A Slight Delay

So says Cicero: Extreme justice is extreme injustice. In his blog Confessions of a Small Church Pastor, Chuck Warnock writes about the recent execution of Christopher Scott Emmett:

While I realize there is a lot of disagreement on the issue of capital punishment, it seems to me that followers of Christ would oppose capital punishment on the grounds that Jesus himself was an innocent victim of the Roman Empire’s capital punishment system. When we think of Jesus’ death, not as a theological doctrine, but as capital punishment gone wrong, it casts a different light on the subject. […] I can’t help thinking of Jesus’ short stay on death row. Is this the best solution we have to society’s problems? What do you think?

Not wanting to clog Pastor Chuck’s comment section, I’ll reply here.

The litany of problems with capital punishment seems endless and ever-growing. It disproportionately targets those with less money, less education, and more melanin. Its value as a deterrent has always been questionable, at best. And, as has been documented on countless occasions, the innocent are as likely to go to their graves as the guilty. Any of these issues, taken by themselves, would be disturbing enough; taken in tandem, they serve as an indictment of an idea and attendant practice that need sorely to be rethought, if not disassembled altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s eighty-odd degrees out, sticky and humid. Don’t ask me why, in God’s name, I’m thinking of baking. I haven’t baked in a while, come to think of it, aside from a batch of brownies over the winter, and I don’t even remember the last thing I baked before that. Probably more brownies (you can’t go wrong baking brownies). That’s not counting the couple of tubes of Nestle Toll House cookies I picked up at the Stop and Shop last time I had a lot of company ’cause there’s no such thing as too much dessert when you have company; I don’t count them because I didn’t make them from scratch.

Anyway. I started poking through my cookbook, and I came across this long-forgotten favorite that I probably haven’t made in about twenty years (oy!). What I like about it is that it’s an adult dessert. That’s not to say it’s shaped like anything particularly naughty, just that your teeth won’t fall out after two bites, plus it’s quick, simple, and tasty. As soon as this infernal heat breaks, I think I’ll dust off the mixing bowls…

I don’t remember where the recipe came from. Hope you like it, either way. What you’ll need:

1 can unsweetened apples
2 eggs
2 cups of flour
1 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of baking soda
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 cup of chopped nuts
2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of oil
1 tsp. vanilla

Combine the apples and eggs in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and nuts. Add to apple mixture and stir. Add remaining ingredients. Bake in 9×13 pan at 350 for 30 minutes, testing with a toothpick when done.

The dishwasher is the bane of creativity. Just my personal opinion, mind you, but one based on years of evidence. Seeing neatly regimented rows of mugs, bowls, dinner plates and silverware represents lost opportunities; for me, there’s no better time for thinking than when you’re elbows-deep in suds. You could say that dishpan hands and creativity go together like peanut butter and jelly.

It’s not that there’s an insane amount of concentration going on; it’s rather the opposite. It doesn’t take all that much concentration to do dishes, so your mind is generally letting something else brew while you’re getting those caked-on bits of oatmeal off your bowls. I won’t say that every dishwashing experience has produced Isaac Newton-quality stuff, but what I have gotten over the years has been useful, sometimes even startling, and usually better than what I come up with when I sit there straining over it.

Now, for you it could be something different. Some people have their a-ha moments in the shower (singing “Take On Me” doesn’t count, by the way), while gardening, or in the course of doing any number of usefully mindless things. They’re a good way to overcome mental blocks, whether it’s a creative block or a problem that stubbornly resists solving no matter how hard you’ve tried. And, lest this sound like some kind of new-agey crap, there’s actually scientific evidence to back it up. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite things: stuff that happens only once, completely at random. Those snippets of found sounds, overheard dialog, or improbable phrasing are a sort of assemblage by accident. Reason and design get lost in the kind of haze that seems to be exactly why the word “ephemeral” was coined in the first place. These things only happen, it seems, when they can’t be captured, whether at the edge of hearing, from the corner of the eye, or in those fleeting moments between waking and dreaming.

And when you try to capture something like this, it ends up losing something in translation. By trying to give it form, make it last, you somehow rob it of its spirit or essence; you end up stripping it of its immediacy, and a large part of what made it special in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

When is a music book not about music? It’s a valid question to ask if you stop to consider Nick Hornby’s Songbook, and Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape. Both are ostensibly about music, and the role it plays in our lives. But if you’re serious–in a passionate sort of way, not a pipe-smoking, suede-patch-wearing sort of way–about music, you get on some instinctive level what it means to say that music is the soundtrack of our lives, something that provides not just background noise but also meaning and context. It’s in that context that both of these works fit.

This isn’t either writer’s first go-round with music. Hornby first came to wide attention with High Fidelity, whose protagonist and his friends are a handful of music-addicted arrested development cases, and drew further acclaim with the book About a Boy, over which the ghosts of pop and Kurt Cobain loom large. Sheffield, on the other hand, has contributed some great music writing to the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, turning in his first book with Mix Tape. That both books are about music would seem to be one of the few things they have in common, save for a biting sense of humor. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »