http://daveshiflett.com/news.html Dave Shiflett: News Jannis' PHPRss class - http://www.jannis.to/ Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:22:12 -0700 http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#78 (Bloomberg) Does hemp get horny?
It appears so, and some marijuana plants may pine away for humans, according to “The Botany of Desire,” a fascinating film airing on PBS Oct 28 at 8 p.m. New York time.
The film takes a “plant’s eye” view of the relationship between humans and marijuana, tulips, apples, and potatoes. While we might think we’re in the command position, author/host Michael Pollan makes a good case these allegedly passive partners have seduced us into doing their bidding by appealing to our desires for intoxication, beauty, sweetness and control.
“They’ve been using us,” he says and by show’s end you’re likely to agree.
Apples originated in Central Asia, and in the beginning there were thousands of types, though most were very bitter. Sweetness, says Pollan, was their ticket out of the forest.
Bears ate the sweetest and excreted their seeds in ever-expanding horizons. Humans eventually took a bite and were hooked, exporting apples down the Silk Road to Europe and later America, where they found an evangelist in the person of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.
The Appleseed saga underscores the love-hate nature of these relationships, Pollan explains. It wasn’t long before Americans started using apples to make hard cider, the go-to drink for children and presidents alike. John Adams started his day with a couple of belts and by the 1830s chronic cider intoxication had become a national menace.
Suddenly, apples were seen as evil, but it was too late. They had used humans to get out in the world and left them with a hangover.
Pretty smart for an allegedly dumb piece of fruit.
Tulips, which also originated in Central Asia, seduced humans by gratifying our desire for beauty. Like Helen of Troy they drove some people entirely nuts.
During the “tulip mania” of the 1630s Dutch investors paid the equivalent of a contemporary Manhattan townhouse -- which Pollan values at $10-$15 million -- for a single bulb.
Like all investment bubbles this one finally burst, unleashing a wave of tulip hatred symbolized by a mad professor who roamed the streets with a stick, beating the scapegoats to shreds. Yet the love of tulips, and other flowers, is very much with us today, symbolized by the Aalsmeer Flower Market, housed in a building bigger than 200 football fields.
The section on marijuana reminds us that plants with intoxicating qualities will always find suitors, even though the relationship can land them in prison.
It wasn’t always that way. In the 19th century Americans legally used cannabis to combat labor pain, asthma, and rheumatism. Eventually the war on drugs drove growers indoors, where they created a strain of pot with a mind of its own. One planter, whose identity is withheld, says that when his partner is gone for a few days, “the plants know it” and they “don’t do as well.” Even weeds get the blues, it seems.
Like humans, they can experience a romantic rising of the sap. When male plants are removed from the growing area ”sexually frustrated” female plants excrete large amounts of resin, apparently in the hope of attracting male spores.
The final segment features potatoes, first cultivated in the Andes 8000 years ago. They seduce men by giving them control over hunger, though this can be illusory.
The Irish developed a dependency on one type of potato — the Lumper — which was wiped out by an air-borne blight in 1845. One in eight citizens died as a result.
We are creating a similar “monoculture,” the film warns, because of our French fry infatuation. Americans consume 7.5 billion pounds a year, many of which are produced from the Russet Burbank. The film stresses the importance of diversifying the crop and the health benefits of organic farming.
Pollan is a thoughtful and engaging host, often reminding us that plants really don’t have minds or agendas. It just seems that way.
There’s little doubt who’ll have the last laugh. One reasonably assumes tulips will be dancing in the sun long after the human race has converted itself to fertilizer.]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#78 Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#77 (Bloomberg) — New York’s Garment District is being buried in a cheap Chinese suit.
That’s the word from “Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags,” which airs on HBO Oct. 19 at 9 p.m. New York time.
The garment industry was New York’s biggest employer in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the documentary. Today, most of those jobs have gone overseas, many of them to China.
The schmatta (Yiddish for “rag”) trade is very ragged indeed.
Yet the 90-minute film is fairly lively, considering it’s basically a long obit for the industry, whose fate is told in this statistic: In 1965, 95% of American clothing was made in the United States. Now, only 5% is made here.
The show begins with a look back at District’s origins. It was basically an Italian/Jewish endeavor, says Joe Raico, a fabric cutter and union official with 43 years in the trade. He’s taking a buyout because things have gotten so bad, though in the beginning they were even worse.
Lisa Nussbaum tells the story of distant cousin Sadie Nussbaum, who shared a Lower East Side apartment with 11 people. Conditions were “horrendous,” she says: no heat or running water plus long tedious days at very low wages.
Director Marc Levin illustrates the era with a still photo of children playing beside a horse lying dead in the street. This isn’t the only corpse we see.
Sadie Nussbaum was among 146 women killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A photo of victims’ bodies lined up for identification is heart-rending and finds a modern counterpart near the end of the film.
The Triangle fire outraged New Yorkers. Some 100,000 marched in the funeral procession while 400,000 lined the streets. The fire helped spark the modern American labor movement, whose early leaders, including Sidney Hillman, would eventually wield great power in New York and Washington.
In its heyday the district was vibrant and raucous, its sidewalks full of fast moving dress racks and its offices full of cigar-smokers and hot-tempered bosses. “I was a screamer,” admits Irving Rousso, who owned sportswear giant Russ Togs.
Other featured insiders include Fern Mallis, creator of Fashion Week; designers Isaac Mizrahi and Anna Sui; Julius Stern, first president of Donna Karan Inc., and Sigrid Olsen, whose company was bought in 1999 by Liz Claiborne Inc., who shut it down in 2008 and laid off all its workers, including Olsen.
The industry’s decline is blamed on automation, deregulation and “free-trade agreements” championed by Republicans and Democrats. We see Bill Clinton hailing NAFTA as a boon though one U.S. worker has a different take: “How do I compete with someone who makes five dollars a week?”
If workers were getting the shaft, designers such as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Halston became gods, according to Stan Herman, famous as the “People’s Designer” and a five-decade fixture in the industry. Nancy Reagan is hailed as a worshipper in chief.
Levin gives the beautiful people plenty of face time but never turns his back on the people who actually make the clothes. He revisits the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, in which Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee accused her of using sweatshop labor to produce her clothing line.
“How dare you,” she sputters during a televised rant, though she changed her tune after sweatshop conditions were publicized. This segment features footage of exhausted children asleep at their sewing machines and a chicken that’s even skinnier than a Ralph Lauren model.
The film ends with a look back at a 2000 fire at a Bangladesh garment factory that killed over 50 workers, an eerie replay of the Triangle fire. Kernaghan predicts other casualties as outsourcing expands: “Wait till the thirty to forty million white collar jobs start going offshore.”]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#77 Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#76 Ralph Stanley, the hillbilly (his term) musician best known for his 2002 Grammy-winning rendition of "O Death" in the Coen brothers movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?," may be 82 years old and play songs nearly as ancient as the southwest Virginia hills where he was born (and still lives). But after all these years his tongue is still sharp, as he shows in "Man of Constant Sorrow," a memoir that may send some cowboy hats spinning along Nashville's Music Row. Dr. Stanley, as he likes to be known—the doctorate is honorary, from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn.—dispenses a few lashes along with his rollicking account of 60 years as a banjo-picking bluegrass performer, though none will do lasting harm.

Born in Dickenson County, Va., on Feb. 25, 1927, Dr. Stanley came up hard. He describes a Christmas when all he got was an orange and a handful of rock candy. In 1939, his father bolted for a younger woman and "never even said goodbye."

Career options were as stark as his home life, basically limited to working in the coal and timber industries. "If you didn't go digging you'd be out logging," he writes. "They'd get you one way or the other." Death lurked in the mines. "I had asthma and figured I'd smother down there." Music seemed a safer option, though as it turned out the trade also had a pretty high body count.

He and his older brother, Carter, took up music together, with Ralph playing a used banjo and Carter learning how to play a $3.45 guitar from Montgomery Ward. Thus began a partnership that would last for 20 years. The Stanley Brothers performed in local lumber camps and wherever else they could land work. They took off for a few years while both young men served in the military—Ralph enlisted two weeks after graduating from high school in 1945, World War II already over. When the brothers reunited onstage, they got a break when a Norton, Va., radio station gave them a daily show, sponsored by Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

The life of a traveling musician is hardly glamorous in Dr. Stanley's telling. He writes (with help from Eddie Dean) of occupational hazards such as knifings, shootings, surly club employees and low-paying gigs. Another hazard, encountered in the 1950s: a fellow named Presley.

"Elvis just about starved us out," Dr. Stanley says, recalling how country-music records and performance opportunities plummeted with the advent of Presley and rock music. "We got used to eating a lot of Vienna sausages."

Yet the biggest scourge was liquor. Alcoholism killed Carter Stanley at age 41. He died in 1966, hemorrhaging so badly on the way to the hospital "that when they opened the back door of the ambulance, there was blood running out onto the ground." While not making excuses, he mourns that his brother died "a poor man" who "never did give up on the dream that finally done him in."

More ravages of alcohol among Dr. Stanley's bandmates: Singer Roy Lee Centers was pistol-whipped and shot to death after a booze-fueled argument, and another singer, Keith Whitley, died of alcohol poisoning at age 34. Makes the Grateful Dead sound like a junior-varsity outfit.

For all that, the author has mixed views about distilled spirits. "Now some might say the gospel and liquor don't go together," he writes, "but they can work fine if you know the proper amounts." He insists that while he was behind the wheel on long nighttime drives, singing hymns while slowly sipping Jack Daniels helped keep him awake "and probably saved us from many a car wreck." Sage advice perhaps, though likely to get him on the MADD watch list.

He takes a few jabs at Nashville, reminding us that Music City has turned its back on legends such as George Jones. The "younger crowd would rather us old-timers go under the wheels of our tour buses and be done with it." The good doctor could have cut a lot deeper without fear of being charged with malpractice.

On the sunny side, the success of the "O Brother" movie soundtrack, which producer T-Bone Burnett heavily stocked with mountain music, strikes Dr. Stanley "as proof people are craving our type of country music, and when they get a chance to hear it, they can't hardly get enough of it."

Dr. Stanley has other passions. He ran for clerk of court and commissioner of revenue in Dickenson County a few years ago, but says his efforts were undone by party shenanigans. He's proud of his membership in the Masons, whose ranks, he notes, have included Harry Truman and Colonel Sanders. And, after a lifetime of singing hymns, he got himself baptized at age 73.

But first and foremost, Dr. Stanley is a traveling musician, still logging 100,000 miles a year with his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys. If he burns a few bridges with this book, there's little doubt that he knows a back road or two that will take him safely home.

—Mr. Shiflett is a writer and musician in Virginia who posts his original music at Daveshiflett.com]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#76 Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#75
Steinway pianos, very much at home among black ties and tails, happen to hail from a decidedly blue-collar neighborhood.
“Note by Note,” which aired on PBS Sept. 14 and is available from filmmaker Ben Niles, follows the creation of Steinway concert grand L1037 from its humble origins in a Queens factory to the Steinway & Sons showroom at 109 West 57th Street, staging area for the world’s great concert halls.
The fascinating film starts on a snowy December day as craftsmen force begin assembling the piano’s wooden frame. While L1037’s destiny will likely include Mozart and perhaps dancing waifs, its birth features huffing, puffing and grunting from guys who tend to be beefy, tattooed and sport pictures of Jerry Garcia and Harley Davidsons on their workshop walls.
They bang away with hammers and chisels, sometimes pulling pegs out of an old Maxwell House can, other times knocking the piano into shape with the help of substantial power tools. The efforts of 450 craftsmen go into a Steinway, along with 12,000 parts. Tiring work, to be sure, punctuated by breaks during which the workers play guitars, cards, or go outside in the rain for a smoke.
Director/producer Ben Niles includes testimonials to Steinway’s greatness from pianists Lang Lang, Hélène Grimaud, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Harry Connick Jr., Hank Jones, Marcus Roberts, Kenny Barron and Bill Charlap.
“A good piano,” says Lang, “is like a good actor” with “several personalities.” Jazz great Jones explains that some “resonate more than others” though that is only “apparent to some people.” Tin ears, we assume, can make due with a Yamaha.
The film follows Aimard’s search for a “monster” to play at an upcoming Carnegie Hall performance. If Steinways had feelings most of them probably wouldn’t like picky Pierre, who has a hard time finding the beast of his dreams.
The show doesn’t go into prices, though we glimpse one price tag a bit north of $103,000. One worker, outfitted in a football jersey, admits that “nobody I know could afford one.”
We also get a look at sale day at the Steinway showroom. A saleswoman plays a magnificent passage for a woman and child, inspiring the little tickler to take a shot at “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” One senses there’s a Porshe awaiting her on her 16th birthday.
There are a few amusing asides. Connick tells of his “heavy handed” technique while Lang provides an animated explanation of what drew him to the piano: hearing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies on Tom and Jerry cartoons.
A child-rearing tip, perhaps.
Aimard finally finds his piano, which has just come off a truck and is ice cold. He sits down to test her out, reminding us that when some people tickle a Steinway they get much more than a giggle.
“Ahhh!” he exclaims after detonating an aural explosion. His monster has been located.
It takes around a year to complete a concert grand, and the final product is a source of great pride to employees, one of whom compares the process to the creation of a swan.
At show’s end we see L1037 getting its finishing touches from a worker whose job is to “even out the tone.” When it’s “easy to play and easy on the ears, then you know you’ve got a piano,” he explains.
The swan — painted jet black -- is moved to the Steinway store, where Helene Grimaud beams it “spoke to me immediately.” We assume L1037 will be speaking to audiences long after we, the humble viewers, have departed for the great concert hall in the sky, which we assume will be home to a truly sublime Steinway.]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#75 Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#74 (Bloomberg)— It takes some nerve to name a new television series “Bored To Death” — just as it would be to name a new CD “Very Lame Stuff.”
The title might quickly become the project’s epitaph.
HBO’s new Sunday night series isn’t boring a bit. Nor, to be sure is it profound, riveting or likely to change your life. It’s an amusing half-hour that may be around a while.
Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman) is a struggling 30-something Brooklyn writer whose girlfriend Suzanne (Olivia Thirlby) flies the coop for standard reasons: he’s been spending too much time with his vino and weed.
One senses Jonathan might have also yacked her to distraction: he talks so much you’d suspect he enhances his pot with a dusting of amphetamine.
He’s thin as a pipe cleaner with a tongue that rarely rests. He also seems to say whatever pops into his head. Early on he tells a pair of furniture haulers that he’s surprised to see “Jewish movers” undertaking “such muscle-oriented work.”
After a suitable glare, one of the movers asks Jonathan if he’s “just another self-hating New York Jew” to which he responds: “Yes I am.”
Yet that seems an overly harsh self-appraisal. Jonathan may be a bit of a schlub at times yet he’s also likable, sympathetic, and in his own way, inspirational. Writers in the viewing audience may especially identify with the poor hack.
While Jonathan can talk up a storm he’s at a total loss for words when it comes to finishing his second novel. Like many with this affliction he seeks solace in writer fluid — a cup of wine — and also dips into Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely.”
Suddenly, inspiration strikes. Jonathan places an ad on Craigslist offering his services as an “unlicensed” private detective. He soon snags his first client, a woman whose sister has disappeared. Being a PI, it appears, is an excellent way to meet the ladies, at least in television land.
The show plays on several detective novel mainstays. Jonathan, playing the tough guy at a bar, takes a big slug of whiskey, which goes down like a shot of lye. He plies sources with cash and wears a trench coat, yet he is not half as salty as many PIs, even reprimanding a hotel clerk for dropping F-bombs.
Viewers who prefer their love on the rocks will find the show deeply pleasing. There’s not an intact relationship anywhere in New York, it seems. Jonathan’s friend Ray Hueston, (Zach Galifianakis), a comic book illustrator, is spending far too much time in the ranks of the celibate for his own comfort. He’s down to the point of getting weepy.
Then there’s George Christopher (Ted Danson), Jonathan’s silver-haired magazine editor boss who’s got his own pot and vino regimen, plus a Viagra prescription. Despite those enhancements he’s bored with life and complains of “death by a thousand dull conversations.” You could almost feel sorry for him if he weren’t so oily and vain.
Jonathan eventually gets his girl, who to no surprise has romance troubles of her own: her meth-head boyfriend is trying out a romantic twist on the Stockholm syndrome. No telling here if the ploy works, though the show ends with Jonathan taking a call from another damsel in distress.
All he needs to do now is figure out how to charge his clients by the word.]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#74 Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#73 (Bloomberg) “Man Men” enters its third session billed as the “sexiest” show on television.
The season premier, which airs August 16 at 10 p.m. New York time, may inspire viewers to break a few erotic sweats, while others may be reminded that sex isn’t all moonlight and roses.
Near the start, for instance, a rustic lass warns her incipient bed mate that if she gets “in trouble” she’s going to slice off his pride “and boil it in hog fat.”
Shivver me timbers. Talk about performance anxiety.
For the most part, however, all remains swell, or at least swollen, among the staff of the Manhattan-based Sterling Cooper advertising agency. Without revealing too much of the story line, at one point creative director and gigolo-in-chief Donald Draper (Jon Hamm), dapper as ever, works his mojo with a foxy blonde airline stewardess (the show is set in the 1960s) while colleague Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt) jumps the bones of a hotel guy sent up to fix the air conditioner.
Something for everyone, it seems, and thankfully no further mention of hog fat.
Yet in our world of Internet sex-on-demand, where you can watch blondes take on an entire planeloads of creative directors, or hogs for that matter, this stuff seems fairly tame.
Thankfully, the “Mad Men” has other strengths, especially its portrayal of human weasels. That and good writing explain the show’s Emmys and Golden Globe awards, and the opener suggests there may be more in the offing.
Prime weasel remains Peter Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser, who simultaneously triggers the gag and slap responses.
The premier finds him in a full snit. Sterling Cooper, now owned by a British firm, is trying out a few new management schemes, including putting Campbell and fellow weasel Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) into a competitive arrangement that, with any luck, will result in a double homicide.
Meanwhile, life at the 1960s-era agency goes on as usual. These were the days before anyone took the Surgeon General seriously and every living thing except the potted plants smokes cigarettes. The endless booze flow indicates the company motto is “It must be 10 a.m. somewhere.” This crowd clearly agrees the liver is evil and must be punished.
The secretarial pool, led by office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) operates behind a phalanx of pointed bras while members of the mostly male creative team leave few hairs ungreased as they go about devising jingles for the company’s client list, which includes Chevron, Dunkin Donuts, Warner Brothers, Bethlehem Steel, Lucky Strike and Platex.
Draper, who considers himself something of a genius, puts his formidable talents to creating a new ad campaign for London Fog. To no surprise, it includes a female flasher. Back then that was pushing the envelope. These days, it might earn a promotion to the mail room.
The pace goes a bit flat here and there, though creator/producer/director Matthew Weiner continues to squeeze good lines out of his writing staff. My favorite comes at the end, when Draper, reconciling with wife Betty (January Jones) while perhaps thinking about the steamy stew, confesses “I don’t sleep well when I’m not here.”
It is hard not to notice that despite all the sex, booze and professional glory the mad men seem to be sad men. Smiles are rare with this crew. A nice atmospheric touch suggests at least part of the answer.
In one office, against there wall, we see a glass-sided ant farm. As metaphors go, a pretty good one.]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#73 Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#72 (Bloomberg) — In the pantheon of political survivors, Marion Barry is king of kings.
Neither a stint in federal prison, drug and alcohol addiction, world-class womanizing, IRS troubles nor even a gunshot wound can keep him out of office.
The four-time Washington, D.C. mayor’s storied career is the subject of an engrossing HBO documentary, “The Nine Lives of Marion Barry,” which airs August 10 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Even his detractors, who are legion, may soften their views by film’s end. Barry, 73, is a whisper of his former self, and if nothing else he played the political scoundrel to the hilt and did some good, especially early in his career.
Born to a Mississippi sharecropper and his teenage wife, Barry would become an Eagle Scout and a standout student, eventually pursuing a doctorate in chemistry. Yet civil rights became his passion. He joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and came to D.C. in the mid-1960s when it was run by white southern congressmen and surly cops.
They met their match in Barry who was, Jesse Jackson says in an interview, a “militant” and “a rabble rouser.” Yet he also co-founded Pride Inc., which found jobs for thousands of desperate city residents, including many hustlers, ex-cons and drug addicts.
After home rule came in 1974, allowing residents to elect local officials, Barry won a seat on the city council. The job had its ups and downs, including a March 1977 takeover of District buildings by Muslim militants who shot Barry as he exited an elevator. That dramatic event, the film indicates, added a heroic glow and may have helped him win his first term as mayor in 1978.
His first two terms were the glory days. A building boom was accompanied by increasing opportunities for blacks; journalist Harry Jaffe says Barry “had the potential to become Martin Luther King’s successor” though his flaws would eventually take center stage.
The film includes interviews with Barry, political colleagues, journalists, and constituents, though none are as compelling as his late wife Effi Barry, who endured tribulations nearly beyond belief.
“Power is a very seductive mistress,” she notes, and power was not his only one.
Barry’s personal life became an international sensation, including an investigation for cocaine use, sexual shenanigans in a strip bar, and finally his arrest in Jan. 1990 after being filmed smoking crack in a Washington hotel room with a former girlfriend.
It was there that Barry uttered his most famous words — “bitch set me up” — and the surveillance tape, a lengthy segment of which is shown, lends credence to his assertion.
The trial was too much for the long-suffering Mrs. Barry, who left him shortly thereafter (she died in 2007). Barry spent six months behind bars, though that was a mere speed bump. He won a seat on the city council in 1992 and was re-elected mayor in 1994.
His secret to winning, the film indicates, is in playing to his strong suit: Barry bills himself a “role model for those who fell down.” As he told one audience: “We are living in an imperfect world where people expect us to be perfect.”
His constituents clearly sympathize. “Everybody has a Marion Barry in their family,” one supporter insists, though that may be a bit of an overstatement.
His talents and troubles have followed him into his senior years, as have his true believers. He won a seat on city council in 2004; in 2005 he pleaded guilty to tax charges. A mandatory drug test found traces of cocaine, but no matter. He was re-elected to city council in 2008 in a landslide.
By film’s end, it’s clear that if Washington is ever hit by a meteor, when the dust clears there will be at least two life forms still standing: the cockroaches and Marion Barry.]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#72 Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#71
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)—If you like Milton Friedman, you’re gonna hate Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, aka The Yes Men.
Their crusade against the “free market cult” championed by the late Nobel Laureate is chronicled in “The Yes Men Fix The World,” which airs on HBO July 27 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Often posing as spokesmen for “corporations we don’t like,” the world-infamous pranksters target Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, and Halliburton in high-profile spoofs that sometimes have a serious effect on the bottom line.
All in the name of truth, justice, and renewable energy.
The first segment, to my mind the most compelling, illustrates their modus operandi. The Yes Men create a fake website for Dow in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, which occurred Dec. 3, 1984. Since Dow had bought Union Carbide, which operated the Bhopal facility, they assume at least one media outlet would come looking for a company representative.
They were right. The BBC invited them in for an interview at their Paris office and got lots more news than expected.
Bichlbaum, posing as Dow spokesman Jude Finisterra, announced the company was not only going to finally clean up the disaster site but also distribute billions of dollars among survivors.
Suddenly the BREAKING NEWS banner appears, though the hoax was discovered soon after airing and apologies were quickly issued, with the BBC saying the “interview was inaccurate and part of an elaborate deception.”
Au contraire, the Yes Men argue. The interview was actually “an honest representation of what Dow should be doing.” The marketplace had a different view. The company lost over $2 billion in 23 minutes, the film says.
Viewers who share the view that the “free market cult puts everyone else at risk” and that if “we let the free market cult keep running the world, there wouldn’t be a world left to fix” will love this film.
If your teeth are set to grinding by declarations such as “big oil” is “destroying the planet” and don’t agree that Milton Freidman is a “guru of greed” who unleashed a plague of evil free-market marauders, you’ll likely think these guys have rocks in their heads.
Yet it’s hard not to agree that both possess a considerable set of stones, and that they sure know how to liven up a conference.
They sabotage several, including an energy conference where they present Exxon Mobil’s revolutionary new renewable energy resource — Vivoleum — to be made from the victims of global warming. They pass around samples in candle form; when lit they smell like burning flesh. The stink was short-lived as conference officials sent them packing, with malice.
They did a bit better passing themselves off as Halliburton reps introducing the SurvivaBall, a very expensive inflatable suit that protects executives and other well-heeled consumers from most forms of natural and man-made disasters. While some of the audience is simply amused others seem to take an interest in the garb.
The show has many amusing moments but drags in parts. Like many evangelicals the duo seems a bit smug at times, and contradictory. Sure, big oil is making lots of money selling fuel, especially to guys like the Yes Men, whose jetting about between Paris, India, the U.K. and North America leaves a carbon footprint any oil baron would envy.
That said, you’ve got to admire a couple of guys who produced 100,000 bogus copies of the New York Times that was distributed in Manhattan on Nov. 12, 2008, announcing that the war in Iraq was over, the Patriot Act repealed, a free university system established, the oil industry nationalized, a “maximum wage” law passed, and the devil issued a summons: “Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge.” If you’re gonna dream, dream big.
Yet both seem to sense that despite their efforts, Friedman and Company continue to hold a strong hand. After one conference prank, they say of the audience: “Instead of freaking out they just took our business cards.”


Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#71 Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#70
Now that the world’s most notorious moonwalker is dead and buried (without his drug-ridden brain, London’s Mirror reported), attention shifts back to the original moonwalkers, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (with Michael Collins circling overhead), just in time for the 40th anniversary of their historic stroll on the Sea of Tranquility.
Not since the walk up Calvary (which followed a reported stroll on the Sea of Galilee) has an ambulation attracted such attention, though the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 lunar walk benefited from a much larger support staff, budget, and audience — at least 600 million people watched Armstrong take his “giant leap for Mankind.”
Four decades on, the sheer magnitude of the mission is still stunning, inspiring a handful of books that also remind us how much the world has changed since the Eagle lunar module touched down at 3:20 p.m. CST that summer Sunday..
Craig Nelson’s “Rocket Men” (Viking, 404 pages, $27.95) is a broad and often entertaining account. Based on 23,000 pages of NASA oral histories, interviews and other documentation, it is also a fact-junkie’s dream, starting with its opening description of getting the Apollo-tipped Saturn V rocket from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch site.
The 129 million cubic foot building had doors 45 stories high and a 10,000-ton air conditioner without which, Mr. Nelson writes, clouds would form inside the building and create rain. The “crawler” that lugged the 363-foot rocket five miles to the pad (at 1 mile per hour) was the world’s largest land vehicle, weighing in at 6 million pounds, while Apollo-Saturn V weighed just under 6.5 million pounds, had 6 million parts, and represented the combined effort of 400,000 people and 12,000 corporations.
This ship had some serious mojo: At takeoff, its engines consumed 10,000 pounds of fuel per second and to break free of Earth’s gravity it hit 24,182 miles per hour, “over ten times faster than the bullet of a Winchester .270.” In the carbon footprint competition, Apollo was a true Sasquatch.
Mr. Nelson, who has written books on the Doolittle raid and Thomas Paine, provides plenty of historical perspective, noting that while President John F. Kennedy, who announced the mission to put a man on the moon May 25, 1961, may not have been a full-blown “space cadet” he worried deeply about falling behind the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson, sounding a bit like an anchor on the Weather Channel, lit a fire under those fears. “Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson thundered. “From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause droughts and floods, to change the tides and raise the level of the sea, divert the Gulf stream and change the temperature climates to frigid.”
The project had other fathers, including Wernher von Braun, whose former boss, Adolf Hitler, employed him to use his technical savvy to incinerate Britons, as noted by Kennedy speechwriter Mort Sahl. During World War II, Sahl cracked, von Braun “aimed at the stars, but often hit London,” though he apparently changed his ways after coming to the U.S., joining the Church of the Nazarene after a religious conversion and even reciting the Lord’s Prayer at Apollo 11’s liftoff — before turning to a colleague and saying, “You give me ten billion dollars and ten years, and I’ll have a man on Mars.”
Mr. Nelson pens an often-gripping narrative of the roughly 240,000-mile (each way) flight, along the way answering several questions likely to pop up in landlubber minds. Claustrophobia? He quotes astronaut Frank Borman: “Here on Earth usually, when you’re trapped in something, what’s good is on the outside. In a spacecraft, what’s good is on the inside and what’s outside is death.”
Regarding the “facilities” issue, we’re reminded that incredible feats of science are often undertaken by men wearing diapers, at least part of the time, though in space even the most mundane matters take on a magical air. After explaining that discarded liquids freeze in a “a shower of glistening ice crystals” Mr. Nelson quotes an unnamed astronaut who said the most beautiful thing he saw during his space travels was a “urine dump at sunset.”
We also learn that no matter how far you travel from Earth you can’t escape the nags. Aldrin celebrated a brief Communion after touching down on the Moon, though he had to keep it secret so as not to further enflame Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who filed a lawsuit after astronauts on Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis. Then there’s the news media, which sometimes seemed dead-set on proving that journalism isn’t exactly rocket science.
While Armstrong wowed the world with his “one small step” comments, Walter Cronkite marked the event with, “Phew! Wow, boy! Man on the Moon!” and also asked an official why it took Armstrong so long to back down the ladder. Because, he was told, Armstrong “doesn’t have eyes in his rear end.”
Then there were countless questions about how the astronauts “felt,” -- which, as Michael Collins explained, was a case of barking up the wrong tree: “It’s not within our ken to share emotions or utter extraneous information.” Armstrong made the same point after being asked what it felt like to walk on the moon: “Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.”
Some astronauts do stretch a bit further, as noted in “Voices from the Moon” (Viking Studio, 200 pages, $29,05), though even the most extraneous keep their feet close to the ground, even while on the moon. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean recalls how he was astounded to look up from the lunar surface and see the Earth -- “I’m really here,” he thought — before quickly scolding himself: “I’ve got to quit doing this”¦because when I’m doing this I’m not looking for rocks.”
What goes up must come down, and after their return Armstrong, and especially Aldrin, hit some very low points (Collins enjoyed relative tranquility, joining the State Department and later becoming first director of the National Air and Space Museum). While gazing at the moon may inspire romance, walking on it seems to have the opposite effect.
Armstrong moved to a dairy farm in Ohio, where he was a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. His wife left him, Mr. Collins writes, and he later had a heart attack.
Aldrin had double the marriage trouble, plus some, which he chronicles in “Magnificent Desolation” (Harmony Books, 326 pages, $27), a breezy read indicating that Aldrin has adapted quite well to our age’s penchant for self-revelation. .
“What does a man do for an encore after walking on the moon?” he asks early on, and for him the answer was: Crash. They didn’t call him Buzz for nothing back then: He had an ongoing wrestling match with alcohol and depression, sometimes rising from bed primarily to down a bottle of Scotch or Jack Daniel’s. He even went to work for a Cadillac dealership.
Yet Aldrin eventually broke free from booze’s orbit, giving it up in Oct. 1978 and later marrying the love of his life, a platinum blonde named Lois Driggs, on Valentine’s Day 1988. These days his passion is putting civilians into space, and the nation’s musicians will be heartened to learn that Aldrin prefers songwriters to journalists because, he believes, they have larger audiences.
In an introduction to another 40th anniversary commemorative book, “One Small Step (Murray Books, 162 pages, NO PRICE ON BOOK ), Aldrin leaves us with another insight into how much life has changed since Eagle landed.
After writing that a combined effort of the U.S. and EU countries may send the next astronauts to the Moon, Aldrin adds “there is no motivation for Russia because they would be 40 years late and they seem more interested in selling tickets to the Moon for $100m” -- recalling the time, not so long ago, when the Bear was officially a non-profit entity.]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#70 Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#69
By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) — If you’re looking for a mega-dose of inspiration, Jason Crigler may be your man.
Crigler, a New York guitarist and singer, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during an August 4, 2004 performance in Manhattan. His unbelievable recovery is chronicled in “Life. Support. Music,” which airs on PBS July 7 a 10 p.m. New York time.
When it comes to comebacks, Crigler gives Lazarus a run for his money.
Calamity struck early in the gig. Bandmates recall that Crigler, then 34, suddenly looked confused and rushed from the stage to wife Monica, who was two months pregnant.
“I need help, I need help,” he said.
They went outside, where he gently lay down on the sidewalk. Being whisked away in an ambulance, he recalls, “is the last thing I remember for a year and a half.”
Jason had little brain function when he got to the hospital, and doctors offered little hope of him regaining even basic abilities. Over the next several months muscles deteriorated and the fingers that once danced along his guitar neck curled into a tight knot.
Filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar, a friend of Crigler’s, interviewed family, musical colleagues and doctors during the recovery, and also includes video shot during therapy sessions at Boston’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, where Crigler transferred after six months in acute care.
The videos are shocking and heartrending:
Crigler’s mouth is wide open and his eyes bulge, as if he had just been speared in the back. I found myself thinking: If I’m ever that far gone, let me go. His doctors offered little hope.
"Scientifically, he wasn't there," says Dr. Christopher Carter, who treated Crigler.
To his family, however, Crigler was anything but a Nowhere Man. Instead of placing him in a nursing home they moved him to a Boston residence and provided round-the-clock care and stimulation.
Slowly the old Jason began to re-emerge.
Wife Monica, who is remarkably unsentimental, says the smallest advances “were miraculous.” She adds that she came to “see the beauty in sadness and hardship,” though she states she is “not trying to romanticize” the situation.
Perhaps the biggest miracle was when Crigler started playing the guitar, initially picking out a small progression of notes, which he repeated incessantly. An old saying came to mind: There’s no curing a guitar player.
While Jason Crigler is not a household name, he has shared the stage with John Cale, Linda Thompson, Marshall Crenshaw, Rufus Wainwright and Norah Jones, who in an interview says his loss created “a big hole in the community.”
Crigler’s comeback came in increments — a cameo song at a friend’s gig, then a set, and finally, on his 36th birthday, a full show at a favorite Manhattan venue, The Living Room.
“I think I’m okay,” Crigler says as he tunes up. The audience couldn’t have been happier if John, George, Paul and Ringo had materialized on stage.
“Something exceptional and quite indescribable occurred,” Metzgar says, and it’s impossible not to be astounded watching Crigler play and sing, considering the dismal wreck of a man we recall from the therapy videos.
His family believes he’s 90 percent recovered, though his sense of humor couldn’t get much better. In a bit of stage bantering, Crigler calls the stroke “quite an experience” during which he met doctors who told him he would never walk or play the guitar.
“Luckily, I proved them all wrong.”]]> http://daveshiflett.com/news.html#69 Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700 New Acoustic Music from Dave Shiflett & Friends and The Karma Farmers - Dave Shiflett - News