Lisa Moscatiello

Internal racism: security at a price

2012-01-07T02:24:00.000-08:00

The case of the accidental racist

Psychoanalyst M. Fakhry Davids presents a case study to illustrate how he slowly comes to see the outlines of what he calls a internal racist organization in his patient's ego structure: Mr. A is a 30 year-old, white Englishman who seeks treatment after a "breakdown" from which he is unable to recover. Several sessions go by during which the patient seems emotionally disconnected. One day, without warning, Mr. A. explodes with rage after Davids offers a "routine interpretation". Because of the ferocious and sudden nature of the attack, Davids hypothesizes that his interpretation had penetrated and threatened a vital defensive organization. In subsequent sessions, Mr. A. makes several remarks alluding to Davids’s foreign accent, immigrant status, and Middle Eastern-appearing features. He wonders aloud if Davids, a foreigner, could be an effective analyst for an English patient and expressed doubts about Davids’s capacity to “take” his hostile outbursts. As more associations to Davids’s foreignness emerge, Davids revisits the initial outburst and concludes it was indeed a racial attack and that its vehemence suggested that what Davids’s had thrown into disarray was the weakening (possibly due to Mr. A. having entered analysis) defensive organization that was struggling to hold him together.

As Davids learns more about Mr. A., he discovers the extent to which his patient dreads becoming dependent on another person. In order to ward off feelings of dependency that he is sure to develop toward his analyst, Mr. A. had mobilized a defensive organization that projected his disavowed feelings of dependence into Davids. In Mr. A’s mind, it was his ethnicity that made Davids vulnerable and enabled Mr. A to continue to see his own feelings as located elsewhere. Because the entire structure of this organization was constructed upon the premise of Davids’s vulnerability as an immigrant, Davids concludes that this defensive organization is a racist organization. Mr. A., who was not otherwise racist, desperately needed a place to deposit the feelings of vulnerability that his analysis stirred up, and therefore his unconscious opportunistically used race as the keystone of his defensive organization:

Through projection I was transformed, in his perception, from an individual who happened to have a brown skin (and a strange accent), to a foreigner trying to find acceptance in a hostile (xenophobic) Britain. His problem … was therefore relocated in me.

During the early stages of his analysis, the arrangement worked well: Davids spent most of the hour asking Mr. A. questions, which would have been consistent with his Mr. A’s image of him as an immigrant asking for help. By making an interpretation, however, Davids stepped out of his racially circumscribed role, thus giving the lie to Mr. A’s entire defensive organization. By voiding this unspoken “agreement,” Davids unintentionally robbed Mr. A. of a fundamental feeling of security. Davids characterizes this system of defense as “mafia-like”:

….the protection offered comes at the price of absolute loyalty. This means that all transactions must be seen as taking place within the parameters of the organization: it must appear in control. This means that everyone must keep to their proper place (and be seen to be doing so), and they must not occupy an unsanctioned place.

This requirement that everyone “keep their proper place” evokes images of the other kind of organization, namely, the kind that is made up of people who are paralyzed by a group unconscious defensive organization making sure that no one steps out of line. In the U.S., nowhere is this stranglehold more evident – or paralyizing – than in discussions about race.

Defensive Organizations of the Mind

2012-01-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

In M. Fakhry Davids's psychoanalytic theory, racism becomes "inscribed in the mind" through the interaction of ingredients that are already present in the inner world. "Some objects," he writes,"are to be found in every internal world and can thus be thought of as part of the structure of the mind. Self, mother, father and superego fall into this category, and it is to this list that I think the racial other belongs." What Davids terms an "internal racist organization" comes about when a racial other is the foundation on which an elaborate system of defenses known as a "defensive organization," is constructed. An internal racist organization may be present even when the racial aspect is not overtly expressed, as he describes in the central case study of his book.

W. Hoffer first used the term "defensive organization" to counter what he saw as a common mischaracterization of Freud's defense mechanisms as mere "sudden creations, spontaneous random reactions of the ego, escape mechanisms, or defensive manoeuvres." Hoffer instead saw them as more complex and permanent, "patterns of a prescribed, automatic and compulsive character, comparable to the well-organized nervous reflexes." A defensive organization, then, is a wide-ranging, elaborate structure "which is itself part of the total ego organization" and controls a wide range of seemingly unconnected functions both conscious and unconscious.

In other words, a defensive organization is not so much a tool that the ego uses but is instead a keystone on which a major ego structure is built, which efficiently "filters out" that which is feared too painful to bear. Some defensive organizations shield out so much reality that they become harmful (as in Sunset Boulevard, for example). More common and seemingly benign are those defensive organizations that people use in order to "get by" and which may serve them well until an unforeseen crisis or a psychotherapeutic intervention threatens the entire house of cards.

This latter category, is what Davids sensed was at work in one of his patients, Mr. A, who came to see him at age 30 after a "breakdown" from which he had been unable to recover.

Internal racism: innate or taught, or something else?

2012-01-02T20:22:00.000-08:00

In the previous post I discussed M. Fakhry Davids's psychoanalytic theory of "internal racism," which he believes to be caused by projective identifications that make racial others the target. Davids considers this a "universal" phenomenon, affecting even individuals who were not raised with racist values and who harbor no conscious racist attitudes. What evidence does Davids provide to support this, and what does he believe is the cause? What about people who are themselves "racial others"? Are they afflicted in the same way? How does internal racism manifest in members of out groups? And what are the implications of this theory? If racism is universal, does this absolve people of their racism? As a psychoanalyst, does Davids believe that racism can be treated, and if so, by what means?

Racism aside, what about virtue? Can virtue be taught or developed through practice, or is it innate, and if not, does it come about by some other means?

Projective identification and racism

2012-01-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

M. Fakhry Davids is a London-based psychoanalyst who maintains that negative feelings toward members of a different race are actually feelings of revulsion against disavowed aspects of the self that are so unbearable that they have been displaced or "projected" onto others and thereby hidden from conscious awareness. Davids designates the recipients of these projections "racial others," a term that he acknowledges to be "arbitrary and inacccurate since social stereotyping is not confined to race alone," but which he prefers to use rather than invent a new term. He thus uses the term "racism" to encompass religious, class, and other strains of social stereotyping because it "evokes a plethora of meanings" that he considers necessary to remain in the foreground throughout his analysis.

Because racial others are so frequently the targets of such projections, Davids suggests that this unconscious social stereotyping may be a universal strategy that begins at a specific developmental stage in order to cope with internal conflicts of a specific type. Davids holds that this unconscious stereotyping is a special case of a defensive strategy known in psychoanalytic theory as "projective identification."

Projective identification is a concept first put forth by child psychoanalyst and theorist Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Klein believed in the primacy of early breastfeeding experience as an influence on personality development due to the intensity of the feelings evoked in the infant, from security and wholeness following an uninterrupted feed to panic and rage when the infant's desire to nurse is unsatisfied. According to Klein, in the beginning the infant does not have a mental representation of the mother as a whole being but instead conceives of her in terms of her constituent parts, with the most salient part being the breast. Klein believed that the infant retaliates against the mother for withholding the breast with both physical attacks, such as biting and "'vampire-like' sucking" and imaginary attacks, including the desire "to fill her body with the bad substances and parts of the self which are split off and projected into her." Klein held that one of the earliest developmental tasks for the infant is to "split" this internal representation of the mother in two: a "good," gratifying one and a "bad," withholding one. By "severing love from hate" the infant can keep the now-idealized "good" maternal object away from the attacks on the now-excessively hated "bad" maternal object.

There is a price to pay, however, for the release afforded by these attacks. The infant now dreads retaliation from "the object into whom badness (the bad self) has been projected," and which has now become "the persecutor par excellence, because it has been endowed with all of the bad qualities of the subject." This cycle of distress, projection, and fear of retaliation by an other filled with one's own projected bad qualities forms the basic structure of projective identification, a process that eventually becomes unconscious, while others ultimately come to take the place of the mother in the scenario.

When the other who is enlisted to perform this function is a member of a racial "out" group, racist attitudes take hold and, Davids believes, an internal racist organization eventually becomes fixed in the personality. This dynamic of over-idealizing and protecting the "good" from a vilified and feared "bad" is evident in racism and is one of the features that distinguishes it from mere "competition for resources" or fear of the unfamiliar and lends support to Davids's contention that projective identification fuels racism. Why, then, does the unconscious seem to gravitate to racial others as its target?

Next: Why race?

What We Talk About When We Talk About RACISM

2011-12-31T16:35:00.000-08:00

What is racism? Is it part of human nature, or something that must be taught?

We who live in the United States or any other country with a history of colonialism have never known a time when racism did not permeate our culture. In the U.S., we can trace the roots of racism back only a few generations to the time when Europeans devised the scheme of traveling to West Africa, abducting people and taking them to a remote country to be sold to landowners who were free to use them however they wished. While we can identify the specific historical conditions that gave rise to the racialized society in which we now live, it is not as easy to explain why we as a species developed racism in the first place and why we find it so difficult to let it go.

London-based psychoanalyst M. Fakhry Davids sees at the root of racism a power dynamic that makes it seductive to both perpetrator and victim. According to his theory of "internal racism," the force that sustains racism is the very shame and guilt those who perpetrate it feel about their own racist impulses. To understand how revulsion towards racism actually keeps it alive requires a familiarity with a psychoanalytic concept known as projective identification.

Next: Projective identification

What I've Been Up To Musically: OCEAN CD Release show at the Birchmere

2011-12-30T17:35:00.001-08:00

Song of Solstice CD release show on Tuesday, December 27 at the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA. Pictured onstage are Jennifer Cutting (keys and squeezebox), Steve Winick (Father Christmas), Zan McLeod (bouzouki, mandolin and electric guitar), John Guillory (recorders), Tim Carey (highland pipes), Bobby Spates (electric violin), Rico Petruccelli (bass), Robbie Magruder (drums) and Sue Richards (Celtic harp). Also on the bill were the Washington Revels Singers and the Foggy Bottom Morris Men.

For a GREAT Hair Cut and Color in DC, call Jeremey Paul at 202-737-0909

2010-09-04T21:37:00.000-07:00

To be young, average and white as a young girl in the 1970s was to be preoccupied, traumatized, and eventually victimized by hair and hair products. The styles that our idols displayed and that we all craved looked tossed off and natural, like sunshine in California. Sadly, though, those iconic looks were beyond our reach: Dippity-Do and Sears curling irons were simply no match for the works of hair architecture we beheld on the TV stars as they chatted on the sofa with Dinah Shore, or framing the faces that grinned at us from DrugFair magazine racks.

Farrah Fawcett's luxuriantly unruly mane may have looked as if a simple toss of the head were the only skill necessary to achieve it, but I learned at an early age that there was no way that Phil at my neighborhood beauty parlor had enough time, chops, or hair product to recreate a signature Hollywood look on an eleven year-old fresh off the street wearing a polyester cowel neck sweater and ill-fitting jeans. When I walked into the strip mall salon with my mom and asked for my first real hairstyle --"wings"-- what I walked out with was not Farrah's shimmering waterfall, but nothing more than my own brown bangs, only fried into into shape by a curling iron and glued to the sides of my head with hairspray.

Even the famous, no-nonsense wedge hairstyle immortalized by Olympic pedestal girl Dorothy Hamill required the same level of precision and timing to execute without tragedy as her trademark Hamill Camel spin.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich are different from you and me, particularly when it comes to their hair.

What is Seventies Hair Scare Syndrome?

It's no wonder, then, that for most of my life, I have suffered from Seventies Hair Scare Syndrome (SHSS): an aversion to sitting in a beauty salon chair so severe that it makes the thought of a colonoscopy exam sound like a relaxing way to pamper myself.

For those of us who do suffer from SHSS, our symptoms can worsen with time, since as we age we face stressful decision points concerning our hair color.

There is hope.

While there is no known cure for SHSS, for sufferers living in the Washington, DC area there is now a way to manage it: through regular appointments with stylist Jeremey Paul at PRatParters Salons & Spas' Metro Center location.

I met JeremeyPaul when I was in the midst of a hair emergency. The only stylist I trusted on earth was half a Beltway away and booked for the next few weeks, and I was about to go to a job interview with unsightly gray that I had suddenly realized was a liability. I called the Metro Center salon, and the only person available on such short notice was the new guy, JeremeyPaul. I was worried about how young he looked in the photo. Did he know what he was doing? Would he make me feel old and massively uncool? My desperation drove me to ignore my fears and just go.

A star in a galaxy of master stylists.

JeremeyPaul put me at ease the moment I met him. He obviously loves what he does, and his enjoyment of the process was irresistible. The confidence and serenity he projected had the same reassuring effect on me as a veteran flight attendant cheerfully going over the emergency landing instructions, as if to say with every sweeping arm gesture, "I wouldn't be on this plane if I thought it would crash. As long as I'm here, everything will be just fine."

JeremeyPaul has several qualities that set him apart as a star in Partners' galaxy of masterful hair and makeup artists: a flawless sense of color; a reassuring and entertaining chairside manner, and the hands of a brain surgeon when it comes to taking blade to hair.

He is also the in-store spokesperson for an innovative hair color product developed by L'Oreal called Inoa, which uses an oil distribution system instead of ammonia in its permanent hair color. According to JeremeyPaul, in microscopic photos, hair treated with Inoa looks stronger and healthier than "virgin hair' that has never been colored before. "You can think of it as reparative," he said. And that is good news for those of us SHSS sufferers who worry about the harsh chemicals in hair color and the possibility that they will damage our hair or, more likely, give us terminal cancer like Jackie Onassis.

In very little time at all, my hair status had changed from "It's complicated" to "I'm in love." I had the cut of my dreams and a fresh new color that was vibrant and shiny and repairing my hair all the while.

If you've been yearning to have some fun with your hair but have been suffering with SHSS, have no fear. JeremeyPaul is here, and he is ready to love your hair.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee on the "Ick Factor"

2010-06-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

“I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” Huckabee told New York magazine. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship.

We can get into the ‘ick factor,’ but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.”

This blog has moved

2010-03-09T17:34:00.001-08:00

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Dad and computers and runtime environments

2009-12-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

My dad doesn't like his Mac. He doesn't understand it. He doesn't want to understand it. He knows how to use a slide rule and understands non-Euclidean geometry, so it's not that he can't do math or can't grasp concepts. He just resents the terminology. He doesn't like the word "server," and all the other made-up, insider-y sounding terms that computer people toss around all the time. He tries to learn about it by reading books sometimes, but as soon as he sees a word like "hypertext," he gets disgusted and shuts the book.

I share some of this novelty anxiety and terminology fatigue, but I want to make myself a more useful and employable member of society. Also, I really love the internet and truly envy people who can create their own little worlds online, and so I genuinely want to overcome this temperamental limitation. A prerequisite for transcending this is a capacity to recognize when I have reached my daily limit of new concepts and unfamiliar terms. In addition, it's equally important for me to acknowledge when some term just plain annoys me.

I just experienced this annoyance upon reading the following sentence, "The Java applet runs in a generic Java runtime environment supplied by the browser...." You might guess that it was the word "applet" that got on my nerves, but I'm actually okay with that. Once I realized that it has nothing to do with Apple computers, and that instead it refers to a sort of mini "app" that you download and then kind of unpack and run on your computer, I was fine. What made my eyes roll was the phrase "generic runtime environment." It's actually the word "runtime" that annoyed me, because I'll bet it has nothing to do with time, and also because I don't care for the way the words "run" and "time" are sissily smooshed together. I'm pretty sure that the guy who thought that up was and probably still is pretty satisfied with himself because of it (and I am sure it's a "he"). I also feel resentful of and kind of excluded by the use of the word "environment." The people who are in the "in" group know darn well that the rest of us find it unsettling and confusing, because we were basically in agreement about what that word meant before they appropriated it. How can "environment" be linked back to "time" in any way other than a most annoying, clubby, cutesy kind of way?

I may have reached my threshold for the time being and should do some laundry or something.

"Runtime" is what you get when you do the fifty yard dash in an "environment' that involves grass and sun and bugs.

Blech.

Database driven web sites

2009-12-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

Trying to figure out databases. I am confused. Okay there's the client, say, a library patron trying to find a book from their own personal computer. The patron's computer is the client. They go online to the library's web site and navigate to the library's online catalog, which has some boxes to enter the title and author, call number, etc. The patron types in the title: The Road Less Traveled. The library's server does something. What? It turns it into a query or something. The library's database management system processes the words the patron types in and turns it into a query that looks like what (I don't know). The query goes to the database which is located where? On some server computer somewhere. I guess the database will have a record that has Title, Author, Call Number, What libraries in the system own the title, and then of those, which ones have one available. It might also have other details like other formats the title is in like CD, audiotape, etc., whether it is on some special status, like it can only be checked out for two weeks or something. The database doesn't "do" anything, does it? It just sits there with the data, right? And it's the Database Management System that sorts it, and then the web server puts it into a readable format and renders it into a sort of temporary web page that it sends over the internet back to the patron.

Possible solution to the "they" dilemma.

2009-10-28T00:12:00.000-07:00

I had thought that I'd read somewhere that it was now acceptable to use "they" instead of either "he" or "she" as the "variable" personal pronoun (as in, "If anyone needs a farecard, they can get one out of this vending machine"). If it makes you resentful to use "he" (I didn't realize I resented it until a St. John's tutor corrected my "they" by changing it to "he"), and it makes you twitchy to allow this use of "they" based solely on the questionable principle that "if people speak it, it's a language. If people do it, it's authentic, so get off my back," then consider this approach: think of the third person plural "they" as a completely different "they" from the other one.

In Italian, the word "lei" is used both for the 2nd person singular pronoun in formal address, and also for the 3rd person singular prounoun. If you do a subtle mental shift and decide that "they" is the new "lei" and that 1) It's about time we invented a new pronoun to represent a concept that sorely needs to be represented linguistically, and that 2)if we all agree not to obssess about subject-verb agreement, then we can pull one of these deals: "the pronoun "they" in this sense takes the plural verb form."

So, to review, the main idea is that the two "theys" are now offically (if I were dictator, that is, heh heh) NOT the same word. Instead, they are homonyms, two drifters that just happen to look and sound the same but are headed for distinct, yet related destinations.

Voila! What was once an awkward, cheesy workaround, the "poor relation" of the pronoun family, is now suave and European, with greasy hair, five o'clock shadow, and a single gold earring.

And the good news is that we were entitled to an extra pronoun all along, since we didn't take the one we would have needed for using formal address.

A test on "The Farthest Wave"

2009-07-24T23:54:00.000-07:00

In case you are wondering what the chicken scratches are in this post, they were my attempts to get myself to practice a few songs. I am an inveterate non-rehearser. I just HATE it. Especially if I'm by myself. So, in the spirit of the 'webcam,' I decided to share my little self quizzes on one of the songs I learned for a memorial service recently.

I don't usually test myself like this (btw, these were 'closed book' tests). I usually just 'run over' the songs a couple of times and figure it'll all come out in the wash. But that worked when I was sixteen and had a young brain with no bills to pay. I have do to more now to prepare. I learned this at St. John's, trying to demonstrate proofs in front of the class. In my head I knew what was supposed to happen, but I couldn't do it in front of the class. I tried to explain this to my tutor that, like Nigel Tufnel (pictured above), "I get the sense of it. I just don't understand it."

So, this is what I was doing at 3:00 am the morning of the service. I just wrote out some questions on the song, called "The Farthest Wave," and tried to recall the answers from memory. Wow. Pretty revealing, especially after I had already writren out the lyrics and a chord chart. Talk about ADDDDDD.

The 11:30 P.M. of the soul

2009-07-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

Image by Tamar Messer used without permission.

I think I understand why so many people like to set up webcams so that the world can see them living their lives. I believe that they do it out of loneliness. Or, if not loneliness per se, something like it. When I was a little kid, I used to pretend that my life was a documentary on PBS. For some reason, this gave me a bit of dignity when my first grade teacher was cornering me in the section of the classroom she called the 'cloakroom' where all the 'cubbyholes' would be with our coats hanging in them. On many mornings I would be hurriedly trying to get out of my coat and into my desk well after the bell had rung. "A diller, a dollar, a ten o'clock scholar." That was the first time (and probably not the last) I was to hear that phrase. But for some reason, imagining that a camera was following me as I nervously walked to my desk made me feel as if I had company, or that my life had some significance and shape to it, and a bit of drama. Maybe it allowed me to get some distance from the shame, and from that slight remove, to "make" some sense out of what was happening. That sense making is one of the chief therapeutic benefits of the process of creating.

It was around that same age that I started fantasizing about performing on stage. I'm sure that I wanted to have as much fun as the Osmonds and Jackson Five seemed to be having. But also, I wanted to do something that other people would see and remember.

The lack of an audience is a major factor in my dread of 'rehearsing.' Oh, god. There's something about it, especially when I try to do it by myself, that is so lonely and desperate and formless. I have a similar feeling when I try to write anything, particularly for a class on a subject that isn't personally compelling to me. During my last semester at St. John's, I experimented with blogging while writing, and it did make me feel less lonely. Like maybe there was more at stake since I was giving "updates" to unknown readers and therefore owed it to "them" to finish my paper.Plus, it provided a little breathing room between me and my tutor. Maybe having one person out there judging my performance was paralyzing, too much pressure to bear. Having imagined "others" out there gave me a sort of hedge against total rejection. My tutor might think my work was worthless, but someone else out there might not. Another fear that haunts me is that I will have "wasted time," particularly if I spend time on something that I ultimately scrap. If I blog about it, I will at least walk away with some nicely illustrated little tableau to look at some day and recall the struggle.

So, tonight, I am preparing for a memorial service. The person who died knew in advance that she had a terminal illness, and so she planned her own service, right down to hand picking the music and the performers. I like the songs I will be singing, for the most part. Two of them are new to me: "Let the Mystery Be" is by Iris DeMent, and it's all about how it's okay not to know what happens when we die, "I choose to let the mystery be." I like the way she and her band do it. It's a nice, bluegrassy arrangement that gently percolates. Moving forward but not in a big hurry to get there. Oh, and it is a song that definitely wants to be sung in the key of F major. We tried it in G and it refused to be sung in that key.

Another selection she wanted is called "The Farthest Wave." This one is by Cathie Ryan and Karine Polwart. It's going to be the highlight of the program, I predict. It's a song about separation that could be about death or divorce, but definitely something insurmountable. The lyrics are well crafted yet natural, and the melody is perfect. It's got that magic combination of familiarity and novelty with the all-important unexpected couple of melodic surprises. I know that this song could be a major hit if someone like the Dixie Chicks or Mary Chapin Charpenter or Kathy Mattea got ahold of it - someone who is a grownup and a real singer.

Now I have to get to it. Here is how the sausage gets made. I have plotted out the basic forms of these songs and have a general idea of the melody of each, although I'm notorious for making up my own melody in the heat of the moment. It's unlikely that I will have the lyrics memorized in time for the service, so I'll have a music stand. I have to be able to spit out, like my name, rank, and serial number, what happens in the intro, who starts it, how many verses and choruses there are, where the instrumental break goes, and how the song ends. I also have to go back over my chords to make sure they are correct, and fix some of the lyrics that I transcribed and that I know are incorrect. OK, it's 12:14 am. I'll check in after I'm done with proofreading the charts for these two songs. Bye.

Get ready for StupidGate

2009-07-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Sean Hannity must be licking his chops right now. Who do you think is going to come on his show tonight to get peppered with leading questions? I have a feeling that Officer Crowley, the Cambridge cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates in his own home, has too much class for that.

Let's see - what is he going to sputter tonight?

"Don't you think, in this day and age, that the President of the United States, would have enough respect not to refer to men and women who put themselves into harm's way on our crack pipe littered URBAN STREETS as "stupid"? Do you agree that the President thinks ALL WHITE POLICE OFFICERS are STUPID?"

or this:

"Is Obama's POST RACIAL AMERICA officially over?" (Hannity hopes it is, so he can keep using racial innuendos to sow discontent and advertising revenues for Fox Opinion Network.)

Have I said before that I have no respect for Sean Hannity? This is his philosophy:

If you criticize anything the government does, you are unpatriotic, unless there are Democrats in the White House and Congress. If everyone would just stop whining and play by the rules and go to church and be NORMAL like me, Sean Hannity, there'd be no problems in this country. All liberals hate America. If I disagree with you, all I have to do is turn the music up and cut to a commercial. It's my show.

His screechy voice and self satisfied smirk give me agita. He has zero insight and is incapable of engaging in civil discourse with anybody who is not reading straight off of the RNC talking points. He makes Archie Bunker look like the Dalai Lama.

I would rather spend eternity in hell, carrying golf clubs for Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter than so much as share a cab with Hannity. Why? Because those guys may be mean spirited and intellectually dishonest, but they are clever and have some measure of wit and legitimate show biz chops. What about Bill O'Reilly? Hmm, well, he's a blowhard, but like Ted Baxter, to whom Limbaugh himself has compared him, there's something adorable about O'Reilly, so I'd carry his golf clubs if I were to end up eternally damned. But Hannity is just boring and a bully.....HOW DID HE GET HIS OWN SHOW?? He can carry his own gold-plated clubs.

Mireille Mathieu sings La marseillaise

2009-07-13T20:16:00.001-07:00

Job hunting

2009-06-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

I've been told by a reliable source that my resume needs more "white space" in it. Also, apparently there's no need to have complete sentences after those bullet points, and so I'm going to go take out all the personal pronouns. That's okay - they did seem unnecessary since it's pretty obvious that it's "all about me." But...right now I have to go look at the job announcement and make sure it's still being advertised. I'm scared. I keep putting this off. Okay here goes...

It is on the web site. I'm actually surprised that it's still there. It's been advertised since April. Doesn't that seem odd? It's not like it's a posting for a blacksmith. This is a public interest/publicity job that every third person is probably qualified for. Hmmmm. Just stop procrastinating and apply for it. What's the worst that could happen?

Why is Dick Cheney getting air time?

2009-05-23T22:48:00.001-07:00

Why did George "All Too Human" Stephanopoulos find it necessary to create a fake news story on a "Showdown" between Cheney and Obama about the President's foreign policy? It's actual news when someone who is in office and who has something at stake makes a major statement on foreign policy, knowing that he or she must live with the consequences. It is fake news when a member of the previous administration takes a pot shot at the current administration from within the walls of a like-minded institution of which he is a board member. I'm not suggesting that the former Vice President does not have the right to voice his opinion in public. I am merely suggesting that only the Fox Opinion Network should be expected to consider this "news," and that no one but Mr. Cheney's publicist should ever be forgiven for calling the event one half of a "Showdown."

Will someone please ask him a real question? Like, for example, why should we listen to you, Mr. Vice President? Or (be honest) what part of the Constitution is not expendable? If you think we should do away with the fourth amendment, there is a process for changing the document. The Founding Fathers fully expected that we would need to make changes to the Constitution, and so they set forth a specific procedure for doing so. They made it fairly difficult to amend the Constitution to protect us from rash, emotionally-based decisions, but it is nevertheless possible to revisit what was written in the 18th Century and conclude that circumstances have changed so much that some of our institutions are outdated (such as the electoral college, for example), and that possibly some of our rights will have to be trimmed back in the interest of national security. By the way, I am not saying that I believe this to be the case; my point is simply that if, as Cheney and other Bush-ites have insisted, these threats to our very survival are so great that we don't have time for the usual way we have always done justice and conducted war, then they need to make a case before the American people for amending the Constitution. That would not endanger our security in any way.

Instead, Bush and Cheney simply ignored the Constitution, domestic law, and the treaties that we have signed, and acted unilaterally, outside the authority of the American people. That is dictatorial. That is assuming fake authority based on nothing, not even any presumed divine right, like the monarchies of old, or by brute force, but by chicanery on the part of the Bush Administration and weakness and laziness on the part of, well, the rest of us. They scared us into thinking there was "no time" to deliberate (this was what, eight years ago? We are still not discussing the real questions of liberty versus security in any meaningful way). In the case of Mr. Cheney, rather than deliberate, he chose to secretly break the law, stare down anyone who would question his decisions, talk in a monotone, and tell the rest of us to go fuck ourselves.

Mr. Cheney, if you are so worried about our safety, why not come out of retirement and lend a hand in the the Global War on Terror? You should be nervously pacing around with five o'clock shadow and sweat stains under your arms, over in some "situation room" like the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis, not playing with your grandchildren in McLean. Why are you still talking?

Is there not a news person out there who is willing to risk his or her career to ask him a real question on live television? How about Campbell Brown? She's been showing more spine than anyone else on network TV these days. That is, assuming she still has a show on the air. Sober, impartial analysis does not sell.

Anybody else out there man enough?

"We asked about influenza, and they said that it had been eradicated in Mexico."

2009-04-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

"Lagoons" filled with pig excrement, decomposed body parts and other waste in Veracruz, Mexico

Government officials in Mexico suspect Smithfield Ham industrial hog processing facility as the petri dish that grew the latest swine flu

Dead pigs at Granjas Carroll laid out to be eaten by birds.

"Some people started getting ill in February and an eight-month-old baby died. After that another baby died on March 21st. Suddenly most of the village got ill. It was weekend and the tiny clinic here was closed. The state health authorities then did send doctors and nurses to look after us, and give us medication. About 60% of the village were ill and we asked them what it was and they said it was a severe and atypical cold. We talked about influenza and they said that was impossible, that influenza had been eradicated from Mexico."
Resident of La Gloria, Veracruz, Mexico, speaking on condition of anonymity.
(Reported in the UK Guardian, Monday, April 27)

In early April, a Washington State based company called Veratect, which monitors disease outbreaks around the world, reported an unusually high number of people becoming ill with flu like symptoms in the town of La Gloria. At least one sample taken from a resident has tested positve for swine flu. Two children in La Gloria have died so far.

The Mexican government has reported findings linking the Granjas Carroll plant, which is located twelve miles away from La Gloria and is owned by Smithfield Ham, to the virus. According to the Mexico City based newspaper La Jornada, the virus could have been spread by the "clouds of flies that come out of the hog barns, and the waste lagoons into which the Mexican-US company spews tons of excrement," although according to the Guardian, it is so far only known to be spread by direct contact with animals and humans infected with the disease and not by flies.

Smithfield was fined over ten years ago for having repeatedly violated EPA pollution regulations by dumping pig feces and other wastes into the Pagan River in Virginia, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay.

Smithfield issued a press release today stating that there have been no cases among either its livestock or its employees of "North American Influenza," citing a WHO study calling it "inaccurate" to call the virus "swine flu," since it is a combination of pig, avian and human viruses.

Can you tell me, O Socrates?

2009-04-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

In the last installment I said that Jesus reminds me of Socrates, and it was in part just a way to tranzish to my next entry. If you have not figured this out I am involving you in my schoolwork for my master's program. I graduated from college twenty-one years ago, and while I did okay, grade-wise, I always felt as if I had not put as much effort in as I could have and did not learn as much as I wanted to. Since I work at a HUGE library, I decided to make IT my grad school for a long time. It's great - I read tons of books about psychoanalysis, religion, addiction, everything Augusten Burroughs has ever written, labor-management relations, everything Camille Paglia has written. For a long time my favorite genre was what I call "true therapy." Some people love true crime, but for me, I can't get enough of reading case studies by psychotherapists, and in particular those of a depth psychological or psychoanalytic orientation. Irving Yalom is my favorite, but I love to read Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott, Harold Searles, Joyce MacDougal, and a few years ago I read, for months on end, book after book of therapist-treating-incest-survivor case studies.. The frustrating thing about reading these heavy books is that they invariably refer to those Great Books that all educated people were supposed to have read until sometime in the 1970s & 1980s when I was growing up. So, for the past two years I have been doing some catch-up going through an actual master's program that has me reading Greek plays, Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, etc.

I have learned that I still have a huge aversion to writing papers of any kind. It makes me so anxious I feel like throwing up. I procrastinate. I taught myself how to make a music video last weekend on iMovies, for example. I hate the idea of being alone, staring at that piece of paper, trying to decide, as sands slip through the hourglass, whether it would be a good idea to reread the book (hint: it never hurts to reread the book). I hate the idea of trying to come up with something intelligent to say about somebody else's work. Who cares what I think? Why is it necessary to analyze everything all to bits?I feel so pretentious. But I think that's partly due to bad habits I picked up in college. I went to a pretentious school and wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to fit in academically. In the process I learned how to write a completely useless, dishonest, contorted paper. No wonder I hate it so much.

I am just realizing that I probably would be doing better in my current program if I had gone in straight from high school, where I had loved learning and discussing books. One of my biggest problems in school and in life is that, whenever I am working on a sustained project that does not come to fruition all at once, I panic that whatever part of it that I am working on at the moment is the Wrong One. All that does is keep me from devoting my attention to that particular component, because half my brain is anxiously focused on the amount of time I have left to finish and worrying that maybe I am looking for a needle in a haystack. I start to doubt that whatever book I am writing about that has been cherished and revered for centuries and has changed the face of history, actually has anything of any value to say to me. Maybe I should change my paper topic, write on a different book altogether, work on an assignment for a different class for awhile, clean all this shit up that's lying around, take a nap, exercise. I usually rebel and do something that is instantly gratifying. Unfortunately, next to surfing the internet, the thing I turn to most often is food."Maybe I'm just wasting my time. I think I'll go see what's in the refrigerator for the fourteenth time." In some ways I have not changed at all since I was nineteen. But I am more humble, more willing to accept that I'm not the sharpest pencil in the box and that I often do things more slowly than others and need to seek help. I'm taking Ancient Greek, and it is incredibly difficult. It is painful for me to acknowledge this, but I am probably the worst student in the class. I spend hours and hours trying to figure this stuff out, and invariably, when my turn comes to read my translation there is always something wrong with it. I may be the slowest student, but I did hang in there, whereas a few people have dropped out along the way. It is interesting, and I do not at all regret taking it. After I went on sabbatical from playing music, I made myself be quiet inside, and asked myself what I would regret not having done if I were to die tomorrow, and I realized that it was reading these books, and studying Ancient Greek.

So, this weekend I have to write a paper on the Meno, one of Plato's dialogues. When I said in my last post that Jesus reminds me of Socrates, I was only partly using it as an abrupt transition. Both men were unconventional and said and did things that people found annoying at best, dangerous at worst. Both had a small group of devoted followers, some of whom lived to write accounts of their teachings. Both were tried under strange circumstances and charged with ill defined crimes. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth, making the weaker argument the stronger (?) and worshipping gods other than the ones the city worshipped (he attributed any orginal ideas or wisdom of his to his daimon, a sort of personal deity or deva. People didn't like that). Both were tried, neither one put up much of fight, and both were put to death, Socrates by government sponsored self-poisoning and Jesus by torture and crucifixion. While Socrates never claimed to be God, and Jesus by several witnesses' accounts did, it is hard to determine whether Socrates believed in any sort of deity or not. Another similarity is that neither of them wrote anything down, and so everything we know about them both is from other peoples' accounts. Jesus' life was recorded by a number of witnesses, while Socrates' life was recorded primarily by Plato, although Aristophanes mentions him and Xenophon wrote his own account of the trial of Socrates.

Take this cup away from me

2009-04-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, so maybe I'm feeling a little overdramatic and a touch grandiose. Hopefully nobody finds this offensive (because if you do, there's more coming and you should probably go back to Susan Boyle and/or lolcats) It's just that, as inevitably happens, my paper writing anguish has now intensified. I have left behind Stage 1 "Book Report on Peter Rabbit" distress and have moved on to full-on "take this cup away from me" dread. All alone, looking down the barrel of some deadline, wishing there were a way out but knowing that there is no turning back now.

"Gethsemane" from Jesus Christ Superstar. This is one of those rare songs whose music tells the story just as much as its lyrics. And the Jesus in this scene is so alone. I am so glad that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Co. had the courage and artistic integrity to let him go there. At one point he screams at God, "Watch me die," and the music kicks into this tragic, epic, relentless death march as photos of famous paintings and sculptures depicting the crucifixion flash up on the screen, one after the other, mercilessly.

I've mentioned on this blog before that this Jesus is my Jesus, and I was gratified to read on YouTube that there are plenty of others who feel the same way. Most, if not all of the Biblical scenes in Jesus Christ Superstar are from the Gospel of John, which I've got on the brain. I'm supposed to have an oral exam on it on Sunday. I had forgotten how beautiful it is. It's so passionate and poetic. This semester we read the Gospels of Matthew and John. I went into it assuming I would like Matthew the best. As my gf says, "Matthew has got all of Jesus' greatest hits" - the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule, plus it's definitely the book in the Bible that best proves that while God may be a Republican, Jesus is definitely a Democrat. It's the one where he tells the rich man who wants to follow him but can't part with his stuff that it's harder to for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

At the same time I thought I would not like John because instead of preaching about compassion and taking care of the poor and less fortunate, in the Gospel of John, Jesus and all of the other 'main' characters are obsessed with his identity and supposed divinity. The Gospel of John is where the phrase "born again" comes from. which is the Protestant equivalent of that which Protestants are baffled by in Catholicism. Protestants do not have a pope, relics, transubstantiation, or rosary beads, but are instead fixated primarily on being "saved." Getting saved is something that happens to both nonbelievers living in non-Christian countries and to atheists, but more often it happens to people brought up in the church. Instead of going to the Vatican and buying a souvenir that has been blessed by the Pope, a saved, born again Christian has to be able to point to a specific, often emotional, conversion experience that has occurred at a particular point in time. The day you are saved is the most important day of your life. Once you are saved, you become a completely different person. You have "accepted Jesus Christ" into your heart, as your Personal Lord and Savior, and once you have "Got Jesus," as a bumper sticker currently in circulation puts it, you now have to get as many people saved as you can, because without salvation they are going to hell to suffer the worst torment possible for eternity. There are no 'mortal sins' in Protestantism. There is no semi-saved state. You are either saved or not saved, and it makes no difference if you are Pol Pot or Lenny Bruce - both are currently burning in hell, and only because (we assume) they were not Saved. Being saved is the orgasm, it is the Super Bowl. It is the reason that Evangelical churches tend to be devoid of architectural majesty, mystery and musical sublimity, because what matters is not the way in which any project is carried out. All that matters is that there is a final product, and the most important product is salvation and making sure that as many people as possible get saved before they die or before Jesus returns, whichever comes first. It's why we have Interstates and strip malls, and why we elected George W. Bush President twice. It's the reason why so many Protestant Christians are so sanguine about the idea that the world might end because of global warming, since The World does not matter and was going to be destroyed at some point anyway. It is the ultimate victory of function over form.

John 3:16 is the e=mc2 of evangelical Protestantism. It is the focal point of the Bible, sucking up into itself anything that looks like it might taste good, be beautiful, intriguing, outrageous, or humorous.

This is the Good News.
16For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

17For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

And this is the Bad News:

18He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

19And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

The part that scares me is where it says "he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." I've always read that and thought how sick it is to go on about how much God loves you, when if you don't love him back, he's unfortunately going to have to stick you in hell forever to roast in unbearable torment. What if you just don't have that faith? You can't just fake it.

But, looking at it again--and I am pretty sure I am not reading this in some kind of gay, French, San Francisco-style liberal way-- it says "he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." Maybe that's it. That's the condemnation. NOT believing. And if you think that sounds like heresy, just look at the next verse, which pretty much confirms what I just said, "And this is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."

That's hell. Missing the Love Boat. Maybe that is so wonderful that just to stay your same old, shallow, resentful, bitter self feels like eternal, Old School Hell by contrast. What if the mode of life that so many of us experience as 'normal' is actually what has been Hell all along?

It's funny, but Jesus kind of reminds me a little bit of Socrates....

Feel My Pain!!!!

2009-04-24T13:40:00.001-07:00

I LOVE this song from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, "A Book Report on Peter Rabbit." The Peanuts kids all have to write a school book report on the story of Peter Rabbit, and each one goes about it in a different maladaptive way, completely in character - Charlie Brown has existential angst, Lucy tries to beat the system by just counting all the vegetables in the garden to meet her minimum word count, Linus tries to be deep, and Schroeder goes off on a tangent about Robin Hood. I have done ALL of these things every time I have to write something for school. OH GOD! What was I thinking!!! I hate this. Next time I tell somebody I want to go back to school, could you do me a favor and, maybe not shoot me, but just lock me in a room somewhere until the urge passes?

This little video makes me feel like I have company. I have concluded that it's the loneliness that I can't stand. I want to do anything but sit with my book and try to squeeze out some idea that is going to suck, anyway. And then I will have spent hours and hours that I'll never get back, working on something that is half-assed and lame, and will be embarrassing and humiliating to turn in. I love Charlie Brown's cri de coeur at the end. It's like something out of a Rossini opera, climaxing with his aria of agony, "How do they expect us to write a book report...of any quality....in just two days...?" as the other characters are finishing the ends of their own reports, also in song. I love this particular cartoon version, which has Charlie Brown singing woefully, all the while standing in the kitchen making himself a peanut butter sandwich, which he eats in front of the TV as he sings his big aria at the end. Charlie Brown, I feel your pain.

In the Beginning

2009-04-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

The Gospel of John starts with the statement, "In the beginning was the Word..." John goes on to say, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." John intends to make clear that by "the Word" he means not only the promised Messiah, but also the man, Jesus. But why in particular does he choose to call him the "word"? Why does John not start instead by saying something like, "In the Beginning was the Son. And the Son was with God, and the Son was God"?

This narrative of Jesus' life thus starts off not in a particular place and time, i.e. "Judea, year One, A.D" but instead in a timeless "beginning." This beginning is intentionally disorienting, in the way that stories that begin "Once upon a Time" are intentionaly disorienting, inviting the mind to open to its visionary, poetic language.

For a reader familiar with the Torah, "in the beginning" brings to mind the account in Genesis of the creation of the earth. To the extent that John is writing for those very readers, he undoubtedly intends for them to make that connection to Genesis, and if we go back to John and "the Word," could it not be that John means for us to notice that in Genesis God creates the world through words: "Let there be light." Might then the "light" in Genesis similarly redirect us back to the Light in John, which he describes as "the true light," but who, he says "was in the world" and who "made the world," and yet, "the world knew him not."

When John says that Jesus "made the world" is this necessarily a reference to the "Beginning" of Genesis and the original creation of the universe? I wonder if, looking ahead to Chapter Three where Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be "born again," perhaps John means something other than literal creation when he says Jesus "made the world." The phrase that John uses in Chapter 1 is "panta di'autou egeneto," which means "everthing came to be from him." The verb he uses, "egeneto," is a form of "gignomai," which means "comes to be." This verb is closely related to "gennaw," which means "to beget," and it is a form of this word that Jesus uses when he tells Nicodemus that he must be born again. So, just as Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be born again, is it not possible that when John 1 refers to the Word as having "made the world" he means it in a sense that is closer to "giving birth" to the world rather than "making" it in the sense in which an artisan makes something. The Greek verb that means "to make" in that sense is "poiein," and John does use this verb in this same chapter, but it is in reference to the miracles that Jesus does or "makes." So he creates miracles and he creates the world, but not in the same respect. The world comes forth from him like a child and not like an object that he builds. And he gives birth to the world through the Word. It might be, then that the "creation" in John 1 is a spiritual rebirth of the world like the one Jesus tells Nicodemus he must undergo.

Why, though, in both Genesis and John, does the "word" command so much power? It is true that certain words can have great power, for example, "Will you marry me?" or "He's the culprit" or "Off with your head," and indeed throughout this Gospel words are used to give testimony, betray, deny, and condemn. But those words have no inherent power. They require a second person, a listener, to take some action as the result of having heard them. By contrast, God's words "Let there be light" actually bring the light into the world, by themselves. It is not as if God commands someone to do it for him. But why does Genesis not say simply that "God created light." What is the significance of having God speak light into being? To whom is he speaking?

"...well, I AM insulted"

2008-12-16T11:33:00.000-08:00

The Election Files - help Greg Palast investigate Bush

2008-09-27T21:05:00.001-07:00

Greg Palast is a patriot and a hero. If you think that we have a free press in this country, ask yourself why BBC showed Palast's films about 2000 and 2004 Florida election tampering, and no major media outlet in the U.S. would touch it. He is working on a new film on stolen votes in this year's primaries. He needs to raise about $24,000 right away to release this before election day. Please donate to www.gregpalast.com and then call your Congressmember and tell them to investigate the 2000 vote in Florida and subpoena Katherine Harris and Clayton Roberts. They have no claim of executive privilege since they were supposedly not working for George W. Bush at the time.

Eyes On The Prize: U.S. Civil Rights Movement

2008-03-19T11:50:00.001-07:00

If you are an American and have never heard of Fanny Lou Hamer, Michael Schwerner, Medgar Evers, James Meredith, Emmett Till,or Viola Liuzzo you need to watch this series or read the excellent companion book by Juan Williams.

Birmingham Church Bombing

2008-03-19T10:57:00.001-07:00

Pro-Segregation Riots Draw Federal Troops

2008-03-19T10:55:00.001-07:00

Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'

2008-03-19T08:50:00.001-07:00

Please listen.

Inwood Coffeehouse Part iii: Interview with Steven and Lesley Choy

2007-12-14T08:55:00.001-08:00

This is the final installment of a series on the Inwood Coffeehouse in Wheaton (or Greater Silver Spring if you like), MD which is where I'll be tonight with the Ocean Quartette performing a seasonal concert. Show time is 7:30 p.m. Admission is $5. Location is 10921 Inwood Avenue, Wheaton, MD. See Part I and Part II

This past Spring, I performed at Inwood for the first time, in a duo with cellist Fred Lieder.
The week after the show, I decided to interview organizers Steven and Lesley Choy for my blog. Lesley's mom Annette (pictured) was there for dinner. As my cassette recorder rolled and Lesley began her story, the Choys' two birds, who had been squawking in their cages throughout dinner, suddenly fell silent.

Lesley was born and raised in New York City. She thrived on the city's vibrant culture and energy, and was devastated when her father's job forced the family to move to Maryland.

Lesley: I missed everything. Suburban Maryland was a wasteland. New York was just extremely textured. That was the only way I could describe it to people. They thought I was crazy. I said 'There's no texture here. In New York, there was a texture to everything. Every face had a texture'

Shortly after the move to Maryland, Lesley (pictured) fell into a profound depression. While it had been building for quite awhile, she recalled that there had been a catalyzing trauma:

Lesley: When I was 16 it really got bad. I remember what precipitated it. I was walking through the halls and I saw a poster of this beautiful German shepherd dog. It was an anti-animal cruelty poster, and it said, "This beautiful dog died of a scientist-induced heart attack." I went into the journalism class and sat under the desk. I sat there every day, under the desk, for weeks on end, as classes went in and out. I didn't attend any of my own classes. I was blindsided by depression.

This was during the 1970s, and like many school systems, Montgomery County had begun to explore alternative approaches to education. Lesley's school, John F. Kennedy High School in Wheaton, was an alternative school that encouraged experimentation and individual choice as well as more informal interactions between students and teachers. The close bonds between teachers and students at the school may have saved Lesley's life. Her English teacher had started to worry about Lesley, and one day he showed up at her front door.

Lesley: He came over to the house and told me I was going to fail English. He mandated that I write out all 20,000 compositions that I hadn't written. So that got me out of it, because I didn't want to let him down. I wrote all 20,000 compositions, and he graded all of them, and jokingly pointed out how unfair it was that I could spend fifteen minutes per composition and earn a B when the rest of the class took a whole semester.

Lesley and Annette recalled that when he first came to the door, he hadn't told them the real reason why he was there.

Lesley: He came under the pretense that he was cold and he needed to borrow some socks.

Annette: And we gave him the socks!

Once Lesley had weathered this crisis, she threw herself into acting in productions by the school's extensive theater department, which put on what she described as "gorgeous, full-blown student productions." Among the roles she played were Ophelia in Hamlet and the Duchess of York in Richard III.

Lesley: I love high school drama. We had three teachers doing drama; one who specialized in musical productions, one who did Southern drama, and one who did Shakespeare, Mr. Teunis. The kids had ample opportunity to direct, to perform, write and direct and produce our own productions. My friends and I would do existentialist theater and theater of the absurd. I directed Endgame.

Around this time, Lesley met Steven Choy (pictured-on guitar in group photo), a local musician performing in a pickup band of revolving musicians sometimes appearing under the name The Internationals. Steven, who also grew up in the DC area, had been practicing the guitar at his parents' dry cleaning plant. One of the Choys' customers was a guitar player who happened to be in the Navy. Steven's mom offered to clean his uniforms in exchange for guitar lessons, and Steven eventually became proficient enough to do paying gigs. At the time they met, Lesley had been dating another band member, but as she spent more time with the musicians she developed a friendship with Steven that ultimately led to their marriage, two children, and an ongoing creative partnership.

After she graduated she became one of the first members of the brand new Folger Shakespeare Group and the Shakespeare Theatre.

Lesley: But we weren't doing Shakespeare. The first show was a rock musical called Dionysus Wants You: A New Rock Musical. It was lousy. I've never seen anything so horrendous in my life. It was a horrible show. I was playing Semele, who gives birth to her son onstage. I was playing opposite Ernest Thompson, as Zeus, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for On Golden Pond.

Although she was landing professional acting gigs as a member of this new company, Lesley discovered that she had a problem:

Lesley: I realized that I don't really like actors. Ultimately, what got me out of it was witnessing a homicide. I was on the way to a rehearsal at St. Mark's Church on Capitol Hill, and somebody stole my purse. I thought he was holding mace, but it was actually a gun. A bystander saw what happened and interceded, and got himself killed. This also happened to be my very first day of college studying drama at Catholic University.

The police advised me that it was probably gang-related, and that there were probably witnesses, and that I should probably absent myself. And there was no sympathy from the producer or the director, or my colleagues or anything. The director said that if I didn't show up to rehearsal and attend every performance, he'd have me blacklisted from every theater in Washington. So, I decided at that point that I really don't like these people at all. So I quit. For good.

I stayed at Catholic for three years, and then I realized that they were really catering to the Equity actors and the graduate students. From sheer pushing I began to direct some graduate student productions while I was still an undergraduate. Nobody who was an undergraduate was going anywhere. It was strictly about show biz, so if you were an undergraduate you got to do the grunt work that equity actors weren't allowed to do. But because of my Folger experience, I was considered the cat's meow. It was, 'Oh my God, she's an undergraduate who had been an extra in Julius Caesar.'

After three years, Lesley transferred to the University of Maryland, and landed a major role on the main stage her first day of school. While studying drama, she took teacher certification courses, which would ultimately lead to her work with disabled people in the Montgomery County School System. But inwardly she had already felt a pull in this direction. One of her drama classes had been a course called Creative Dramatics. It was through this class that Lesley came to the understanding that, for some people, the drive to create is actually an urgent need, and that even if a person is severely disabled, that need still needs to be met. Lesley was gradually discovering that she had a gift - and a calling - to help disabled people meet their artistic needs.

Lesley: In Creative Dramatics class, we were given the assignment to create an activity for a population. I devised a method for allowing paralyzed children to create and perform in a theater production. In this hypothetical production, the performers were children who still had enough range of motion to move their eyes. By moving their eyes from one object to another, they could create stories using the progression from one object to another create character, setting and plot. It occurred to me that while people who were completely paralyzed couldn't speak and couldn't walk, they still had ideas and could still create. When you are in an institution, only your basic bodily needs are seen to. Having only those needs acknowledged and addressed adds insult to injury, and if you are an artist and have no way to engage your artistic side, that can be a great loss.

Lesley went on to teach disabled children in the Montgomery County Public Schools for several years, taking a break after becoming a mother. She continued to work with disabled individuals even after leaving the public school system. In 1995 she was commissioned by Washington Very Special Arts to write an opera. Her piece, called Perfection: A Space Opera in One Act, included performers with physical and mental disabilities as well as nondisabled professional musicians.

For Lesley, one of her chief aims is to provide opportunities for disabled artists to share their work with the public and also to collaborate with other artists who are not disabled.

Lesley: One of my themes is to be totally inclusive. So, pretty much, if someone auditions for one of my productions in an amateur capacity, not for a leading role necessarily, but in an amateur capacity, I will have a part for them. Period.

One such inclusive musical production the Choys helped to launch took place in November 2001 at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre in Rockville, MD.

Steven: At the time that we produced the show the whole country was in mourning, and this was their way of expressing themselves to get relief. It was a big show. We spent months rehearsing the show. We did "America the Beautiful," and helped them pick out other songs. The featured act was a zydeco band. Our friend Peter who's a professional singer came in and sang a duet from a Broadway musical with one of the disabled women.

It was this experience that ultimately led to their involvement with Inwood Coffeehouse. Meg Marshall, who was one of the show's organizers, was also an administrator at Inwood House, an apartment complex in Silver Spring for people with disabilities.

Lesley: At the end of that show people were saying that they wanted to do more performances like that in the future. Ultimately Meg (pictured, left, with volunteer) invited me to come work with her at Inwood, and she got together the funds to make the coffeehouse happen on a regular basis. By coming up with the funding, Meg Marshall turned what could have remained a pipe dream into a reality. This was the first time Steven and I had ever had a backer. Before, we were expected to bring in money and finance the show through the proceeds alone. Meg found financing for the coffeehouse; I'm not sure how!

Steven : At first we didn't have any idea how to proceed. The first one was very freeform. It was around Christmastime, so we knew we were doing Christmas music, which made choosing material easy. And we also did some of (locally based singer songwriter) Eileen Joyner's music. Eileen stayed with us, actually, for the whole first season, and then she moved out of the area.

Lesley: Initially there was minimal resident participation; we did a couple of group songs.

Steve: The drummer at the first show was an Inwood resident who has continued to play at the Coffeehouse on a regular basis. Since he started playing at the coffeehouse, he's become a different person. He's been so happy.

Eventually Lesley had the idea to bring in performers from the outside.

Lesley: I don't like isolation. I don't like barriers. There are so many barriers. Even within communities, they set up barriers. There are so many misconceptions about people with any disability. One misconception is that they are monolithic, that everybody's exactly the same, and that all disabilities are the same disability. There's no understanding. The only way to change this is to have dialogue and contact. So, that's why...this was my dream. I've had lots of time to think about it. We bring people together.

We are going for good art, and it is good art. You can achieve it with anyone. People have different levels of accomplishment. You know, they aren't at a professional level, but still, there are different levels of accomplishment that are beautiful and artistically accessible.

LM: This is what really struck me. In the folk world, it's about inclusiveness, but it's a cheap kind of inclusiveness where you can have no talent and have put no effort into this, or have no sense of what an audience might want to hear, but still be allowed to perform on stage. I was contrasting what I experienced at Inwood with all these times I've seen people on stage who aren't disabled, but who seem to have no musical sensibility. At Inwood you can feel the creative struggle going on with your group. You may have someone who can't see or can't walk, but you still make them do the work.

Lesley: Steven and I are really clear that we don't accept second rate, and by first rate, I mean we are glad to work with you provided you work, and that you're committed to art, and you defer to our judgment as artistic directors.

Steven: We've had members drop out because they didn't want to go along with this. They didn't want to put any effort in. They just wanted to show up and do whatever they felt like doing.

Lesley: We're interested in bringing people who otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity to fulfill their artistic needs...to give them that opportunity. But we're not pushovers, and we're musicians. We really abhor shoddy performances.

Steven: They aren't at the same technical level as you.

Lesley: But we expect them to put in as much heart as you would put in, and as much effort as you would put in, and to also, again, be flexible enough to defer to our direction.

LM what kinds of things do you come up against?

Lesley: We fight, especially with people who are writing their own original things. Some of it is just bad. And you have to come up with a way to be gentle and stand back, and offer criticism. Sometimes people storm off and say "I'm never coming back." I pretty much say, "Oh that's unfortunate." They always come back and apologize.

LM: I guess you have to know how much you can demand.

Lesley: Exactly--without going overboard. It's been an ongoing effort for me to explain to one of the performers that he doesn't really know how to play the guitar. We focus on showing him how to hold the guitar and how to move like someone who is playing the electric guitar, but I don't want to foster a delusion or fool him or flatter him since he's actually playing air guitar with the band backing him. That would be really horrible.

We have all our performers pick their own music. With one singer, we talk about what key she wants to sing in, and if necessary Steve transposes it to her key. And then, when it's all set, he comes up with an arrangement. Steve makes her go through it about fifteen times, and he'll focus on problem measures. She has problems with rhythm. But hey, she can sing high G, so I'm not complaining.

Bring Them Home, don't be fooled again

2007-08-30T09:04:00.001-07:00

Tell Congress to stop the war. They are going to be told that they are "not supporting the troops" if they vote against continuing the war. They need your encouragement to do the right thing. Call them now.
http://www.congress.gov

That's what I'm talking about!

2007-07-04T18:46:00.001-07:00

Lovely singer, great song, awesome band. It's Sandra Joyce on vocals, Niall Keegan on flute, and Micheal O'Suillebhain on piano - according to the credits. The song - For Ireland I'd Not Tell Her Name is the air and the last line that's in Irish.

Peggy Noonan

2007-06-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

Who's the goddess of the Right,
Who coined "a thousand points of light?"
Who can make a man out of a buffoon,
And cause a Democrat to swoon?

Peggy Noonan, fair of face!
How can this bleeding heart not race?
I'm not her type, or so it seems
But Bush may drive her to switch teams.

Inwood Coffeehouse

2007-05-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my music partner (cellist Fred Lieder) and I performed at a Wheaton, MD venue called the Inwood Coffeehouse. Fred had performed there before, and he explained to me that it was a residential facility for people with mental and physical disabilities. The format was supposed to be a first half with a professional "feature act," followed by a second half that would be performances by both residents and other members of the community.

I assumed that this second half was either going to be something like an Open Mic or a jam session, and I was hoping to find a way to make a polite exit after my half was done.

Fortunately, that's not what ended up happening. Shortly before the show was to start, Fred had not yet arrived. It's not like Fred to be that late so I phoned him to find out where he was. It turned out that I had given him the wrong date, and he thought we were on the following night. He hurriedly hung up and jumped into his car and sped over to the venue. As 8:00 pm arrived, he was not yet in sight, and I thought, well, this is awkward, but no problem, maybe this open mic or jam thing can go first, and Fred and I can perform second. When I asked Steve Choy, the organizer, if this would be okay, he adamantly refused. We had to go first, and if necessary, I would have to go on alone. I thought, okay, another uptight folkie bureaucrat, but what can you do. When in Rome.....

(Steve Choy, pictured)

To my great relief, Fred arrived just at the stroke of eight, cello in hand, looking charmingly tousled and very handsome in a black suit that he had probably snatched up out of his laundry hamper as he jumped up out of his man chair in front of the tv following my call. Sometimes unforeseen events or emergencies can have a positive effect on a performance, since they throw the musicians off guard and out of their safety zones of tried and true material and interpretations. This proved true for us. The terror I had felt while waiting for Fred was channeled into energy and spontaneity on stage, and maybe because I felt so guilty about the time mixup, I had a sudden injection of humility and a desire to make people happy rather than worrying about mistakes or how many CDs I was selling.

Before the concert, I had asked Steven and Lesley if they had any advice on how to perform for an audience like this, which included people with physical and mental disabilities as well as people from outside who were were not disabled. Lesley was very clear that I was to change nothing about my act, and in particular she did not want me to treat the audience like children. Her purpose in bringing music groups into Inwood was to expose the residents to good art, and that bringing the arts to them was a lot easier than taking them on a trip to the Kennedy Center.

Maybe sensing that I was feeling unsure of myself, Steve helped me immensely by confessing that when he first started performing here, he had felt 'very uncomfortable.' That instantly reassured me, because it made me feel like it was okay to feel uncomfortable myself, that it didn't make me a bad person and so I could stop trying to pretend that I was A-okay.

Following our part of the show, I decided that it would be a good idea not to leave but to stick around as a gesture of respect, since I had screwed up so badly with the time mixup. But while I thought I was showing support for the residents by staying around in the audience, the residents and the Choys gave me much more than that by completely turning inside out my notions of art, beauty, performing, and the reasons why we create. The next show is Friday, June 8, and the feature act is jazz flutist Arch "AT" Thompson.

Next: The Show

Inwood Coffeehouse part ii

2007-05-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Show

The second half of the show was nothing like what I had expected. Rather than an open mic or some kind of free-for all, there was instead a house band composed mostly of outside musicians, who performed sophisticated, fully scored arrangements of songs chosen by the evening's performers at least a month earlier. The instrumentation included Lesley Choy on accordion, Steve on guitar, along with electric guitar, double bass and what Lesley described as "remedial jazz basson."

The arrangements and the instrumentation gave the band an otherworldly, cabaret society-meets-Tom Waits 3:00 o'clock in the morning feel. In addition to songs there were also poetry readings, which were accompanied by music as well.

One performer named Russell (pictured below) read an original poem about a bird while the band played an instrumental version of the English ballad "The Three Ravens," with Lesley on accordion playing the lead.

Elizabeth (pictured, right)who has Down's syndrome sang the Barbra Streisand hit, "Evergreen." When I heard the band break into the opening phrases I was astonished, since the melody is full of hairpin turns, strange intervals and really high notes. But Elizabeth nailed all the intervals with seeming ease, and while she didn't quite make some of the high notes, it didn't really matter because her performance was passionate and quite moving. I felt my world shifting.

Elizabeth's dad (pictured below) also sang. In his rich baritone he delivered a rendition of "The Greatest Love of All" that was rhythmically loose but which had a sort of recitative quality that made me listen to the words for the first time.

I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows. If I fail, if I succeed at least I'll live as I believe. No matter what they take from me They can't take away my dignity. Because the greatest love of all Is happening to me I found the greatest love of all Inside of me.

A born diva, Phyllis several times expressed a desire to take on the popular American Idol contestant Antonella Barba. Phyllis had a commanding stage presence and held everyone spellbound with her rendition of "Sidewalks of New York"

Things have changed since those times,
Some are up in "G,"
Others, they are wand'rers,
But they all feel just like me;
They'd part with all they've got,
Could they but once more walk,
With their best girl and have a twirl
On the Sidewalks of New York.
East side, west side,
All around the town,
The tots sang "Ring-a-Rosie,"
"London Bridge is Falling Down."
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie O'Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic,
On the sidewalks of New York.

I found out after the show that Steven and Lesley volunteer hours each month, meeting four or five times a week with residents to help them with their performances. I was struck by the contrast between this coffeehouse, with its emphasis on rehearsing and artistic quality for people who, because of their disabilities are never going to be perfectly in tune or in rhythm, with some of the really bad art I've experienced at folk clubs and open mics where there is no quality control whatsoever because it's not considered egalitarian or accepting to expect musicians to work on their act before subjecting others to it.

I had a feeling that there was a story behind this, so I decided to interview Lesley and Steven about the coffeehouse, their lives, and their approach to music.

Next: The Interview

Aries Women

2007-04-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

"Aries women are devotees of Nietzschean will power and inexhaustible nervous energy."--Camille Paglia

In a relationship, Aries is very romantic, will defend their loved one to the death, will insist on doing the chasing and can not bear to be chased by anyone, and can be extremely possesive of the lover, but can't understand if the lover is possesive. Aries will usually put their loved one on a pedestal. However, they do expect total faithfulness from their partner and for their lover to respond as if he or she is the first and best lover ever known. The partner of Aries must always keep a little mystery in reserve and must always believe in every new Aries dream. Aries can get bored very easily if there are no challenges left to face and can likely go out looking for another relationship as a challenge to him or herself. Any lover that hurts Aries very deeply will probably be totally frozen out and ignored.

March 21 Rosie O'Donnell
March 25 Anita Bryant, Aretha Franklin
March 26 Nancy Pelosi, Vicky Lawrence
March 27 Sarah Vaughan, Charlotte Joko Beck
March 30 Celine Dion, Melanie Klein
April 1 Grace Lee Whitney, Ali MacGraw
April 2 Camille Paglia, Emmylou Harris, Aine Minogue
April 3 Jane Goodall. Doris Day
April 4 Kitty Kelley
April 5 Bette Davis
April 7 Billie Holiday
April 8 Betty Ford
April 12 Shannen Doherty
April 14 Loretta Lynn, Annie Sullivan
April 15 Bessie Smith, Emma Thompson
April 16 Dusty Springfield
April 20 Mother Angelica

"Regardless of how you appear on the surface, there is a 'warrior woman' deep inside you, and what you really want is a "warrior" who is strong enough or brave enough to be your mate.
You're the kind of woman who secretly wants to say, 'You Tarzan, me Jane.' "

Beneath the Watchful Eyes - New CD by Arthur Loves Plastic

2007-03-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Arthur Loves Plastic's New CD, Beneath the Watchful Eyes, is set for release on Saturday, March 31 at Montgomery College Planetarium in Takoma Park. DJ Bev will be there in person, spinning tracks under the "stars." I've heard it, because, well, I'm singing on it. This has some of her spookiest, most heartbreaking tracks ever. ALP tunes just stay with you....See you at MC.

"Jane, you ignorant slut."

2007-03-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

Recently on Hannity and Colmes they had a guest on to discuss Barack Obama's church, which is, apparently, a "black" church, but not just a church that has a predominantly African American congregation and a "black" style of worship, but it's a church that espouses a sort of positive black power message, and teaches "black" values. Sean asked, "is this racist?" And I thought, wow, what an interesting question. I was also looking forward to finding out more about this church, what constitutes black values, and so on. I felt bitterly disappointed, when, instead of a stimulating debate, all I got was about ten seconds of the guest making his point, and then being interrupted, and then the guest interrupting back. Do they coach people before they go on the show by telling them to talk over each other? If I wanted to give myself agita I'd just walk over to the dog park down the street and toss a pork chop into the fray. This show is junk food.

Do people debate anymore? Do people present opposing views in a civil manner, using evidence and reasoned thought to 'win' an argument? I remembered that Point-Counterpoint bit that they used to have on 60 Minutes where Shana Alexander would take the liberal stance and James Kilpatrick would represent the conservative side. At the time I was a little kid just waiting for The Wonderful World of Disney to come on, so Point-Counterpoint was just one more obstacle the grownups had erected between me and Herbie the Love Bug, but I did pay attention enough to recall that they would debate rather forcefully at times. Saturday Night Life famously parodied it on Weekend Update, when Dan Ackroyd would lean over condescendingly, point his finger at Curtin as if lecturing a child, and preface his remarks with an exasperated, "Jane, you ignorant slut." The joke was, wow, they sound so intense on the real show it almost seems like this is the kind of thing they might be thinking. Wouldn't it be OUTRAGEOUS if people actually SAID that?!

Well, guess what? Now they do say those things, and nothing could be more tedious.

I recently found this clip of former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show. Holtzman was on the House Judiciary Committee that brought articles of impeachment against Nixon, and in her interview with the skeptical and at times combative host, makes a compelling argument for impeaching George W. Bush. Listen to her airtight reasoning and agile ripostes to Lopate's every objection, and then you'll see Hannity, Coulter, Matthews, Conason, Maher, O'Reilly et al. for what they are - school kids trading playground taunts.

She has also written a lucid, easy-to-read and fascinating book called The Impeachment of George W. Bush. Part history lesson, part constitutional seminar, part "how-to" manual. Check it out.

It's coming ....

Scenes we'd like to see: If the Environmental movement hired Frank Luntz as a consultant.

2007-03-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

When Al Gore lectured to the Oscar viewing audience, "This is not a political issue. It's a moral issue," and Melissa pleaded, "None of us is Red or Blue. We're all GREEN," I heard the sound of a million remotes clicking across the fruited plain. What these guys need, I thought to myself, is a consultation with right wing media genius Frank Luntz. Frank's first memo might look something like this:

From the desk of Frank Luntz:

RECOMMENDATIONS:

I. Iconography:

OUT:

A picture paints a thousand words. The American public is not motivated by images that appeal to the "conscience." Nothing says, "hmmm, some of last night's chicken nuggets would be great right about now; think I'll go look in the fridge," like footage of a glacier melting.

Needed: A new icon. Suggestion: Avid sportsman, rugged individualist, Indian fighter and avowed conservationist Teddy Roosevelt.

IN :

II. Terminology

Discontinue the use of depressing terms like "morals" and "responsibility." "Challenge" is good. The word "Stewardship" should replace "Environmentalism," and where appropriate, "Creation" should be used as opposed to "the Earth," "Mother Earth", "Gaia," or anything that sounds like witchcraft.

"Green" is another turnoff. It's a weak, neutral color, and is too closely associated with a certain effeminate singing frog. It's widely known that "It isn't easy being green" is code for "It isn't easy being gay."

And by all means avoid the term "Global Warming." If absolutely necessary, use "Climate Change"TM

III. It's the Narrative, Stupid!

Rough Outline for PSA:

Music: fife and drums "Over two hundred years ago, our forefathers shook off the yoke of domination from overseas."

Today, we are fighting a new American Revolution. We are engaged in a battle for Independence from...... (music: fife and drums fade into horror film score)

Foreign Oil

America can no longer afford to be dependent on her enemies for her source of power.

During the Cold War, we struggled against the Soviet campaign for world domination, and we won. Now we are engaged in a quest for Energy Security, and we will win this battle as well.

(Now for the climax . Your proposal to use the Space Race to introduce the idea of the War for Energy Security TM. , is on the right track, but Kennedy didn't get us to the moon - the RUSSIANS did.)

Right now, Japanese automakers are researching ways to phase out petroleum based cars altogether. They are developing faster, more powerful clean-running vehicles and intend to invade U.S. markets with them in the near future. Our forward-thinking rivals know that renewable energy is not only good science but good business. Will we be ready?

(Cut to tractor shot. Music: Western. The Big Country theme would be great, but expensive. I know this guy out in L.A.--what's his name? Monticello? Moscatiello? who can score something that sounds just like the original without violating any copyright laws!)

Today, we have joined the battle, from the high tech laboratories of our nation's research centers to America's heartland, where farmers are harvesting grains to produce biofuels such as ethanol.

You can be a part of the quest, too. By supporting funding for Energy Security research, and by purchasing Eternal RenewalTM products for your home and business.

Reclaim your birthright to dominion over this great Creation. Reach for the Stars.

Help us get there.

Before they do.

Tribute to Loretta Lynn

2007-03-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

On April 21 I will be performing (with my band the Space Dots) in a Tribute to Loretta Lynn at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD . I'll be sharing the night with Ruthie and the Wranglers.

I have been trying to write my own Tribute to Loretta Lynn here, but all I came up with was a bunch of pretentious crap. I'll just say this - a couple of years ago I had the blues big time for several months. About 90 percent of my CD collection was off limits. I discovered a "Loretta Lynn Greatest Hits" CD that I had bought years earlier, when I didn't really know her music and had probably been expecting her to sound like her friend and mentor Patsy Cline. Since she didn't, I had just shelved it. But now I needed something new, since my playlist at that time was some combination of Puccini, Lucinda Williams and Janis Joplin and assorted Irish music, and all of that was just TOXIC!! So I grabbed Loretta and took off on my road trip. I don't know what I missed the first time around, but this time her forthright, heartfelt singing and her effortless sounding lyrics and music just wrapped around my heart and put a smile on my face every time I played them....and played them....and played them.

I found some wonderful YouTube clips of some of her performances from the 1960s and 1970s tv variety shows. Go listen to them. My favorites so far are "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Blue Kentucky Girl" and "How Great Thou Art," which moved me to tears when I first heard her do it.

I'd like to thank the Academy

2007-03-03T13:36:00.000-08:00

I went through a phase during my early 20s in which I was tormented by fears about death and violence, and violent crime in particular. During that time, I happened to watch the very first Prime Suspect series, in which Helen Mirren played a flinty Scotland Yard detective trying to nab a serial killer. Her character, Jane Tennison, was unafraid to go into slums and examine decomposing corpses and set foot on crime scenes where acts of unspeakable horror and degradation had been committed against women. The climax of the investigation was a one-on-one confrontation with her suspect in a bare interview room, as she met his eyes and wore him down with her interrogation until he confessed to the crime. Something about this portrayal of a woman just doing her job and being able to look with the cold eyes of compassion at human suffering and evil against this backdrop of London's crushing grayness gave me great hope and strength. I felt like I had found the perfect hero for our time. Mirren's portrayal of that character helped me form my young adult stance toward life. I was on my own search for meaning, and I saw that in order to "make sense" of life, you actually have to make it, by just getting up in the morning and walking through the shit of your life without shrinking from any of it.

I was so impressed by this that I wrote Mirren a very detailed and heartfelt fan letter, and stuffed a copy of the New St. George's British folk-rock CD High Tea into the envelope along with it. A few weeks later, I got - not a restraining order - but a gracious note from Mirren thanking me for my note and for my band's CD, which she said she was "enjoying a great deal!" Helen Mirren listened to "The Steggie" and "All the Tea in India"!

So, naturally, I would not have missed this year's Oscars for the world. I was not at all surprised when Mirren won the Best Actress award for The Queen, which, in a totally different way, portrayed another kind of hero for our time. But what I was surprised by was how moved I was by the entire Oscar presentation this year. In watching this year's Oscars I felt a sense of realism and optimism, as if Hollywood suddenly knew its place and was ready to both serve and lead, like Mirren's character in The Queen.

Host Ellen Degeneres set the perfect tone for the show. In her jester persona, part Charlie Chaplin physical humor and part Harpo Marx mischief, she disarmed the nominees and the rest of the audience by voicing what everyone was thinking (to paraphrase): "this is a night that will make or break your careers. There must be a billion people watching. I hope you're not too nervous" with the inside joke being that she, too, as host, would be on the line as much as if not more than the nominees. With her wide-eyed schtick, she cut through the layers of icy defenses that anyone in show business finds themselves encased in after a few years, portraying a naive bumbler who makes every faux-pas in the book. Kneeling beside Martin Scorsese in his aisle seat, she makes fawning chitchat with him for a few minutes and then, as if the thought had just occurred to her, slips him a script she just happened to be carrying along with her. Later, she hands her digital camera to Spielberg and asks for a photo of her and Clint Eastwood for her MySpace Page, and then at one point gets "caught" on camera making snide remarks about Oscar absentee Judi Dench to a crew member ("She's home having 'knee surgery' Yeah, right. More like eye surgery.") As the night progressed and the camera panned the crowd, it was evident that they had succumbed to her charms and were laughing unguardedly at themselves and having a wonderful time. To the rest of us at home, she seemed to be saying, "It's just a show. It's just entertainment. After this is over the auditorium will be vacuumed and we're all going to get back to our job, which we're doing for you, the public."

As in many other years, the 2007 Oscars had its share of politics, but not in the form of an Oliver Stone conspiracy blockbuster or an actor's grandstanding acceptance speech. West Bank Story, a musical romantic comedy about Jews and Palestinians, ("I just met a girl named Fatima...") won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short film. On the film's web site, the film maker Ari Sandel states his modest-sounding goals for the movie:

I wanted to accomplish three things with the movie:
1. I wanted to make a film that would get attention and also make people laugh.
2. I wanted to make a movie that was pro-peace and offered a message of hope.
3. I wanted to address the situation in an even-handed and balanced way so that Jewish and Arab audiences would feel fairly represented enough to let their guard down and laugh WITH the characters from the "other side". I thought, if we can make a movie that Israelis will watch and like the Arab characters and that Arabs will watch and like the Israeli characters then that will be something valuable.

Entertaining people and bringing them together through laughter? It sounds so corny and simple, but how many people would have had the courage and generosity of heart to pull this off? In his acceptance speech he said that so many people urged him not to do the film that he "shelved it" for five months before resuming work on his short film.I wonder how many people in Hollywood warned David Guggenheim not to take on another lost cause by making a documentary on the un-radical, anti-chic Al Gore and his Power Point presentation on Global Warming?

It may have come as a surprise to some that the man who composed the groovy theme music for tough guy Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a little old Italian grandpa in coke bottle glasses. Probably the only winner whose acceptance speech the band dared not interrupt with its unsubtle sendoff music, Ennio Morricone started off in English and then switched to his native Italian, with Renaissance mensch Eastwood gamely translating by his side. In a trembling voice, he expressed gratitude for his honorary lifetime achievement award and acknowledged all the great artists who had never won an award. He also thanked Maria, his wife of 51 years. Ironically, Maria really stood out in a crowd of people trying to stand out in a crowd, with her naturally aged face in the midst of all those androids with their regulation long necks, pert noses, wide smiles and plunging cleavage.

In her rendition of "I Knew I Loved You," one of Morricone's film themes recently set to lyrics, Celine Dion delivered the best musical moment of the evening. Unlike Melissa Etheridge, who seemed overly anxious to sell her song (which won a much-deserved Oscar), or the dueling divas in the Dreamgirls screamathon, Dion was poised and relaxed as she gave a restrained and reverent performance. Dion can afford to be relaxed. She isn't really even a star anymore. She has actually moved on to the Supernova stage. After the show she and manager-husband Rene Angelil returned to the heavens where they each rule their own planet.

I have not yet seen The Departed or the Last King of Scotland, so the climax of the evening for me was Mirren's award for The Queen. I did see that film, and found it to be profoundly moving and stealthily political. In its portrayal of a struggle between Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II over the crown's public response to the death of Princess Diana, The Queen was a testament to statesmanship at its best. In the film's pivotal moment, the beleaguered Elizabeth, who has been insisting that the funeral is a private matter, and who will be damned if she's going to pay homage to a trollop who's splashed her family's business over the tabloids, gets stuck while driving alone in the hills at Balmoral during a hunting expedition. She encounters the very animal that is being hunted, a fourteen point stag, and the two lock eyes. As she murmurs, "You're magnificent," and is moved to tears by the sight, she suddenly gets it. The stag represents something rare and majestic - the monarchy, tradition, the sacred trust between the Queen and her people. It could be many things, but whatever it is, she realizes that it is bigger than she is. After that, she decides to visit the shrines and bouquets laid out in front of the palace. I cried watching Mirren as the Queen, slowly walking along the gate, handbag in arm, reading handmade placards accusing her and her family of being heartless murderers, while stunned members of the crowd helplessly and reflexively curtseyed before her.

To me it seemed obvious that Stephen Frears was trying to tell our leaders to wake up and realize: it's not about you. Unless you stop fighting personal vendettas from forty years ago and working out family dramas on the world's stage, there will be no more world. That call to duty was the theme I heard in this year's Academy Awards. Hollywood is not the center of the universe, but it plays a vital role in keeping the rest of us going, by inspiring, making us think and feel, making us laugh and believe and want to get up in the morning. And each of us has our own role to play as we walk through the shit of our lives, struggling in each moment to do the next right thing.

Now, let's all have a nice cup of tea and get back to work.

Camille Paglia

2007-03-03T07:34:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a lecture and discussion by the colorful and controversial public intellectual Camille Paglia at St. John's College in Annapolis (where I'll be going next fall to pursue a Master's Degree in Liberal Arts.) I was completely blissed out - freshly dosed with my ADD meds and buzzing on a can of diet Red Bull, I was spellbound by her two-hour slide presentation on Egyptian and Greek architecture and sculpture and the ways in which the arts expressed the changing political climates in those societies. She made a chilling point when, flashing slides of post-Athens, Hellenistic and Roman statues depicting lurid scenes of violence and sexuality, she commented that this type of art often appears when democracy is in decline. She sees the exploding body parts in today's video games and the oddly-proportioned, Photoshopped images of "perfect" faces and bodies on the covers of fashion magazines as indications of disturbing undercurrents in our own society. Democratic societies tend to produce realistic images of ordinary mortals and celebrate the wonder of the human form and human achievements. They create buildings that invite people to approach them and make use of them. By contrast, the huge, forbidding images of fabulous gods, goddesses and dictators that autocracies pump out as an intimidating form of PR remind her of the artificially elongated, hard and unapproachable looking women seen everywhere in today's media. And, according to Paglia, when a society seems to crave sensational images of eroticized violence and sexual acts, that is also a sign of chaotic tendencies. She darkly suggested more than once that we take our form of government for granted and that after one or two more terror attacks our American Democracy could well go the way of the Roman Republic.

Afterwards, a smaller group accompanied her to the "conversation room," where she took questions from a combined audience of St. John's students and members of the community. I was supposed to wake up at 5:30 am the next morning to drive to Central PA by 11:am, and I suggested to my partner Anita that we just stay for "one question." But we Could Not Leave Our Seats. It was a dizzying back-and-forth about everything from Egyptian art to the Rolling Stones to Meredith Baxter Birney's brilliant portrayal of scorned wife-turned-murderess Betty Broderick in a 1992 television docudrama. Since Paglia mentioned talk radio and how boring most left wing hosts are, I jumped on the opportunity to throw in a word for Stephanie Miller, which immediately got her attention. "Oh yes, I know her! She's from Boston, isn't she?" In true CP form, she would not take my word for it that she was wrong and I was right and that Stephanie was in fact from L.A.! She also didn't seem to realize that it's a nationally syndicated show. But she thanked me for reminding her about it and said she was going to find out more.

The four-hour event flew by. Afterwards, Anita confessed "Okay, I'm a convert." Finally! I am really going to have to get my Paglia talking points together. So often, when I mention her name to people I can practically hear the horses whinnying like they do at the mention of the pointy-breasted Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein. I am going to have to do a bit more thinking on this, but until I get my own Power Point presentation up and running, I'm going to recommend checking out this clip of a lecture and Q&A that she gave at Colorado College that was broadcast recently on C-SPAN.org

Arthur Loves the Caveman

2007-02-21T17:35:00.000-08:00

Bev and I made it onto the GEICO ad campaign featuring the cranky Caveman. You can invade the caveman's privacy by clicking on various parts of his apartment. Don't forget to look at what's playing on his iPod.

I'm turning Japanese I really think so

2007-02-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

Apologies for not writing in this blog for almost a month and leaving the Happy Hooker to babysit. There is an explanation, though. I've had a life-changing experience!!

A few months ago I wrote in here about taking meds for depression, and mentioned that they've made me gain weight. Well, I saw a shrink to see about changing to a different drug, and after she did a differential diagnosis she said that she didn't think I had depression, just dysthymia (the farm team for depression), but that I was off the charts for ADD. I already knew this, actually, as did anyone in any band I've ever been in, but I've never sought treatment. So, always up for a mind altering experience, I decided to give it a go.

The drug she put me on is called Adderall (get it, ADDerall). It's an amphetamine. I took it and could feel the effects within about twenty minutes. I was at work, about to get started on a project. I told my boss that I was just going to take fifteen minutes to straighten my desk first and.....about six hours later I was still working on it. I suddenly saw what was wrong with my desk and filing system and could envision the perfect way to rearrange it. Unfortunately, I also became obssessed with having everything on the desk be exactly parallel to the edge. I ended up staying at work until 10:00PM, finishing my desk and working on my original project. After I went home I did the same thing all weekend, rearranging the contents of cabinets, labeling containers, discovering the efficacy of tools I never thought to use before, like paper clips, funnels, flashlights and footstools. I actually went a little overboard - to OCD (which is what made me wonder about the inspiration for that 1980s song by the Vapors). But my obssessive ideas were actually good ones - ones that ended up saving me time in the long run, and that I wish I had implemented long ago (and my desk and kitchen and home office are still organized a month later.) I learned later that during the first few days there's a "honeymoon phase" where you are euphoric and seemingly superhuman and that, if pushed too far by taking too much, will tip over into paranoia and psychosis. Cool!

I'm normally a person who does everything all at once - like, taking off my pants, shoes and underwear all at the same time, sending change flying everywhere. Or, I'll wake up in the middle of the night with cold feet and start rummaging around in my sock drawer without thinking to turn on the light first. How a drug could bestow upon me what most people call "common sense,' I'm not quite sure. But I have learned a few things about ADD that might explain why I tend to work this way. First, ADD is sort of a misnomer. It's not so much an inability to sustain attention as it is an impairment of the part of the brain (located in the prefrontal cortex) that controls what neuroscientists call the "executive functions" - prioritizing, determining salience, delaying action until a more opportune time, etc. This is why people like me get paralyzed - our little brains are unable to tell us whether to focus on getting our bills paid or our dishes done or calling our best friend to make sure some offhand comment we made hasn't offended her. We can't tune out a barking dog or a ticking clock or some idiot snapping gum on the Metro while we're trying to read. The drugs don't so much turn a perforated line of attention into a continuous one - rather, they show you the big, three-dimensional picture, helping you to foreground the important things and keep them there. Otherwise, everything is an immediate brushfire that needs to be put out RIGHT NOW, which causes a great deal of anxiety, frustration and discouragement. The drugs also stimulate the "rewards" part of your brain by increasing the access it has to dopamine, which is one of the chemicals that gets activated when you're in love or doing something that you know is going to bring some great benefit later. So that's another way the drug helps to keep you focused, by chemically inducing a feeling of assurance that whatever you're doing is going to 'pay off.'

The effect of the drug only lasts about four to six hours, so after it wears off you can either take more, or just go back to 'normal' if you want. When mine starts to wear off it's as if I can feel my coach gradually turning back into a pumpkin. I hope there won't be any neurological hell to pay for this down the line, but for now I am enjoying it. I feel like I have my brain back. Now that I've started taking these meds I appreciate what a disability ADD is, and how much time I have wasted for the last twenty years since this 'trait' first became a real problem (like me, a lot of adults with undiagnosed ADD get into trouble in college). This is why I could never read more than four pages in an hour, and why I forget lyrics to songs and can't remember to bring extra strings and batteries to gigs. It explains why I have to write on a piece of paper every little thing I'm doing as I try to clean my house, since ADD also affects the part of your brain that handles "working memory" - the capacity to keep a thought 'on line' in your brain concerning the past in order to help you accomplish something in the present. Apparently, I and others like me have a hard time doing something while simultaneously being able to remember the thought we had just a few minutes ago that set the activity into motion in the first place (Example-I have actually had to write a note to myself as I'm carrying a plate to the sink to remind myself why I went into the kitchen. To read about this in more detail, I recommend Russell Barkley's book ADHD and the Nature of Self Control)

So, the reason I haven't been posting on the blog lately, is that I've been playing with a new toy - my brain. I've been enjoying the fact that this medication has allowed me to focus on boring tasks like finishing my income taxes and actually doing my assignments at work without having to take 'escape breaks' all over the internet every five minutes. And blogging is one of my favorite escapes. But, gradually, I'm starting to take the 'new me' in stride and don't feel compelled to spend every medicated minute I have doing things I normally can't do.

Actually, will you look at the time? I have now been shirking for quite awhile.
Before I get back to work I will leave you with this thought, which I can now affirm along with former Vice President Dan Quayle:

"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."

Website of the week-Xaviera Hollander

2007-01-10T16:38:00.000-08:00

Ring a bell? Were you born in 1970 or earlier? Are you sort of a trashy reader?Still can't put your finger on it, so to speak? Click here for the answer. This is a really fun site. I especially like the music jokes under the Personal section.

Oscar 1994-2007

2007-01-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

Oscar passed away peacefully at home at about 7:45 am on Saturday. He didn't have to be euthanized or anything. It was about as un-traumatic a death as we could have hoped for. He was just one month shy of his thirteenth birthday. I'm doing okay with it, although I felt really sad and tired all day Saturday. My partner Anita is having a much harder time of it than I am. Since she moved down from Boston she put in a lot of time with him and was particularly good at knowing what he was trying to tell us. He really mellowed a great deal under her care, and I feel very grateful that she was in his life for the past few years.

We took him to this pet cremation place in Rockville called Heavenly Days - it was like something out of a David Lynch movie, but in a quirky, cute way with a nice little old lady handling all the arrangements. He'll be cremated by this guy named Greg and sent home in a tasteful wooden box.

He had had a rough time in the past few months with what appeared to be a nasal tumor, but then had rallied right before Christmas. He had a good last few weeks. Over the holidays there were lots of people around and lots of excitement, and he met another dog friend at Anita's mom's on Christmas weekend. He was doing great until right before he died. He was only really in decline for about two days. We were all home at the time. Dr. Pat Kriemelmeyer ("Dr. K") at Takoma Park Animal Clinic offered us a lot of good guidance on how to handle his decline and passing.

He was a good dog - goofy, energetic, intuitive, great at catching frisbees - not so great at returning them. When my cousin David was briefly living with me he thought his name was Oxford, and since we all suspected he was no Rhodes Scholar, "Oxford" became his ironically affectionate nickname. He was happiest when all of his housemates - Fred, Lisa and Anita, were home, sitting in the living room with him contentedly curled up on the floor. He loved to swim and run and gave us many many years of love and laughter. He was known and loved by many in the neighborhood! We all will miss him.

Singer jokes

2007-01-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

I love love love singer jokes!! Like, you know, Q: How can you tell when a singer is at the door? A: She can't find her key and she doesn't know when to come in.
Or this one:
Q: How many chick singers does it take to sing a Patsy Cline song?
A: All of them, apparently.

I got many of my favorites from my bass playing buddy Rico Petruccelli, but this has got to be my favorite - a "living" singer joke (also courtesy of Rico).

Enjoy, and send more! Post here. Luv it

New Year's Resolutions

2007-01-03T13:18:00.000-08:00

Ok, here are mine:
Quit cussing, dammit
Practice Italian every day

Here are some additional ones I've come up with for myself and all my musician friends.

Some things never to utter on stage again, ever:

"...and now for something completely different."

"This is a family show"

"We tune because we care"

"Is everybody having fun tonight?"
and the corollary:
"I can't HEAR YOU!"

"I'm going to kill myself"

Please add your own!!!!!!!!

Hello, Cleveland!

2007-01-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

So, is it just me, or is anyone else wondering why the Department of Homeland Security gave the Associated Press a copy of a draft report naming the six U.S. cities least prepared for a natural or "man-made" disaster??? For once I'm glad I live in DC!

Overheard on the Hill

2006-12-27T10:23:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I was walking around the Hill yesterday and I heard this guy several paces behind me having a cell phone conversation. It went something like:
"How was your Christmas?....Oh, mine was ok, but....it was kind of awkward. It was the first time I've seen my mother since I admitted to having sexual desire for her."

Alllllllrighty then. Do not turn around, do NOT turn around.

Magic Holiday Playlist

2006-12-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

This is a special holiday party playlist that I made. It's about three hours long, and is designed to match the pacing of a typical party - starting quietly, building up, and then coming to a denouement. It took me about twelve hours of solid work to--in the lingo of Congress and Starbucks--craft this playlist. I'm very happy with this mix - it has something for everyone, and includes Loretta Lynn, Leonard Bernstein, the Klezmatics, Bollywood, Brandi Carlile, Julie Andrews, and the incomparable Richard Cheese. Check it out - it works! Try it at your holiday party. You'll have to come out of your bedroom at 3am in your pajamas and put on Kate Smith's "God Bless America" to get people to leave your house.

(It does require the download of a free player. I've tried it on both Mac and PC, and it should be pretty easy on either one. Email me if you have problems)

My Rhapsody Playlist

Christmas - Part One

2006-12-18T07:14:00.000-08:00

Christmas reminds me that at one point in my life I was a real Christian, and that on a cellular level I probably still am one. I'm fairly certain, for example, that next time someone close to me dies, I am probably going to reach for "Amazing Grace" first and the Heart Sutra later.

I read in a book somewhere that everyone has their own personal Jesus. My Jesus was the guy in the Gospel of Matthew who preached the Sermon on the Mount. He was based on the character Ted Neely (pictured) played in Jesus Christ Superstar. Passionate, charismatic, uncompromising yet conflicted, and totally unmaterialistic.

The way it happened for me was, at a certain point I started take to heart all the stuff I was taught in Sunday School at my Presbyterian church. I was about twelve, and for the first time I experienced how much easier my life was when I didn't do everything out of my immediate selfish desires. That whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" thing made perfect sense to me. I read the Bible at night in bed with a candle. I almost didn't want anyone to know. Faith was easy for me, because right away I found that trying to do what Jesus taught made me feel lighter and happier.

Unfortunately I didn't read the fine print before I got on board. I didn't realize that my church was more interested in the death of Jesus than the life of Jesus, and that it taught that if you DON'T believe that Jesus died for your sins you are going to go to hell. I also discovered that, after graduating from sixth grade Sunday school, I would hear more and more what St. Paul had to say and less about what Jesus taught.

I quickly jumped into the deep end of the pool and tried to adopt those beliefs. I started hanging out with people who believed the earth was 6,000 years old, and I listened to this radio station on the far right end of the radio dial that featured a psycho-Calvinist named Brother Harold Camping who scared the living crap out of me. For one thing, he had the entire Bible memorized. A caller would ask a question about Nehemiah 2:14 or something, and he knew exactly what it was, word for word. He also taught that God picks the people who are going to believe and be saved, and that he also chooses to make other people choose not to believe and therefore go to hell (this is in the Bible, by the way. See Romans 9), and because he knew the entire Bible by heart, I figured he must be right.

After awhile my faith became untenable. I couldn't believe that my Jewish friends were all going to hell. Plus, Brother Camping and that whole predestination thing really flipped me out. Eventually I lost my faith, which threw me into a massive depression. The irony of losing my faith was that I didn't believe in Christianity anymore, but I still worried that I was going to hell. At the same time I also started to notice that I was starting to have crushes on girls, which I knew would also get you damned, so I just took it as proof that I wasn't one of the elect and that I was done for (to be continued).

Next: The Schism (below)

Christmas - Part Two: Schism in the Episcopal Church

2006-12-18T04:01:00.000-08:00

Pictured: The Rev. John Yates, Rector, The Falls Church (Falls Church, VA)

One of the first people I came out to was a friend from church who was a mentor and surrogate mom figure. She was interested and not judgmental, but she clearly liked being straight and being a mother and wanted me to feel the same way. I don't think she ever actually accepted my gayness, because she would thereafter check in with me periodically by asking "are you dating any MEN?" Ultimately, she left the Presbyterian Church and joined an Episcopal Church called The Falls Church, which she explained was "more conservative" than other Episcopal Churches and "didn't believe in ordaining homosexuals." I never knew how to respond to these comments, which were painfully reminiscent of my own mother's discomfort with me, and in my own conflict and paralysis I let the friendship drift.

These memories all came back to me yesterday when I read that two Episcopal churches in Northern Virginia, one of which was my friend's church, had broken off from the denomination because of its official policy of allowing gay men and women to be ordained to the priesthood. In the article I read, it said that the Nigerian bishop who heads the branch of the Anglican Communion these two chruches are joining believes that growing acceptance of gay relationships within the church indicates the existence of a "satanic attack" on the denomination.

If this had happened when I was a teenager, struggling with faith and sexuality, it would have driven me deeper into the hole I was already in. I already believed that I was under a Satanic attack - I even believed crazy things, like the death of Pope John Paul I one day after assuming the papacy was somehow tied to my wickedness. In the end, my decision to leave the church saved my life. But certain events, like the return of the Christmas season every year, make me feel grief at this loss of a vital part of my identity. While I have a new faith home as a Zen Buddhist practitioner, the sights and sounds of the Buddhist liturgy and the Buddha himself remain emotionally one step removed from me. While the teachings of my Zen teacher pose no threat to my sense of reason and have tremendously changed my life in much the same way as my initial Christian conversion, when I hear the a beautiful hymn like "O Holy Night", I feel a sense of loss.

A few years ago I saw a film that perfectly articulated my conflicts. It's called Priest, and it's the story of a Roman Catholic priest serving a lower-income parish in England. This is a story of humain frailty, redemption, and community that makes me cry for two days me every time I see it. I plan to write a review of this film as part of this series on Christmas and Christianity.

Next month: Priest

Heaven on the Hill

2006-12-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

Since about ninety percent of all folk gigs take place in the northeast, one of the first things I discovered on the road is that a "diner" up north is an entirely different animal from the archetypal southern version you see on TV (the kind where Flo told people to kiss her grits on Alice in the '70s.) Starting at around Exit 7 of the New Jersey Turnpike and extending through somewhere near Poughkeepsie, NY, there exist these eccentric north-of-the border food amusement parks, boxy stonefront eateries where the waiters wear black vests and bow ties and you can go in and get a feta cheese omelette with an order of rice pudding and a shot of Jack Daniels at two o'clock in the morning. (see Mastori's in Bordentown, NJ).

Today, I stumbled upon little a piece of bridge-and-tunnel food heaven in my own neighborhood below the Mason-Dixon line. I work on "the" Hill (the one in DC, not Seattle) and just ducked out to do some errands along Pennsylvania Avenue when I happened upon this delightful, unpretentious restaurant called Sizzlin' Express, in the 600 Block. It's a Korean-owned wonderland of food. At this take out/eat-in establishment you can get sushi, generous helpings of baked goods, breakfast, lunch and dinner. There's a sparkling self-serve coffee area with an arsenal of spigots dispensing several flavors of coffee, a salad and cold food bar that includes at least fifty different dishes, including calamari, sesame and spinach salad, and some sort of pudding with vanilla wafers on top, in addition to the usual salad bar items. There's a festive display with a complete line of all the latest power bars, gum, candy and tin boxes of obscure little foreign made pastille type hard sweets. There's also a full-service bar with a real bartender, mirror and colorful holiday decorations. The guy behind the checkout counter was friendly and helpful, and when I was there at 11am there was a table full of well-fed DC cops happily chowing down on a hot breakfast. As I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue on this crisp December morning, with a view of the Capitol dome and my hot coffee and $5.85 Sizzlin' Express fish salad, I felt positively patriotic!

Rant: Madeleine Peyroux

2006-12-06T07:18:00.000-08:00

Many people whose musical taste I respect a great deal enjoy this artist, but I just don't get it. I think there is a legitimate place in the world for tribute artists, and that is what Madeleine Peyroux is, phrase for phrase. She's actually remarkable - I get fooled every time! MP fans, go check out the original, starting with Songs for Distingue Lovers.

Mi Piace Laura Pausini

2006-11-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

Remember those commercials back in the '70s that proclaimed, "The rest of the world loves Julio Iglesias!" and you were like, WTF? Well, you're probably still saying that, but I am here to nominate the next "rest of the world" candidate: Laura Pausini . She's a 28 year-old pop star from Italy who records mostly in Italian and Spanish, but also a little in English. I just stumbled upon her music today, and now I can't stop. If it were in English I might be too embarrassed to admit this guilty pleasure, but since it's furren it seems more legitimate. I just listened to her Live in Paris album, and got this incredible power pop sugar rush. Check it out!

The most addictive track for me is "Vivimi". What does that mean, anyway, "Vivimi"? Give me life? It's a wonderful over the top Prom Ballad. Luv it!

Viva Laura!

Possible Side Effects

2006-11-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

I was riding the subway, reading Augusten Burrough's new book of short pieces, called Possible Side Effects, when his description of a trip to England made me laugh out loud, repeatedly, until long after I got off the train, unexpectedly ran into my therapist on the street, and sat through a movie about pedophilia and self-mutilation. I was chuckling to myself the whole time.

All his books are funny, honest, and moving. They deal with dysfunctional families, gay life, personal ads, filthy apartments, pets, being a drunk, recovery, and much more. Some of his most hilarious pieces concern his stint as an advertising writer and the absurdities of that industry. I have enjoyed all of his books, but I think Possible Side Effects registered the highest on the laugh Richter scale.

Right then on the telly, live open-heart surgery. Again, why? Why don't we have this? We have similar shows on various cable stations. But they're heavily packaged. With graphics and music and a plotline, edited together to create tension and suspense. But this is relaxed surgery. It's live and it's real and a little boring. But the payoff: the person might die. They never die on U.S. television. But here in the United Kingdom, they just might. And I will be right here, watching.

Oh, Augusten, how I love you! I've read ALL of your books now - Sellevision:A Novel; Dry: A Memoir; Magical Thinking, and of course Running with Scissors, although at the time I was using it more as a prop when the person I was desperately in love with was blowing me off and I had to look like I was absorbed in something else. But I got the jist, and I plan to see the movie, and even then, you were there for me, man! It's Thanksgiving, and I'm thankful for you!

Your Personal Day of Death

2006-11-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Have you ever seen paintings of medieval scholars, bent over their books with candles dripping wax, and a skull sitting in the window? That was a tradition to remind them of where we all end up, to keep them humble, and to spur them to be productive and not waste time.

A few years ago I stumbled upon this great web site that had a similar effect on me. It's called Deathclock.com It allows you to enter in certain coordinates - your age, your body mass index (it gives you a calculating tool for that), whether or not you smoke, and something about your frame of mind. Your can choose from Optimistic, Nomal, Pessimistic, and Sadistic. Using these factors, the site calculates your "Personal Day of Death."

When I calculated my personal day of death, I was told that I only had about 15 years left! I tried changing around the different variables, making myself twenty pounds thinner, or saying I was a smoker. The only thing that changed my outcome significantly for the better was lying and saying that I was an "Optimist" instead of a Pessimist. This added years to my life!!

So I did a little math: If I'm depressed, I only have fifteen years to live. And if I only have fifteen years left, I sure don't want to be depressed the whole time! I decided to go on antidepressants. They worked! (They seem to have made me gain weight, but as I learned from Deathclock, this won't make that much difference in my longevity.)

Although it's probably not completely "scientific," I found this a very useful exercise. Go ahead and give it a spin.

Donna Long: Handprints

2006-11-13T15:04:00.000-08:00

True confession - I don't like Irish piano. It's almost always either this really clunky, corny, boom-chuck Ceili style with zero subtlety, or it's overly ornate and new age, recorded in an echo chamber with fake strings. About two weeks ago, I played a concert at the Cellar Stage in Baltimore with a group of locally-based musicians on the trad. Irish scene. For some reason I had never before played with pianist Donna Long, who has been in the area for about twenty years and who performed for several years on the national circuit with Cherish the Ladies. After hearing Donna, I am going to have to revisit my position on Irish music + piano.

I knew Donna was really tasteful at backing tunes, but I'd only really ever heard her in sessions and had never heard her solo. For her solo spot in this concert, she chose one of my favorites, an O'Carolan tune called "Bridget Cruise", which I knew from the late Derek Bell's solo harp album. It's a stately, elegiac piece that is so perfectly composed that it almost plays itself. Donna's interpretation was innovative but respectful, with subtle jazz inflections and impressionistic touches. I knew from that one tune that I would love her CD, Handprints, and I got one that night. I have since listened to it dozens of times.

She is a virtuouso. She obviously has had "legit" training - she plays with a sure touch, sensitivity and clarity that belies years of scales, Hanon, and other forms of torture, no doubt. It's tricky, playing this music and interpreting it in a way that is individual yet within the tradition. In some musicians the urge to innovate leads to experimentation that is forced and downright silly . Donna's approach reminds me instead of one of my favorite Irish musicians - Chicago fiddler Liz Carroll. Both musicians have a way of breaking down a tune and polishing it until every melodic and harmonic possibility that was already there is made to shine, rather than superimposing arbitrary flourishes for the purpose of showing off. I was just thinking that Liz and Donna would make a fantastic dream team, when I opened the booklet and read the liner note 'essay' - which was written by none other than Liz Carroll

While known as a great accompanist of Irish dance music, on this CD Donna plays melody on all of the tunes, which is fairly uncommon for a pianist. Irish tunes are intricately melodic, and the piano doesn't easily lend itself to the requisite triplets (hitting the same note rapidly several times in a row) and other forms of ornamentation commonly used in Irish tunes. I've heard other recordings by musicians who play jigs and reels on atypical instuments - Dick Gaughan's Coppers and Brass on guitar is one - and my reaction is, okay, you did it, so what? It's more like an athletic activity just to show you can . Donna, by contrast, slows down the jigs and reels to a heartbeat and lets them breathe. Her readings of chestnuts like the "Blarney Pilgrim." the "Banshee" and the "Pinch of Snuff" seem to tell stories, and remind the listener why these tunes are classics. She seems to gravitate toward tunes that are slightly melancholy, which is probably why they happen to be some of my favorites, like the hornpipe "Jackie Tar" and "Maguire's March".

Where Donna really blossoms, though is on the airs. The aforementioned money song, "Bridget Cruise," is on this disk and is breathtaking. On the "Lark in the Clear Air," she channels Bill Evans from his "Live at the Village Vanguard" era. I can practically hear the glasses clinking at the tables. Like Evans, Donna uses colors from the French impressionist palette to dazzling, hypnotic effect.

She saves the best piece, her original composition, "Luna" for last. On this piece she is joined by Billy McComiskey on button accordion and Liz Knowles on fiddle and viola. The tune brings out the best in all three players, as each takes a turn at the melody while the others weave in and out, with all three breathing as one. This is an instant classic. It's one of those mournful, achingly gorgeous melodies with an epic quality that should land it a feature as the soundtrack for an Oscar winning film.

You can hear samples from this recording (and buy it) at Donna's CDBaby Page here.

How do you spell "Schadenfreude"?

2006-11-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

Stephanie Miller vs "Sock"

2006-11-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

Wow. As the smoke from the World Trade Center was still wafting over Manhattan, I asked myself if music might now be irrelevant. What is the most appropriate art form for this new era? I actually have not sufficiently answered the music question for myself (hence my current semi-sabbatical), but I have fortunately discovered the artist whom I feel most fittingly taps into the Zeitgeist in a miraculously healing manner. I've already commented on this blog about how funny and entertaining radio talker Stephanie Miller is, but in the past week she has reached new levels of sublimity. She is In The Zone.
Her show, which she broadcasts for three hours every week day with co-stars Jim Ward and Chris LaVoie, perfectly articulates the horror and wonder of these times. It's fast-paced, improvisational, tragicomic, highbrow and lowbrow. It's interactive and democratic, featuring interviews with senators alongside audio clips of jingles composed by fans and montages of angry phone calls from listeners. My favorite evolving bit concerns one funny and touching contretemps with a little old lady from Miami named Mildred, who started out as an irate caller and has now become Stephanie's new unofficial grandmother. This show is postmodern, post-9-11, postfeminist, post-everything. Nothing is off limits as fodder for comedy, from Kim Jong Il to Stephanie's own cosmetic surgery and personal freshness.
Earlier this week, a man nicknamed "Sock," who had seen Stephanie on Fox's Hannity and Colmes TV show, wrote her the above letter, in which he essentially threatened to have her killed. What did she do in response? Stephanie, who is the daughter of Barry Goldwater's running mate, and who cut her show business teeth doing standup at trashy obscure comedy clubs, is apparently able to withstand just about any tomato Human Nature can toss at her. Before phoning the FBI, she called and talked to the guy ON THE AIR. And it was funny! On this mp3, to me, Stephanie demonstrates that she is the talk radio equivalent of Michael Jordan, Lenny Bruce, and Charlie Parker. This is what it's all about. This makes me want to weep. Check it out here.

George Will said it, I believe it, that settles it!

2006-10-30T13:26:00.000-08:00

"Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early --very early-- church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America's principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today's evangelicals, and that they founded a 'Christian nation.'" George F. Will, New York Times Book Review 10/22/06 (Review of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, By Brooke Allen

Rate-your-shrink.dot com

2006-10-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

Wow, I always wondered if there existed a site like this. A good friend of mine is looking for a therapist. There are like ten thousand therapists out there and about ten good ones, so I went online to see if I could help him find one. I've always advised people to get a recommendation from another patient (NOT one of the therapist's orofessional colleagues)and wondered if there was a site that provided "reviews" of therapists, like they have for professors. I just found the site! I haven't fully pondered the implications yet, like the potential for slander and unhealthy airing of issues. But it seems at first glance that the pros outweight the cons. So, go check it out and rate your shrink!

"Bad Girls" is eating my brain!

2006-10-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

The most lethal British export since mad cow disease is the prime time soap opera Bad Girls, now available in the U.S. through Netflix and BBC America, about a fictional women's prison called Larkhall. Bad Girls is deadly, a prion that has tunneled into my brain and turned it into mushy peas. But unlike BSE sufferers, Bad Girls victims are guaranteed to die happy. In spite of the potentially campy and sensationalist subject matter, Bad Girls takes on drugs, bullies, phone sex, incest, and clandestine affairs between employees and inmates with humor and originality. The plots are gripping, and the dialogue is, for the most part, believable. When it's not, it's saved by the committed, dead-on performances of the cast, many of whom will be familiar to U.S. audiences from appearances on other British tv series like Prime Suspect and Coronation Street.

I'm in the middle of Season Two, and my favorite Bad Girls (and Boys) include the outrageous, sadistic, but oddly loveable and hilarious bully (Debra Stephenson); her devoted sidekick and love slave, Denny Blood; her other love slave, corrupt prison guard Jim Fenner.

But the best reason to watch the show is for the steamy, unlikely love affair (see photo, above) between prison warden Helen Stewart (Simone Lahbib) and convicted killer Nikki Wade (Mandana Jones). The depiction of the relationship between the straight Wing Governor and lesbian inmate is nuanced, suspenseful, and romantically old-school. Supposedly, Lahbib (right) was worried about playing the part, not so much because of its potential impact on her career, but for what her grandmother might think. She has said in interviews that her granny said it was okay, as long as she didn't enjoy it. I hope her gran doesn't have a tv.

Space Dots at the Kennedy Center

2006-09-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a recent Space Dots performance at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. I was horrified to learn that I had left my makeup at home, so I was working without a net here, folks. The Hispanic Heritage Awards ceremony was being held at the same time, and I decided to risk looking like a jerk and went down to the the "Hair and Makeup" complex and asked one of the gals if I could borrow a lipstick. The answer was ¡No! View the show by clicking here.

Oh, for God's sake

2006-09-08T12:32:00.000-07:00

I hear that my favorite actress Helen Mirren got into trouble for talking about her British T&As at the Emmys. Some Parental Legion of Decency group had enough time on their hands to call up the FCC to complain that their widdle kiddies were scarred for life after hearing a reference to breasts on a Hollywood awards show. (I believe the FCC allows "ass" - especially if you pronounce it "ahss.") There IS no such thing as bad publicity. Rock on, Dame Helen.

Adieu False Heart

2006-08-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

Linda Ronstadt was, along with alt country pedestal girl Emmylou Harris, one of the pioneers of country rock in the 1970s. Like Harris, she has had a prolific and adventurous career, bravely following her muse even when it led her into to the outer darkness of the uncool with Gilbert and Sullivan and pop Puccini. At 60 her voice is as glorious, confident and sensuous as ever in this addictive new duo CD with Cajun singer Ann Savoy, called Adieu False Heart.
This CD is unapologetically folk. It is reminiscent of early recordings by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, with reedy sister harmonies, heartbreaking double fiddles and a generous helping of new world French melodies. The album starts off with a melancholy fiddle instrumental, which leads into the naive and reproachful folk song, "Adieu False Heart." Several reviewers have remarked that it is difficult to tell where one singer ends and another begins. Even though the two voices are markedly different in timber and style, with Savoy's being the more weathered and Ronstadt's the more trained, what creates that mirroring sensation is their sympathetic give and take, and the generosity with with each tapers the outer edges of her particularity for the sake of the whole.
The second song, however, is unmistakeably Ronstadt, as she savors her Big Dog moment on Julie Miller's instant classic, "I Can't Get Over You." Every time I listen to it, I hold my breath as her chocolate tones melt over the opening phrases. Savoy follws with the second half of a one-two punch, the devastating Cajun ballad, "Marie Mouri"(Marie Is Dead)). Savoy also delivers a deep and satisfying reading of Richard Thompson's "Burns Supper" (which probably refers to the Scottish poet and not to ruining dinner). The other Thompson cover is the tender and enigmatic "King of Bohemia," which may be my favorite track on the CD. Actually, it's impossible to pick a favorite. Every time I listen to this album I get hooked on another song. I could go on, about the spare and tasteful backing musicians and perfect production, but I'll just say that this is one of the best folk albums I have heard in decades. Five stars, etc. Go and get it. You need it.

Robert Drake and Q'zine on WXPN

2006-07-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, dj Robert Drake, "the mayor of South Street," will be devoting his entire radio show on Philadelphia's WXPN to Arthur Loves Plastic's new album, Troubled, which is based on Trouble from the Start. His show, Q'zine, is "devoted to queer arts and culture," and airs on Sunday nights at 11:30 PM. It can be streamed live from WXPN's website, and can be heard in the Philadephia area on 88.5 FM.

Thanks, Robert!

Q'zine can be heard on:

88.5fm WXPN-Philadelphia, PA
88.1fm WXPH-Harrisburg, PA
104.9fm WXPN-Lehigh Valley, PA
90.5fm WKHS-Worton/Baltimore, MD

- and live worldwide, http://xpn.org/listen.php

Troubled

2006-07-19T13:42:00.000-07:00

Arthur Loves Plastic's Bev Stanton (pictured) has just released a new CD, Troubled, which is an atmospheric meditation on my most recent CD, Trouble from the Start. Bev is a mad scientist of a techno artist who consistently garners critical praise from all quarters and who makes her fans very happy whenever she releases a new CD to groove to. The Washington Post has called Bev "one of the best, melding moody, downtempo pieces with dance-floor-friendly stompers."

To buy a copy, click here: Troubled

Check out some tunes here!
La Musica
and
I Can Dream

Book Review: "Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale," by Jen Trynin

2006-06-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale is a music memoir about Jennifer Trynin's mid-'90s brush with major label rock stardom. One of the reviews on the dust cover recommends, "To anyone with her own dreams of hitting it big in the scene: First read this book." But really, anyone with dreams of any kind, anyone who's seen This is Spinal Tap more than once, and anyone who enjoys a good read and more than a few good laughs should read this book.

A year after a magical, chance meeting with Joni Mitchell at age eight, Jen Tryinin loses her family as she has known it when her father leaves. When she takes up guitar at age eleven, she vows to become a "real singer, like Joni Mitchell--beautiful, fearless, sauntering through strange cities, tossing lovers over my shoulder like salt."

Eighteen years later, she's an Oberlin creative writing graduate with a gift for lyrics, living in Boston. Having continued to write songs, she enters the open mic circuit and soon finds herself trapped in the "Sunday-to-Wednesday night folk/acoustic-chick-band-wasteland," of Boston's famed coffeehouse scene, where,"Nobody even remotely cool ever shows up, and these gigs aren't leading to anything besides more crappy gigs at these same crappy clubs where the audiences drink tea and stare at their shoes."

She quickly vows to jettison herself from the folk scene by methodically studying the ingredients for rock cred. Her producer boyfriend, Guy, explains that her songs are too complicated and that they don't "move" like rock songs. He makes her a cassette entitled "Great Pop Rock Songs," and Jen sets about paring down her lyrics and tweaking her image.

As her transformation takes places, you can see the pages flying off the calendar while she figures out, bit by bit, how to get rock gigs. It's "a tricky business having to do with where you work and what you drink and where you rehearse and who you're sleeping with or used to sleep with or who you might be sleeping with really soon."

I stop cutting my hair with nail scissors and go to a salon for the first time since high school. I get my hair cut straight across at my shoulders, leaving long bangs covering the left half of my face. I chuck my black jeans, ankle cowboy boots, and brown suede jackets and go to the cool thrift stores, where I find myself an old blue corduroy jeans jacket, a pair of big black-laced shoes, and three ugly print polyester shirts.

The finishing touch is repackaging her work. She takes one song off her "earnestly wrought twelve-song cassette," entitled, "Don't Make Me Beg," and shortens the title to "Beg" (because "cool bands use one-word titles"). For the cover, she chooses a picture of a "weird cat" she saw in a newspaper "because cool bands usually have weird nonsensical artwork," and, in a stroke of marketing genius, has it manufactured as a 45 and sends it out to all of the cool local radio stations.

To her surprise, it takes off. She then makes a full-length CD called Cockamamie with the help of Guy and her friend Aimee Mann, who happens to be one of Guy's clients. The CD lands steady rotation at all the hip local radio stations, and Tryinin finds herself playing to packed houses around Boston.

She soon becomes the subject of music industry buzz, climaxing in a record label "sharkfest" that takes place in New York, when she and her band perform at a trendy rock club called Brownies.

The rest of the book is the story of how Trynin's star rapidly rises and then steadily fades back into the atmosphere. It's a gripping read, and a hilarious drawing room comedy of rock-and-roll "manners."

Trynan has a winning combination of self-deprecating honesty, impeccable comic timing, and perfect pitch for the nuances of music biz posturing. At the Brownie's gig she meets promoter Freddy, who doesn't recognize her as the singer-songwriter who's been trying to get him to return her calls for past three years. Freddy turns out to be a short guy with dirty fingers and long black hair, who's "clacking the lollipop around in his mouth a mile a minute." When he casually tosses the lollipop against the side of the band's van, Jen protests:"'Hey, man, that's our van,' I say, not giving in to my fear of people like Freddy."

Later that night she observes a pack of music-industry personnages who have come to check her out:

Against the opposite wall, a small group is gathered around a tall guy in a suit with a heavy black beard. He's pointing at his ear and talking fast. Then he makes like he's shooting himself in the head. Everyone laughs, shaking their heads or grabbing their noses like this is the funniest fucking story they've every heard. Hovering on the outskirts of the group is Mr. Skivvy, laughing along, until he turns away and his smile disappears. He rubs his temples with the tips of his fingers, then pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes it across his mouth. He looks up and catches me staring at him, then waves and smiles. He walks over and introduces himself.

Trynin thankfully chooses to "show, not tell" and with deft strokes paints pictures that speak a thousand unsaid words. As she waits for a label photo shoot to begin, "...a woman appears in red sweatpants, an oversized baseball shirt, and two long ponytails sprouting from her head like huge dog ears. She introduces herself as 'Patty, Makeup Momma.'"

Trynin also has the narrative gift of sprinkling 'plot forwards' - hints at what lies ahead - that keep the reader turning pages. If you are already reading the book, though, you probably know that it is the story of her career's demise. What draws you in is wanting to know how and why.

Some reviews have portrayed Trynin as the innocent victim of the big, bad, music industry. She is unsparing in her account of the ruthlessness, insincerity and absurdity in which the industry is knee-deep. By far the most difficult reading in the book is her description of the byzantine shell game through which major labels actually pay recording songwriters for their work. Some of the juiciest sections of the book involve her showdown with the odious Shalaah!, a pretentious, prissy, Nellie Oleson of a singer-songwriter, with whom Jen is forced to tour toward the end of her career. (Several bloggers have wondered who this person is, since there's no evidence of Shalaah! online. I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and guess that it's Tori Amos).

But Trynin is also quite frank about her own role in her downfall. It has been said that "there's a very fine line between clever and stupid," and Jen straddles that line as she exhibits a certain contrarian streak. She writes a hit song with an out-of-the-ballpark chorus that goes, "I'm feeling good," but against all advice titles the song "Better than Nothing" ("because it's not about feeling good.") When she finally signs on with a label after a pitched and protracted bidding war, she becomes indignant when she is flown "coach" on her first tour, after having rated first class status while being wooed. She makes a petulant phone call to her manager that raises the first red flag that she may be "difficult."

By far the most self-destructive choice she makes, though, is her complicated and sexually charged relationship with her bass player, Buck.

This is one of the most implausible aspects of the book. There is nothing to like about Buck. Buck makes jokes like, "How do you get a million dollars, tax free? First make a million dollars. When the IRS comes to get it, just say, 'I forgot.'" Ok, I had that Steve Martin album when I was twelve, too. I can't figure out what he has going for him other than the fact that he possesses street cred from having played in punk and alt country bands, and occasionally rests his fingers on the back of Trynin's neck. He's forever sulking, stalking up stairs two-at-a time with his hands shoved into his pocket, saying things like, "Just doing my job, boss," when he gets pissy.

The bigger the gigs the band gets, the more self-absorbed and insufferable Buck becomes. When the band films their video and the director asks if he might try a few takes without the baseball cap (!) Buck wears at every show, he flatly replies, "Gotta have the hat." ARGGHHHH!!!!! I kept silently begging Jen, "Please, for the love of God, FIRE his ass."

But the truth is, Jen can't fire him because what she desires more than stardom is a family, a band of brothers to ride with in a van across the countryside, taking on the world together. Laced throughout the book are poignant snapshots of her actual family, who clearly care about one another but who seem to constantly just miss each other. Particularly heart-rending is her longing for a bond with her idealized brother, Tim.

A paragraph near the beginning of the book, as the band starts heating up, hints at where Trynin's heart truly lies:

This is the way I always imagined it would be. Me and my band goofing around in the van, roaming the highways. I have the feeling I used to get driving down to the Jersey shore with my family when I was maybe six....I remember wanting never to get there, wanting to always stay just like we were in that car, together and forgiving, because there was nowhere else to go.

Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be shows that, no matter what her medium, Trynin is a true writer, whose prose takes wing like a soaring lead on her shiny black '70s Les Paul with the Big Muff distortion pedal.

I can't wait for the movie.

See this movie!

2006-06-13T07:41:00.000-07:00

I joined Netflix just to rent this movie - (well also because I was tired of being laughed at by the clerks at my local artsy video boutique whenever I wanted something starring Ashley Judd.) I had read a review of it about three years ago in the NYT, but couldn't remember the name of it, which turned out to be somewhat forgettable in English, "The Best of Youth." Its Italian title comes from a line from Pasolini, La Meglio Gioventu'. It's a 388-minute epic coproduced by RAI as a miniseries for tv. The story takes one family through three decades - the 60s through the 90s. It was long, but I watched it twice, in several sittings. I'm going to reprint the review I read below. All I can say is that it was incredibly moving, intimate and uplifting. All of the actors were outstanding. I've included a photo of the unbearably sexy Alessio Boni, who jumps off the screen as the troubled Matteo Carati. Jasmine Trinca is magical and heartbreaking as the mental patient Giorgia, who shares a lifelong connection with Matteo and his brother, psychiatrist Nicola. Like the reviewer below, I was sad to see it end:

"...''The Best of Youth'' was originally made as a mini-series for Italian television and was broadcast in several other European countries after being released theatrically in Italy. Its genesis as a multiepisode small-screen epic accounts for its length, but also makes it easier to take. The director, Marco Tullio Giordana, is motivated by generosity -- toward both his characters and his audience -- rather than by self-indulgence.

The story he has to tell, written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, is full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel. Yes, ''The Best of Youth'' is long. But ''War and Peace'' is long. ''Middlemarch'' is long. Life is also long, and there is so much life in these six hours -- 37 years, to the extent that you can quantify it -- that you may marvel at Mr. Giordana's economy.

The film begins in Rome in 1966, in the bustling apartment of the middle-class Carati family. There are four children, but most of the attention focuses on Nicola and Matteo, who are studying for their exams and whose contrasting temperaments structure the crowded, expansive drama that follows.

Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio), who is studying medicine, is the more cheerful, while Matteo (Alessio Boni), a would-be philosopher, is volatile and rebellious. He flunks his exams on purpose and impulsively joins the army.

There is something quintessentially Italian about the way ''The Best of Youth'' uses the lives of the brothers to reflect the schisms and tensions within the larger society. A similar motif informs movies like Lucchino Visconti's ''Rocco and His Brothers,'' Francesco Rosi's ''Three Brothers'' and Bernardo Bertolucci's ''1900'' (as well as, for that matter, ''The Godfather'' Parts 1 and 2.)

While Nicola and Matteo never waver in their love for each other, their lives take radically different paths. After Nicola's hippie sojourn in Norway (which coincides with Matteo's basic training), they meet in Florence during the terrible winter floods of 1966, when young people from all over Italy converged on the city to rescue its artistic and historic treasures -- their common cultural patrimony -- from the mud.

But the blissful, selfless unity of this moment, in which Nicola falls in love with a beautiful music student named Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), is short-lived. He impulsively transfers to the University of Turin, the northern industrial city that became a center of late-1960's labor militancy, which he eagerly joins. There he and Matteo cross paths again, but they are on opposite sides, since Matteo is part of a police unit charged with suppressing the violent demonstrations.

All of this may sound a bit schematic, like that horrendous American mini-series ''The Sixties'' a few years ago. But what is most arresting about ''The Best of Youth'' is how gracefully it enfolds its characters within their historical context, and how fully it respects their individuality.

Mr. Giordana's sympathetic gaze seems to fall, with mellow radiance, on all generations and ideological persuasions, much as Nicola himself is able to love both his angry, sometimes brutal brother and Giulia, whose political ideals lead her toward the abyss of radical nihilism.

She and Matteo, though they cannot stand each other, have in common a kind of moral allergy to their own feelings and to the messy bonds that connect them to their lovers and families. Every time such a connection seems to be forming, they tear away from it, with tragic results.

Despite its unblinking attention to the destructive forces at large in Italian society -- from the Red Brigades terror and the political scandals of the 1970's to the anti-Mafia campaigns (and further political scandals) of more recent years -- the spirit of ''The Best of Youth'' is quietly, wryly optimistic. Its political point of view turns out to be precisely the tolerant, middle-class humanism, with its belief in human goodness and the possibility of social progress, that the postwar generation claimed to rebel against.

These values are embodied first by the elder Caratis, and then, in the next generation, by Nicola and his older sister, Giovanna, a magistrate. Nicola's professional life, which occasionally drifts into the foreground of the story, involves him in efforts to improve the treatment of the mentally ill, and this rather specialized cause is the clearest statement of the film's central idea, which is that a commitment to human dignity is ideology enough.

Mr. Giordana's is a humanism without limits, and toward the end of ''The Best of Youth,'' he seems unable to let go of the extended family he has made, lingering in the Tuscan sun while you check your watch in the dark. But the extended denouement is very much in keeping with the capaciousness and warmth of this wonderful film. Long as it is, you hate to see it end." A.O. Scott, New York Times

Team Katie

2006-06-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

I don't get why everyone seems to hate Katie Couric so much. I like her! She's well-spoken, professional, prepared, intelligent, ambitious and stylish. I like the fact that she bombed the first time she went on national TV (the president of the network reportedly said he "never wanted to see her" doing national news again) and then went to some elocution coach to make her voice sound less peepy and juvenile. (If only every white woman in America under the age of 50 would do that.) She's from my home town of Arlington, VA and is SO ARLINGTON (sensible, not "too" this or "too" that, civic, responsible, M.O.R.)So maybe I'm a bit biased. But how many women would have a colonoscopy on national TV? Huh? I stopped watching her on Today because it just got so fluffy. I couldn't stand that bimbo Matt Lauer, and I found extremely offensive the ambulance-chasing, shoving microphones in grieving parents' faces that they were so fond of. Maybe she left the show to get away from that. I am looking forward to seeing her in the big chair - maybe I'll start watching the news again.

Washington Folk Festival

2006-06-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

Everyone should go to the Washington Folk Festival. It's a long-standing tradition, a free music festival at one of the area's funkiest landmarks, the art-deco era former amusement park, Glen Echo. There's dancing, crafts, storytelling, and living dinosaurs - I mean esteemed legendary folk musicians. I went today and had a wonderful time. WETA grande dame Mary Cliff was the MC at the stage I played on, which is always exciting, and the weather was beautiful. I'll be back tomorrow with the Ocean Orchestra.

Two caveats - Bring your own food. There are concessions, but lines are usually long and choices are limited. And by all means, stay away from the pretentious, overpriced "Irish Inn"
behind the festival grounds (formerly the biker bar Trav's Inn). The food isn't good enough to justify the sticker shock and bad vibes.

Also, be wary of the Park Police. They do a great job keeping the traffic flowing, but if you end up accidentally parking in the wrong place you may regret it. I had my head bitten off by a short, chubby, red-faced ranger for innocently driving somewhere "off limits". Yikes! Dial back the aggression a few notches, please!!

See you tomorrow! Bring your sunscreen.

Brandi Carlile at the Birchmere

2006-05-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

Tickets went on sale a month ago, and I drove over to the Birchmere box office and bought ten - without knowing who I was giving them to. But I felt evangelical about this. It's the flip side of being a curmudgeon about a lot of music - when I really like something I want everyone to know about it!

A few people I invited seemed skeptical - maybe "Brandi Carlile" sounds like it's going to be mall music, like Britney Spears. But the show at the Birchmere was 100% stand-and-deliver - high energy, passionate and confident. Even though the between-song silence of the mostly older, Northern Virginia yuppie crowd had Brandi admitting to being "freaked out," by the end of the show she and the band had everyone on their feet. Favorite moment - when Brandi came out to do her encore and admitted to hating the "encore" concept - the pretense of doing your "last song" in hopes that the audience will bring you back. But she used her encore time wisely and charmingly, with a new band song or two, a gritty rendition of "The Times they Are a Changin'" and, my favorite song of the night - a driving, table-slapping version of "Folsom Prison Blues."

For the most part, the highlights for me were songs off the CD, which is impeccable (I can't fathom why they are re-releasing it in June with different takes. This one is perfect! Buy it now!), but I was pleasantly surprised by a rocker they pulled out toward the end where Brandi got to get her Janis Joplin screaming ya-yas out. I don't think they said what it was called, but I'm sure they will put it on the next disc.

After the show, the Birchmere had set up a little musician petting zoo, and Bev Stanton (far right, Arthur Loves Plastic) and Ruthie Logsdon (second-to-right, Ruthie and the Wranglers)joined me in the dork-a-thon - but to be honest, one of the things I love about this band is that they are not cool. They are beyond cool. They're just great musicians. I can't wait to hear what they do next!

Space Dots in NYC

2006-05-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

Since I last blogged a lot has happened - I turned 40. I went to Italy, met cousins over there I'd never met before, and did a lot of thinking about life and music. (more about that later) I also took the Space Dots to our first show in New York - at Makor. We were honored to be on WFUV's "Under the Radar" program with Ana Egge and Alan Semerdjian. My Whirligig friends Greg Anderson, Lisa Gutkin and Matt Darriau (Lisa and Matt are now Klezmatics) came out for moral support, which was great. The Dots played wonderfully - I was very proud of my boys! We were there without electric guitarist Erik Wenberg, so it was an especially jazzy and lush, piano-oriented vibe. Makor has a wonderful sound system and a grand piano. It's a beautiful venue. I wish I could play there every week.

Space Dots in NYC - above (at Makor)- Harry Appelman, Jon Nazdin and Lisa. Below (on the street) drummer Robbie Magruder, bassist Jon Nazdin, and pianist Harry Appelman.

Brandi Carlile - Not Afraid to be Beautiful

2006-03-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

You know how, when you were a little kid, teenager, and maybe even into your 20s, when you didn't have much money and could only afford a few albums, you would listen to the few that you had over and over until you even memorized where all the skips were? I often wonder why I don't do that anymore. Is it because I'm older and more jaded about music? Is it because I am too self-conscious and competitive that I'm not open enough to other peoples' music? Is it that there are too many options out there, and that it's so accessible that I don't appreciate it anymore? Maybe the music that is out there doesn't do it for me?

I am happy and relieved to report that I have found a CD that makes me feel like a kid again. It's called Brandi Carlile, and it is by Brandi and her two band mates, twin brothers Phil and Tim Hanseroth. In the past few years, I have unfailingly been drawn to singers who, while performing under their own auspices, are considerably aided and abetted by a songwriter and/or arranging partner. (see Feist and Angela McCluskey). No matter what its provenance, this CD is a classic. Go and buy it!

This CD makes me believe in the future of pop music again. All the songs on the album are superb. I love the arrangements. I love the production. All three of the band members are incredibly talented, and the addition of the drummer on this album adds a whole dimension of space and emotion to the mix. The guitar lines are juicy and hooky, and the bass provides both anchor and urgent propulsion. And Brandi sounds like the child of kd lang and Roy Orbison and even looks like Elvis on the back of the CD. The harmony vocals are truly sublime. It is pure, ecstatic, drive-with-the-windows-rolled-down, ear candy that makes me remember why I love music in the first place. The whole CD makes serotonin go charging through my brain.

What I find particularly refreshing about this album is its sonic roundness and voluptuousness. From the chimey tone of the acoustic guitar to the enveloping lushness of the harmony vocals and Brandi's sparkly, rich alto, this album is not afraid to be beautiful. There is no hipster detachment here. And there is none of the neo-folk, yuppie, squeaky-clean angularity that sounds like background music for an IKEA showroom. So many of today's female singer-songwriters affect a breathy, little-girl voice, and deliver their lyrics in an oddly juvenile, matter-of-fact, hypersuburban accent ("My-eeee fa-the-errr".) Brandi sings with the frankness of Loretta Lynn and the machismo of Patsy Cline.

I am very fond of "In My Own Eyes" - I love the harmonies on the "hide me" part. I just melt everytime I hear that. I love the last "hide me" where Brandi just cries out with abject bewilderment and profound sadness. That is pure emotion and just great singing. I feel the pathos.

BUT I have to say "Throw it All Away" is the one that makes me want to scream. (I missed my chance to do this in my childhood and adolescence. My mom wouldn't let me go to concerts when I was a kid--I think I wanted to see the Osmonds or something-- because she read that people had been trampled at a Who concert. Maybe that's why I became a folkie-fear of being trampled) I can't wait to see them live somewhere (are they bringing a drummer on any tours?) so I can make a fool out of myself like one of those Beatles women.

Big Fun in Bear

2006-03-16T14:12:00.000-08:00

Fred and I had the pleasure of performing at the Lilith Grove Women's Center in Bear, DE last month. When I hear "women's center" and "potluck" I think, "Better eat first," with visions of taboulleh and brown rice dancing in my head. But this was a carnivorous pot luck, with chili and ice cream and festive adult beverages. In the photo are Lynn, who owns the property, and friends. We were happy to see a huge crowd of Lilith Grove-rs at the Blue Crab Grill in Delaware (another laid back and festive place with non-ascetic food). We'll be back in September! See you there!

THIS is NOT the End of the World!!

2006-03-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

From the Baltimore Sun, March 2:

Despite rejection of a similar bill by House lawmakers last month, a Maryland State Senate committee took up yesterday the emotionally charged debate over whether Maryland should ban same-sex marriage in its constitution. Sen. Nancy Jacobs engaged in an impassioned debate with Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor from American University (and candidate for MD State Senate), over the influence of the Bible on modern law.

"As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained and started by God - that is my belief," she said. "For me, this is an issue solely based on religious principles."

Raskin shot back that the Bible was also used to uphold now-outlawed statutes banning interracial marriage, and that the constitution should instead be lawmakers' guiding principle.

"People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible," he said.

A Cultural Experience in Our Nation's Capital

2006-03-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

Hey, here's a video of a recent performance by the Ocean Orchestra, at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. This clip is unedited, complete with questionable references to commitment ceremonies, cold showers, and the exotic "Chinese paper cut dance."

Yes, I want to view this video!

Stalk Talk

2006-03-02T07:22:00.000-08:00

It's 11:10 am in Washington, and right now, as I type, my goddess, LA-based Talk Radio host Stephanie Miller is SOMEWHERE IN DC broadcasting her show. She's here for some radio conference. I heard her in my car on the way in to work, and I'm just heartbroken that I'm stuck here instead of out roaming around trying to get a glimpse of my hero!! I wonder where she's broadcasting from? I'll bet it's the studio of her DC affliate, Progressive Talk 1260 (they are so hip they don't even have call letters) Aren't they in Bethesda? Maybe I could start coughing now so I can take off and go down to Betheda and try to find Stephanie. My roommate Fred was telling me about going to see shows in the '80s and then trying to find out where the stars were most likely to hang out afterward (he met a very trashed Deborah Harry this way). I wonder if there are any shops in Bethesda that sell rawhide and boxed wine.

Can't get enough of Dusty?

2006-03-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

Then check out this great Dusty Springfield site created by Andy Robinson. It is a treasure trove of Dustiana. I am grateful to Bev Stanton for linking to this from her site, which you should also check out, but I am just going to print out the name here because it may include some "adult" content (and I use that word very loosely): www.arthurlovesplastic.com

More DC music history- '60s!

2006-02-27T14:13:00.000-08:00

There's a song on Second Avenue called "Sleepin' Late." It was written in the 1960s by my mom's best friend, Fangette Willett. They met in 1967 when they shared a hospital room waiting to give birth to sons (Chris, my brother, and Jason, who owns The True Vine in Baltimore). Back in the day Fangette wrote songs for Motown, including "Dark Shadows and Empty Hallways," and "Uphill Climb to the Bottom." Fangette gave me my first singing "lesson" at her grand piano in her house on Ellicott Street when I was about four. I remember her telling me to wave my arms around when I sang! Fred "Cello Guy" Lieder and I visited her in Arizona last year when we were on tour, and she regaled us with stories about Mama Cass and Roberta Flack and recordings of her songs by Billy Eckstine and Lou Rawls and others. There is a really interesting and fun article about Fangette in Spectropop.com that refers to a lot of 1960s DC music history -Bohemian Caverns, Clydes, the Chad Mitchell Trio and more.

This whole MySpace thing

2006-02-23T10:14:00.000-08:00

Okay I'm on MySpace now, even though it makes me feel old. And the "will you be my friend" part scares me. BUT it is a good procrastination tool. I have "met" a few people on it, including an enterprising young man named JAG (pictured). He has set up a podcast called Tunesbaby,(no connection to CDBaby. I hope they are okay with this, Jag!) and is including me and other people of all genres (Christian acoustic jazz?). So far I really like the company I am in. Check it out!

Wammies

2006-02-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

Hey - Just wanted to let the world know about the WAMMIEs - the Space Dots won Best Contemporary Folk Group of the Year (there's no category for "Acid Cabaret"), Contemporary Folk Album of the Year and the "overall" award for Album of the Year for "Trouble from the Start". Now will you believe me and get one?! Oh yeah, and I won for Contemporary Folk Vocalist of the Year

I had a great time, except I'm shy about giving speeches. I had to get up three times in all, and the third time was no en casa when they called my name(I went out to grab a couple copies of the CD from my trunk for some folks and in true form got lost trying to find my car). By the time they found me to "accept" from the stage I had been at the party a little too long (see "sheets to the wind, four") but survived with three out of four of the actual awards in hand. If anyone knows where the fourth one is let me know.

For complete coverage, including a cute photo of Musician of the Year Dave Chappell, see the article in the Post

SHOOT!! Brandi Carlile is SOLD OUT!!

2006-02-11T10:27:00.001-08:00

Drat! I really wanted to go see Brandi Carlile this Tuesday night at Jammin' Java! She is SOLD OUT. If anybody has a ticket they aren't using, please contact me!!!!

Check this woman out - she has a gutsy, grownup voice (if I hear one more "little girl"-sounding chick singer I'm going to have to move to another planet) she really knows how to write a punchy, uplifting pop song with a memorable hook. Her lyrics make sense and scan properly and transcend at times. She can play the guitar! She has pleasing harmony vocals with her cute boy bandmates. And she's so adorable in that boy scout shirt! (what?! - I thought it was a requirement to expose your midriff to sell albums!) What's not to love............YAY Brandi!

Tribute to WGTB

2006-02-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

I just found this wonderful tribute to WGTB, the Georgetown University station that introduced me to so much of the music I love today. Sadly, the station was closed down by the University for its radical politics, and in particular its pro-gay programming. The program "Friends" was one of the first places I ever heard about gay life other than on the bathroom walls at the public library, and it was a lifesaver. Its theme song was Bette Midler singing, "Ya gotta have....friends." It seems corny now, but when I heard that song it was like getting inside a warm sleeping bag of safety and acceptance. This article brings back so many memories of the 1970s in DC and Georgetown in particular- Orpheus Records, Yes! Bookstore with the cafe and meditation hut in the back, the Cellar Door, the Exorcist Steps, and the Watergate just several blocks away. I was just a kid and getting turned on to folk music at the time. I would listen to and record Mary Cliff's show on Saturday nights on WETA and tune in to WGTB on Sundays to listen to Myron Bretholz doing his Summer Solstice program - all British Isles and Irish folk! I couldn't get enough of the Bothy Band, Nic Jones, Robin Williamson, Clannad, and local stars like the Irish Tradition and the Hags. This article brings back the drama and hopefulness of that period. It makes me want to go back there in spirit, or bring it back here.

GWAR

2006-02-06T12:21:00.000-08:00

At the end of a marathon five-hour rehearsal with the Ocean Orchestra, Jennifer played us some tracks from her new favorite German medieval-rock band, Adaro(apparently Germans don't have British style "folk"-rock, since Hitler took all the fun out of German folk music). That led to a conversation about fur vests as stagewear, Kenny Rogers, and Zan McLeod's favorite band, GWAR. Thanks, Zan. Now I can get on with the rest of my life.

49 West

2006-02-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

Fred and I did our monthly First Saturday at 49 West in Annapolis, MD. We were very happy to have a great crowd (beware - I'm going to start posting audience photos soon!) and also to have back some of our "regulars" - Richard and Karen Otto have been living overseas in Vienna and just came back to their old house in Bowie. Can you blame them? As Fred said, "Once you've lived in Bowie..."

Crystal Radio Blue Podcast

2006-02-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

Dan Herman has a very cool podcast every Sunday night. He'll be playing something Trouble from the Start this Sunday. There are lots of great bands to discover on his show. Very diverse...just whatever he feels like playing.

http://www.radiocrystalblue.com/

Pandora.com

2006-02-02T14:09:00.000-08:00

I want to point out a really fun new web site called Pandora.com

This is a service that allows you to create your own personalized radio stations, based on music you already like. They have developed a system called the Music Genome Project that analyzes music based on specific musical characteristics (rather than a user's previous buying choices). You can enter in the name of an artist or a song, and Pandora.com will line up more songs that are similar to what you chose. You can then pick a song from THAT list, and go create another radio station. It's VERY cool! And it's free. It's all paid for by advertisements.

Check it out! http://www.pandora.com

Post here and let us know what you find.