Play the Winning Card

If a travel agent insists that Florida is north of Maine, you don’t stay on the phone to plan your winter vacation.

Sounds absurd? Yes, but it is the level of delusion and derangement to which many if not most Republican candidates want to reduce this election.

Television ads for Republican candidates on Boston stations tell us that the Democrat running for Massachusetts governor and the incumbent US senator from New Hampshire are not just soft on crime, but pro-crime.

Video clips show riots in city streets as a voice-over trembles in haunted tones calculated to give the impression that this is daily life wherever there’s anything large enough in America to be called a downtown. All Democrats are accused of wanting to “defund the police,” no matter how much most of them–including Joe Biden–denounced the idiotic slogan as soon as it appeared in 2020.

Somehow this is connected to “open borders” with videos just as menacing.

Apply this same “logic” to baseball, and Red Sox fans could select a single inning in which the Sox exploded for six or seven runs. We could then claim that the Sox are the best team in the major leagues. A crafted video of that one inning–played repeatedly–would prove it.

But more: We could then claim “scoring fraud” to insist that the Sox, and not the NY Yankees should be playing the Houston Astros on their way to the World Series. Just look at the video! The Red Sox are constantly running the bases and scoring runs! They never make outs!

Ah, but those other eight innings! And those other 161 games!

Like videos we never see, or may not exist, of so many families fleeing violence in Central America being detained in Mexico until they can gain legal entry, not to mention others in not so dire straits who are denied entry.

Open borders? Only if truth is selective.

Both surreal comparisons dawned on me Monday night at a Town Hall meeting in the Massachusetts coastal city near me when the Republican challenger asked our Democratic incumbent US Rep why he refused to meet in a debate.

The Democrat, Rep. Seth Moulton, said he’d be willing to debate on any substantive issues, but he “will not give a platform to an election denier.”

Late that night, I posted a report on the meeting on a Newburyport social media page, and that exchange drew an immediate debate between a man who called Moulton a “coward” and a woman who credited the representative for sparing us from “unhinged” right-wing talking points.

Name calling aside, both sides of this argument have merit. A debate would further expose flaws in candidates who sow distrust in elections. However, there are basic facts that must be observed for debate or discussion of any constructive kind. Put another way, you can’t plan for the future if you don’t agree on what happened in the past and what is true in the present.

As Pres. Obama once peevishly quipped about addressing climate change, “We can’t waste time debating whether or not the Earth is flat.”

As for the name calling, the name-caller insisted that candidates “must being willing to face voters.” Well, yes, and that’s what Moulton did Monday night. As for the name called, the most unhinged remark I heard last night, from May himself and at least one supporter, was calling Moulton a “coward.”

The veteran of four tours in Iraq did not blink.

Targeting a veteran or not, cowardice is a strange charge coming from Republican candidates who deny the validity of American elections. Also, there have been at least 19 state legislatures controlled by Republicans that have passed laws restricting access to the polls.

Both of these betray a fear of voters.

Making the rounds to justify election denial is a video of Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. In it she cites election complaints made by Democrats.

All of them, from Stacey Abrams to Hillary Clinton, had reasons: Georgia Gov. Kemp did purge voting rolls, disenfranchising African Americans far more than white voters. Trump did receive foreign assistance. There is evidence of both. Whether that evidence is enough or not is another question.

Meanwhile, Republican election-deniers have no evidence, nor do they care about evidence. They can’t even be bothered to wait for evidence:

Going even further than her surface whataboutism, Lake has already said she will not accept results of the Arizona election if she does not win–an echo of Trump in 2016 when he was crying about a rigged election before he won it.

The claims prove that the aim of Republicans is not to debate or govern or engage the public in any honest, constructive way. It is to throw all elections–past, present, and future–into doubt.

If they succeed, what is left of democracy?

Omitted from all the Republican TV ads and from grievances aired at Seth Moulton’s Town Hall Monday night is any mention of reproductive rights. That’s understandable.

The Democrats seem to take the issue for granted. That’s dumbfounding.

Won’t be the first time Democrats fail to play a winning card. Michael Dukakis in 1988 didn’t touch the Savings & Loan scandal only because a few Democrats were implicated. And if Hillary Clinton had picked Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio as a Rust Belt running mate, she’d be in the middle of her second term right now.

More than one friend worries that Roe v. Wade has been lost as an issue. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s anti-choice decision this summer and the numerous state bans that followed it all seem buried under news of inflation–and we can only wonder why mainstream media barely mentions the corporate price-gouging that exacerbates it.

Still, the media will report what candidates say. To motivate voters, Democrats should start talking about price-gouging, but they should be harping on reproductive rights.

It doesn’t matter if those on the other end of the megaphone know which way to go on US 1 to land in Florida or Maine. All that matters is that they know where the polls are.

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A poster last month in Montclair, New Jersey: https://www.bluewavenj.org/roevember

Of, by, and for the Empty Seats

When I planned to attend US Rep. Seth Moulton’s Town Hall in Newburyport tonight, it never occurred to me that the opposition would show up and attempt to turn it into a right-wing rally against him.

But there they were on all four corners of a downtown intersection with their signs for Bob May, Moulton’s Republican opponent on next month’s ballot, an hour before City Hall opened the auditorium doors.

Sometime after I entered, they followed. Even May was there to shout into one of the mics passed around for questioners, so loud that I wondered if the man knows what a mic is–or if he has a severe hearing disability.

His question was why Moulton would not debate him. After stating it, he occasionally repeated it while going on and on listing right-wing talking points about “open borders” (which they are not), “sexualized education” (which it is not), and “critical race theory” in public elementary and high schools (which it never has been).

Had he stopped talking, Moulton could have answered it much sooner than he did: “I will not give a platform to an election denier.”

That may have been the loudest applause of the night, as the Town Hall was effectively scored by dueling applause. At times, there were laughs and giggles at the nonsense that came from May’s supporters, including a woman who quoted Pres. Biden welcoming anyone anywhere to cross our borders.

As Moulton pointed out, no such statement was made. When the woman insisted on it, Moulton dismissed her with the late NY Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s oft-cited: “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

That drew the second-loudest applause of the night.

The most shocking claims came from a man who condemned Ukraine and President Zelenskyy for genocide against ethnic Russians. Carried away by his own delusion, he claimed that Pope Francis had endorsed Putin’s war.

No one laughed at what he said. In fact, it was dead silence until Mouton answered: “Pope Francis has supported Ukraine.”

Must admit that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud, which set off a chain reaction. For all my years as a teacher (and as a projectionist who often watches a film in the back of a small cinema), that’s embarrassing. Maybe it was involuntary relief after the shock of just having heard a pro-Putin position expressed in Newburyport City Hall.

Near the end, Moulton kept referring to the first question, how can we make politics more civil. The congressman, a veteran of four tours in Iraq, listed instances where he has worked with Republican congressmen on issues such as China’s threat to Taiwan and support for veterans.

He did qualify his quest for bipartisanship with a rhetorical question: “How do you work with Ted Cruz? (Pause.) You don’t.”

That drew the loudest laugh of the night.

But I had stopped laughing. Instead, I was scanning the balcony where every seat was empty. On the floor were barely a hundred moveable seats, a dozen or two remaining empty. Judging from the applause, I’ll guess that May’s alternate-reality crowd was a quarter of those in attendance while the rest were either Moulton supporters or people looking to learn something.

Judging by the volume and sound of voices, you may have thought that the MAGA crowd had us outnumbered.

Before you dismiss this with the old “squeaky wheel” adage, please consider: If those are the numbers in Massachusetts, what must they be in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania? You know, the usual suspects where new voting restrictions could make them the places where democracy goes to die.

To borrow a phrase that he used when addressing the MAGA crowd at least a dozen times tonight, with all due respect to Rep. Moulton, the solution to the obstruction of congress is not in bipartisanship.

It’s in filling those empty seats and raising more reasonable voices.

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This was Seth Moulton’s last Town Hall meeting in the Merrimack Valley, over in Amesbury, pre-pandemic. I was seated in about the same place, front row, far to his left. Photo: Newburyport Daily News.

What Child Is This?

Well, it finally happened Sunday at King Richard’s Faire: A patron, a man maybe 50, 55, walks right up to me as I’m in mid-tune and asks if I can play “Greensleeves”–while I’m playing “Greensleeves.”

As a busker of 45 years, I long ago learned to play through jokes, good or bad, and insults, intended or not, with a straight face and bring a tune or an improv to a musical conclusion. As I did Sunday when the man walked away while I continued play. Hopefully, he never thought that I ignored him only because assault and battery are frowned upon in the realm

Tried to rationalize it: Maybe he was fooled by my up-tempo rendition of what is most often played with syrupy sentiment. Maybe he heard it as the carol, “What Child Is This?” and thought I was out of season.

A tune or two later, I walk away to take a break, or to “hydrate” as rennies prefer to specify, and who should be right in front of me but Dr. Gypsum Goode, the realm’s psychiatrist who wears his office as part of his garb–or “costume,” a word that rennies prefer to avoid:

Dr. Gypsum Goode, office and all, with two other clients, Lady Catherine and Lord Karen, both members of the King’s Court. Photographer as yet unknown, but I’m working on it.

So, I saunter over, not so much for advice, but to vent, something we cannot do at patrons, also frowned upon no matter how bad the infraction. Though I have witnessed Gypsum’s admirable ability to keep a straight face while bantering with patrons over the years, he laughs aloud when I unroll my “Greensleeves” grievance, and I’m cheered by his implied commiseration.

Apparently, I’m also re-energized, as I re-hydrate quickly and am back in the realm playing full tilt. All with an eye out for my daughter and grandkids who are due to show, as well as two friends from my days at Salem State during the Nixon years.

By the time I break for lunch, I figure my daughter has chosen another day to attend, but one of my friends, Ann, has shown up and agreed to join me mid-afternoon by the front gate when I always jam with the Buzzards’ Bay Buccaneers, my favorite part of the day and the one I always mention when friends or family say they will attend.

On Sunday, I sit in with them a bit earlier than usual, and before long I notice a woman, maybe 35, 40, standing and looking right at us with a certain grin. Long ago while busking I interpreted that look as curiosity about–possibly a vested interest in–the Celtic and Baroque music I play. Many memorable conversations have resulted, though at King Richard’s I learned to assume nothing out loud when I finished a piece with a flourish and a bow to a young couple while rousingly naming the composer, “Georg Philipp Telemann!”

The woman clasped my outstretched hand, and said: “Oh, I’m Sarah! And this is my husband, Ted! Delighted to meet you!”

With or without such a gaffe, these are people I am keen to impress. Between songs on Sunday, I say to Bob and Kelly, let’s play “Royal Princess.” Then, looking up to the woman, I clarify: “This is a song by the great Irish bard, Turlough O’Carolan, not for any princess, but for a ship docked in Dublin harbor with that name.”

She widens her grin and nods, which inspires clarity in every note of an emotional rendition. As we play, she moves over to the side of our bench, and when we were done, I see her standing just behind Ann. When I say hello to the woman, Ann, who hadn’t seen my daughter in 25 years, turns, looks, and exclaims, “Rachel!”

Must admit that my failure to recognize my own daughter surpasses anyone’s failure to recognize “Greensleeves” no matter how it’s rendered. Is a change of someone’s hairstyle equivalent to the change of a song’s tempo? Was I so caught in the expression of curiosity that I didn’t see the familiarity of a face?

Where was the realm’s shrink when I needed him?

We all laughed about it, and were still laughing when my son-in-law, two grandkids, three of their cousins with an aunt and uncle all rolled in from the joust. And so I was let off the hook.

Until yesterday when I learned a day late that Sunday was “National Daughters’ Day.” By that time I was back in a Newburyport coffee shop, thinking: Don’t know where Dr. Goode lives, but there’s an optometrist’s office right next door.

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L2R: My grinning daughter, Rachel Rain; Yours Unruly with amazement still on my face (plus a t-shirt I neglected to turn inside out); and Ann, Salem State Class of 1971 (identified as “Fort Myers” in previous blogs), still laughing at my befuddlement. In a previous life, Ann took a ride with me in a Washington DC police wagon, which may be why three Carver policemen are behind us trying to figure out possible extradition. Photo by Nancy Cushman Rice.

Here I am with the Buzzards’ Bay Buccaneers, R2L: Kelly Reed Hathaway on autoharp and Bob Littera on Irish bouzouki. Sometimes I introduce us as the “Buccaneer Bay Buzzards” as a plausible way to include myself. At other times, I intro myself as “the Merrimack Valley Vulture sitting in with” the BBB. Depends on my Bay State-sized appetite at the time. Photo by Nancy Cushman Rice.

Lashing Out

Among Mark Twain’s least read, least known, least referenced, least critically regarded, and never anthologized stories is a wild, raucous scream titled “Journalism in Tennessee.”*

Thought of it today when I was dispatched to Connecticut, the state with a name that contradicts itself, and had yet another spanakopita at the Vernon Diner, one of my fave pit stops just this side of Hartford.

Behind the counter where I always belly up hangs a fair-sized, silent TV broadcasting Connecticut news. Biggest story here is the trial of Alex Jones, the popular right-wing radio host, frequent Fox Noise guest, and devout Trump ally who insists that the massacre of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 is a hoax contrived by the liberal media to bring about gun control.

Who needs sound? Just as they tell us on the national cable stations, you can clearly see him–scowling face, jabbing finger–play his role of defendant as if warming up a rabid crowd at a Trump rally.

Subtitles as enraged, distorted, and ugly as his face translated the hate and mockery he kept flinging at the Sandy Hook parents, as well as his fundraising when out of the courtroom talking to the press. If Trump doesn’t run in 2024, Jones is primed to nail the MAGA vote in Republican primaries. At the very least, he’d be a well-matched running mate for the neo-Nazi governor of Florida.

Cut to the reporter at the scene, and connect to the anchor, both women with eyelashes that might make you think you’re listening to a pair of lawn rakes standing on end. Next story is an imminent nurses’ strike at a hospital in Willimantic. Another pair of upside down rakes so we can tell her apart from the nurses.

Before a commercial break comes a segment called “Trending,” popular Conn videos found online apparently. From the degradation of Sandy Hook parents and aggrieved Willimantic nurses, where else to go but 60 seconds of a dog jumping and barking (“dancing and singing” per subtitle) to the music of its owner squeezing a rubber duck?

Following the commercial break–silly ads with bright colors and people of various ages making silly faces–came a story about recent bomb threats at high schools in Waterbury, Watertown, Storrs, Canton, and Manchester, right next door to Vernon. The reporter looked like this:

Yes, Mark Twain would connect these dots only to cut deep into the heart of journalism in Connecticut. Me? I’m too content to cut apart Vernon’s spanikopita and connect it to my taste buds to do anything other than just rake it all in.

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*Mark Twain’s “Journalism in Tennessee”:

https://literatureapp.com/mark-twain/journalism-in-tennessee#:~:text=Journalism%20In%20Tennessee%20Short%20Story%20by%20Mark%20Twain,Glory%20and%20Johnson%20County%20War-Whoop%20as%20associate%20editor.

A Better Mousetrap

See How They Run is a parody of a whodunit that’s as engaging a whodunit as Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap, the whodunit it parodies.

Patrons leaving the Screening Room rate the film with laughter punctuated with single words: hilarious, wild, entertaining. The word wacky is seconded by nodding heads across the lobby.

Several sight gags force me to laugh aloud in the back of the hall, something I try not to do for fear of a projectionist being a shill, but most of the audience is laughing just as quickly, so I likely go unnoticed.

Most credit for the comedy goes to a dead-pan cast, most memorably Saoirse Ronan as Constable Stalker. While her title role in Lady Bird (2017) and many of her supporting roles include comic moments, she’s best-known and regarded as the serious actor we’ve seen in Ammonite (2020), Brooklyn (2015), and Stockholm, Pennsylvania, directed by Newburyporter Nicole Beckwith in 2015. In See How They Run, Ronan is cast so far against type that you might wonder if it’s the same person–and if it is, how can she possibly do it?*

Adrien Brody, on the other hand, appears much as he does in Wes Anderson films, from The Grand Budapest Hotel to The French Dispatch, both as a sleazy director of a planned film adaptation of Mousetrap and as the jaded narrator of See How They Run. Both roles add to the laughs, and his narration, flippant as it is, makes the parody convincing no matter how whacky it gets.

Sam Rockwell’s “world-weary” detective is modeled more on A Prairie Home Companion‘s Guy Noir than on Sherlock Holmes or anyone from the film noir genre of the fifties. His unwanted pairing with the officious Stalker plays like a parody within a parody, as if Bogart and Bacall had sailed into Christie’s Mousetrap on the African Queen with a script from the Coen Brothers.

Worth noting here, before it is mistaken for a Wes Anderson or Coen Brothers film, that this is the directorial debut of Tom George, a veteran of British TV, who, as a Minneapolis reviewer best puts it, “nails the lighthearted tone and embraces verging-on-hokey jokes in the same way that Arrested Development used to.”

Examples abound: Of a possible murder weapon, Stalker says, “That’s the ski he took in the face and I’m afraid it was all downhill from there.”

There’s also the prissy playwright (David Oyelowo) who, during a flashback, rages against the suggestion he use flashbacks: “crass, lazy and they interrupt the flow of the story!” He then huffs, “What’s next? ‘Three weeks later’?” Cut to a subtitle: “Three Weeks Later.”

For all the zaniness, it’s the twists and turns of a plot loaded with suspects whose possible motives are as diverse as apples and oil-spills that keeps See How They Run running. Think of a jigsaw puzzle that changes its picture each time a new piece is added, and rather than you getting the picture, the picture gets you.

Like Stalker, we might jump to conclusions at each incriminating hint, but in the end the pieces all fall into place. As she finally gets to see the end of Mousetrap, we realize that all our laughter at crime implicates us in crime.

Near the end, there’s a sympathy-for-the-devil moment that raises a serious ethical question regarding art based on crime that may prompt debate when the laughter dies down.

This is not at all to say that we are guilty of or should atone for anything, but it does oblige us, as characters from both Mousetrap and See How They Run ask at the final curtain, not to reveal who dun it.

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If you are anywhere near Newburyport, Mass: https://www.newburyportmovies.com/

*About the name, Saoirse: She has been known to introduce herself as “SUR-sha, as in inertia.”

An Unusual Suspect

Like all good jig-saw puzzles, The Good Boss–a Spanish film that hardly needs subtitles to convey its American relevance–offers a variety of seemingly disparate pictures that overlap until we see it all fall into place near completion.

The full picture may be grim, but the various sub-plots with their surprising twists and turns are hilarious, especially the news that the factory owner’s wife keeps forgetting to tell her husband until it does more harm than good.

Blanco, played by Javier Bardem at his best, owns and operates a company that makes scales, thereby serving as the mother of all metaphors for a man who sees himself as a father figure promoting fairness and balance for his employees–and his company as a civic-leader both locally and nationally.

But there is fishing off the company dock, and The Good Boss keeps us guessing who is the fisher and who is the fish, not to mention which fish is on which line.

Add the rich and lavish sets, and Boss plays much like a film directed by Pedro Almodovar, as does the recent Spanish/Argentinian film with Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, Official Competition. Both films attest to Almodovar’s influence on Spanish-language films.

Apart from inter-office affairs, Boss recalls The Usual Suspects if you pay close attention to how and when the word “favor” is used. As Blanco advises:

Sometimes you have to trick the scale to get the accurate weight.

The Good Boss is the only film I’ve ever seen and the only story I’ve ever heard in which no gun is ever fired, and yet a bullet drives home the point.

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https://www.newburyportmovies.com/starting-friday

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13066182/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

E Pluribus E

Got into the car yesterday to start home and heard a reporter on WBUR talking of the musical recordings of FC. Missed the opening of the story, which I assume included the identity of FC, and so the confusion I’m about to describe could be dismissed as my own fault.

In my defense, it is the nature of radio to serve an audience, much of which is on the road, getting in and out of cars at random times. Why else do they measure ratings according to morning and afternoon “drive times”? Or brag about “driveway moments”?

Since I liked the snippets of music I was hearing, the report drew my interest, and there was something satisfying about hearing that FC is a student at Northeastern University in Boston where I once taught.

Then the reporter says that “they are from Dorchester,” and I’m wondering who “they” are. Now I’m thinking that FC is the name of a group, possibly “Eff Cee,” and the reference was to one member who, back during the Clinton Administration, might have landed in my writing class.

Or maybe all of them, as I keep hearing “they” and “them” while driving out of Bradford, through Groveland, and into Georgetown. Yet, when the reporter aired FC’s answers in a pre-recorded interview, it was always the same single, high-pitched voice.

Eventually, one of those answers included the word “non-binary,” and soon after the reporter added that FC stands for “Felicia Clarice.” So it’s all explained by what is lately called “a preferred pronoun.” FC, who is one person, prefers to be mentioned as “they” and “them.”

By now you’ve heard the reasons why plural pronouns–they, them, their— should or should not be used for individual people.

Plurals have long been commonly used when the speaker does not know the identity of a person. When we say, “they ran a red light,” it is understood that the driver of the car could be he or she. This is different. This is a request–at times a demand–to use a plural pronoun when we do know the identity of the one person of whom we speak. As a consequence, journalists are expected to do this while audiences unknown to them supposedly keep track of the plural-for-singular references.

In a free and open society, those who consider themselves neither male nor female should not have to hear themselves referred to as either. On the other hand, news sources should be committed first and foremost to clarity, not to any preferences held by those about whom they report.

Lost in that debate is a third party: The English Language.

When someone says “my preferred pronouns,” they presume that a part of speech belongs to them. The error is not in the phrase “preferred pronoun,” but in the possession inherent in the pronoun, “my.” If pronouns “belong” to individual people, then logically so do nouns, adjectives, and other parts of speech. This is why it was been so easy for the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson to ridicule it.

So, too, easy-going people who support all gender rights but are always ready to share a laugh, like my editor, Helen Highwater, who says my pronouns should be “nit, wit, and twit” no matter what I prefer.

Among the sayings you may see on t-shirts and elsewhere is “Ask Me About My Pronouns.” Something crucial will be missing from any possible answer. At the risk of putting this in an uncomfortable political context, most everyone who agrees with the sentiment–or who, like me, agrees with the intent, but not the expression–is right now engaged in a contest. Round one is just two months away, round two two years from that.

Whether or not we believe in or respect non-binary genders, American elections are inescapably binary. No way around it, like it or not. One side supports gender rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, environmental protection, occupational safety, affordable education and healthcare. The other side does not. That first side bases much of its (our) argument on truth and accuracy in science, in history, in language. The second insists on myths, manipulating science, whitewashing history, distorting language.

What does it do to the first side if the second side can point at the request–now available on t-shirts–to “Respect My Pronouns,” and demand, as they will, that we “Respect Our Language”? What does it say that, in such a debate, theirs will be the most inclusive pronoun, our vs. my?

More to the point, what impression will it make on those with no connection to either side as they look for the more reasonable and comfortable choices put in the most understandable and familiar terms come this November, come 2024?

Anyone’s mere use of pronouns is unlikely to influence moderates or independent voters, but the insistent requests for their acceptance and general use cannot help advance any urgent rights or causes.

Worse than that, we will make the other side seem more reasonable, if only because they will be more clear.

Regrettably, the English Language has no more say in America 2022 than it did in Orwell’s Oceania 1984. Ironically, non-binary people are forcing a binary debate: Those for them vs. those against them.

Neither side would ever accept the existing singular, neutral pronoun, it. Nor should they, for a reason too obvious to state. Rather than argue either side of the case, here’s a proposal to satisfy both, along with the logic by which I arrived at it:

What do the words she and he have in common? The letters HE. So far, no good because this leaves us with one of the two pronouns we want to avoid. So what is there in he that is part of both she and he without indicating either?

Answer: E. Why not? We already have a single-letter pronoun. And like I, a long E, pronounced EE, for as long as you want it.

Some wise-ass, like the guy in the supermarket last week wearing the shirt that says “I don’t care about your pronouns,” might demand, ” What about H?”

Either he missed the first-grade instruction that every word has to have a vowel, or he actually thinks that while writing about how we must protect one rule–the plural pronoun–I’m going to endorse breaking another.

Be that as it may, the better reason to use E is sound. Moreover, like the word you, it will sound fluid in all three cases:

E was in the supermarket.
I ran into e at the supermarket.
I ran into es car in the supermarket parking lot.

Well, that’s what bumpers are for, but there might be another bump in that last example. Vocally, the S sounds fine following the long E. In print, the tendency might be to put an apostrophe between the two.

But pronouns are purposefully free of apostrophes, and for clarity’s sake we should keep them that way. Just as plurals should be kept plural.

I’ll be interested to hear from those whose everyday language might be altered by what I propose. Unlike that guy in the supermarket, I do care about pronouns.

Not my pronouns, not his pronouns, not your pronouns, not anyone’s pronouns, not even es pronouns, but pronouns that, like every noun, every verb, every adjective, every preposition, every article, belong to the English Language, each and every one.

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Here’s a proposal made over a year ago. Certainly preferable to the use of plurals, but the sound is unnatural, like an affected foreign accent.

Hard to imagine a grown man wearing such a thing, but I saw one last week.

Once Upon Next Weekend

Once plays the Firehouse just one more weekend. Wish I had seen it sooner so that my endorsement here could give you more time for an experience that truly is beyond categories of “play” or “musical.”

More than any other theatrical event, including the film on which it was based (a huge hit at the Screening Room 15 years ago), it recalls this line from the introduction to a book published in 2008:

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is not a painting. It is an event.

Once at the Firehouse is an event. It begins before the program tells us it starts, and it continues after we leave the hall and make our way toward the stairs or elevators. In this sense, it recalls Renaissance faires–where I will be the next eight weekends*–that begin and end outside the gates before they open and after they close.

Between times at the Firehouse, the acting and music in Once could not be more entertaining or enjoyable. So, too, innovations in sound and lighting and the ingenious positioning and movement of at least a dozen characters and all kinds of musical props.

My reluctance to offer any specifics is only to avoid spoiling any of many surprises. Instead, I’ll just say that this production of Once will be as memorable as the lines of the great Celtic ballad that it evokes:

… a time to rise and a time to fall
Come fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all
Good night and joy be with you all

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* A strolling piper at King Richard’s, Carver, Mass., weekends, Sept. 3 – Aug. 23, at the gate opening and closing.

https://www.firehouse.org/event/once/all/

First time I ever saw a cellist wear and walk with the instrument while playing. I’m at least thrice his age and have been around musicians all my adult life.

True Places Never Are

When the September issue of Harper’s appeared with the headline, “Gall-Peters Reflections,” it rang a bell.

A short entry in the monthly magazine’s “Readings” section, it was a whimsical label for seven tweets posted by a Kenyan journalist this spring to report what was happening in Western countries.

No doubt many Americans would find it insulting to hear the USA called a “banana-exporting republic… where many reject modern medicine due to Christianist superstitions.”

If it’s any consolation, America is but one of many nations north of the Tropic of Cancer in the Kenyan’s scathing sights. The “tribally-divided” United Kingdom; “disease-ridden, war-torn sub-Scandinavian Europe”; and the Russia of “Slav warlord” Vladimir Putin all combine to form what Patrick Gathara, said Kenyan, vilifies as the “Caucasian bloc.”

All of it, he tweets:

… observes holy weekend of Easter, when shopping festivities mark ancestors’ sacrificial murder of Jesus Christ, a radicalized preacher of Mideastern appearance.

A lot going on there. Holy shopping? Ancestors’ murder? Jesus a radical? Brown skin! No doubt many Americans who identify themselves as “Christian Nationalists” and the Republican Party that now panders to their paranoia would demand that such talk be cancelled–along with books that teach honest American history–all while they condemn “cancel culture.”

As many cable news and social media pundits have pointed out since the 2016 presidential campaign, this is called “projection,” accusing your perceived opponents of doing the very things you yourself do.

As a movie theater projectionist since 1998, I’m a bit leery of the term, and opt for other ways to describe defensive deceit. Whenever possible, I’ll let the matter speak for itself, as does Gathara with hard-to-argue observations such as:

Fifteen killed during traditional school shooting in separatist region of Texas, in violence-prone, far northwestern U.S. republic, where surviving school gun attacks is a rite of passage and seen as preparation for adult life in a country with more guns than people.

Even the most adamant advocates of gun-safety legislation must flinch at the word “traditional” in this context. Clearly hyperbolic, but the obvious grains of truth in it are as irrefutable as in this:

Baby-food shortage is latest blow to the troubled nation once considered a stable lynchpin in Caucasian bloc but which has now endured years of corrupt rule, political and ethnic violence, disputed polls, an attempted coup, deadly disease, and climate-related disasters.

Wait! No matter how valid, if exaggerated, we think the Kenyan’s assessment, there is one factual, geographical error: Texas is not in the northwestern US, but in the southwestern US. Or did he intend that word to mean the entire USA? Before we charge Gathara with an error, let’s consult Gall-Peters.

In 1855, cartographers James Gall and Arno Peters offered a correction of the distortion that enlarged the northern hemisphere and diminished the southern on the widely used–to this day–Mercator map.

Gerardus Mercator drew his projection in 1569 when there was good reason to allow more space for the known European countries and the about-to-be explored and settled New World, most of it on or north of the Equator. No matter what history has done to that reason, you can bet that it will remain the preferred–nay, insisted upon–map of those who have manufactured and those who believe in the “Critical Race Theory” scare tactic that helps elect and re-elect governors deep in the heartlessness of Dixie.

Put it this way: If they are going to distort and suppress history and literature, they pretty much have to insist on distorted geography. Little have we realized that the teaching of geography is itself just as gerrymandered as our congressional districts.

Attachments below show a difference in what, in recent years, has been a recurring controversy in both political and educational spheres. Do Americans and Europeans view the world with a diminished view of African and South American nations, or an inflated view of our own? Do we groom our own children with that view?

As we all know, opinions here are sharp, hot, and polarized, but no matter which side you’re on, you can see why a Kenyan could not possibly apply the word “south” to Texas and would feel fully justified calling it “north.” Geography sides with him.

Turns out that “polarization,” like “projection,” plays tricks with meanings. So I learned when I asked my editor, Helen Highwater, another Harper’s subscriber, to weigh in on “Gall-Peters Reflections”:

Calling herself “an amateur Fullerite,” she favors the Dymaxion projection of 1954 which puts the North Pole at the center. (For a pic of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion along with Mercator and Gall-Peters, see below.)

As flat renditions of a round surface, all maps unavoidably have some degree of distortion of size and/or shape of land masses. Imagine carefully peeling an orange to keep the peel in a single piece and then trying to press it to a flat surface. Dymaxion mitigates this by carving out empty spaces in what would otherwise be overly vast oceans.

What would Herman Melville say of so much oceanic redaction of his “watery world”? Answer to that may be the line in Moby-Dick where Ishmael tells us of Kokovoko, a South Pacific island that “is not down in any map. True places never are.”

While Dymaxion is more true to size and shape than Gall-Peters and Mercator, it is wildly disorienting regarding direction. Ditto a comparison of it to projections favored by National Geographic–Robinson of 1963 and Winkle tripel of 1921–which curve all four corners and correct Mercator’s distortion at the Equator (both also below).

To plan a trip with Dymaxion, you would no longer draw lines, but curves. The words north, east, west, and south would have no bearing, although you could use “north” to mean “center,” and “south” to mean “perimeter.” How could that possibly be helpful?

Here’s how:

With the Arctic melting away and shipping lanes already starting to open, Dymaxion could prove the most practical of all, especially to oil companies. Environmental writer Rebecca Solnit nailed this about five years ago when she wrote in Harper’s that Putin’s main motive to interfere in our 2016 election was not so much to elect Trump as it was to elect any Republican who would ease the sanctions that followed the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Those sanctions limited where Gazprom, Novotek, and Rosneft could drill in the Arctic. Moreover, Russian oil companies would gain four years of American refusal to approve any United Nation attempts to protect the Arctic.

Anyone who has paid any attention to news from Moscow in the ten years since Putin became president knows that he and his oil industry executives form an oligarchy that controls the country. As the late Sen. John McCain told CNN in 2015:

Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. It’s kleptocracy. It’s corruption. It’s a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy, and so economic sanctions are important.

Since sanctions are based on an expected result, we turn from geographic to economic projections. With a chuckle at how Dymaxion in 1954 indicated mean low annual temperature with colors, Highwater writes:

I have not studied why that scheme was given priority. Is it conceivable that mean low annual temp is the glue that bound civilizations (and capitalism) together (up to and including 1954)? In 2022, we might be more interested in mean high annual temperature.

“Might be”? She’s a master of understatement:

Seems to me humans as trend-observers will default to extending whatever trend they perceive at the moment that seems to deviate from the norm, rather blindly projecting that that trend will continue, unstoppable. Economic trend analyses seem especially prone to this, with the result that inflation is almost a kind of self-fulfilling phenomenon. When these trends follow novel paths, the economists resort to inventing new terms (e.g., stagflation), as if there must be a limited number of scenarios, rather than admit that the models are all impossibly simplistic.

We, especially policy-makers, hate admitting that random events will have (unpredictable by definition) effects. We might have better policies some of the time if we designed them with the help of the I-Ching or a coin toss!

So much for projections. Whether economic or geographic, psychological or political, they are all in play. This is why a Kenyan journalist has as much credence as anyone else at projecting a vulnerable developing nation’s view on industrial superpowers and military might. And why he can write about America being “a stable lynchpin” in the past tense while putting “Caucasian bloc” in both past and present.

Me? I’ll keep my projections on the big screen. Maybe Gathara will show up someday, and we can talk about a rectangle that never changes any sizes or shapes on it no matter who the projectionist is.

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https://open.lib.umn.edu/mapping/chapter/7-lying-with-maps/

https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/170723246891/mercator-vs-gall-peters-projection

Dymaxion Map

https://www.worldatlas.com/geography/world-map-robinson-projection.html

https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/map/projections/winkel-tripel.htm

Dropping Bluebird’s Mic

When the sound check with the lights still up morphs into the opening act, you know you’re in for something memorable.

Don’t know if Joe LeBlanc does this every month at the Bluebird Invitational Mic Night in Georgetown, Mass., or if he even does it consciously, but it works wonders to put a collection of ten or twelve performers in this new and unique venue at ease. The transition was so detailed–with guitar used as percussion and momentarily put on a loop–that each member of the audience could decide just when the show did, in fact, start.

His test, test, test as soundman was fascinating by itself, enabling him to jokingly hush the audience before strumming and singing Elton John’s “Rocket Man” as I’ve never heard it before, a soulful appeal to attend what comes next.

Making the familiar sound new introduced Bluebird’s co-hosts, Alyce Underhill and Lynne Deschenes, who initiated Bluebird’s monthly offerings in this second floor atop a small firehouse just north of Georgetown center.

All acts are local, and the first–John Hicks on guitar and Madeleine Downs shifting from violin to viola–got Bluebird off to a racy start with sets of Celtic jigs and reels. Hicks introduced one as “where I get to play my favorite instrument” and promptly sat in the audience where he tuned his ears to Downs’ endearing rendition of the traditional, “Down by the Salley Gardens,” named for William Butler Yeats’ love poem.

Composer Dianne Anderson followed on keyboards with “a piece from the Great American Songbook” that had the nostalgic feel of a Great Plains soundscape before playing her own “What to Wear” accompanying singer Anne Grant. The duo then torched Loren Allred’s “Never Enough,” a title that couldn’t be more American or up to date.

Underhill herself delivered a rapturous rendition of “The King of Rome,” a ballad by Dave Sudbury based on a true story about a carrier pigeon sent on an impossible journey that had us so enthralled we awaited the bird’s return through the Georgetown firehouse’s open windows.

Late in the show, Audi and Peter Souza evoked the working maritime days of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia with traditional songs that ranged from jolly-ho chanty to plaintive lamentation. Most moving was Cyril Tawney’s ballad, “The Oggy Man,” about food vendors selling oggies–something of a meat-pie shaped as a turnover–on the docks before the arrival of fast-food chains:

Well the rain’s softly falling and the oggy man’s no more
I can’t hear him calling like he used to before
As I pass through the gateway, I heard the sergeant say
The big boys are coming now, see their stand across the way
And the rain’s softly falling and the oggy man’s no more
The rain’s softly falling and the oggy man’s no more

Spaced among the musicians, two poets shared the mic, the first, Jac-Lynn Stark who ranged from wistful poems about love and aging to a blithe romp about gardening titled, “My Life as a Zucchini Sex Facilitator.” As one who never tended a garden, I found myself paying attention to the act for the first time in my life, only to wonder how long it will be before I plagiarize the line about sautéing.

Poet Lee Moss mixed an adamant resolution regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine with several ironic takes on everyday life, including his hilarious and equally stunning “Redial,” in which, out of pure curiosity, he dials–or punches in–his deceased Father’s cell-phone number. Whether you are hi-tech or neo-Luddite, you laugh at satire that cuts both ways.

Along with music and the spoken word, Bluebird features musicians playing instruments rarely seen or heard apart from period films. Filling that role were Adrienne Howard on hurdy-gurdy and Emily Peterson on concertina–both taking turns on fiddle. When they were done I tried to recruit them for King Richard’s Faire, but it’s too late for the season that opens Labor Day weekend. Keep your eye on listings of local coffee shops and perhaps an ear out at Beverly Depot where they sometimes perform.

And keep your eye and ear on all the venues for live performance throughout Essex County, from Newburyport to Lynn and from Lawrence to Gloucester. Coffee shops, bars, cafes, churches, schools, train depots, pedestrian malls are where you will find those who perform at The Bluebird Performance Venue in Georgetown.

There was one other act, but I should perhaps recuse myself from reviewing myself. So I tack this on as an optional sequel:

Had I any sense, I’d have begged off until the November show when I’d be fresh off the eight-weekend run of King Richard’s. But it was a great advantage to be scheduled next-to-last, and a patient and kind audience kept laughing at the good natured jokes I was able to poke at most everyone before me as a way to offset the rust.

Most were of the had-to-be-there variety, such as when I hinted at what the last lines of Lee Moss’ “Redial” implied about someone who never has and never will own a cell phone. That may have been the second-loudest laugh. He laughed, everyone laughed–except me.

Since I was asked to talk about my life as a street-performer–40 years ago this month I first played in downtowns Newburyport and Salem–I read a short piece from my book, Pay the Piper!, a street scene that captures both the joy and challenge of busking in America today titled, “Slip-Jig for Flute & SUV.”

I filled the back of the SUV with “zucchini awaiting sautéing.”

Bluebird’s September and October offerings are featured performances, full shows:

Sept. 10, 7pm — Unlaunch’d Voices: An Evening with Walt Whitman, a one-man play written by Michael Z. Keamy and performed by Stephen Collins.

Oct. 8, 7pm — Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards, an eclectic duo with an eclectic assortment of instruments for songs both serious and humorous.

In November, Bluebird will resume its Invitational Mic.

http://thebluebirdperformancevenue.com/

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Cast cast in (approximate) order of appearance: