A Slight Delay

Got an interesting email yesterday from Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager. I should note that it wasn’t to me, as such; it’s not like I have connections, I just signed up for the McCain mailing list on the candidate’s website. Anyway, Davis says of Barack Obama:

Sadly, Senator Obama’s actions are just more politics as usual. I don’t know who should be more disappointed - the supporters whose faith in Senator Obama has already been betrayed, or the people who Senator Obama now expects to believe his new sales pitch. Either way, one thing is clear - Senator Obama has shown that he is just another politician.

And who’s calling the kettle black?

This isn’t to say that Obama is some new breed of politician; we turn those out with such alarming regularity that they’ve lost their irregularity (what would be truly new would be a politician playing the game and admitting it). What Davis’s statement smacks of is a man crying sour grapes, having been beaten at his own game. In a country with the collective attention span of a fruit fly, it’s easy to forget sometimes that much of Obama’s appeal derives from many of the same things that had people taking a serious look at McCain in 2000: what was, or at least appeared to have been, a willingness to buck the party regulars, to take unpopular stands, and to propose (believably, for a change) that government didn’t have to be an albatross around the necks of those it proposed to govern. Yes, I’m aware that there are some deep ideological and practical divisions between the two men; that said, I’d still argue that there are also some deep similarities between them.

And while we’re talking about “just another politician,” let’s take a look at John McCain. The new 2008 John McCain, with all sorts of features added over the last eight years. That peskily principled stance on the environment has been ditched in favor of expanded drilling that–by Conservative economists’ estimates–will have little economic impact, and that little bit will only come years from now. He’s flip-flopped on “agents of intolerance,” welcoming the likes of Hagee, Parsley, and Falwell into the fold. The New Republic, Balkinization, Crooks And Liars and Carpetbagger Report all list several more reversals of position, so I won’t list every last one of them here. To be fair, at least he’s consistent on abortion; he’s still against it, having already reversed his position in time for the primaries in 2000. (more…)

Sooner or later, it happens: you’ve read a lot, or listened to hours upon hours of music, or seen enough paintings to fill the MoMA twice over, and a thought comes to you: I could do this. That spark, when it comes, will be something different for each person; it’s that one thing that lets you know not only that you want to do this, but that it’s alright to give it a whirl.

Salman Rushdie wrote something years back that sums it up wonderfully. In an essay on Gunter Grass, he says:

There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected. And then there are readers who dream of becoming writers; they are searching for the strangest door of all, scheming up ways to travel through the page, to end up inside and also behind the writing, to lurk between the lines; while other readers, in their turn, pick up books and begin to dream. For these Alices, these would-be migrants from the World to the Book, there are (if they are lucky) books which give them permission to travel, so to speak, permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A book is a kind of passport. And my passports, the works that gave me the permits I needed, included The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, the Crow poems of Ted Hughes, Borges’s Fictions, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros—and, that summer of 1967, The Tin Drum.

(more…)

You know that old saw about not judging a book by its cover? It probably goes double for restaurants. Exhibit A could well be Park and Orchard, in East Rutherford. From the outside, it has all the charm of your average auto repair shop. Get inside, especially once there’s a plate in front of you, and it’s a different story altogether.

The ambiance is good; the place is unexpectedly large inside, airy and tastefully decorated. Then again, you can’t eat sage paint. Thankfully, they don’t try to get by on looks alone. (more…)

This is, I think, the third time I’m writing about Passing Strange, Stew’s musical at the Belasco Theater. The first time, I was exhilarated. I’d just seen the show a few days previous on its opening weekend, and still had the whole experience bouncing around in my head. The second time, I was hopeful; it was just before the Tony Awards, and I had hoped that there might be sufficient buzz around the play that people might actually go to see it. And I saw it a second time a couple of Saturdays ago, fiancee and parents in tow.

The third time–this time–I’m disappointed and a little pissed. Passing Strange will close after its matinee performance this coming Sunday. I realize that I probably sound a bit like a fanboy in that last paragraph, and I also realize that three posts about anything in the space of six months may seem excessive. On the other hand, I’ve been a fan of Mark Stewart’s music and lyrics since the first time I heard The Negro Problem’s Post Minstrel Syndrome about ten years ago, and have followed everything that’s come since. It doesn’t seem right, somehow, that something this good, from a writer this good and a cast/band so phenomenally talented, should end quite this way. (more…)

I don’t remember quite how I came across this. As with so much else, I was probably looking for something else and came across it by accident. Oh, in case you were wondering what “it” is, it’s Jefferson’s Bible.

A bit of backstory: legend had it that one night, Jefferson took a razor blade to the Bible, excising the bits with which he didn’t agree. Those bits consisted mainly of the stuff referring to the geneology and divinity of Jesus. What’s left reads like a synopsis of the synoptic Gospels, a Cliff’s Notes version of the Good News. (more…)

Books on music are always a bit of a crapshoot. Even the best-intentioned authors can deliver works that sound flat and uninspired, struggling to bring to life on the page what would give you goosebumps if it came through a pair of halfway decent speakers. So it’s a pleasure reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.

It would be enough to read the writer’s lively warts-and-all portrayals of some of the giants of twentieth century music. Happily, Ross doesn’t take the Alka-Seltzer approach (”I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”), preferring instead to have a smallish handful of composers–the likes of Mahler, Strauss, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Cage, Glass, Reich, Britten, et al.–stand in for entire movements and scenes. It also helps that he doesn’t sketch the evolution of the century’s music as merely a sense of inevitabilities, where one thing follows from another as though it must. The parts are a mess, a set of accidents happy, unhappy, or contrived; the whole isn’t much tidier, and it’s to Ross’s credit that he doesn’t try to make it so. (more…)

If you’re one of those people for whom the obituaries are essential reading (or the first part of the paper you go for), I think I may have found you the perfect website. It’s called The Music’s Over, and if you go in for music, obituaries, pop culture, or some combination of the three, it’s to die for. Okay, bad choice of words, but you get the idea.

The blog’s author has pretty catholic tastes, commemorating the passing of the famous (i.e. Buddy Miles), the obscure or quasi-mythical (Syd Barrett), the unfortunately forgotten (Mia Zapata), and those famous just as much for being dead as for their music (Kurt Cobain), among dozens of others. And this isn’t some slapdash, half-assed effort; the author–I keep referring to him as “the author” ’cause his name’s not listed on his site–has clearly done his homework. Hopefully Don McLean never sees The Music’s Over, or we’ll be subjected to a rewritten, 77-minute, CD-length version of “American Pie;” unless and until that day comes, enjoy the site.

We’ve all bombed in the kitchen. If you haven’t yet, don’t worry, you will. Some of my favorite food writing of late has been other people’s kitchen mishaps; it’s not schadenfreude, so much as just being happy that I’m not the only one who’s screwed up a dish so badly it could only be identified by its dental records.

So let’s peek in on some foodie misfortunes, shall we? (more…)

Last week’s assignment was to shut off the computer and get yourself to a library. I’ve had a thing for libraries for almost as long as I’ve had a thing for books, which is a long time now. I feel like a kid in a candy store… so many books, so little time. If you’re a reader, there’s no better place on Earth.

And if you’re going to write, there’s really no way to overestimate the value of reading. That may seem too obvious to even bear stating, but it’s not something to take for granted. More than once I’ve spoken to writers who claim they don’t like to read.

What the…? (more…)

So much for “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader.” One game show I’d actually tune in to see would be “Are You Smarter Than An Immigrant?” Here’s why: immigrant bashing has never, unfortunately, gone out of style in this country. It seems someone’s always close at hand complaining how “they” don’t speak English/take our jobs/hate America/(insert jibe of choice here). While I can understand why illegal immigration gets under people’s skin, a number of those same people forget that legal immigration is the bedrock of American life and history.

But I digress. People also tend to forget that citizenship isn’t handed out like copies of the Watchtower. To become a citizen, you have to be at least 18 years of age and a lawful permanent resident of the United States. You also have to have lived in the United States for five years, unless you’re married to and living with a United States citizen for three years. You have to have a basic grasp of English. There’s oodles of paperwork, an interview, and a test. (more…)