December 31, 2012

  • The Year of the Brit


    There are two rather odd features regarding my partner's and my viewing pleasures of the passive variety,  especially of television. Or it that redundant?

     The first is that we continue to see- I seem to have noticed it before my partner- the same actors in a number of series with a frequency I, at least, don't recall from a majority of the years previous to this last one or two. Or is it three? 

    In any event, as the proliferation of programs and cable formats ever increases- though for my taste this growth includes far too many of the unreal "reality" variety- you might be forgiven for thinking this offers an opportunity for actors who would otherwise be new to the general public's awareness within our dramas, or our comedies or in our burgeoning "miscellaneous" categories of entertainment. And yet there does not seem to be that many more new faces apparent as one might suppose from doing the  math.  


    An additional element of irony in this apparent realization on our part is that in a sea of pervasive under- or non-employment in many, many fields of labor as well as in creative work (- which is  disingenuously under-reported in my native USA -) there is an ongoing spectacle of the recycling of no doubt talented but familiar faces to every other televised presentation. This fact seems to beg the question "is there a talent drain even in a surplus population boom that we simply haven't been apprised of somehow?"



    Damian Lewis in "Homeland"


    My feeling is that even in the most mediocre of times culturally there is never really a lack of people with what is generally understood as "talent". The only shortage has been opportunities available to this talent.

    Here is one gentleman we've both noticed popping up on several shows that ran or continue to run simultaneously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sheppard .

    There's nothing wrong with him- as a talented actor I mean. He does, of course, tend to be typecast as an oily, duplicitous sort who doesn't lack for brains and strategizing abilities. 
    This "type" of actor is called a "character actor" and this fact is a staple of films and television. I can't quite put my finger on it with a wealth of examples but no doubt within a couple of months I would be able to produce a list of a number of men and women who seem ubiquitous in their enduring consistency on the little screen. In the older days, shall we say, it wouldn't be unusual to find a couple of handfuls of actors who appeared frequently playing the more or less same part repeatedly.
    What seems different now is that these actors no longer show their peculiar and distinctive gifts serially but rather they are free in our current marketplace to show them in many venues simultaneously.  As I mentioned earlier, because of the fact that there are so many more venues to display their wares one would think the producers and talent agents could keep a larger percentage of actors busy with the existing opportunities. One element that might work against this is the latter day notion of what constitutes a current series "season" on the telly.

    The older television series of the 50s and 60s would often run to 40-plus episodes on an annual basis which corresponded roughly with what was then the United States public school year - that is the months of September to and through some part of the month of June featured the ongoing successful shows that made the grade year after year. 


    The other media phenomenon is the proliferation of leading American men in dramas and comedies who are British.

    Hugh Laurie is, well, was House.

    Damian Lewis was an American cop in the short-lived NBC series "Life" and is now even more brilliant in the hit Showtime series "Homeland".

    Charlie Hunnam was introduced to us as the young, cute "chicken" in the original British "Queer As Folk" but is now the leader of a California motorcycle club in "Sons of Anarchy".

    Dominic West was a Baltimore cop on HBO's "The Wire" but can currently be seen on the British series "The Hour".

    Batman is British Christian Bale, Spiderman is British Andrew Garfield and Superman will be British Henry Cavill. A British band once sang "heroes are so hard to find"-maybe they just needed to hang out at home more because Britain is evidently filthy with 'em.

    Tom Hardy is a Brit who plays the Batman villain, Bane, in the latest installment as well as the alpha brother in a family of Appalachian bootleggers in "Lawless" and a martial arts fighter who's also a former American marine.

    Abe Lincoln is a Brit this year.

    Throw in the rest of Ye Olde Brit Empire and the acting avalanche is even more striking. 

    Anna Norv the heroine of Fox's "Fringe" is Australian as is John Noble who plays Walter Bishop the eccentric scientist on the same series.


    Joshua Jackson with Australian co-stars Anna Torv and John Noble of Fox's "Fringe"

    HBO's "True Blood" set in and with characters from the American South features Australian Ryan Kwanten as the not-too bright but easy on the eyes stud-muffin Jason Stackhouse, English Steven Moyer plays vampire Bill Compton and Anna Pacquin who's from New Zealand plays the lead role of Sookie Stackhouse.


    "True Blood" include two Yanks, Rutina Wesley and Sam Trammel  (to the left) and Anna Pacquin (New Zealand) Steven Moyer (UK) and Ryan Kwanten (Australia) in it's cast members

    I've seen discussions on line that try to figure why the seeming glut of British actors is so noticeable these days. Some say the less celebrity-conscious notion of acting is more British whereas Americans seem to have stars in their eyes figuratively in a couple of senses. Others make economic arguments  based on what they say are the going monied realities of the entertainment industry. Believe me when I say the last thing I'm doing is complaining about this phenomenon- but it is curious. 


    Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes
    Well as I have no conclusion worth the time to draw about the Year of the Brit I am not opposed to drawing your attention to two of the more recent "discoveries" someone like me in these backwoods colonies has taken a fancy to these days. Benedict Cumberbatch and Ben Whishaw. Let's call them "BC" and "BW". BC is the latest BBC and PBS Sherlock Holmes incarnator- well along with fellow Brit Johnnie Lee Miller who play another updated variant of Holmes with a female Watson on an American show called "Elementary". BC's looks alone fascinate me. He's tall with angular rather dramatic features, wavy hair and especially piercing eyes. BW also arrests my attention. Fortunately for me while my partner finds the new BBC Holmes less than engaging as a show we are both fans of  BBC's "The Hour". And from what I've read we also seem to be more taken with the show than many would-be fans in Britain are who do seem to like BW quite well but find "The Hour" a bit contrived and tedious.
    BC has played a wide variety of roles including Stephen Hawking, Vincent Van Gogh and both Frankenstein's monster as well as Doctor Frankenstein (which he did trading off the two roles with, again, Johnnie Lee Miller).
    BW has played the poet John Keats, Keith Richards and James Bond's gadget expert "Q". 
    Both men have played gay roles- it seems to be an actorly requirement of our era as once Algebra was in high school.
    Ben Whishaw from "The Hour"
    Both Whishaw , whose first name is not Benjamin but also Benedict, and Cumberbatch have a distinctly nerdy quality as well- at least it's easy to imagine it being accessed. Both, I think, are quite lovely in their own way and excellent actors obviously. Cumberbatch is a bit gangly and in one scene from "The Hour" Whishaw took off his shirt and I was actually rather stunned at how skinny he is. Still sexy as hell though.


    Lastly, Happy New Year!

December 23, 2012

  • This Just In

    I wanted to share with you all this thought about recent events from a friend:
    Eventually, I will be posting here. Happy holidays- whatever those are to all of you. It's wonderful to hear Banyuls is back-right now we're both posting about an equal amount here.

November 28, 2012

  • Flicks of Our Wists

    It's been a real cinema-rama lately. Last night I took PLC and his brother to see Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" with Daniel Day Lewis in the title role. There is hardly a soul on the planet that doesn't realize what a fantastic actor Day-Lewis is and he lives up to all expectation by making the role of arguably the most iconic of all Americans his own. One critic implied that this is as close to anything we've seen portrayed as the "real" Lincoln that it's possible to experience short of having access to a time machine.

     
    Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln

    There are good performances all around with Tommy Lee Jones as the Abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and David Straithorne as Secratary of State William Seward. One critic mentioned his feeling that Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lincoln's oldest surviving son, Robert, was given little to do in view of his own virtuosity as an actor. I can understand that notion but the film is from a script by Tony Kushner most famous, justifiably, for his play "Angels in America" and the film has used only about 10% or so of the original 500 page script. The other prominent source material for the screenplay in turn derives from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's tome about Lincoln and his administration, "Team of Rivals". This is hours and hours of superb quality material from which to condense into a mere two-and-a-half hour film.  By any standard the film is long enough to be considered worthy of an  intermission in the old days- you know when I was young. Films like "Lawrence of Arabia", "Ben Hur", "My Fair Lady" and "West Side Story"  were routinely two-and-a-half-plus to three-hour affairs and they all had a midpoint intermission. "Lincoln" didn't seem to have any drag to me as a film but I read that The Progressive magazine's editor said it put him and his family asleep due to it's length and subject. This makes me more concerned about The Progressive- a very good magazine- than the film. Maybe I should just skip their film reviews.
    "Lincoln"'s events are orchestrated toward the end of the Civil War and around the passage of the Thirteenth amendment to the United States constitution which banned slavery. PLC and I found it fascinating, filled with wonderful detail which flowed very naturally and believably with subtle touches and hints throughout. But we never, ever found the film dull or deadening.
    Raymond Massey and Henry Fonda both had played Lincoln decades ago and each of them gave a lasting vision in the popular imagination about "Honest Abe", but I can state without qualification that Daniel Day-Lewis seems to give creedence to the myth that "the third time's the charm". The prior ones were good performances- hagiographic but still very good and a reflection of that era in America- but this one is great.

    In a somewhat presaging bit of fortune, we watched  about half of "Capote" on Netflix the day before - and the second half hours before-  we went to see "Lincoln".  Of course "Capote" has been out several years but neither PLC or I had seen Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance as Truman Capote. To tell the truth just looking at the dvd jacket in years past I kept finding it hard to believe the subject would arrest my attention. Well here is another rather astonishing channelling of a personality by a brilliant actor. In this case what could have been a mimicry- indeed Truman Capote's celebrity image almost seems pre-fabricated to suit that type of facile rendering- Hoffman convincingly fills out a portrait that manages to give deep insight to Capote's effort in creating a new template for literature in documenting four horrific murders while still leaving the man a mystery in a manner that seems somehow true to the facts. Capote's resulting book was "In Cold Blood". Again I have to plead that I have only my ignorance directly and an understanding by inference about Capote's non-fiction masterwork- I have never read it. I have a feeling I will make time for that now.
    Catherine Keener is very interesting as Capote's friend and fellow author Harper Lee. In the film she is helping Capote interview people around the Kansas murder as well as the two young men  accused of the crime of whom a subtle homoerotic component seems to be implied.
    Clifton Collins Jr. as Perry Smith is also excellent. Smith was the brighter of the two  convicted of the murders. The tension of unease and compassion between Capote and Smith is a key focal point of the film and of Capote's want to understand this man who appears as a negative mirror image of the adaptations Capote evidently felt he'd suffered. As Capote put's it in the film Smith seems to have gone out the back door while he went out the front door from the same cursed house.

    A day before this we went to see the new James Bond film "Skyfall". Bond films ran out some time ago of the original 12 novels. I read them all as a young teenager. What most fascinated me about Bond was the depth of knowledge he had about a wide variety of subjects and his sophistication in dealing with all things worldly. My Mom was actaully a bit concerned about me when she'd noticed that I'd basically read all of the novels quickly in serial order when I was somewhere between 12 and 15. I now forget exactly when my Bond obsession transpired chronologically. I pictured Bond as vaguely olive completed though Caucasian, wiry but not thin, muscular but not showily so and handsome but in a cypher-like, quiet way that might almost be unnoticed in a public setting. Bond succeeded by outhinking a step or several ahead of all but the most gifted of his diabolical adversaries. The image Sean Connery cut as Bond was very diferent than the book Bond- of course he was great in the role even so. Of all the Bonds I always thought Pierce Brosnan and to a slightly lesser extent Timothy Dalton fit the image of Bond best. Certainly Roger Moore did not. But even less likely is the current Bond, Daniel Craig, who nonetheless may be in one of the very best Bond films in "Skyfall". Craig is a wonderful actor and while physically miscast to my, and many others', eyes he fits the bill better because of his chameleon abilities as an actor. After all an undercover operator IS an actor. All the better if one does not draw undue attention to oneself."Skyfall" has a great opening sequence along with the requisite title sequence that helps to set a tone to this one of the best-directed and acted of any Bond film. It probably is the best in those categories. Javier Bardem of "No Country For Old Men"  and "Before Night Falls" among a compact but sterling group of quality films with his quality performance anchoring them is the evil adversary in this one. He's simply smashing in the role and might be the best monstrous villain since Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman  film "The Dark Knight". Craig's Bond is surreally vigilant and resourceful as any Bond must be but he also conveys the widest emotional palette in doing so. Judi Dench abley supports as Bond's boss "M". 
    Leaving the theater I asked PLC if he thought this was the best Bond film and he said yes. I tend to agree with him, though "Goldfinger" and "From Russia With love" with Sean Connery may be the gold standards for the early films that established this sub-genre.
    Then the night before that we'd gone to watch Denzel Washington's role as an alcoholic pilot in "Flight". "Flight" is both effectively exhilarating and depressing. Robert Zemeckis is the director and I've never been a particular fan of his somewhat overbroad brand of filmmaking. But Washington's riveting performance and Zemeckis' avoidance of his more sentimental tendencies serve this film well. Along with the star performance the script manages to keep suspense and surprise in play throughout.
    Lerman, Miller, Watson in "Wallflower" 

    And, finally a week earlier we'd gone to see "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" mostly because of the buzz the young actor, Ezra Miller, playing an eccentric  gay teenager in a trio of friends in a Pittsburg area high school was generating.
     "Harry Potter's" Emma Watson plays his step sister and fellow senior with a "loose" rep among the boys and  Paul Rudd plays a caring teacher. But somewhat unheralded is  Logan Lerman who plays the thrid spoke in this wheel of friendship as a transferring freshman with deep problems in his immediate past. This young actor is really wonderful in the film.
     We were both reminded of Michael Chabon's first novel "The Mysteries of Pittsburg" with it's gay themes within a somewhat similar age group of a decade earlier than early 1990s "Wallflower" is based.

November 8, 2012

  • Flushing Once, Twice......

     

     

    Eleven Assholes In Search of a    
    Body Politic to Attach Themselves To 


    Ted Nugent, has-been rocker, states "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. If you can't go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil America hated administration, I don't even know what you're made out of." 

    We know what you're made of, Ted, empty threats. For once I thank God for that if not for you.
    Anne Coulter, doyen of Right-wing harpies everywhere, summarizes, "On the bright side, and in conclusion, at least college campuses serve as sort of internment camp for useless leftists in wartime. We know where they are, this way. And, as General Patton said, 'I love it when they come out and shoot at me because then I know where they are and I can shoot the bastards."   

      
    She's opposed to gun laws- but now, are you?

    Alledged show-biz has-been number two, Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys, intones, "Obama's an asshole, unless you're interested in never having any money and being socialized."
          
     I think I draw the line at "socializing" with you Bruce. By the way, another reason to be luke-warm to the overheated Beach Boys reappraisal.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
    Grover Norquist, the rich guy famous for getting the GOP congressional membership to sign a pledge that they will never raise taxes is best known for his tonic to Libertarians statement , "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub. " 

     
    He does for bathtubs what Norman Bates did for showers.

    Machiavelli for the GOP and un-prosecuted, treasonous revealer of classified intelligence agent identities, Karl Rove, puts it succinctly, "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

       
    We recently had a friend over and he told us that he was getting interested in planting something that would help future generations.
    I suggested Karl Rove.


    Noted drug-addict and the leading "Conservative" media star, Rush Limbaugh pithily notes, "Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns. I mean if we want to get serious about this, if we want to face this head on, we’re gonna have to openly admit, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns, nor should they be allowed to use computer keyboards or typewriters, word processors or e-mails, and they should have their speech controlled. If we did those three or four things, I can’t tell you what a sane, calm, civil, fun-loving society we would have. Take guns out of the possession, out of the hands of liberals, take their typewriters and their keyboards away from ‘em, don’t let ‘em anywhere near a gun, and control their speech. You would wipe out 90% of the crime, 85 to 95% of the hate, and a hundred percent of the lies from society.”

          

                                  
    The real disappointment with Rush is that he took other folk's drugs when he ran out of his own. Sounds sort of Socialist to me.

    Donald Trump, the billionaire "job creator" whose most famous phrase is "You're fired!" wittily posted on election night, "He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!"
                                          
    Really, what should our slogan be "off with their hair?"

    The two Koch Brothers, David and Charles, who have been a, if not THE, major force behind the Tea Party. David Koch has said "global warming" would not be a problem because, “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food,”

                                              
    Food for thought may not be included in their package deal for the future.

    Rupert Murdock is known to most for his many holdings in media companies most notable to Americans is the Fox Network. Roger Ailes is the President of Fox News and as Ailes has made clear, "One thing that qualifies me to run a journalism organization is the fact that I don’t have a journalism degree.”

    After Fox's coverage of Obama's re-election this may not come as a surprise to anyone.

    And lastly, Obama Won!

    Thanks, God!

November 2, 2012

October 29, 2012

October 10, 2012

  • Notes From a Mixed September

    I’d decided a couple of months back that the weekend after my Mom and Dad’s posthumous celebration on September 22nd PLC and I should have some other activities to keep our spirits up.

     

    Jimmy Cliff

    So for the next weekend, on Saturday the 29th, I’d gotten tickets to go see Jimmy Cliff, one of reggae’s great stars (“The Harder They Come”, “Many Rivers To Cross” and others) and a current indie-pop group of guys from Portland and lately the Southwest called The Shins at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View,California about 60 miles south of San Francisco and about 35 east of Santa Cruz.We especially like some of The Shins’s songs and the lead singer, James Mercer’s,voice. We'd seen a couple of Neil Young's Bridge School Concerts there in years past so I at least felt vaguely familiar with the venue.

     

    For the weekend after that I’d gotten tickets for us to see journalist and former Salon and current UK Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald give a talk October  5th, Friday night, about the legal, political and cultural discrimination American Muslims are going through in the U.S.during the so-called War on Terror. Greenwald was speaking at the Santa Clara Convention Center- a large, modern, rather elegant complex next to a large Hyatt hotel. Greenwald is probably the journalist or writer about the political and cultural reality in the United States besides Truthdig's Christopher HedgesI depend on as my "go-to" guys about the moral reality of my country's activities and policies in this world.

     

    This all seemed likea good combination of the celebratory and the connected-in that would be good experiencesfor us with people we cared about.

     

    The first weekend wegot to the Shoreline at a leisurely pace, for us, and walked around beforegetting some not particularly great and nearly unflavored supposed Thai food atone of the food vendors before the main shows kicked in. I hadn't realized tillI looked online a day before the show that it was not a simple matter of JimmyCliff and The Shins but was a multi-band and two-stage event called"Harmony By the Bay". The poster actually claimed there were threestages but I guess one of them was hidden- to my eyes anyway.

    One of the stages wecould actually verify the existence of was out nearer to the parking lots andthe main stage was in the main amphitheater- the only place we'd seen showsthere before.

     

    We listened to an opening reggae band performing on the parking lot stage for awhile and then after we'd finished sitting on a curb eating our nourishment headed into the main amphitheater to see another band called Kimbra.

    Unfortunately PLC andI both sat there while our entire skeletons rattled from the bass tones coming through the amps for several minutes before PLC said "I can't listen to this." I didn't argue because it WAS unlistenable and it was time, anyway,for Jimmy Cliff to appear at the "parking lot" stage so off we trekked a few hundred yards out of the amphitheater and into the parking lot-ish stage area where you had to stand not sit, to see the show.

    After several minutes of the musicians tuning up and an emcee winding up the crowd for a "legend"- which is a completely accurate term to define who Jimmy Cliff is - out came the man himself  in green, red and yellow with a gold headband and proceeded to demonstrate how great a performer and upbeat a presence he truly was. I can assure you that the last time I stood and danced in place to the music, sang along at the singer's insistence and shouted my lines during the music on cue was, well, never, really.

    I loved this show and I loved Jimmy Cliff. PLC said it was the most worthwhile show he'd ever seen afterwards and I agreed.

    The music was not cranked up too loud here and the lack of seating melted away as a concern as he started the show with "You Can Get It If You Really Want". He also covered Cat Steven's "Wild World", did a song with the lyric refrain,"they took the children’s bread, and give it to the dogs" and a song about Afghanistan that had the same theme as one he made years ago about Vietnam. Neither song had a pro-war or a pro-let's-give-the-top-one-percent-more-tax-breaks theme to it. A few, but not many, people seemed to leave the area during the one about Afghanistan. The vast majority stayed.

    He also sang"The Harder they Come" which was the first reggae-styled song I remember hearing and being thrilled by after Desmond Dekker's "The Israelite" hit from the late '60s.

    Cliff did a cover of  "I Can See Clearly Now" as well as "Rivers of Babylon"  a rendition of his classic "Many Rivers To Cross" that brought tears to my eyes and about ten others in a show whose last number was called "One More". "One more" was the audience response till it became clear his show was indeed at an end.

    As we were exiting to go back to the amphitheater to watch the last few songs of Allison Kraus and her country-inflected band Union Station (they were very good but it just wasn't quite the same) we both said to each other we suspected we'd already seen the highlight of the day and we were correct about that.

    Unfortunately for Miss Kraus the way the event was staged necessarily meant having to miss all or part of some bands in order to see others. Of the bands we were aware of, or in earshot of, her band and she herself sounded very good and she had a wry sense of humor that would have been more enjoyable in a serial-band style setting. I have to say cramming a bunch of groups onto multiple stages seems silly if well-intended in someone's mind. If they are worth seeing or hearing and they're all booked- why not use one stage and see them all? But I suppose the preponderance of booths hawking various skills and items was another aspect of this event I had only belatedly realized wasn't simply a concert.

     

    One clear fact about the shows in the main amphitheater was that the music- especially the bass end of it -was cranked up beyond human endurance unless perhaps you were already skipping from planet to planet in a drug-induced atmosphere of your own. And except for some wafts of pretty potent pot and a bit- but not too much- of beer this was not my impression here.

     

    Maybe we're just too damn old.

     

    Anyway the last twobands we were to see were Tegan and Sara and The Shins.

     

    Tegan and Sara were a female duo that seemed well-known to many in the crowd and they did quirkily short pop songs that were each a little over or under about two-minutes it seemed to me and I found them rather interesting if not terribly coherent. PLC found them less amusing than I did and we both still had our teeth rattling at the venue's insistence on shattering sound levels. Perhaps with a lyric sheet I might have fared a bit better but I had my brave concert grimace on and was, in fact, somewhat charmed by the almost elfin or anime-like figures the two petite women cut on stage with such a big sound around and behind them from the four male musicians backing them as well as from them.

     

    In any event after their set concluded PLC and I wandered up to the "VIP" lounge which one of the ushers had earlier mentioned upon seeing our wrist bands we were entitled to. I had bought the tickets in July right after I'd gotten paid. They weren't THAT expensive but I might've shelled out a bit more than I probably might have otherwise. However, I'd apparently forgotten this little fact and could've gotten better parking as a perk instead of better parking for the$30.00 I paid. We went up to the VIP lounge and still saw a long line of folks waiting for complementary food. Unfortunately we'd already eaten our plates of faux-Thai mediocrities moments before and even though it was "VIP" it was still a big 'ole honkin' line. I will say I kept drawing PLC's attention to at least two or three VIP cutey-pie 20-somethings that graced the big ole honkin' line with their sexy bodies and cute faces. To look was to be besotted by this nearly rude display of beauty. One blonde young man had a very handsome face and a flawless body and a posterior view that turned my usually orally-fixated sensibilities a bit inside out or at least upside down.  Another dark-haired young man had the appearance of a book-wormy nerd of sorts with rather prominent teeth but some how the combination of all of his elements in totality was ravishing nonetheless. PLC seemed ready to go rather shortly after I'd gotten a beer to relax. No doubt he wanted to spare me or himself or others from the spectacle of me not quite able to not stare at the types of lads I've always stared at but now with the additional trace of unconscious slobber my doddering old age threatened to bestow my gobsmacked countenance with. Okay- I hope I wasn't that bad but I didn't argue with his timing. Short of stumbling upon a time machine and thereby fitting into a pair of skinny-legged pants I would otherwise mortally wound trying to zip up today to go scouting for talent- it was probably a good suggestion on his part. Poor PLC. Gads I'm bad.

     

    When we got back TheShins were finally to make their show-concluding appearance. They did and thesound of their music was very much as the sound of the CDs and downloaded musicwe'd been listening to for the last few years. And yet.

    By about the fourth or fifth song PLC said he didn't feel that great and wondered if I would mind going early? In fact, I replied, I was somehow not terribly interested in the music we'd actually come primarily to see- though Jimmy Cliff HAD been a strong seconding as to why we came.  Sadly, the Shins sounded so much like their music and the music was truly all they were offering that their portion of the show seemed to lack some inspirational fire.We agreed on this and so left. We were able to beat most of the traffic this way.

     Hence we were disappointed by the Shins but still reveling in the Jimmy Cliff concert we'd seen and so a splendid time was had by us both as we drove home.

    Of course if we HAD stumbled across a time machine.........but that's another story in a galaxy far, far away.....

     

    The week intervening before our next more staid event was punctuated by a lot of work toward preparing for an audit at my work. That involved a lot of prep trying to make coherent the "philosophy" of our most recent corporate masters who leaned toward a type of "corporatese" as I prefer to call it that has a very tiny resemblance to, say, the English language and a very heavy rendering of the pastiche of buzz phrases and gung-ho pretend enthusiasms that passes for their official Bible of competitiveness and team spirit. I did,however, do a nice job reorganizing a number of files that had gone rather to seed but now were reborn as an efficient and complete set of calibrated records. Of course almost none of this mattered for my section of the audit but the auditor was quite savvy at honing in onto the weak spots of my presentation which nonetheless passed muster as the saying goes.

    The other punctuation mark for the week was the fact that PLC had lost his wallet with all of his IDs and his bank card. He was also trying to create a coherent essay on current political concerns as well as meticulously re-organizing his taxes and income documentation for a possible reassessment at the time he'd become ill over a decade ago. It was painstaking work for both endeavors. The lost wallet stayed lost but he was able to get the wheels in motion to regain what he'd lost.

    So after a busy week we were pretty efficient in getting over the Santa Cruz mountains Friday night to see Glenn Greenwald speak in Santa Clara.


    Glenn Greenwald

    PLC had taken over trying to find a place for us to eat in Santa Clara since it was the most expedient thing to do given the time allotted. As it turned out the Hyatt hotel adjacent to the convention center had a very nice Italian restaurant, Tusca,we felt lucky to be at once we located it in the hotel lobby.

    PLC chose to try the"Chicken Mercado" pizza and I opted for a whole wheat penne pasta with a couple of great cheeses.  I'm sure except for the chicken Biggles could've eaten all we ordered in comfort and with a clean conscience. We shared an antipasti plate (I always wondered if someone would devised a "propasti" plate for the Italianate illiterate among us) with paper-thin rounds of mozzarella, a fig jam, honey and Italian bread as well as two feathery light green salads. My penne past was better than PLC's pizza I got the impression we both thought but overall the food was very good and well prepared and we had an older gentleman who was Italian attending us. A bit more luxury than I'd had in mind for a meal but it was pretty affordable actually and I eschewed any wine. I joked with PLC that I knew he wouldn't enjoy me being sloshed trying to stay awake while Glenn Greenwald regaled us with the realities of our suspended civil liberties-especially for Mid Eastern people living in the United States.

    Not sloshed- mission accomplished.

     

    The event with Mr. Greenwald was actually a benefit for the "Muslim Legal Fund of America" and the "National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms" organizations.

    When we got to the room- a theater type room with an upward sweep of seats we were a bit surprised at how sparse the turnout was. Because of the nature of the event after I had downloaded the tickets we had a couple of things foul up on our computers and so PLC and I made some jokes about being under surveillance.  The truth is PLC’s family had had their phone obviously tapped during the era of the Contras in Central America and especially after the Mary Knoll nuns had been murdered. It was a scary time for them. I have also been photographed by what I assumed to be FBI agents decades ago in the early 70s for some of my political activities. All just part and parcel of living in a police state that seems to be inching toward making it’s profile more distinct with each passing year. Of course for most white citizens of the US there has been little to worry about ultimately compared to many others’ experiences.

     

     

    And so it turned out that a couple of hours were devoted to several speakers most of whom were interesting relating their experiences and in regard to the people they were trying to give voice to and defend. There was at least one woman at the event who noisily demanded after about the third speaker that Glenn Greenwald speak as “That’s why most of us are here!” The woman was persuaded to leave the room and I thought I could hear her somewhat outside in the lobby area but then she either calmed down or left. It was a very odd occurrence as well as being rude and kind of off-putting in that Greenwald obviously cared about allowing the groups who the event was ostensibly for speak to the issues of incarceration without charges, solitary confinement and the underlying fact that even their government prosecutors admitted in many cases that the people being held isolated from outside information and their families were not guilty of any specific crime except the most tenuous of associations. It was a point made in the photos of imprisoned Muslim civilians on the walls and in pamphlets and from the speeches of those on stage that it is the total absence of anything most Americans would assume was meant by “due process” that was truly disturbing.

    Finally Greenwald spoke and he was riveting, articulate and direct as usual. I have recommended his column before and I suppose he is as close to what I imagined journalism and reporting to actually be about when I started out with the notion that I would be a reporter many years ago. Of course, I did not become that reporter but I certainly find it easy to separate the slick nonsense paraded on the telly from someone who is actually engaged in trying to keep people informed about subjects that are difficult to reconcile with many American’s desire to see themselves as part of a system and culture that values truth and justice. These are perilous times for many people and I’m not immune to the thought that acts of terror are a part of our reality. But what our nation is doing in the name of fighting  this terror is not what I would’ve expected- naïve as that may be- and has revealed itself to be another pork-barrel industry which is recruiting rather than blunting an appeal to would-be terrorists.

    Up is down and down is up. We must abandon our principles in order to defend them is what much of the last several and the current administrations seem to be embarked on.

    It is up to the citizens to wrest back some control of these circumstances. It will not improve on “automatic pilot” – especially if the “pilot” is a drone.

    I volunteered a donation after Greenwald spoke during a somewhat uncomfortable and yet amusing bid by one of the American Muslim speakers seeking support for just these kinds of informational events as well as funding to defend those caught in this era’s version of World War II’s Japanese internment camps. That speaker realized people are not fond of being asked for money in a public form particularly but he definitely had a sense of humor and even sport in doing it.

    At last the evening was over and I dragged PLC up to the stage to meet Greenwald for a moment but kept finding my self-consciousness allowed almost everyone else to chat with him before I did. Finally I stepped up to him and extended my hand which he shook – and then realized that I had forgotten to let go of his and was squeezing it much harder than I would have had my nerves not gotten the better of me. I felt that I more or less mumbled my appreciation to him about his reporting and that I was glad to be able to offer what little I could to a cause that seemed very justified. I also mentioned the name of the other great journalist of the age of terror we are going through, Chris Hedges of Truthdig and Greenwald brightened when I mentioned this according to PLC afterward and told me that he’d just had lunch with Hedges a couple of weeks before and had read one of his books about his experiences of war. I was too nervous to relax and so left Greenwald rather as awkwardly and shyly as I had walked up to him- though he is very friendly and down to earth- and felt I’d seemed banal and somewhat idiotic compared to a couple of older people and students who’d spoken to him ahead of me. PLC assured me that I had been completely fine in my statements and very brief words with Greenwald and that it was obvious the reporter was also shy around people one-to-one by his own observation. That’s PLC’s version of “No worries, mate.”

    Ok then- good enough for me.

     

    And finally…

    Like everyone else I am also concerned about our friend Banyul’s absence from the site and continue my hopes and prayers that he will be regaling us with more tales of the city he loves and some culinary and cultural insights when he is well enough to poke his head back into our little sphere of Xangaland.

    I’ll chat with you all again, soon.

September 24, 2012

  • Get Well Banyuls

     

  • I'm Back

    Hi everyone. Sorry. I've been away for a spell. 


    This last weekend was the culmination of organizing a much delayed celebration for surviving family and friends for both my Mother and Father. I was also very busy at work, then took two weeks off and kinda collapsed for the first week- not medically (I'm quite all right if a bit more overweight than I would like right now) but just sort of vegetated 'cause I could for awhile.  The second week became consumed with the celebration and Saturday was the celebration and the day before what would've been my parents' 62nd anniversary on Sunday, September 23rd.
    Along with this I must also confess that the owner of a site I had vacated some months ago asked if I would come back specifically because he enjoyed having someone to talk sports about and I did because I missed having something lighter to quibble and get silly over. 

    So....... Work, Mom and Dad, Sports, Silly. 
    The Four Horseman of my A-Blog-E-Clipse.

    My oldest sister and her daughter actually did all the organizing and found a wonderful place to have the celebration and she and especially her daughter really did 90+ percent of the work. The place they found happened to be across the bay in South San Francisco where we first lived in a house with a true neighborhood. It was the kind of neighborhood that the neighbors actually knew each other in and though I had bullies to deal with from school and issues with them I also had a lot of freewheeling fun and fond memories with my sibs and our friends.
    My sister and I agree that within this "celebration" town was the place we both remember as the last true neighborhood we really were fond of. Not that our home in Hayward wasn't good- it was. But there was a level of intimacy that no longer remained. Some of this may simply be the perspective of childhood and some of it may be the trick of selective memory. I can't say for sure but I will say that the loss of contact with neighbors does appear to be one of the more striking realities of anyplace I've lived since those days. It seems a trend that I've had friends newly arrived to California note as well. But California was arguably the biggest "boom" area in all of Boomerdom after WWII and our childhood was planted in the heart of where many families had relocated to recently from the US midwest, back east, and points north and south. And California still is, even as it's slowed along with the economic belt tightening of recent years. But there was the remnant of a national pulling-together back then after a depression and a major war that created a different ethic than the later incarnations of "California Dreaming".


    Anyway, I worked on a music selection that I hoped would represent my parents' tastes and pleasures and also wrote an opening remarks speech of sorts for the event. It was about 15 minutes long or so I think and went over pretty well though I guess no one's gonna come up to me and say -"Gee your Mom and Dad were really great but your speech sucked."
    Actually I was very pleased with the reception my remarks received and I'd hoped to provide a basis for an event that had been delayed almost a year and a half after my Dad's passing and a half year after my Mom's that would be a real story about who I thought they were to me and how I thought they impacted other people's lives around them. I wanted to avoid anything maudlin obviously and they wouldn't have wanted that anyway. It needed to be wistful due to the circumstances and yet celebratory.

    So for me this has been an important life project. It accounts for an increasing amount of time on a daily basis that has been ratcheting up over the last few months. One irony of my blogging about sports things at this other site is that my site here at Xanga is the natural place for me to really talk about the more personal concerns in my life but I was finding it too hard to split time between our celebration and this blog. 

    But having done this it's also truly a relief to have done this celebration for me and my family and PLC and other friends and to feel it worked out so well.

    PLC worked on a series of photos most of them older and some in need of repair and did a great job but we didn't get much help from the store we went to that specializes in helping us display the photos. To make a long story short we got a large cardboard triptych display and needed a suitable adhesive to afix the photos with. Unfortunately the two adhesives we got both failed  and he had to try repeatedly to get them to work but we finally had to give up and they were put on a table with other photos and objects of sentimental and humorous value.

    Some of the items my niece put together were just wonderfully evocative and often very, very funny such as a pack of playing cards  because they liked to go to Reno and Tahoe and a bottle of whiskey for my Dad's table and a bottle of Vodka for my Mom's with a few shot glasses for people to take a sip or nip as a toast totem of sorts.
     My father's and mother's reading glasses were there and my dad's 49er voodoo doll to poke needles into to provoke other teams' misfortunes was present as well as a large collection of a much larger one my Mom had of various Santas representing different interpretations from around the world. My Mom had the big gathering on that holiday as her Mom had before her. It was a very crowded and often silly event but Mom was superb at keeping everyone amused and entertained. She looked forward to it all year.
    We found out from high school friends who knew my Dad and Mom things we'd had no idea about including copies of their high school yearbook with my father in renaissance costume in a play devilishly handsome and smiling at a young female classmate. We had no notion he'd been in plays. Both of my parents had unknown aspects.
    One of the most touching things were family members that made it clear my mom was THE confidante of many in my family. They knew whatever they told her would never travel to the ears of others. Both of my folks knew how to listen but my mom's depth of compassion became clear this day though it came as no surprise to us, her children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews, it was a powerful reaffirmation that brought tears to our eyes.
    The next day PLC and I went over to my brother's house to watch the 49ers lose to the Minnesota Vikings. My brother had been distant from me in the days following my Mom's death and we have all been grieving in our own ways. My brother's had a lot of big brother (me)/ little brother animosity issues I'd imagined as part of this which can be seen as intellectually absurd but it is still a real fact of life that emerges in troubling times.  He has had some real health issues and it overworked at a job in which he seems under appreciated. I am unhappy and frankly concerned for him for this but I am definitely on his side and I definitely love my brother. But Saturday and Sunday it seemed clear that this is now healed and I am so happy about it. Believe me, watching our parent's and our favorite team lose on their anniversary day and taking it with equanimity and good humor just confirms our parents did a pretty good job. 

    PLC and I have been keeping up with the political stuff  a lot of "Colbert Reports" and "Daily Shows" as well as attending news of the Internets.
    I think it's becoming clearer that Obama should win re-election but Congress and the Senate will be concerns. More on that later but for now I just wanted to say "hi!"

August 20, 2012

  • A Postnote on Our World Political Reality


    Dear all,
    Below is a link for a story written by the former war correspondent Chris Hedges. Hedges has pointed out as have some others such as one-time Republican and CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson that what we do in terms of military and intelligence operations has a "blowback" effect. "Blowback" is a shorthand term for the material that spatters from shooting someone- usually spraying back onto the shooter.
    The term as it's increasingly being used has to do with the blowback of consequences for the United States- or  as Hedges rightly points out- for any country or organization that initiates a campaign of murder, disinformation and interference with the political reality of any other country or organization.
    Whoever wins this November- in the House, the Senate or the White House will have the largest array of forces engaged in this kind of activity in the US's history.
    It's something to think about as I know my own partisanship may obscure the fact that there are forces working daily that make understanding and reconciliation an ever less likely possibility for all of us.
    This is legitimate food for thought.