

10, The New York Dolls, The Sonics, The Patti Smith Group, U2, R.E.M., The Tragically Hip,  The Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pearl Jam, Bob Marley & the Wailers, Nirvana, The Beach Boys, The Ramones….

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Posted in The New York Times |

The Critical Mass

Nov 22nd, 2011 by Jeff

Not exactly a cappuccino at the Student Union coffeee house: A cop pepper sprays students at UC Davis.

Not exactly a cappuccino at the Student Union coffeee house: A cop pepper sprays students at UC Davis.

Occupy 1, Cops 0

Newt Gingrich has told the Occupy protesters around the country to “take a bath” and then “get a job.”

It’s a laughable comment from an out-of-date politician, intended to reenforce the stereotype that the Occupiers are nothing more than this season’s flavor of Woodstock ‘69. And it’s also a reminder of how mean these people, like Gingrinch,  can be.

By ”people,” I’m being generous. Arrogant, divisive things are being said of the Occupiers, who are hardly of one mind and one description. As we saw at the University of California at Berkeley last week, the Occupiers are also poetry professors. A handful of them were beaten by the cops. “Beat Poets, not beat up poets,” was my favorite sign that appeared the following day.

It’s particularly enlightening to watch critics such as Gingrich assail the Occupiers, while pleading for civility when it comes to the critical words fired at them. This past weekend, Gingrich dashed to the defense of his wife during an interview with hard-hitting correspondents at the Christian Broadcasting Network. “There have been lies told about her and lies told about the campaign to her disadvantage, and it’s not fair,” Gingrich whined. Indeed, Gingrich’s wife Callista, while not accused of being in need of a bath or a job, has been variously described as a book-and-video profiteering, materialistic, Tiffany’s trolling, surgically enhanced homewrecker who this summer selfishly dragged Newt off on a two-week Greek cruise just as his campaign for president was tanking.

Well, to borrow Newt’s words, there have been lies told about the Occupiers and lies told about the Occupy Wall Street campaign to its disadvantage, and it’s not fair. But the lies that have been said of the Occupiers – none of whom, I would guess, Gingrich has ever met – are easily disproven. Let’s go to the videotape.

Virtually everyone who’s seen the images of the para-military cops pepper spraying peaceful students at UC Davis has expressed revulsion. But there’s so much more than that on the many videos that were shot that afternoon. Once you get past the first couple of minutes, which is all most people have seen, because the news anchors hate to be off screen for too long, something really remarkable occurred that day. I’ve downloaded it here. It starts to happen at about four minutes into this eight-minute, 30-second video. Watch the cops as the students begin to turn the tide with chants of “Shame on you!” And “Our university!” The cops look confused. They start backing up. Do they feel shame? Do they know they’ve done wrong? And then, after the students shout that they will leave the cops in peace so that they won’t feel threatened and can simply go, the student chant of “You can go!” picks up.

And then, amazing, inspiringly, the cops simply leave. Through sheer force of peace, the good guys win. Those kids who need a bath, those college kids with no jobs, because their future has been vandalized by their leaders, accomplished something remarkable. Watch this entire video. You’ll be stunned at what the news broadcasts didn’t show you:

Occupy 1, Cops 0

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Posted in Politics |

The Critical Mass

Nov 20th, 2011 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: Nov. 20

Today’s coffee: Guatemalan. First music of the day: Swedish jazz singer Sine Eeg.

1, The Class War is Over! “Retirement seems out of the question for increasing numbers of Americans who are saddled with debt and whose savings evaporated during the recent bust,” writes Harvard economics Edward P. Glaeser in the Week in Review.

2, Yet some folks of retirement age appear to have emerged from the economic disaster with hefty disposable income. The next project by the conceptual artist Christo will be “Over the River,” suspending 5.9 miles of silvery fabric across the Arkansas River in Colorado. It will cost him $50 million.

3, In the Week in Review, former poet laureate of the United States Robert Haas describes how he was beaten by “deputy sheriffs in Darth Vadar riot gear” during last week’s Occupy movement at the University of California Berkeley. Fellow poet Geoffrey O’Brien suffered a broken rib. “Another colleague, Celeste Lange,” Haas writes, “a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.” The next day, the Occupiers returned, with new tents. The English Department tent bore the sign “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”

4, Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof addresses New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “wildly over the top” decision to clear Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. “Sure, the mayor had legitimate concerns about sanitation and safety,” Kristof writes, “but have you looked around New York City? Many locations aren’t so clean and safe, but there usually aren’t hundreds of officers in riot gear showing up in the middle of the night to address the problem.” The over-reaction by the mayors of American cities, Kristof suggests, has allowed the Occupy movement to easily occupy the moral high ground in this argument.

5, Stephen M. Davidson, a Boston University professor, evaluates health care reform: “Surely it is in the national interest that our population is healthy and that we compete successfully with those countries whose health care systems are less expensive but more effective than ours”

6, Rene Morel has died at age 79 from cancer. A native of France, he worked out of his shop in Manhattan, restoring violins for the world’s finest players. This, despite the fact that he did not play the violin. But Morel knew he had the sound right, said frequent customer Itzhak Perlman, when it raised goose bumps on his arm.

7, Mark Hall, who created the cartoon Danger Mouse, has died. He was 75 and lived in Manchester, England. Danger Mouse ran from 1981 to ‘92, and featured a secret-agent mouse and his inadequate hamster pal Penfold regularly saving the world. Quoting from its own story in 1981, The Times notes “Danger Mouse seems derived equally from the Monty Python school of comedy and the Road Runner school of conflict resolution. Thus, it is much given to not only gifted parody but also quite a bit of pummeling, shackling, crushing and being made to go splat.”

8, Kris Jenkins, a former NFL lineman for the Carolina Panthers and New York Jets, has such an amazing story to tell that the Sports section turned over its entire front page to him. It’s a stunning and provocative series of quotes from a guy who was a successful player, detailing the dehumanizing craziness of his world of pain and violence. “There’s not too many places a 400-pound guy with an attitude can go and beat the crap out of somebody and not get locked up for it,” he says. “I have a violent streak. I have to fight it out of my system. We signed up for it. All of it. We’re not trying to be sane or rational.”

9, Rap pioneer Dr. Dre is marketing headphones called Beats by Dr. Dre. They come in a wide range of hip colors. They also distort the sound of whatever you’re listening to by cranking up the bass to stupid levels. “In terms of sound performance,” the editor of an audiophile web site says of your trendy new $300 headphones, “they are among the worst you can buy. They are absolutely, extraordinarily bad.” That’s OK. What Dre is selling you is celebrity and attitude.

10, In the magazine, “Situation Normal All Fracked Up” visits Amwell Township, Pa., where the rural residents are selling energy companies access to the massive Marcellus Shale Deposit, which runs 575 miles beneath Ohio, West Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania. The money from hydraulic fracturing contracts is saving family farms. “Harvesting this gas promises either to provide Americans with a clean domestic energy source,” Eliza Griswold writes, “or to despoil rural areas and poison our air and drinking water, depending on whom you ask.”  Griswold follows a trail of anecdotal evidence – unexplained illnesses among the residents, strange smells in the air, undiagnosed deaths of farm animals and birth defects in the litters of family pets – that more than suggests that fracking is a deal with the devil.

11, Forget the threat of asteroids, “if all the 14 trillion spores of a basketball-size giant puffball bore fruit, the earth would be knocked out of its orbit,” writes Miranda Seymour in her review of Eugenia Bone’s Mycophilia: Revelations From the Weird World of Mushrooms. Just another factoid to keep you up at night.

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Posted in The New York Times |

The Critical Mass

Nov 15th, 2011 by Jeff

Civil uprisings are a messy business

On a news web site today, I read this line of text accompanying an Associated Press photo of Zuccotti Park, ground zero of the Occupy movement:

Trash is piled high near Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street’s longtime encampment in New York, during the cleanup effort early Tuesday.

I looked closely at the photo. I saw lots of unidentifiable stuff. And tarps, and a tent. It wasn’t trash. It was items the Occupiers were using to keep the rain off their heads. That trash heap was created by the bulldozer tactics of the cops who swept through the park in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The Occupy movement has been a success even if it ended tomorrow. It has succeeded in turning the national debate on the inequity between the haves and the have-nots. But this country-wide protest – no, this worldwide protest – is gaining strength. Winter will be a test. But when spring returns, so will throngs of Occupiers.

In this battle between the government and its citizens, critics sneer that the Occupy sites are filling with homeless people. But the homeless in this country are just as important to this movement as are the people who are losing their homes, and the unemployed, and even the well-off citizens who have joined the movement because they realize its moral correctness.

If  Zuccotti Park had decayed unto a health hazard, the cops certainly could have been sent in at daylight, when it would have been safer for a large number of people to be moved. Instead, they did it under cover of night, perhaps with good reason. Operating ion the dark, cops beating up American citizens at the Occupy events is less likely to be documented with clarity by photos and videos. And we have seen much evidence of that.

It’s a startling sight, watching a government at war with its own citizens. The mayors of major American cities are permitting their well-armed police forces to harass, intimidate, arrest and beat up their own citizens, just as we’ve see despots in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and other countries doing in this year of the Arab Spring.

Meanwhile, we have our own American Spring evolving here. Authorities always get a little nervous when large groups of unsupervised people gather. They’d rather we be at home, sedated by television. They don’t want us talking, comparing notes. So they make it difficult for us. They place restrictions such as curfews on the use of public spaces. In Oakland, they turned off the street lights, making it more dangerous for their own citizens to use their public parks in a manner that they see fit. And while cities regularly assign hundreds of thousands of dollars for the care and feeding of officially sanctioned festivals, when thousands of citizens gather to express a fundamental aspect of American society, free speech, their tax-supported government can’t be bothered with sending over a truckload of portable toilets.

A couple of friends were in New York City two weeks ago, and they visited Zuccotti Park. They were taking pictures. A cop admonished them to stop because, “there’s been enough pictures of those people.” That cop’s confused. In America, we’re allowed to use cameras in public places. And one of the issues for many of the people in that park is to secure the right of civil servants, like cops, to have access to collective bargaining.

There was a stench in the air, my friends said. I’m sure the Occupiers as well have noticed the problems that arise when a large group of people assemble over a long period of time. They’re to be commended for having accepted this reality: civil uprisings can be a very messy, uncomfortable business.

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Posted in Politics |

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