Last Straw Ballroom

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.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/peopleandplaces/new-white-house-ballroom-renderings-released/vi-AA1NjoNz

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.

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Variations on a Birthday Wish

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.

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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.

Mr. Oscar for Mr. Nobody

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.

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Old Gaol, Old Golds, & Old Gail

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*.

From the street: https://ppreservationist.com/the-old-gaol-in-newburyport/

There are three structures on the site: https://ppreservationist.com/the-old-gaol-in-newburyport/

A ‘Doctor’ on ‘Dr. Oz’

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.

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Dinner is served! The men in charge of American health.
https://newswav.com/article/rfk-jr-shares-bizarre-pic-with-lizard-russell-brand-and-shirtless-dr-oz-A2502_m3FFEo

History Pulled Taut

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.

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https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000626/

War Between States II

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.

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https://ballotpedia.org/Gubernatorial_and_legislative_party_control_of_state_government

Call It ‘Hate of the Union’

Five quick points to make about last night’s address. In no particular order:

1) A strong indication–if not an outright announcement–of a plan to replace the income tax with tariff revenue. Sort of thing the MAGA crowd–and I fear others–will fall for.

2) The claim that Memphis, New Orleans & DC are safe & clean while never mentioning Minneapolis, followed by naming California, Massachusetts, & Maine as next up. State names, but we know he means cities. LA Olympics, 2028 will serve as a pretext. Sue Collins will gain praise and credit for Maine (a lot of Somalis in Lewiston) being spared in an attempt to keep her seat Republican. Mass (i.e. Boston & Cambridge) hardly needs a pretext, as the MAGA crowd hates us more than anyone.

3) Not a single mention of Epstein, even though it was well-known that survivors were in the gallery. If you don’t make him look good or if he can’t attach himself to your success–say an Olympic gold medal–while you smile at and cheer along with him, you do not exist.

4) Most glaring was the way he smeared Somalis. As ugly as the charge that Haitian immigrants eat dogs and cats, the most malignant claim in his thoroughly malignant 2024 campaign. Anyone who hears that and still say that nothing today can be compared to the movement that swept Germany in the 1930s is looking for an excuse not to think, nothing more, nothing less, nothing other.

5) The constant smirking 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.

No wonder the ringleader’s top two assistants didn’t keep a straight face. Not that they couldn’t, but that they were there behind him in the frame of the camera to literally rub our faces in the farce and fraud by adding to the stimulant. What better to do that than smirk?

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Postscript: Turns out they did reveal what they really thought:

https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/2025/03/jd-vance-and-mike-johnson-caught-on-hot-mic-before-trump-speech/

A Storm of Nostalgia

After so many winters of slight reminders, a reasonable facsimile of the legendary Blizzard of ’78 has finally buried New England.

In recent years we may have wondered if we would ever see a real winter again. We have to go all the way back to Snowpocalypse of 2015 for any serious challenge to 1978, but that was an accumulation of four blizzards in 17 days.

So many reports of power outages, downed trees, snow drifts blocking roads as soon as plows can clear them, even a few plows spinning into ditches, something of which I never heard, along with claims from Rhode Island that the accumulation tops that of ’78, setting the Ocean State’s all time record for a single storm–all of that was waiting for me before I logged in this morning.

Which had to wait before power on Plum Island was restored. I knew it was out only because I was up late enough, reading until I became drowsy, to have the light turn itself out. Mid-sentence, too, how rude! Having just watched Jon Stewart, I knew it was just past midnight. I looked out my window facing northwest over the marsh toward our one and only road to the mainland and saw a line of yellow and red lights flashing about a half mile away. Utility vehicles. They were already on it, so all I needed to do was get under as many covers as I have.

When I awoke before 8:00, quite early for me, I was surprised and a bit concerned that the power was still out. But I was grateful that I had ground enough Colombian yesterday that I needed no grinder this morning. I took the cup and French press to bed, put on two shirts, and got back under the covers, found the syllable where I was interrupted and settled in. Twenty pages later, I heard the heater kick in, and noticed that the light behind my bed was on. It was 9:15.

Nine hours may be the longest power outage I’ve ever experienced in my 42 years on this wind-swept, wave-beaten North Atlantic sandbar. But if I managed to sleep through eight of them, it really shouldn’t count. At best, a minor inconvenience compared to what friends and family south of Boston are still living through, wondering if they have enough oil for their generators, or when they might find someone able to remove the downed pine tree blocking the driveway, or if insurance will cover the smashed taillight on the Toyota. With next-door neighbors, a couple of my daughter’s generation, clearing our shared driveway, as well as clearing my car’s windows with their brooms, I might even feel a tad guilty for having it relatively easy.

But I did suffer one unnerving bit of news. Not at all personally, but– Psychologically? Philosophically? Whatever it’s called, it was demoralizing to hear that the Boston Globe did not publish a print edition today. Yes, I know that we are hurtling headlong down a hands-free highway that is all on-line, but I still hope to travel the back-roads of newspapers with all of their scenic views and serendipity to my final rest stop.

That’s no doubt why I drive this Lenovo slowly. However, I now hasten to offer a memory stirred by the Globe‘s decision to sit this one out. One that allows me to relive better days and revel in nostalgia.

During the Blizzard of ’78, clips of the Globe along with others from the Boston Herald, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, the Haverhill Gazette, the Salem Evening News, and a full pull-out section of the Manchester Union Leader were sent to me in Bismarck, North Dakota. That’s right, I missed it, but never have I received so much mail, most of it requiring extra postage, some in packages.

A grant-writer for the United Tribes of North Dakota, I found myself in occasional contact with the Bismarck Tribune, and befriended several of its reporters. Not long after my Prodigal Son return to Massachusetts, one was hired as editor of the Grand Forks (ND) Herald and one by one hired the rest to join him in that vibrant college town on the Minnesota border not far south of Winnipeg. In 1997, the Red River flooded, ruining downtown with electrical short circuits that burned down the Herald building. But they put together a paper, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press produced it for them. Their effort won them the Pulitzer for community service.

Granted that 29 years later, the Globe‘s audience has access to the Globe‘s website, as well as more websites than they could click for as long as they could handle their caffeine. While my friends in Grand Forks were providing something that would not have been there at all, the Globe knows that what it did not print was still available to most.

Most? I thought the whole idea of diversity, equity, and especially inclusion was for all.

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My friends won the Pulitzer and all I got was this T-shirt. On the left of the blue line atop the paper’s name, are the date, April 21, 1997, and the price, which for this issue was changed to “Free.”
The three headlines you probably cannot read are: “Another day of lost battles, and embers of hope,” “A heart destroyed,” and “Mayor inspires GF as dad, 92, evacuates farm.”

The back. First word is “Through.” Last word is “Delivers.”

America’s Case of the Clap

Surrounded by whitened windows through which I can barely see the shrubs where the wrens and the bluejays play just five feet away, I might be grateful that I have no choice but to focus on a subject I’d rather ignore.

The tell-tale beep-beep-beep of a utility vehicle penetrates the howl of wind, which I take as a warning that my power could quit on any given keystroke, so I better say what I have to say as quickly as I can.

The subject: The State of the Union Address is scheduled for tomorrow night. As far back as John Kennedy when I first became aware of the nature of participatory governance, I’ve regarded this annual event the way Catholics regard holy days of obligation.

Never mattered what I thought of the president giving it. In fact, it seemed more important to keep track of what Reagan and the Bushes would claim than what Carter or Clinton would explain. As the trial lawyer for the Chicago 7, William Kunstler, told us back in the Nixon years: “We need to keep abreast of evil.”

Many Democratic senators and representatives say they are going to boycott, but you can bet they’ll be pouring through summaries Wednesday morning. Many progressives, liberals, and friends who still consider themselves conservative–but are alienated by the MAGA-Republican Party’s nihilism and corruption–say the same, and I don’t blame them.

If anything, I envy them, but for me it’s an addiction. At least if I’m going to continue writing political commentaries, and are not those commentaries among the commentaries they’ll seek on Wednesday?

All that said, none of this means that I am obligated to provide one. For starters, I would never attempt a summary of a full speech, especially one made by a barking, babbling, incoherent, cruel, scrambled-brained, endlessly repetitive, fitfully flippant fool. My self-assignment is always to find an item that may otherwise go unnoticed, and at times that has not been in the speech, but in how it was received.

Spin the clock back 34 years, and my State of the Union report was a call to ban the applause made by members of one party after every statement made by a president of their party. This not only significantly prolongs the speech, but robs it of continuity and coherence. Of course, that will be doing this anti-literate sleaze a favor, but it taxes the listener’s patience, and in 1992 it near knocked George H.W. Bush down for an eight-count.

Parroting the Republican lie about universal health care, Bush mentioned a Canadian suffering for weeks while awaiting an operation, and then ended the sentence. And right on miscue, enough Republicans were on automatic pilot that loud cheers filled the hall. Bush, to his credit (although to his disadvantage), was not on automatic pilot, Visibly confused, he stepped back from the microphone and furrowed his brow as laughter overcame the cheers. Then, as if remembering where he was, he chuckled and continued speaking.

Too bad the local newspaper’s electronic archives do not reach that far back, but the column is included in my collection, Once Upon an Attention Span, under the headline, “Suffering a Case of the Clap.”

As for tomorrow, this clown’s severe case of non-stop verbal diarrhea combined with the slavish worship of a political party-turned-personality cult, the State of the Union should be ripe with such moments. (Ripe in both senses of the word.)

Wait, you may say, wondering what happened to my claim in the opening line that I “have no choice but to focus on a subject I’d rather ignore”?

Picky, picky! What you missed is that I never ruled out changing the subject to something on which I’d have no choice but to focus. So there it is, along with one of the blue jays that’s frequented that shrub outside my window all winter, perhaps looking at the picture of another on a Christmas card sent by Cousin Janice a couple years ago.

The utility vehicle? The beeping stopped not long after I mentioned it, right about when someone posted on Facebook that one of the utility poles along the Plum Island Causeway, the one and only link we have to the mainland, was bent about 45-degr——-

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