Reaction to yesterday’s tweet from the man who 30% of American adults voted to be our president–and whom another 39% tacitly approved by not bothering to vote at all–was based more on the significance of the date than on its content.
Oh, there’s no question that Easter Sunday is an odd time to threaten a country of 82 million people with Back-to-the-Stone-Age annihilation, to do it with an F-bomb, and end it with “Praise be to Allah.” But it sure begs the question of just when is the right time.
With a Secretary of Defense–who calls himself “Secretary of War”–openly calling for a Christian crusade in the Middle East and claiming, “God wills it,” it’s readily understandable how religious meanings are eclipsing political realities. That’s as true of those of us who oppose as of those who support or passively allow authoritarian rule.
Still pouring in, the shocked reaction to the Mob Boss’s Easter Tweet reminds me of a few weeks back when the former FBI Director who led the investigation into Russia’s influence in Mob Boss’s 2016 campaign, Robert Mueller, passed away. Even some Republicans–who still support him nevertheless–admitted they were “aghast” and “disgusted” by the tweet on his doubly Orwellian-named “Truth Social”:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!
For all of the religious reminders that we should not speak ill of the deceased, especially so soon after that last breath when families and loved ones are still in the deepest of grief. Off course, patience is not Mob Boss’s long suit; in fact, it seems entirely absent from the deck, which is clearly not even close to full.
And so the smear of Mueller–decorated veteran and life-long public servant–just comes and goes, much like that of John McCain, entirely wrapped in the warped amorality of a man whose main drive now appears to be creating monuments to himself.
Lost in the smear of Mueller is political reality: When Mueller finished his investigation in 2019, it was first submitted, by law, to Mob Boss’s Att’y General, William Barr. Before public release, Barr issued a two-page summary that, he claimed, was “complete exoneration” of Mob Boss.
Days later, those who read the report saw that Barr’s summary was a bold white-wash. The report’s conclusions were damning. Yes, the Kremlin did install an American president.
But it was too late. As Orwell warned, those who speak first and loudest often win the day. Plus it was what most Americans wanted to hear, and most importantly, it was so much easier than the 476 pages that built so much evidence for what came only at the end. Mueller played by the rules of not casting a definitive verdict; Barr bent the rules by making it seem as though no verdict meant no conclusions. It was as if the word “exoneration” all by itself meant we could “put it all behind us” and “turn the page.”
Fast forward seven years almost to this day, and we should have noticed that Mob Boss forgot is own lie. If the Mueller Report was “complete exoneration,” that why be “glad he’s dead” and accuse him of “hurt[ing] innocent people”? In effect, Mob Boss’s Mueller tweet was an Act of Confession that we mistook for nothing more than his characteristic bad taste.
For all of the concern we on the left of America’s dial express about the separation of church and state, we need to see these religious expressions–from Hegseth’s crusades to Leavitt’s cross necklaces–for the camouflage that they are. If a couple of wild tweets recently aren’t enough to make you suspect, please consider the architectural plans for Mob Boss’s presidential library:
Is it not an American Tower of Babel? Or have we completely forgotten even the most basic cautionary tales handed down to us through centuries of history we are supposed to know so it “won’t repeat itself”?
Late one night after a weekend way out of town and not wanting to make dinner when I arrived home, I drove my voracious appetite into the 401 Tavern in Hampton, NH, and took a seat at the bar.
Happened to be the last of two seats on a corner, and so I sat next to a woman whose husband and another elderly couple were on the three stools perpendicular to us. They were all in their eighties, and very pleasantly welcomed me into their conversation.
Before long I was wolfing down a burger, and they resumed getting to know each other. When the man nearest me mentioned that he was a retired police chief, the other asked, “Portsmouth?”
“No. Burlington, Vermont.”
I swallowed and waited for a pause in the conversation: “Were you chief of police when Bernie Sanders was mayor?”
Under much darker-colored hair, the smile that immediately beamed back at me appears on page 456 of a new book, Bernie for Burlington, with an equally beaming Mayor Sanders and an in-character Crime Dog McGruff as they appeared in 1987.
It is one of many surprises of poet and English professor Dan Chaisson’s part-memoir, part-biography, part-history, and very-much-nostalgic ode to the city where he came of age during Sander’s eight years in city hall. It was the police union that put the socialist alternative to a corrupt Democratic incumbent and a weak rogue Democratic challenger in office. More specifically, it was the police union that did it with a unanimous vote.
Where were the Republicans, you ask? They were quite content to support the incumbent and make their efforts elsewhere in the state. And they dominated the state, including elections for the US congress throughout the 70s in which Sanders ran a distant, but improving third.
Before Chaisson gets to that, he gives us a look at Bernie’s childhood in the Bronx. Source for this is older brother Larry Sanders who describes a father who could have been the model for Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. Mom was equally hard-luck, but the brothers made do without complaint. Instead, they explore, including free pamphlets in a store named Vermont in Manhattan aimed at drawing tourists to the Green Mountain State.
At least Larry makes no complaint. Chaisson deliberately did not interview Bernie for the book, though they are pictured together, arm in arm and smiling, at a family picnic in 2024. Bernie and his wife Jane were said to be “aware” of the project and “intrigued” by it. Sources are numerous without them, including campaign workers, political rivals, neighborhood activists, historians, business leaders, and political allies, most notably his successor as mayor, Peter Clavelle. If you subscribe to the theory that your legacy is measured by the person who replaces you, then all you need to know is that Clavelle and Sanders were the co-founders of Vermont’s Progressive Party.
Other notables include Howard Dean, sometimes ally sometimes opponent, and Peter Freyne, a court-jester columnist for The Vermont Vanguard Press who predicted Sander’s rise: “Don’t be surprised to see Ol’ Bernardo draw a lot of votes from folks who just want to flip the bird at the status quo in Montpelier.”
Freyne also had the scoop of “the notorious smear shop” of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone “to attack… Eagle Scout Patrick Leahy,” Vermont’s long-time US senator in a campaign for re-election–three decades before the two felons helped fix America’s 2016 election.
Following Sanders’ upbringing in Brooklyn and a couple of semesters in Chicago, Chaisson give us a history of the hippie movement into northern New England, college-aged kids dropping out and looking for abandoned farms they would turn into communes. Sanders was in but not of that wave, as inspired by the renowned Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neil, he of Summerhill School fame, as any. To the contrary, he was impatient with the “tuning out” part, but he never gave up, and the grass roots grew. Unable to win a seat in the Vermont state legislature or in the US Congress, Bernie, as calculating as any natural politician, jumped at his chance in Burlington.
My Newburyport friends may do well to get Bernie for Burlington just to study the ins-and-outs of the waterfront issue, which beyond all else was what turned residents against the Democratic mayor. Writes Chaisson:
Sanders’ first Burlington apartment on Front Street was adjacent to Battery Park on the Old North End. Few physical settings in the United States present such a contrast between agonizing urban problems and almost unreal natural vistas. Bernie’s small, rented worker’s cottage, his first home in the city, sat on the seam between the two Burlingtons. His challenge was to make the city take its eyes off the sunsets and face itself.
Mission accomplished with the help of a cultural undercurrent the book captures in fine detail, such as new and trendy businesses downtown, some of which Chaisson worked at as a teenager. And around the state, such as Bread and Puppet Theater, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Phish, and Goddard College:
Between fish farms in the mountains and cauldron of soup at the Fresh Ground Coffee House, a relay ran. Goddard and the Fresh Ground, sixty miles apart, were the transmitting stations for radical ideas about power and subjugation. Sanders, no fan of fish farms or gourmet coffee, and “ruthlessly sarcastic” about (anarchist-environmentalist Murray) Bookchin’s wild-eyed pronouncements, nevertheless participated in the busy traffic moving between the two points, one artery in the larger organism evolving into a new Vermont.
Both those passages hint at more of the surprises this book has for those of us who supported Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. He never got high marks from environmentalists because of his full commitments to unions. He was at harsh odds with the University of Vermont because the state–that “status quo in Montpelier”–paid no Burlington taxes. And he rode in the cruiser with Chief Kevin Scully during the crackdown on UV students.
As Scully told me a few years ago at the 401 in Hampton, in paraphrase: Bernie was great to work with. We didn’t always agree, but he always listened, and I know had some influence. Just as he had over me. He always explained things, and was always very clear.
To make 520 pages well worth the time, that last line is true of Chaisson’s book.
As a projectionist in a small arts-cinema with but a single screen, I’ve considered myself lucky all these years that I haven’t had to show or overhear or be in any way exposed to blockbuster films heavy with special FX.
That, of course, rules out most any film set in space, though I have always looked forward to documentaries regarding the Moon or Mars on PBS, some of them written and directed by Newburyport’s own Mark Davis.
As for the explosions, the high-speed chases, the hell-fire and deafening noise, I have no more appetite for them than I have for tofu and sushi. Do the cineplexes hand out barf-bags when they sell you a ticket?
Now comes Project Hail Mary, free of violence and minimal with blasts and booms, but necessarily loaded with FX necessary for a film set in space. For over a week I held to my own rule, but I also heard no end of patrons praise it as they left. Two words I kept hearing: “hilarious” and “heartbreaking.” That’s a combination I find impossible to resist.
Project Hail Mary begins mid-story. Ryland Grace regains consciousness well on his way to a destination from which he is to learn something that will save the world from a virus that will kill us all in 30 years. The two astronauts flying the craft are both dead. If that’s not enough of a problem, he has the immediate obstacle to overcome: He has never been on a spacecraft, and he was put on this one against his will, already unconscious.
As he will later recall yelling at the commander back on Earth who put him on the flight, “I put the ‘not’ in ‘astronaut’.”
No, Ryan Gossling (following his stellar Ken in Barbie) plays a high school science teacher who caught the attention of an international space agency due to a paper he wrote for journal that contained too many inconvenient truths for his own country to leave unpunished. But he’s an easy-going, carefree guy who mines the vein of entertainment in the classrooms of Grover Cleveland Middle School.
As he has to teach himself how to fly the craft already “Neptunish” away, he recalls bits and pieces of how he got there in flashbacks. Before too long in what is a long but fast-paced film, he finds himself aside another spacecraft that is launching objects about the size and shape of car mufflers at him. Gossling’s wondering aloud about whether he’s about to receive an intergalactic gift or a bomb was Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” cast as comedy and set to science fiction.
My expectation was that Project Hail Mary would harken back to 2001, but there are few hints of any Hal vs. Dave conflict. Instead, Capt. Grace meets Rocky, a creature about the size of a young goat who appears to be a cross between a crab and a monkey, or maybe a giant turtle with extra legs. Turns out, Rocky is also an advanced, sought-after scientist sent from another direction from Eridia, a planet also threatened by the same virus. Rocky and Grace soon figure out how to communicate and form a team.
More than an update of 2001, this film is the hopeful counterpoint to Don’t Look Up‘s sardonic doom and gloom. Rather than a very few people knowing the threat outnumbered by a world that wants to ignore them, Project Hail Mary is all about answering the call–which necessitates the ultimate sacrifice.
Subject matter here is quite serious–especially in a time when government agencies deny and defy science on behalf moneyed interests than will not hear any mention of inconvenient truth. But the film is flush with laugh lines, including a few sight gags, such as Capt. Grace appearing in one scene in a t-shirt reading, “I Had Potential.”
Also, this is yet another vibrant, often hilarious performance by Ryan Gossling with a solid, at times heart-breaking turn from Sandra Huller (following her Best Actress Oscar nomination for Anatomy of a Fall). And then there’s Rocky, an alien with a humane spirit as infectious as a Beatles’ song, specifically, “Two of Us”:
…wearing raincoats, Standing solo in the sun. You and me chasing paper, Getting nowhere, on our way back home.
We’re on our way home We’re on our way home
We’re going home...
Do Rocky and Grace make it home? Near the end of the film when Rocky asks if he has “a mate,” Grace sighs: “I had one, but she said I had my head in the clouds, that I live in another world.”
By now you may have heard that Trump’s fantasy ballroom is back in the news if only thanks to his ham-fisted changing of the subject when asked on Air Force One about his contradictory answers to questions about his war on Iran.
Occurred to me months ago when we were still grieving over the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, all of our objections were based on historical perception. Nothing wrong with that, and it should have been enough to point out that the White House is the people’s house, and the president but a tenant.
But what of architectural perception?
For that, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Randy Johnson of Natick, Mass., a senior partner in Resolution Architects who has done some consulting work here in the Lower Merrimack Valley, and a friend of mine since his nephew and my daughter hauled their families to each other’s college graduation parties down in the Hudson Valley back before the turn of the century. He also writes about local architecture for a newspaper in the section of Massachusetts known as Metro-West. When his editor preferred not to run this non-local piece, he asked my advice.
As soon as I began reading, I knew that it had to have circulation. By the time I finished, I decided that unless we could find a larger platform, I would offer to make it Mouth of the River‘s first “guest blog.” Back in the day when newspapers still had freelance budgets, this would have landed in a Sunday “Ideas” section as soon as an editor received it. To compensate for that, I’d just ask that if you know people who are into historic preservation, building design, or who simply appreciate handsome, functional architecture, please pass this on:
Last Straw Ballroom
by Randy Johnson
Knowing of the ornamentation now slathered on the walls and mantels of the Oval Office, I wasn’t surprised to see a lot gold in the renderings of the proposed White House ballroom.
Of course, that wrecking ball news immediately drowned in the media zone flooded by Epstein, Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, Minnesota, yet more Epstein, and even another architectural foray-sure-to-be-folly to defile the Kennedy Center.
Keeping track of President Trump’s ballroom project is a challenge, but an addition to the White House will get built. A legal objection has been raised by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but obstacles like this have not stopped other questionable Trump activities. Construction will proceed as legality is sorted out. Work on the foundation has already begun. The train has left the station.
Trump has fired the entire U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, and loaded it with his appointees. Among the new members is the ballroom’s initial architect. Likewise, the National Capital Design Commission is staffed with a handful of loyalists. The project, officially called the “East Wing Modernization Project,” was presented to the NCDC by the new architect in January; the Commission seemed to reach a consensus that the design program makes sense. After all, a great country shouldn’t hold its official gatherings in a tent, with porta-potties for sanitary facilities.
The East Room was way too small for big events. The White House public-visitor reception process was characterized as confusing and undignified, definitely in need of improvement. All the commissioners thought these sensible reasons for something new, in the tradition of previous modifications to the White House. The project was characterized as fostering “diplomacy, celebration and unity,” with a “respect for collaboration and tradition.” No mention of grandiosity, or conveying the wrong message.
What’s on the table is huge: 89,000 sq. ft., of which 22,000 sq. ft. is the thousand-guest ballroom. Beneath the main floor is the kitchen, along with a spacious First Lady office suite. The movie theater will be reconstructed. The NCDC presentation did not discuss how supplies will be delivered; as with the bunker design, loading docks must be among the top secret security concerns.
None of the NCDC commissioners seemed to question the scale or validity of the program. All acknowledged the experience and competence of the new architect. Only one quibbled with the design, expressing concern about the overall size and cornice height, and asking if reduction to the footprint were possible given the reported foundation start. To provide some balance to the design’s relationship to the residence, the architect’s mitigation proposal is to add volume to West Wing, another step in turning the White House into an American Versailles. The hearing ended with the understanding of “more details to follow.” The project is not on the Commission’s February agenda. It is not on their website’s listing of “Major Projects.”
The project is a perfect representation of where our nation is headed. You saw this first with the gaudy golden gee-gaws in the Oval Office, so it wasn’t surprising to see the amount of gold in the drawings of the ballroom’s interior. Even the dining chairs had a precious-metal look. The Trump style is heavy on gilding; it’s the mark of an imperial ruler. The design strives to create a suitable stage for our autocrat to impress his peers.
The exterior design is in keeping with the priorities of the administration. An executive order called “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” dictates what any new federal building should look like. Bring back those columns and pediments, harkening to the good old days of ancient Rome and Athens. No room for other ideas that would compete with this vision. Building grandiose buildings is what Mussolini and other bullies did to further their agendas. Kudos to the American Institute of Architects for their opposition to MFABA, noting the “directive would replace thoughtful design processes with rigid requirements that will limit architectural choice.”
The ballroom facades mimic the adjacent Treasury Department building. The proposed main entrance has temple-like features, with ceremonial steps, columns and pediment, fitting for a place in which to pay homage to an autocrat, curry favors and make deals. Maybe the president is figuring that at $10,000 a plate, the scheme will gross $10 million for each chicken dinner. The ballroom might be Trump’s most lucrative deal.
In addition to the hollow, spiritless architectural vision, there’s the financing. The claim of “no taxpayer money” is fraudulent. Sure, private citizen billionaires have lined up to donate funds, getting both their name on a plaque and presidential access. But as any competent real estate developer knows, there’s the matter of ongoing operating costs, like heating the white elephant as it sits vacant 99% of the time. When Trump is gone, donors won’t be lining up to fund the power washing of all that marble.
Where’s DOGE when we need it?
Then there’s the mendacity. Beyond the financing myth, what about the promise of no demolition and a freestanding structure? Oops! It stings to think that one twisted mind can do so much damage to “the people’s house.”
What we need are forceful and respected voices to explain how this project runs counter to our national mythology. The design should put less emphasis on exclusiveness, power and opulence, and more on an image that speaks of our egalitarian roots, in keeping with the “People’s House” to which the East Wing is connected. The Trump brand will eventually fade away, but let’s not be left with a reminder of its shallow history in such a significant, prominent location.
The entities reviewing the East Wing Modernization design see it as a sensible response to the requirements of a functioning White House. But the key word is House. A project of this scale turns the property into more of an events center than the home of the president and family. For a president that primarily resides off-site, this shift is inconsequential.
For future presidential families, the shift in balance will be a loss. The program should ideally create a better residence, support the administrative needs of the executive branch, and establish the architecture for a dignified reception of the public and official visitors. The huge ballroom does not fit in. Do the big parties off site. Something will get built. If Trump gets his way, it will be a neo-classically correct reproduction of what he and his minions think Washington, D.C., buildings should look like.
If built, the best hope for a ballroom is adaptive re-use, like conversion to a 300 bed shelter for all the families made homeless by the Trump Economy. When asked where they reside, the previously unhoused occupants could respond that they are staying at the Last Straw Ballroom.
Instead of that bleak future, the better approach is to stop construction and conduct a thoughtful re-evaluation of what is really best for our White House.
Today, March 18, I turn 75. That’s three-quarters of a century, an occasion to be marked with something out of the ordinary.
One idea came to me last Friday, the 13th of all dates. Can’t recall any source of inspiration, though I did model it after the signs that line the highway approaching Wall Drug in what South Dakotans call “West River.” And I fashioned it a bit on “The News from Lake Wobegon” from A Prairie Home Companion with a common theme and a recurring phrase in the first five entries–the sixth being more akin to reaching the destination, a coffee and pastry shop in Newburyport at the Mouth of New England’s Merrimack River in lieu of a tourist trap posing as a drug store on the Plains somewhere between the Missouri River and the Black Hills.
Since then, I have posted one each day on social media. Expecting and aiming for a lot of laughs, the number of likes and loves and cares has taken me by surprise. But I laughed out loud when the second entry drew a comment from a friend telling me that I “may be onto a new podcast theme here.” If so, should I call it A Coastal Home Companion or Island Caffeine?
At any rate, I add that preface to explain the repetition you’ll encounter reading them all at once, hoping you’ll allow for it. I tried to lessen the pain of same by changing the phrases and words used, but how many ways are there to say 75 except to put the 7 before the 5? I suppose I might have used LXXV, but the letters remind me of sizes of clothing that I see on the tabs inside collars and waistlines, way too depressing for birthday requests:
March 13: — As in, Friday the… :
Word has reached me that, for my birthday this coming Wednesday, my renfaire friends in Rhode Island and along Massachusetts’ South Coast are pitching in to buy me a brand new Maserati Quattroporte. I’m deeply moved, but with a grandparent’s urgent obligation to this planet’s dubious future, I ask that any money that might be spent on me be given, instead, to the campaigns of candidates for the US Senate and House who have a viable chance of unseating a Republican. Thank you dearly, but please send your money to Brown in Ohio, Talarico in Texas, and others who might rid Congress of a Republican once their own state primaries are past. There’s also Ossoff in Georgia who needs to keep his seat out of the Republican column.
Trust me. As I turn a doddering 75, my Nissan Versa is an automotively young 76K, and it serves me well. I’ll make do.
March 14 — Pie Day:
Now I hear that my Dakota friends, from the ones still in the territory to the diaspora that spreads from Lake Michigan to the Salish Sea, are chipping in to buy me a $10K gift certificate on Amtrak for my birthday this coming Wednesday. Much appreciated, but times like these call for sacrifice, and I ask that the $10K go instead to US Senate or House candidates who have a real chance of ridding Congress of a Republican. There are House elections everywhere. Find the one nearest you that is close in the polls, and whatever you’d have spent on me, spend on the Democratic or Independent or Green, or Farm-Labor, or Yippie candidate who has a reasonable chance.
Trust me. I’ve been to enough places in my 75 years, and I am now quite content with my annual weekend getaways in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In January. January. New Bedford. New Bedford in January.
March 15 — The Ides:
Rumor has it that my Salem friends, including a few as far flung as Florida and Oregon, are pooling money to buy me an all-expense paid month-long vacation in Reggio di Calabria on Italy’s Mediterranean coast for my 75th birthday on Wednesday. Ah, my mom’s ancestral homelands I’d love to see! But, for the sake of our kids and grandkids–any greatgrandkids yet?–please spend the money instead to help elect US Senate and House candidates who have a chance of winning what are now Republican seats or who need help defending themselves against Republican challengers.
Trust me. I live on Plum Island, so I see enough salt water. Then again, if you persist, you might want to talk to readers of the Newburyport paper who have offered me one-way tickets to go far away.
March 16 — Madison’s Birthday:
Officials in Newburyport City Hall are planning to surprise me for my birthday on Wednesday with a gift certificate from Park Lunch according to the mole who last year leaked to me the Confidential Report on the Library Investigation. Quite generous, too. Could keep me in fried clams and onion rings every day all the way to Mayday, even if they are upwards of $40 per plate. Mayday, indeed, but I’d lose my appetite thinking of how the total of those tabs might flip one Republican seat in the Congress if it went, instead, to a candidate with a chance of beating a Republican.
Trust me. At 75, I don’t need any more fried food than the occasional salmon I’ll sizzle this summer. But if any councilor, clerk, or character in the executive branch wants to spring for a falafel or gyros wrap over at Port City Sandwich Co., sure, I’m there.
March 17 — St. Patrick’s:
Through the magic of social media, I hear that my friends from Central Catholic HS Class of ’68 and St. Augustine’s Elementary ’64 have arranged a 20-day group-tour to Ireland, one of my parent’s and most of their parents’ ancestral homeland. For my birthday on Wednesday, each paid a share to include me on the trip. That includes two I’ve known since first grade, 1956-57. Erin go bragh!, as we were taught to say 70 years ago. But in this year that may be make-or-break for those to whom we will be ancestors, I must say Erin go braghless… Sorry, but any money you might spend on me, will be better spent on viable candidates opposing Republicans for the US House and Senate.
Trust me. At 75, I’ve quaffed more Guinness than most people have seen. And by the time you read this, I’ll either be on my way to a St. Patrick’s Day concert playing yet another jig or in my seat tapping my feet and quaffing yet another Guinness.
March 18: — Hangover Day:
Today, March 18, I turn 75. That’s three-quarters of a century, spanning from the appearance of the automatic transmission to the intrusion of the cellphone–or, in other words, the beginning and the end of human devolution. Certainly an occasion to be marked with something out of the ordinary. After sipping coffee with two friends at Cafe Chococoa for about two hours this afternoon, I realized just what that should be:
Sipping coffee in a downtown spot and chatting with anyone wanting to join me for all or part of two hours once a week. Starting next week, from Noon to 2:00 pm every Wednesday, I’ll be at Cafe Chococoa–located in Newburyport’s Tannery–or seated at one of the outdoor tables when weather allows, open to any and all subjects of conversation.
If you need added incentive, Chococoa makes a superb lemon-ginger scone as well as other tempting pastries. As an alternative to their fine coffee, their smoothies are quite good.
-787-
A “selfie” more than three decades before the word was coined: In the darkroom of the St. John Valley Times, Madawaska, Maine, where I learned how to develop photos in February, 1975, just a month before my 24th birthday. Taken by a camera I put on a stand with a timer so that I could shoot my still-23-year-old self.
When the director of Mr. Nobody Against Putin accepted the Oscar for Best Documentary last night, I expected a condemnation of Russian aggression and a call for the USA to confirm its now dubious support for Ukraine.
Instead, David Borenstein immediately spelled out the film’s lesson, and without naming any countries, it was clear that his target was close to home:
Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country. And what we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume, we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a “nobody” is more powerful than you think.
After it was over, Borenstein did name names while speaking with reporters:
One interesting thing about working with a team of Russians throughout this process has been my desire as an American to constantly compare the situation in America to Russia. But a lot of my Russian colleagues and friends always said, “No, no, it’s not the same situation. It’s actually happening quicker in America than it’s been happening in Russia.” Trump is moving a lot quicker than Putin in his early years.
The film itself, much of it assembled videos smuggled out of Russia by a young “videographer and events coordinator” opposed to his country’s war on Ukraine, focuses on the Kremlin’s efforts to control children’s perception of that war with revised history texts and “patriotic displays.” Echoes of calls for “patriotic education” by Republican officials in DC and in state capitols across the USA are hard to miss.
Also hard to miss are the confused and frightened looks of children and their parents who are receiving contradictory news from relatives and neighbors who have been sent to the front, and where many of them themselves may be dispatched. Some teachers are glad to go along and win citations for their enthusiasm, while most go through the motions, and silently pray for change–a listlessness not lost on their students.
Screening Room patrons leaving the film call it both heartwarming and heartbreaking, no doubt due to Pavel Talankin, the videographer dubbed “Mr. Nobody” at the center of the film. He does all he can to keep students engaged and hopeful until he senses a tightening noose and defects. He, too, has an Oscar, but, like Vladimir Zelenskyy telling the world, “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition,” Talankin didn’t come here seeking any award. He came here for the students of his country seeking a much stronger ally.
Overall, I’m satisfied with the Oscar choices. Can’t really pontificate on them because, unlike most years, I missed half the films nominated. Wish I had seen Sinners, nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards, but taking just four. Problem was that it was billed as a horror film, a genre for which I have no more interest than I have in roller skating.
The top awards for One Battle After Another–Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay–surprised me even as I cheered each time. Surprising because it was satire that many people took literally, and because it was as incisive and relevant to the ICED-America in which we now find ourselves. That artistic sin led several critics to dismiss the film as “liberal fantasy.”
But the second highlight of the night goes to Norwegian Director Joachim Trier. Accepting the Best International Picture Oscar for Sentimental Value, he concluded by paraphrasing James Baldwin’s observation that all adults are responsible for all children.
Would never have thought of it before the event, but that was a common theme for all of last night’s winners.
Ever since I was a young boy, I played language like pinball. From Lawrence down to Salem, I bet I played it all.
For me, a silver ball such as “Gaol” lights every bumper and racks up the score. Why, I might flip so furiously at its possibilities that I’ll tilt the machine.
The Old English spelling remained in use until 1960 when finally overtaken by the phonetically friendly, though visually anemic “jail.”
At age nine, I never noticed. A decade later, when I was thrown into one, all the signs said, “Charles Street Jail.”
Too bad. “Jail” made me think only of bail.
With “gaol,” I’d have tripped on the psychedelic hint of “ghoul” and haunted my captors, or I’d have prolonged the sound of “goal” and declared victory over them.
Then there’s one Gail way back in the black mining hills of Dakota, called herself Nancy, though everyone knew her as Lil. Cherished memories that may yet tilt whatever is left of my septuagenarian machine.
Newburyport’s “Old Gaol” even recalls the Old Golds we smoked when we were left recumbent, close to paralyzed, and staring at the ceiling after the bells and buzzers fell silent and the bumpers dimmed.
Washing ashore in 1982, I was heartened that the Port’s numerous historical treasures include the Old Gaol.
That’s why, on Tuesday, March 10, at 7:00 pm, I’ll attend yet another Zoning Board of Appeals meeting in the Senior Center to decide its fate.
Or will they?
Since 2019, the Old Gaol has been pinballed into a bureaucratic Limbo that began when owner Charles Griffin gained variances to divide the lot for the sake of separate sales.
For that rare form of zoning relief, he agreed to place a preservation restriction on the Old Gaol buildings. The ZBA reasoned that the public would benefit from the preservation of a rare architectural treasure.
Eager to get what he wanted, Griffin has not been so eager to give what he promised. Seven years later, there is still no restriction on the Old Gaol buildings and landscape.
In Massachusetts, such applications must go first to the city, then to the state Historical Commission, and finally to the City Council.
Alas, that document was never sent. Instead, Griffin submitted revised versions in 2021 and again last year, both of which MHC rejected.
But why waste words? If language is a pinball machine we can tilt, politics is a whirl that tilts us.
That’s good news for Griffin. His long-time ally on city commissions is Kim Turner, who is now Mayor Sean Reardon’s Special Projects Manager.
Rather than enforcing its own laws, City Hall awarded him a “Certificate of Appreciation” for his interior improvements of the exact same property that, nevertheless, remains the site of his non-compliance.
Perhaps if the beleaguered folks in the City Clerk’s office had ignored laws rather than enforcing them last year, the mayor might have treated them with a modicum of respect.
Anyway, as if by invitation, Griffin is back at the same ZBA asking for a whole new variance to use the Old Gaol as, if not an Airbnb, then maybe a Bed and Breakfast or hotel.
Six weeks after Reardon’s inauguration last year, Griffin filed a new application on February 18, and a public hearing was set for March 25.
Board members discussed the matter, only to continue it to April 8, then to May 27, then to June 10, July 8, August 12, October 28, and finally to January 13 of this year.
Did I say “finally”? My bad. On January 13, it was continued.
On that unfateful evening, some 20 members of the public attended in hopes of protecting the architectural treasure, some planning to comment during the time that all civic meetings include.
When the first began speaking, the chairman apologetically interrupted to remind her of the continuance.
She could comment only on the motion, but all else had to wait for when the Zoning Board would finally, if ever, vote on Griffin’s appeal.
“Alright. But just one question.”
“Yes?”
“How many continuances does he get?”
A burst of laughter from the audience lit my bumpers and sounded my bells: If the ZBA were a pinball machine, its name would be “Continue to Continue!”
Stall until it falls your way. It’s a bureaucratic flipper that always gets a replay. I’ve never seen it fail.
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Redesigned as living and office space: Photo by Newburyport Daily News.
A friend strolls over to Applebee’s only to find a line of hungry folks waiting to be seated. Since he’s alone, he peeks in at the bar, spots an empty seat, asks “May I?” and is told, “Sure, be right with you!”
He enjoys the meal and the vibe enough that he orders apple pie with candied walnuts and ice cream to top it off. He’d surely savor that as well, except that two barstools near him are vacated and quickly filled by a couple who have a lot to say, though neither seems to be speaking to the other, much less anyone else:
[H]e was kvetching about the sports on TV, [and] she was debating out loud about whether to get a cocktail or a glass of “chard” (-onnay)…
Despite his decadent dessert, my friend finds himself losing his appetite when Chard says something about a “doctor” she “heard on The Dr. Oz Show.” My friend, a physical therapist who knows about health, how to get it and how to keep it, can’t resist offering a candid assessment of Dr. Oz, which Chard counters by praising the guy who put the fruitcake in charge of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services.
Paying his bill and getting “out of there before (he) said something that might have caused a scene,” my friend “needed some antacids by the time (he) got back home”:
The point is, this is the kind of thing we’re dealing with as far as his devotees are concerned. I can only hope that she catches a clue-by-four to the head if that so-called “SAVE Act” is passed, and she suddenly finds herself… unable to vote because of her support for (expletive deleted)!!
To me, the the very phrase, “a doctor on The Dr. Oz Show” is a punch-line that needs no set-up. Made me laugh so hard that I missed his fusion of the expressions “get a clue” and “two-by-four to the back of the head” as a method of enlightenment. A nice play on phrases, but now that we’ve shed a laugh, let’s get back to reality check, please!
The very idea of a doctor quacking it up with a renowned quack sums up what “we’re dealing with as far as his devotees are concerned.” My friend wasn’t engaged in an argument. He was on the outside of an inside joke. The question he is left with, and leaves us with, is yet another version of how any ostensibly intelligent person can possibly believe the gaggle of loony tunes in this (expletive deleted) Administration.
They don’t believe it. They get off on it.
The inside joke was teasingly on display during last week’s Hate of the Union Address. Behind the (expletive deleted) were his top two enablers who made no effort to keep a straight face. Not that they couldn’t, but that they were there behind him in the frame of the camera to visually if not literally rub our faces in farce and fraud.
The frequent smirks of VP Vance and House Speaker Johnson were the reactions of those who are in on a joke. They know it was all lies, but truth, fact, and reality have nothing to do with it. As Clara Barton said of Southern propaganda in the decade before the Civil War, all they want are stimulants. There’s no attempt to inform. In fact, information just gets in their way. What they want is to excite, inflame, detonate. If you’re in the background, and in on the joke, what better way to enhance the stimulant than to smirk?
It’s not that we are dealing with people who are wrong. It’s that we are dealing with people who are high–and who have neither hope nor intention of sobering up.
I know very well how hard it is to resist responding to people who parrot Fox Noise, but I’ve made it a rule to hold my tongue unless others are present on the chance that they may be open to evidence and reason. Just the fact that Chard indicated–openly and out loud–that she watches The Dr. Oz Show would have been enough to convince me that she wasn’t worth delaying the next mouthful of lemon meringue pie. (I don’t much care for walnuts.)
Better to let those people stew in their own regurgitated food for ignorance. Otherwise, you’ll be reaching for antacids no matter how good your spinach pie and Greek salad.
Among the first films I saw at the Screening Room where I now show them was 1984’s playfully pointed The Brother from Another Planet, one of the earliest written and directed by John Sayles, by then already acclaimed in art-house cinema circles for Return of the Secaucus Seven.
I had missed that 1979 gem, but when I got caught up in the Boomer hoopla of 1983’s The Big Chill, Screening Room faithful let me know in no uncertain terms that it was a sanitized version of Secaucus Seven. They were right.
Sayles would continue riding high in the world of independent film with film after film of compelling stories, irresistible characters, and dialogue at once natural and purposeful. The list is surprisingly long even to a Sayles fan, so many more than the best known: Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and Lone Star (1996).
There’s a reason why these and every other film of his are beyond entertaining and informative. As a projectionist I was able to see them several times. (Not only do I not pay to see films, I get paid to see them.) Every viewing was always just as satisfying, and on one busman’s holiday, it was doubly so. That was during a cross-country trip with my daughter, then 16. We stayed a night in Lawrence, Kansas, for dinner and a movie at the Free State Cinema & Brew Pub. If that combo wasn’t luck enough, Roan Inish was on the screen. Next day we were talking about it half way to Colorado.
Can’t just be us. In 1997, the West Newton Cinema, an art-house with six screens including one with perhaps 35 seats, played Men with Guns for at least six months. At the end of the run, their entry in the Boston Globe‘s schedule announced that it would be the final week. I had monitored that weekly page for 15 years and cannot recall any other film gaining such a notice.
Two years later, Limbo would nearly match it. Some irony here. Limbo ends not with a fade to black, but to white. As the one-word title suggests, there is no certain outcome. When viewers left the theater, they stopped at the base of the projection booth, asking if I knew what happened next. A former projectionist at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, N.Y., now co-owner of the Screening Room, tells me that people left angry when it played there.
That may have turned the tide on Sayles’ films, although it’s far more likely that “market forces”–a euphemism for greed that seeks the lowest common denominator–caused funding for independent films, particularly those made by writers and directors committed to honest exposes of history, to shrink. A brief succession of films–Sunshine State (2002), Casa de los Babys (2003), and Silver City (2004)–continued to do well in art-house cinemas such as ours, but as Sayles recently said in a public appearance, at least on of his screenplays is still on the shelf.
All along, Sayles was also writing novels. He appeared at Newburyport’s Jabberwocky Bookshop last month to read from and talk about his latest of nine novels, Crucible. The event was billed as “a conversation” with local author, Andre Dubus III, who noted that, for all Sayles’ attention to people who have been slighted and wronged by the twists and turns of American history, he is “never didactic.” Quite a compliment for a novel that might pass as a fictionalized chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
As cinematic as his films, Crucible is an epic spanning nearly 500 pages, 16 years, a couple dozen characters, and six settings from Michigan to Brazil. To unify all of that is the Ford Motor Company, ads for which divide the novel’s seven sections while denoting the passage of time–from the Crash of 1929, through the last years of Prohibition, into the New Deal, up against one of the most consequential strikes of America’s Labor Movement, accompanied by race riots, past a mural by Diego Rivera, into labor unions, and headlong toward World War II, churning out tanks where once they made cars.
The characters are distinct and as recognizable as those we see today: a Polish family, a Jewish family, a Black family, an AFL, a CIO, members of the Detroit press, Henry Ford himself with his gun-happy henchman and his affable son Edsel, as ill-fated as the car that would bear his name. You can see the crowded neighborhoods, feel the humidity of the rainforest, hear the drills in the factory; touch the steering wheel of a Model T, smell the golabki in the kitchen.
There’s also a family named Rogan who would be dispatched from the pine forests on Michigan’s lily-white Upper Peninsula into the Amazon Jungle to grow rubber trees when the “Sage of Dearborn,” tired of paying Goodyear and Firestone for tires, thought he could make his own. In his talk, Sayles estimated that “Fordlandia” was about the size of Connecticut, but in the book he gives far more space to Kerry Rogan who we watch grow up in Brazil with her puppy-love, Flavio, each of them teaching the other their native language.
May sound like too much, but the pages may be three-fourths dialogue. The result is as fast-paced as Hemingway, though the casual, witty narrator, the jokes, the historical content, and the innovative format make Hemingway’s friend, John Dos Passos, a closer comparison. While Dos Passos employed a “Camera’s Eye” between chapters of Manhattan Transfer and his USA trilogy, Sayles’ narrator is a camera. Here’s an exchange between a young Jewish woman [Rosa] and a Polish couple [Kaz and Molly] who rescue her from a riot after her boyfriend shoved her into their car because he wanted to join the fight. Unable to drive safely into her neighborhood, they take her home for the night:
“Your father won’t be worried?” she asks.
“Not really,” says Rosa, amazed at how much cooler this house is compared to their apartment in Hastings. “I told him I’d be staying with Rick overnight.”
“And Rick is–?”
“The soldier you saw me have a fight with.”
“Ah.”
Rosa forgets, sometimes, that she is in the minority in many ways, social mores being one of them. Kaz looks amused, but Molly–
“Do you have a date set?”
“Ah—-? Oh, no marriage plans.”
Molly tucks a sheet under the sofa cushions, pulling it taut.
Crucible weaves the stories of these and over a dozen other characters into a final section that, without dictating just what their future holds, gives us the direction they are heading. Rosa will be rid of Rick. Kaz and Molly’s handicapped daughter, Sonia, will have a productive life. Mavis is far less fortunate at the morgue looking for her 14-year-old son. Flavio is a rare teenager who can speak fluent English in a third-world country. Norma wants to be a nurse whether she gets paid or not. And her daughter Kerry is on a flight back to Michigan to attend a teacher’s college:
“You are going home now?” asks the nice Brazilian lady beside her.
Kerry’s answer to that question would make a Ford owner’s manual worth slogging through. Thankfully, Sayles put it at the end of a novel rich with such moments. Much like his films.
The naming of states in Tuesday night’s Hate of the Union rant continues to nag.
Today, Doc Oz announced million$ in Medicaid to be withheld from Minnesota. Last time states were attacked by an internal force, it was immediately recognized as a Civil War. At the time, states vs. states. This time, the internal force may reach north and west with sizable minorities in the bluest states, and control of several Great Plains and Rust Belt states. But it has a solid geographical base of states once called the Confederacy.
Over a century and a half later, they may not be the same people, but they profess the same ideology that gave us slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, segregation, “separate but equal,” George Wallace, Lester Maddox, fire hoses, ax handles, and “strange fruit.” You can say that a few of those have no comparison to anything in the USA today. But you cannot say that of the black masks that have replaced white hoods while raiding Northern and Western cities to apprehend innocent people they call “illegal aliens,” the updated phrase for “fugitive slaves.” Nor can you say it of Republican bills in numerous states and in the US Congress to purge rolls of registered voters.
We keep saying that many of ICE’s individual actions make no sense. For instance, last night’s seizure of a student at Columbia University with no criminal record. Until we reject the absurd pretense of “law enforcement” and recognize what this actually is, we will continue to be baffled. Consider it in the same context as the Reign of Terror across the South from the end of Reconstruction well into the 1930s, and everything ICE has done–including murder, including taking five-year-olds in bunny hats from their parents, including the jokes about the number of bullet holes one could pump into a day-care teacher–makes perfect, if perverse, sense.
Problem is that we are well past the start of Civil War II, and only one side knows it, understands it, talks like it, acts like, and has the advantage of it. All while the other side clings to the belief that it can’t happen here.
Mouth of the River 