Oh Director! My Director!

I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.

I feel like all of us at King Richard’s Faire have been kicked in the gut, but I don’t want to assume anything, so I’ll speak for myself.

If you haven’t heard, Kitsy Olson has been dismissed. You might say, well, it is new ownership, and so they have the right, and they should call the shots. I wonder if they know what they are shooting.

Of course they have the right to dismiss and replace any current directors. Perhaps the new owners are a young, energetic cadre, all of them artistically inclined, and one wants the position of Entertainment Director. This is understandable, even admirable, and unquestionably legal, but none of those makes it right.

What’s right is that King Richard’s Faire has been wildly and increasingly successful in the 24 seasons I’ve been part of it. In recent years we have had the town of Carver running school buses as shuttles from the high school parking lot a mile up 58 during the last four or five weekends. We’ve had the Carver police at times begging–or was it ordering?–us to declare the faire sold out to prevent more cars from coming our way.

What’s right is that we have gained glowing reviews from print and broadcast media outlets all over New England. We have countless patrons who treasure the faire as part of their lives, who attend nearly every weekend year after year, some of them every day. With many, some of us are now on a first-name basis. Couples get married here and return to celebrate their anniversaries. Relatives of our patrons plan trips here in the fall so that they can join their families at King Richard’s.

What’s right is that the entertainment–in its variety, its energy, its timing and positioning around the realm, its offerings of surprise, amazement, and hilarity, always hilarity–has done this. Let me be quick to praise the merchants all over the realm and the gamers in their vibrant, if sometimes muddy lane. All of them have played an equal role, and they do it by their own natural knack for entertaining. Even our security guards make people laugh. Everyone from the royal court to the 14-year-old kid in chain mail carrying the banner for Joker’s Press at the end of each faire day’s parade is part of what keeps bringing patrons through the gate.

Speaking of The Gate, though I cannot claim to speak for others who work the faire, I can claim a unique view on the effect it has on patrons. As some of you know, I spend up to 90 minutes before closing each day outside the gate, facing patrons when they leave. The smiles I see, the laughter I hear, the dancing I pipe for, the praise of that day at the faire directed toward me are closer to unanimous than any reasonable person would think possible. “Come back next year,” I’ll begin to say. “Oh, we’ll be back,” they keep saying, sometimes adding “next week” or “next month.”

Only complaints are mostly the cries of toddlers who want to turn around and go back in.

Thanks to its riches of entertainment, the faire cannot be more successful than it already is, and you cannot name anyone who should receive more credit for that than Kitsy Olson.

Apparently, or at least to date, there has been no reopening of the position or any invitation to re-apply. My guess is that she was given the well-worn, null-and-void-of-any-and-all-thought, bureaucrapspeak, “We are going in a different direction.”

To go in any other direction from where this Entertainment Director has brought us–since before my audition in 1999–will be a wrong turn.

Unless there are appeals from more than one of us–perhaps less seething than I cannot help but be–this will be a done deal. Perhaps it already is, but even at that, don’t we owe it to Kitsy to make it known–right now–to the new powers-that-be what she has done for this faire?

If it was worth their buying, what do they think made it worth the price they paid?

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From the website of Stanislaus State University where she teaches in the Drama Dept.https://www.csustan.edu/people/ms-kitsy-olson

Driving in the Dark Ages

Today I was dispatched to a new customer in a very small town just over the border in New Hampshire.

Familiar with so many twists and turns of the roads of Rockingham County and thinking that Main Street had to be the only numbered highway that ran through that town, as is usually the case, I neglected to look at a map before driving there.

Yes, a map. For all I know, the van I drive likely has GPS, but I’m strictly lo-tech. I have been known to refer to myself as the last adult in America not latched to a ball-and-chain everyone else calls a cellphone. It’s not that I can’t figure it out, it’s just that I find the very idea of using GPS an admission of feeblemindedness.

Call me a cartographer. I choose the route myself.

When I arrived at the numbered highway, I saw right away that it was not Main Street. But I also saw a small strip mall that included a coffeeshop, and I was due. In I went with my map and the invoice to show a barista just what I needed to find.

But it was too busy to tie up a barista. Instead, I went to one of the few empty tables, put down my coffee and scone, and put the question out for several people sitting nearby to hear. Within moments, at least three were tapping into their cellphones, as if competing to be the one to provide the answer.

Turns out that it’s a brand new place these local folks had not yet heard of. And so they were asking me what it was, what was I delivering, and, as always in my case, Do you have any free samples? Also turns out that I was nearly seven miles off target because, when I was told where to go, I somehow missed the word “East” in front of the town’s name, and they are two separate towns.

When one of the women at the next table unraveled this, I held up my road map: “I’m from the Dark Ages.” Laughter all around, some of it from folks looking up from laptops.

Directions were so clear that I finished the trip without squinting at any signs. And my eyes were opened wide when I found myself across the street from a restaurant where my cousin and I occasionally rendezvous.

Note to self: Ask not how to get there. Ask what else is there.

When the day was done, I stopped at the Newbury Public Library to make some photocopies to send a few columns and blogs to a good friend who is the last adult in America not to have a computer of any kind. No email. No internet.

When copying and pasting my on-line writings to a Word document, I had to delete the ads. Something I’ve never noticed on my laptop here at home: The ads were for MAGA hats. Here’s the complete text:

Join the movement and make a bold statement for the future.

Imported and not made in the USA.

If an algorithm lined me up with that, then it was programmed to insult me. I’d use GPS before wearing one of those. I’d yak on a cellphone in public before being seen in public in the company of anyone wearing that dunce-cap.

Offense in these cases is but momentary. Before long I was laughing my way out the door until I noticed something by the door I had never before seen: A “self-checkout” stand.

The laughter ceased, and I was stunned. One of the very few rules I live by is that I never set foot in stores that have self-checkout. Once upon a common cause, I was a regular customer at CVS and would get groceries at Stop & Shop if I happened to be driving past it on the way home. I haven’t been in either–in any of their locations from here to Plymouth, Mass. where I spend serious time every fall–for at least ten years, or for as long as it has been since they installed self-checkouts.

But a library? Noticing a handwritten sign on the top of it, about shoulder high, I approached it:

Hi! My name is Janet

Occurs to me that many people would hear that first story and think I should learn the lesson, get a cell, and use GPS. Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut explaining why he preferred going to the post office for a single stamped envelope rather than having a supply at home.

Would the folks in the coffeeshop had that task that they clearly enjoyed, brief as it was? Would they have had any exchange with each other? Would a dozen people have had a good laugh at my Dark Ages joke? Would the new customer and, oh by the way, my employer have gained any attention? And did I enjoy it as much as Vonnegut his exchanges with the postal clerk, the woman next in line, the kid walking a dog he met along the way?

Worth noting here that Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), and a few stories in his Welcome to the Monkey House collection (1968), predict the consequences of automation. As well as noting that automation was something that many people feared in those days when it loomed as a threat to the middle class. Today, it is resisted only by unions, which themselves are becoming a thing of the past despite the glaring need for them.

Who’s in the Dark Ages now, Techie?

As for the second story, you might say, Well, what’s wrong with self-checkout? Many people want convenience. The immediate response is always that self-checkout eliminates jobs, but it goes beyond financial opportunity for X number of workers, as vital as that is. It also eliminates personal exchanges, greetings and jokes, suggestions and compliments, questions and gratitude.

Maybe I should be grateful that I happened to land at a coffeeshop with a barista and customers rather than a vending machine. And grateful that I had to go to the library’s front desk to pay for photocopies rather than sticking coins into Janet.

Hate to break it to you, but that’s the kind of gratitude that says you don’t give a shit at just how sterile the world is turning all around you.

Either that, or the way to communicate in today’s word is with statements, bold or not, written on our hats and t-shirts, free speech we pay for, made somewhere other than the USA.

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I doubt that this 1927 jalopy has GPS, but it does have a Harpo Marx horn. Photo by Carla Valentine.

Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat

In the summer of the year I turned nine, the name “Patrice Lumumba” came from a faraway place that had nothing to do with anything my friends or I cared about. But it was fun to say, and say it we did.

The year was 1960, and news on the networks and front pages of newspapers made the name unavoidable. Safe to say that all of us–parents too–heard Lumumba always described as a communist, and that was all we needed to know. He was a bad guy, and so we did not care at all when he was executed after just six months as the first Prime Minister of a Congo Republic he helped free from colonial rule.

Nor did we hear much jazz unless you count Desi Arnaz’ Cuban rhumba on I Love Lucy. But the word itself was intriguing: That’s a jazzy shirt you got on! Or, His brother jazzed up his car. Or, describing a stylish play on a basketball court: That was jazz, man! As if it, too, came from a faraway place but with an allure that had everything to do with what we hoped for.

Add those two subjects, and you get:

History with a Pulse

The new documentary, Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat, doesn’t simply explain both, it combines them. Call it history told in jazz, or American music played by global politics, there is no other film I know of that is anything like it.*

The rise and fall of Lumumba in the Congo serves as a foreground story, but the film covers–and the music plays–colonial struggles around the globe as well as the odd controversy in NYC between the United Nations and Harlem when the young new ruler of a newly independent Cuba made a trip across town to chat with Malcolm X.

When Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe on a UN table, you might wonder if he’s adding percussion to Duke Ellington’s Orchestra–even though you’ve already heard him on tape saying he can’t stand jazz.

Something else we never knew in 1960: The American wire services–Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters–agreed that photos of anyone deemed a communist by the American State Dept. would always show them scowling in anger, preferably with a stabbing finger. That list included Martin Luther King as well as Malcolm X, Castro, and Khrushchev. Reminds me of the stereotype of jazz held by those who think it’s all dissonance and unapproachable. In Soundtrack, they all show the full range of, well, the soundtrack.

A photo of a broadly smiling Lumumba, waving at the camera from the backseat of a car? American papers would have been quicker to publish pornography in 1960.

Also prominent are Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Thelonious Monk and others that toured Africa–and that the Eisenhower Admin tried to use to gain intelligence. While Khrushchev, Castro, Malcolm X, Lumumba and others railed against colonialism, the US “abstained” when it came to a UN vote. You hear the railing in the music. As for the abstention, Dizzy will make you dizzy.

Dennis Ade Peter, writing for an on-line magazine, OkayAfrica, nails it:

Lumumba’s murder is central to [Director Johan] Grimonprez’s documentary film, but it’s much more than that. Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat is a sprawling, masterful interweave of colonial cruelty, western callousness towards Africa, the singular power of music as an amplifier, the unparalleled strength and unspeakable suffering of women when everything goes awry, and the lasting, definitive impact of a failed revolution. It’s a gripping historical treatise with a distinct pulse.

Lumumba and his movement ridded Congo of the Belgians, but the mining interests and the rich uranium deposits remained. And while America’s kindly Pres. Eisenhower was publicly proclaiming Congo’s right to independence, what he was saying in private was more in tune with the Belgian mining company as well as American arms manufacturers who needed the Congo’s uranium. Much of which would be dropped on another colony seeking independence–Vietnam.

The film ends with Lumumba’s death, and so it spares us the mysterious death on UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold nine months later in a plane shot down over nearby then-Rhodesia, now Zambia. But it reminds us that, like jazz, the corporate demand for uranium plays on. Why else would it flash an array of colorful mobile devices for an instant among so much black and white archival footage?

As for colonialism, it was just twelve years ago that Newt Gingrich ran for president accusing Barack Obama of being “anti-colonial.” Call it his version of “Make America Great Again.” It was as if the Declaration of Independence came from a faraway place that had nothing to do with We the People.

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*My first rule of writing a film review: Name other films that are somewhat like it. I can’t, although some feature films have soundtracks that describe the setting as much as does the camera. In the film I recently reviewed, A Real Pain, Chopin plays Poland. But the film that first comes to mind is Nebraska, a delightfully quirky but moving art-house hit in 2013, accompanied by a Tejano soundtrack, a fusion of Mexican and Eastern European sounds that began on the Plains over a century ago.

Photo from OkayAfrica: https://www.okayafrica.com/soundtrack-coup-detat-congo-crisis/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14452174/

In and Out of Time

‘Tis the season when many of my friends and allies go up in flames over a misunderstanding that I attribute to the modern habit of scrolling through headlines and photos with no attention to any details that explain them.

Quick reactions are then posted on social media and gain immediate agreement from people who are hearing it for the first time. The case I have in mind surfaces only in December. Some years it might cough up a little smoke, but it is more often dormant. Last erupted in 2018 and it is high on the Richter Scale this week.

When I notified one poster of the mistake, she seemed to agree but did not retract the post which continued to gain agreement and generate outrage. Many condemned the national magazine targeted by the post, some comments calling it another reason to distrust what’s ridiculed as mainstream media.

I hear the Kremlin pays well for such work.

Be that as it may, here’s a column I had in the local paper on Presidents Day, 2019, which I have tweaked here and there to bring it up to date. The term “Individual-1” was the designation for Donald Trump in the Mueller Report:

Nativity of a Nation

Six years ago this week, when the editor of Time appeared on the Today Show to announce 2018’s “Person of the Year,” he explained the runner-up by saying that American presidents always contend.

Would have been more useful to explain why the president at the time, the runner-up, was not the choice.

Since the designation began 97 years ago, presidents (eight times as presidents-elect) have been named 23 times—eight of them twice, FDR thrice.*

If we allow for 1944, nine years before General Dwight David Eisenhower entered politics, the tallies increase to 24 and nine.

Only three presidents not selected since 1927 include Calvin Coolidge, whose business-of-America-is-business sent us headlong into the Great Depression, and the ultimate personification of the Peter Principle, Herbert Hoover, who took the blame.

If Time restricted the choice to a single individual, our current nightmare actually told the truth when he claimed to be the only logical choice in 2018.

More in narcissistic character, he thought it an award of approval. But that’s a mistake many make, year after year, no matter how often Time reminds us that it’s the person having the most impact—”for better or worse.”

How else could past recipients include Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin (twice), Ayatollah Khomeini, and—though not at all murderous, surely more insidious—Newt Gingrich?

Instead, Time dodged a certain wave of revulsion in 2018 by naming, as it had seven times in the past 16 years, a group:

Journalists reporting on the world’s most repressive totalitarian dictatorships. All while Individual-1 allied America with dictators who wanted to—and in at least one case did—kill them.

Another option was co-recipients: 1972 with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger; 1983 with Ronald Reagan and short-lived Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. As a model for 2018, they had 1998 with Bill Clinton and Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

Months before Attorney General Bill Barr whitewashed a damning indictment into “complete exoneration,” how did Time forego the surreal juxtaposition in 2018 of interminable tantrumps with the sphinxlike, no nonsense efficiency of Robert Mueller?

As for a group, Individual-1’s supporters had more impact than journalists who stood up to him and his blood-soaked allies.

Think of the photos: Countless contorted-faced, clenched-fisted white folk yelling from Time’s cover, signs and T-shirts laced with Confederate flags, iron crosses, swastikas, some superimposed on—and, oh by the way, defacing—American flags.

T-shirts saying “Thank You, Russia!” or showing a noose and a tree with the word “journalist” would reinforce the point. Curt Schilling might wear one while railing at the locked (to him) door of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Another T-shirt they wear like the proverbial badge of honor is Hillary Clinton’s “Deplorables,” which Time could have dubbed them, a la 2018’s “Guardians” and 2017’s “Silence Breakers” (later #MeToo). Or what Individual-1 called them the night of their neo-Nazi rally in Virginia: “Very Fine People.”

Taking a cue from an always reliable sign of the times, Time might have coined “Toxividuals,” morphing his designation in the Mueller Report with the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year, “toxic”—a selection that captured America, 2018.

Whatever the name selected or photos used, focus on the supporters of this third president of the Confederate States of America–after Jefferson Davis and Andrew Johnson–would have confronted readers with something not just in the White House, but permeating America from coast to coast.

Not a mistake to be corrected by an election or an investigation, but a modern-day mash-up of the early 20^th Century Brown Shirts, the mid-19^th Century Know Nothings, and the Flat Earth Society for centuries out of mind.

And what could be more fascinating than interviews with people who believe that coal is “clean,” that barbed wire is “beautiful,” that Finland “rakes its forests,” that teargas is “very safe” in the eyes and lungs of children, that windmills cause cancer, that Democrats control the weather and sent hurricanes Helene and Milton through red states of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina?

For a December issue, they could pose with their Nativity creches—Arabs and refugees removed, Mary and Joseph stamped “Return to Sender” in the outgoing mail, Baby Jesus kept in a private contractor’s jar by the door.

As the wags on social media say, only the jackass and sheep remain.

Third president never selected was Gerald Ford, best remembered for his pardon of Nixon: “Our long national nightmare is over.”

Too bad Ford has left us. Time would surely pick him four years from now if he could win the presidency and say it again. And most Americans, approvingly or grudgingly, would call it an “honor.”

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*American presidents selected since the 1927 inception of Time‘s Person of the Year (called Man of the Year or Woman of the Year until 1999):

FDR 3 (32, 34, 41)

Truman 2 (45, 48)

Eisenhower 2 (44 as a general leading the allied forces in Europe, 59)

JFK 1961

LBJ 2 (64, 67)

Nixon 2 (71, 72 w/Henry Kissinger)

Carter 1976

Reagan 2 (80, 83 w/USSR Premier Uri Andropov)

Bush the Elder 1990

Clinton 2 (92, 98 w/Special Prosecutor Ken Starr)

Bush the Younger 2 (00, 04)

Obama 2 (08, 12)

Trump 2 (16, 24)

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/time-person-of-the-year/

Coincidence or Algorithmism?

On Sunday, I attended an event and heard the main speaker call dedicated activist groups “small but mighty.”

I recognized the reference thanks to a diminutive villager and singer at King Richard’s Faire who often wore the shirt at cast-call before she climbed into Renaissance garb.

Made without mention of Shakespeare, “small but mighty” came near the end of the event, and so while rising to leave, I turned to two nearby friends, a married couple, and let them know. But I couldn’t name the play and guessed, Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like it. “Has to be one of the comedies.”

On Monday, my newsfeed included an ad for literary t-shirts. First and foremost was:

https://tshirthodoca.com/product/and-though-she-be-but-little-she-is-fierce-shakespeare/

Has my brain been tapped? Unnerving though it was, I laughed at the ask-and-you-shall-receive immediacy–and the exact re-wording–of what I hope is pure coincidence and passed it on to the couple. I’ve heard of opening Pandora’s Box, but I opened a Litmus Test: She worried that “someone is listening in.” His reply could not have been more cheerful: “The web heard you wondering which play it was from, and kindly gave you the answer!”

Yes, the line is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy that may qualify as the Bard’s weirdest play, spoken by Helena in act 3, scene 2, referring to her friend Hermia. When I added that, the reply was this: “Our daughter named her cat Hermia, and she was little but fierce.”

Before and after that exchange, I was drafting a column for Martin Luther King Day for the local paper. Yes, six weeks early, but I had an idea prompted by a question posed to the speaker on Sunday. Already drafting it in my head on the drive home, but up against a deadline for another project that night, I had to draft it next day.

In it, I describe and quote a sermon King delivered in Lima, Ohio. When I had a complete draft, I went clicking for emails and messages which included a friend request from a friend of a friend as often happens on social media. As always, I checked a profile before approving, and there it was: “From Lima, Ohio.”

Is it possible that the name of a place in my unpublished and unseen-by-anyone-but-me Word file was caught by an algorithm and connected via social media to a woman from that place, prompting her to send a friend request?

Nor could my remark while leaving a church be anywhere near the internet. And yet…

And yet it feels so much like other “coincidences” that should be suspected. I’m an avid, lifelong cribbage player, so it was only a matter of time before I mentioned the game in an email not long ago with my most frequent opponent. Next day I was looking at this:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1341/crib-wars

No fan of gimmicks, she was appalled, as was I. She even sounded a bit miffed that I dared send it. But I inflict it on you to make a point: As soon as I mention it, it’s known to cyber-advertisers. Unlike this week’s surprises, I had put it in an email, so I hardly noticed or cared. First noticed this 15 years ago when I reviewed a Jethro Tull concert opened by Procol Harum. I was already a member of a Tull fan group and seeing ads for their merch, but the next day I began seeing ads for Procol Harum.

I can only wonder if it was due to my enthusiasm for them, the only opening act to gain a call for an encore in the 30-plus Tull concerts I’ve attended since 1971. Interesting to note that, in the column, I made made bare mention of The Rolling Stones and The Who but received no ads for them.

And now I’m bombarded with ads for nativity scenes. When drafting my Christmas column last week about displays of refugees seeking shelter on the lawns and in the homes that fly the flag of a candidate promising mass deportations of refugees seeking shelter, I wanted to know where the figurines are manufactured.

Do the Marys and Josephs have green cards? If not, may they be rounded up and deported to Guatemala or Pakistan or wherever they may have been mass produced?

For that, I get ads offering them at bargain rates. Call it comic relief. The algorithms have no sense of satire. They’d try selling guns to a nun if the nun wrote “gun” more than once in an email.

What’s new–and what’s worrying–is that I’m now receiving ads and possibly friend requests that appear too specific to be coincidental. We’ll see what this account you are now reading might draw. If I start seeing ads for services providing encrypted text or web secrecy, I’ll ask the algorithms to let you know.

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A Return to Music

Maybe I’ve been waiting for this day.

Or this weekend that began Friday night with the annual holiday celebration at the Custom House Maritime Museum. The speeches were encouraging, greetings and introductions were cheerful, the buffet satisfying, the Ipswich Ale delicious. And the music was delightful, ranging from The Newburyport Ukulele Group playing carols upstairs to the Sea Dogs, an a cappella quintet belting out sea shanties downstairs. At times I wondered if I had walked into a folk festival.

Also singing were members of the Newburyport Choral Society. All of it very joyous, especially with a conductor who turned to laugh at us following “o’er the fields we go.” Maybe it was the ale, but while others laughed and sang, I was choking on nostalgia. With the exception of “Jingle Bells” and “Winter Wonderland,” every song they sang was in my holiday season repertoire as a busker a short distance away in Market Square.

Not only that, but Christmas carols were what taught me to play. Lacking the patience to repeat scales and arpeggios, I noticed as soon as I picked up the instrument that carols are close to scales. In fact, the opening of “Joy to the World” is a scale descending, while “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “We Three Kings” bounce half way up and down scales. Others serve the same repetitive purpose of developing what musicians call “chops” while giving a novice the satisfaction of playing recognizable songs.

That happened in Salem in the early 70s. By the time I first played Newburyport in 1982, my repertoire was mostly Celtic and Baroque, with carols reserved for December and often played with fingerless gloves. To play them any other time of year would be bad manners.

Took a while for the Chamber of Commerce to realize that busking is not panhandling, but before long they left me alone, and I thank the city’s police for gaining me that time. (In Salem it was the other way around, but that’s another story.) Since then the city and its tourists have been generous–all the way to 2019 when I last busked.

Paying jigs and reels–and vivaces and allegros–on a wind instrument can be an athletic event, and by 2019 I was no longer an athlete, if I ever was. Still, I always thought I would do it to the end. Quoting Ian Anderson, I told anyone who asked, “Death may beckon, but retirement does not.”

Little did I know that there was a third possibility for the final curtain. Covid closed my show. It was impossible to play while wearing a mask.

On Sunday, the Museum of Old Newbury hosted a duet from Gloucester called O’Carolan Etc., named for “the last of the great Celtic bards,” as the late and lamented Brian O’Donovan called him. Turlough O’Carolan was a blind harpist who traveled Ireland non-stop it seems and wrote songs for all his hosts and for whatever amused him along the way. He was prolific with compositions that fuse traditional Celtic with Italian Baroque brought to Dublin by Francesco Geminiani.*

Call it Gaelic & Garlic. Ethnically speaking, I, too, am 50/50 Irish-Italian, which is likely why I came under O’Carolan’s spell in the mid-70s. Not only have I lost count of how many of his tunes I play, I’ve lost count of how many made me think they were written for me three centuries ahead of time. That’s a comment I’ve heard from other flautists, fiddlers, and mandoliners.

While I haven’t played a carol or busked at all in six years, I’m still belting out O’Carolan at King Richard’s Faire and in Salem’s Haunted Happenings every fall. Some are in my wheelhouse, allowing me to improvise and segue into other songs. At faire, I play a few with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers in wild and wacky tempos. Others aim straight for the tear duct. For others I need the sheets, calling for a caution that can be parlayed into elegance.

And there’s at least a dozen O’Carolan songs that I tried but could not deliver in any convincing way, and so gave up. That, despite a few being among my favorites. One of these met my ear when I approached the room where Celtic Etc. was playing. When they finished, I said “Nice!” When they looked up, I named the tune, “Planxty Hewlett.”**

Those of us who play O’Carolan are taken by surprise by people who know the titles. I briefly described my connection to the music so they would be quick to play another. I hoped they might ask for a request, which would have been “O’Carolan’s Draught,” a sweet, graceful song with swagger that began every busk of mine since the Clinton Administration. Instead, the guitarist turned to the fiddler and said, “O’Carolan’s Draught.”

The room was not set up for a concert. No one was seated save for the musicians, and most people were stopping in for ten or fifteen before wandering into adjacent rooms where the music carried. I went to a wall opposite the duo and faced the window. Not to look at any traffic on High Street, but so no one would see me fighting back tears. The carols two nights earlier no doubt weakened any defense I might have conjured, but I managed to be silent, and no one was nearby.

Before long I was able to face the players and smile approval at their uptempo romps, laughing all the way along their bouncing triplets and octave jumps, all so lucid and smooth. When they finished, I thanked them for something more than the music played and the nostalgia offered.

Buskers can never be certain of a date until the date arrives, as weather always has the final say, but it will happen by the end of March that I will be out of retirement playing on Newburyport’s Inn Street Mall.

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*My first book, Pay the Piper!, includes a biographical sketch of Turlough O’Carolan.

**”Planxty” is a word apparently coined by O’Carolan to mean “in honor of” or “hail.”

Yours for just $950: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/newburyport-piper-barbara-busenbark.html

Hollywood’s Holiday

While we prepare for the holidays, Hollywood, as always will release the big-budget, star-studded films that open with Oscar-buzz.

For years you have surely noticed how many open on Christmas Day and wondered why theaters would target a day associated with family gatherings. The logic is rather simple. The industry figures that most of those families gather on Christmas Eve for dinner and song and good cheer, followed by breakfast and opening of presents on the morning of the day itself, and then there’s lunch. The logic holds that, after lunch on the 25th, people are now getting tired of each other, but it’s Christmas and they want to stay together without having to listen and respond to each other. Plus, there’s a lot of good food and drink remaining to put on that dinner table. What could fill that void better than a movie?

This year it’s a biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, that figures to meet that need by opening on Christmas Day.

From another angle, it’s saving the best for last. Or, more to the point, making Hollywood’s best efforts fresh in our minds by qualifying for a year’s Oscars in the final week of that year. This also guarantees that most of their audiences will see these films in the first two months of the next year, which takes us right to the time of the Oscar awards ceremony.

If you ever wondered why you and so many others haven’t been able to see most of the nominees before the list is announced, or even before the winner is picked, this is why.

With apologies for that, it is also why I do see most of them before a ceremony. Some, especially the hyped-up block-busters based on spectacle and fantasy, such as Wicked and Gladiator, are films that I avoid. Easy to do because they are never on the Screening Room’s menu. As for the rest, let’s just say that I’m no fan of special effects, car chases, explosives, or slackers. In a category all its own are films with F-bombs punctuating every phrase in every sentence. No, I’m not a prude, but in this case I have to say, “Fuck that!”

Last month, the Screening Room ran Anora about a sex-worker who may or may not have gotten married in one of those Las Vegas “chapels.” More accurate title would have been Annoyingra. While in the lobby that first night, I was thinking that if you took out the obscenities and the screaming, you’d have a silent film which might be called Somewhat Less But Still Annoyingra. Unable to kill the sound–which would have improved the film but prompted an audience rebellion–I, for the first time ever since becoming an SR projectionist in 1998, actually considered calling in sick. But I must admit that audiences, including men and women my age and older, praised it.

Last year, all ten nominees for Best Picture played the Screening Room. I saw them all, most of them more than once, and told anyone who would listen that all ten were worthy of the award.

Nominations are at least a month away, but I’m quite certain I have seen at least four films that will be on the list for the top award. All four are worthy. My last blog reviewed A Real Pain. Only reason I reviewed that but not Lee or Conclave or Small Things Like These is that I wasn’t able to view them until the end of their Screening Room run. Here’s three short reviews:

Academy members may pick Small Things because the story is told more visually than in dialogue, and because it is two stories. In the foreground we have a man paralyzed by his conscience and struggling to act, while in the background we see and hear scenes from Ireland’s infamous Magadeline Laundries that turned “fallen women” into slaves for three centuries ending just 30 years ago. At times, we overhear the horror even when it’s out of view, a device that made last year’s German film, The Zone of Interest, a contender.

Conclave, a thriller from start to finish, fast-paced despite its contemplative setting, will gain the votes of Academy members who favor plot twists, MacGuffins, and superb ensemble acting. Ralph Fiennes will likely gain a nomination for Best Actor, as will Cillian Murphy for Small Things and Keiran Culkin for Real Pain. That’s already a heady line-up, and we have yet to see Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. Also recommending Conclave are its parallels to the political, social, and cultural turmoil now erupting around the globe.

My favorite to date is Lee. This was Kate Winslet’s project from the start, and she finished it with a tour de force performance that ranks with the best of Frances McDormand. Really a dual performance portraying the very real Lee Miller as an older woman in the late ’70s and as a young American photo-journalist who broke gender barriers in Berlin 1944-45. Her scenes under bombardment and in the line of fire are memorable enough, but what sticks more than any are her feuds with editors who, while they want to get the story out, do not want to risk upsetting their readers too much.

Lee (Winslet) grabs her graphic photos of victims at a concentration camp: “And what about them! What about upsetting them!”

This week I heard that echoed in Real Pain when Benji cries, “Why does everyone have to be happy all the time?” The same statement describes the dilemmas faced by the coal merchant (Murphy) in Small Things and by cardinals Lawrence (Fiennes) and Bellini (Tucci) in Conclave. Whether mere coincidence or not, it’s spot on that these leading contenders for Oscars all pit the call of conscience against the love of ease. Each of these four films mirrors us, insisting that we answer a question:

For the sake of what is right, for the sake of truth, are we willing to upset the comfortable? Are we willing to upset ourselves?

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Kate Winslet as Lee Miller: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5112584/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_1_nm_6_in_0_q_lee

Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11563598/

21st Century ‘Odd Couple’

Every now and then I watch a movie that I had resolved to avoid. Such is the life of a projectionist who, at times, is too burned out to write or read as I often do.

Maybe it’s my age, but the poster and the ads for A Real Pain led me to interpret the title as a warning label. Nor was I at all curious about Keiran Culkin’s transition from child-actor into roles calling for F-bombs or a film directed by Jessie Eisenberg, the actor who played the annoying Mark Zuckerberg and starred in the even-more-annoying Zombieland.

But into the theater I went after putting the money away and locking the door. Within ten minutes there were at least ten times when Benji’s (Culkin’s) F-bombs might have sent me back out, but I love cinematography that turns a place into a character. Add a soundtrack that was all Chopin ranging from contemplative to thrilling, and I couldn’t leave the guided “Holocaust Tour” that brought Warsaw’s history to life.

Benji is the title character, relentless in his slapstick jokes and upsetting, verging on torturous complaints. Like his cousin Dave (Eisenberg) and others on the tour, I was tolerating him in the opening scenes. That includes a zany photo session Benji stages with the monument for the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 when Jews resisted the Nazis. “Isn’t that disrespectful,” Dave nervously suggests, but their fellow tourists join in one-by-one, breaking out of shells in which they appear to have been for the first time since long before the tour began.

Part of me wanted to walk out as soon as that scene began, but like the retired couple from Shaker Heights, the recent divorcee from LA, the theological student from Winnipeg, and the British tour guide himself, I began appreciating Benji’s antics and diatribes. And it’s right about there you realize you are watching and hearing an examination of the dueling roles of honesty and politeness–and between exuberance and inhibition–in personal relationships.

Writer Eisenberg (yes, he also did the script) shows admirable attention to detail, as when we hear “Shaker Heights” without any mention of Cleveland or Ohio. As much as the next bronze placard the tour members will pause to read on a sidewalk, the name evokes a memory for Americans of a certain age: Shaker Heights was the home of one of the Israeli athletes killed at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

A Real Pain never imposes horror on us, but juxtaposes it with day to day life. Anyone who saw last year’s Oscar-nominated The Zone of Interest will be reminded of the Nazi officer’s family living just over Auschwitz’ wall. Real Pain‘s scene of the tour’s visit to a gas chamber begins with a walk across flat, barren land with Warsaw far back on the horizon. Suggests the tour guide, “Imagine what it would have been like to live just three miles away while this was in operation.” Inside of “this,” we see a corrosive blue stain on the walls and ceilings, as well as a cage stuffed from floor to ceiling with shoes.

Benji is conflicted to the point of contradiction, and with Cousin Dave the film might be titled “21st Century Odd Couple.” Benji can improvise a comedy at a memorial of a tragedy, but he goes to pieces in the train taking them to the next stop. He disappears when the others blithely plan their next day. Dave finds him seated in another car. Cries Benji, “Why does everybody have to be so happy?” It’s a scene that that could have played in other award-winning road-trip buddy films from Thelma & Louise to Little Miss Sunshine and from Rainman to Nebraska.

Echos of past films and literature are rich. Before it’s over, you might wonder if you’ve just seen a modern take on The Canterbury Tales crossed with The Diary of Ann Frank and a protagonist that joins the ranks of Ishmael, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, and Dean Moriarty as all-American misfits.

Had I known that ahead of time, I’d have been as eager to see A Real Pain as I now am to see A Complete Unknown.

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https://www.britannica.com/event/Warsaw-Uprising

The tour walks into a camp: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21823606/

45 Will Look Like a Park Ranger

Simon and Garfunkel nailed it over 50 years ago: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Since the election, we’ve endured a day-by-day litany of wackos, cranks, and sex-offenders nominated (by a wacko, crank sex-offender) for cabinet positions. During commercial breaks, ACLU television ads begin with a maudlin rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” and I want to hit the mute button. How do you overcome something that has just made a comeback from having been overcome? “Overcome” is in the past, folks. Overcame R US.

Face it: Over half the electorate will believe anything that reinforces what they want to believe. So if the guy and party and news source that fan their flames say it’s a landslide, it’s a landslide.

In truth, it was a landslide. Not for one side, but for non-voters, 38% of eligible voters compared to 31% and 30% for the two major party candidates.

Here’s how my friend Helen Highwater, editor of the Saint Volcano Fallout, a monthly mag that covers the Pacific Northwest, put it:

Voters did not simply vote for Trump. Millions (compared to 2020) simply stayed away. The war in Gaza, I think, drove voters away from Harris, away from voting at all, despite the math that made their absence a factor in electing Grump (deliberate sic). Discussion of this topic, in today’s vocabulary, has been “canceled,” due to its confused association with charges of anti-Semitism. In other words, this topic is too fraught with complications for public discussion.

Harris also apparently confused Dem-leaning voters by traveling with Liz Cheney. Could Harris have let Cheney endorse her without the appearance of an embrace?

Change Gaza, Harris, and anti-Semitism to Vietnam, Humphrey, and Communism and she is describing 1968. Back then, though, Republican VP candidate and Maryland governor Spiro Agnew seemed the only clown, and a mean one at that. Now it’s from the top down: DT, JDV, RFK, Musk, Gaetz, Gabbard, Noem, Stephanik, Oz, and who knows what flame-throwers are yet to come?

She’s not alone in emphasizing the tour with Cheney as a bad move. Jon Stewart did the same on the Daily Show, which led me to regard it as the logical culmination of the Democratic Party’s bent on out-Republicaning the Republicans that began with the rise of the Clintons, plural, in 1992.

When I sent that to her, she responded:

Some Senate Rs are daring to pose questions about these jokers, but I can’t picture them denying whatever Grump (again) wants. I dread that will include RFK Jr for HHS. The next 4 years will make 45 look like a park ranger, as 47 proceeds with divine retribution, baby.

What she dreaded became true before I read the email. I offered possible explanations: 1) Rs in change of Sen & House might simply go on recess and let all DT’s fruitcakes take over, uncontested & unchecked. 2) Let congress stop the fruitcakes, then send up the serious, tactical flame-throwers. And 3) Many Ds & wanna-be moderate Rs (Murkowski, Collins, perhaps Thune) will think they can only vote against one, so they’ll nail one (Gaetz or Gabbard, possibly both) and the rest will skate. (Since that missive, Gaetz made it a bit easier for them by his withdrawal.)

As for the rest, I added, even if they screw up their attempt to end all public services and privatize everything, I don’t see how the environment will survive four years of a kakistocracy bent on serving themselves and their corporate donors. I told her of the brush fires here in the northeast corner of Massachusetts and how three of my days in Salem’s witch-trial reenactments were canceled:

So I can now put a price tag on what climate change has cost me. All while we are about to see the erasure of the EPA & NOAA, as well as a US/Russian assault on the Arctic under the banner of Drill, Baby, Drill!

Prediction: Trump will broker peace between Zelenskyy and Putin. Ukraine will keep all its land, but will stay out of NATO, with Russian citizens living in Ukraine symbolically having some rights guaranteed for Putin to save face. DT will be hailed as a miracle peacemaker, and Ukraine will be relieved and happy. Putin? He’ll start sending ships with drills into the Arctic which will be made entirely open to him.

Access to the Arctic was the primary reason for Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was mostly aimed at Hillary Clinton because any Republican would have opened it to Exxon-Mobil, and Exxon-Mobil already had a partnership with Rosneft. With Trump they struck it rich. This is why, for his first Secretary of State, Trump “selected” Rex Tillerson even though he didn’t know him. Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, well-known to the oligarchs in Russia, a place once described by John McCain as “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

The time between the peace accord for Ukraine and Russian drilling in the Arctic will be enough that the American public won’t make the connection, will refuse to believe there is a connection, or in most cases just won’t care.

Highwater joked that what’s left by a melted Arctic might be named for her, and then she drilled into the method behind the madness:

I’ve been thinking the election explanation is more haze than belief… DT emits haze, continually contradicting himself from moment to moment.

And his followers either do not notice or do not care. Worse, they do it themselves. Case in point: Fox “News” hosts praising Kennedy’s talk of America having a more healthy diet were the same people ridiculing Michelle Obama’s initiative for nutritious school lunches.

Now that he has won, and has raised his loyalty requirements, will he leave all gov biz to his underlings and go back to his golf clubs? How long with these loyal underlings last? If Rubio is fool enough to leave the Senate for Foggy Bottom, how long can he last?

Probably irrelevant if they can follow Project 2025’s plan to wreck the federal state. Drowning it in a bathtub has been the aim for decades.

Yes, that was 45’s intent when elected eight years ago, but he was too blundering, careless, and ignorant of how DC works. Today, 47 knows his way around and is too motivated by revenge to let anything slide. Take a look at the company he keeps, his cabinet picks, his advisors, his preferred foreign allies, and Highwater’s crack that 47 will make 45 look like a park ranger seems imminent.

Then again, I would have said “zoo keeper.” It is, after all, all happening here.

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Here I am again, bemused by the fact that blogs featuring useless, pointless, and irrelevant photos of me get ten to twenty times the response on social media as do blogs with pictures of the actual subject. However, the message on this shirt–numerous copies of which shirt in various sizes comprised my entire Christmas shopping list a few years ago–is an honest reaction to my expectations for the next four years, so here I am.
Photo by Herman Melville.

Dodging a Draft of 2024

For much of my adult life, I’ve been told I’m stuck in the past.

Most friends and casual acquaintances intend that as a compliment, but even when it isn’t, I agree. This past year, on top of all the time I spent in the 16th Century Renaissance and in 17th Century witch-trials, I’ve been stuck in 1968.

Comparisons of this year’s election, both before and after the results, to previous American presidential elections are easy to find. Favorites so far have been 1960 and 2000. Some have compared it to the most notorious transfer of power in Europe just under a century ago. As just did happen here, what happened in Germany, 1933, was preceded by a failed coup d’etat and the eventual rise to power of a convicted felon who led that attempt, who turned minorities into scapegoats and convinced the public not to believe a lugenpresse (lying press). For an American comparison, I’m impressed by the current (December) issue of Harper’s which makes a compelling case for 1856 as a forerunner of what we have just experienced.*

Still, my choice is 1968. Like Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden abdicated. Like Richard Nixon, Donald Trump had been elected to a national office, and then voted out. Just as Nixon boasted of “a secret plan to end the war,” Trump claimed–and still claims–he can end Russia’s war on Ukraine. Like Spiro Agnew, JD Vance was–and is–a rabid attack-dog. Like Edmund Muskie, Tim Walz was a breath of fresh air. Like Hubert Humphrey, Kamala Harris walked a fine line trying to reconcile her role in the current administration with establishing plans for her own. And just as the war in Vietnam fractured the Democrats then, the war in Gaza, the cause of campus protests from coast to coast, split them now.

Another similarity may be viewed as a sharp difference. Unlike Israel’s war on Gaza, American troops fought in Vietnam, and most of them had been drafted. After reading and hearing the history of Southeast Asia–French colonization, Ho Chi Minh’s appeal to the US to support independence, the tin and tungsten coveted by US corporations which outweighed that democratic appeal, Eisenhower’s admission that Ho Chi Minh would have won a national, north and south, election–many of us avoided the draft.

And so the slur “draft dodgers” named a target of Republicans as much as the slur “illegal aliens” has been in recent years.

Technically, I was not a dodger. With a student deferment when Nixon turned the draft into a lottery, I drew a high number that guaranteed I’d never be called, and my 2S was reclassified as 1F. But I did send one card back to the draft board in Lawrence with an invitation to “come and get me” before rolling the other into a joint to smoke with a friend and a few hippies at the Newport Jazz Festival. So I wasn’t dodging, I was doing the opposite. I was targeting. I never heard from the draft board, perhaps because my uncle was on it. And that joint was rough, but I think we all got high on the idea.

While there’s nothing like that these days, we do have dodgers. Democracy Dodgers, eligible voters who did not vote, who do not keep themselves informed of civic affairs in a nation that is constitutionally founded on public awareness and participation. In effect, they have forfeited self-governance.

Ironically, they are very loud on Veterans Day and Memorial Day when they pay tribute to those who risk their lives for the USA and our right to self-governance. Their heroes pick up guns for the country, but they can’t even pick up a newspaper. No wonder it’s so easy to convince them that newspapers are all lies.

In these three weeks since the election, many of my liberal friends and allies talk about “reaching out” to Democracy Dodgers, and the need for “kindness” in so doing. They talk in this vein even as the MAGA crowd laughs in their faces and calls all of us weak, which is what they really mean by “woke.” Meanwhile, MAGA also cheers on hatemongers eager to put decorated veterans, dedicated public servants, life-long scientists, city mayors, state governors, members of congress, journalists, health professionals, educators, librarians, anyone who opposes them on trial and in jail–at times insisting on “execution” and “death,” words Trump has used regarding outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

But Democracy Dodgers are oblivious to all of this. Nor do they want to know it, nor will they know it if we limit ourselves to the mild methods of “reaching out” and packaging our appeals in “kindness” rather than taking stands in the uncomfortable necessity of confrontation. These calls for kindness are the liberal equivalent of the conservatives’ vapid “thoughts and prayers.”

The new film Conclave turns on a scene where the conflicted, cautious cardinal in charge of the process to elect a new pope interrupts the most progressive and vocal cardinal’s urgent warnings not to let the Church “go back to the past.” He sighs, “This is not a war…” The liberal snaps back, “But it is a war! And you have to decide!”

Audiences leave the Screening Room visibly moved by the film, many of them making comments such as, “the parallels are impossible to miss.” That scene, that one exchange, is the reason why the parallels exist, and the most relevant of all to America today.

This country has just experienced a Second Civil War. One side has won it while the other side still doesn’t know it happened. But there’s a third side, bigger than each of the others, that let it happen. Some 38% of eligible voters compared to Trump’s 31% and Harris’ 30% who dodged Democracy.

In 1968, the press pointed to a “Generation Gap.” As bad as the division was, most Americans paid attention, at least enough to make democracy work. Nixon won re-election by a landslide in 1972, but his crimes and his paranoia caught up to him in his second term. It took unrelenting protests, heated and confrontational, though interim president Gerald Ford was calm, and the winner in 1976 was peaceful as you please. Jimmy Carter pardoned draft dodgers, and though some grumbled, it was hardly high on the list of reasons why he lost his bid for re-election in 1980.

Prospects for such a resolution this time are not promising. Trump’s crimes and paranoia have already caught up to him, but cases have been dismissed, dropped, at best suspended. Between now and 2026, there’s a chance for Democrats to reclaim both the Senate and the House. But fewer Americans pay attention to mid-terms than to presidential elections. And my side thinks we can wake them up by “reaching out” with “kindness”? A century ago, that would have been called “appeasement.”

Maybe I’m stuck in 1968 because the odds back then were so much better.

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*”The First Punch” by Matthew Karp writing for Harper’s describes a campaign that was:

… frenetic and bewildering, marked by… unholy alliances, bizarre and unbelievable charges that were nevertheless widely believed, dramatic events soon overtaken by yet more dramatic events and then forgotten, apocalyptic rhetoric, and a good deal of vigorous brow-furrowing…

Among those dramatic events was the unprecedented discarding of an incumbent, Franklin Pierce, by his own party, the Democrats who, instead, nominated Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, a northerner who would appease the Slavocracy–and who would be described a century later by fellow Pennsylvanian John Updike as one who:

… projected a certain vaporous largeness, the largeness of ambivalence.

The Whigs, in their dying breath as a presence in American politics, nominated a former president, crank and bigot Millard Fillmore–hence Harper’s comparison to 2024. The difference is that Fillmore didn’t win, mostly because a brand new party emerged to make its first presidential nomination, a hero of western exploration and exploits, “Pathfinder” John Fremont.

Personalities aside, the main point of the Harper’s article is that the election was held in a deeply divided country plummeting headlong toward civil war.