Protected: The Sparrow — Mary Doria Russell

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Don’t Be Evil (Except When a Really Big Market Is at Risk)

This is chilling and shameful. You can enter whatever search terms you wish.

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Friday Night in the Mansion

The show with Frank and Nancy Moccaldi last night was a wonderful free-for-all, with an old-time string band, traditional Irish and Scottish tunes (the latter on electric guitar), and a surfeit of harmonicas and banjos.

The show was part of the Good Coffeehouse series, held at the Ethical Culture Society on Prospect Park West, a a gorgeous mansion built by the inventor of Bon Ami cleansing powder. We arrived early for a run-through, and I spent a little time wandering around the nearly empty building.

I wish I’d had the real camera

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Protected: The Poet , Michael Connelly

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Seven Days, Seven Towns, 1400 miles

I spent most of the last week on the road, travelling through four states (NY, VT, NJ and PA), mostly for my new job, but with a side vacation including a visit to rednoodlealien and her husband. It was hectic, but a great week.

Story, with photos

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Sane Grandma

The anagrammers on Flatbush Avenue have apparently ended their run.

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Walk the Line: Fact and Fiction

We finally saw Walk the Line this afternoon and I can’t say enough good things about it. Phoenix and Witherspoon are spectactular; she in particular absolutely lights up the screen and if anything sings better than June Carter did in real life.

But there are a couple of very important characters missing from the movie that are central to the book on which it is based: (Cash’s Man in Black: His Own Story in His Own Words). The first of those characters is the most important in the book after Cash himself: God. I’m no more comfortable with deeply held religious convictions than most of my fellow urban-intellectual Johnny Cash admirers, but to ignore that aspect of him is to seriously misunderstand the man.

Cash’s book is dedicated to his father-in-law, Ezra Carter, husband to one of the original Carter Family trio (Maybelle) and brother to another (A.P.), “who taught me to love the Word.” In the introduction, he says,”If only one person can be saved from the death of drugs, if only one person turns to God through the story which I tell, it will all have been worthwhile,” and the first sentence of the book describes it as a “spiritual odyssey.” It is just that: the story of a deeply troubled, self-destructive man, coming to terms with himself and rebuilding his life through devotion to his God. It’s not necessarily a story most modern audiences are ready for, but that’s the reality, and glossing over it does Cash’s memory a disservice. The Man In Black himself explained, in part, “I wear the black for those who never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said.”

A somewhat more disturbing mischaracterization involves Ray Cash, his father, a cotton sharecropper in Arkansas portrayed in the film as a hard and abusive man who never has a kind word for his son and whose rages terrorize the household. Of the real Ray Cash, his son says,

I have good memories of my daddy when I was a little boy. I always thought he was about the greatest man I ever knew, and I still do.

Possible spoiler here

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A Strike Song

Just in time for its conclusion, I’ve written a song about the transit strike. The song is still pertinent, though, since the issues raised by the strike aren’t going to go away when service returns.

I’ve taken some creative license but for the most part, the song is true. It came out of conversation with my family over the weekend, being bothered by the disproportionately hostile reactions to the strikers, and listening to a lot of Johnny Cash. Both the rhythm and the attitude of this song owe a great deal to The Man In Black.

Lyrics

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Then they came for the transit workers…

My grandfather worked multiple manual-labor jobs for much of his youth, and finally “made it” when he got a job for NYC Transit as a token booth clerk. He bought a house and raised his son on that salary and sent him to college, the first one in the family. His son also got a job at NYC Transit, and raised two kids on that salary, and sent both of them to college. My grandmother, widowed for more than ten years, has a house to live in and decent health care because of her husband’s benefits. My father has a secure retirement because of those benefits. I have a decent job and a college education because NYC Transit paid a decent salary to my parents and grandparents.

There are lots of children out there who will not be able to say any of the above. Most of their parents work for private companies or other organizations that, like my employer, have hacked away brutally at retirement and medical benefits to the point that our old age will be less comfortable than that of our parents. Those children have already lost.

But the parents of some of those children are fighting right now to hold onto decent pay and decent benefits. The fact that many of us have long since given up that fight does not mean those workers are wrong, it just means that they’re the last ones standing. And the fact that they’re fighting for the things that my parents had, and that I benefited greatly from, means that I cannot in good conscience do anything but support them.

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John Lennon

Twenty-five years ago this morning, my dad came into our bedroom as we were getting ready for school and asked if I’d heard the news that John Lennon had been shot. For some reason I remember Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” playing on WPLJ, although it seems strange that they would not have been playing Lennon’s music.

That spring, I’d cut out a squib in the Daily News that said Lennon was working on his first new album in five years. When the single came out I was thrilled; that was the year I was getting into Bob Dylan and David Bowie but The Beatles were and still are my first love, and Lennon — the smart sarcastic punster — was the one I admired best.

Yesterday morning (yesterday was the actual anniversary of Lennon’s death, but it happened late at night and I didn’t hear the news until the next day), NPR had an interview with the emergency room doctor who tried (hopelessly) to save Lennon’s life when he was brought in, with no vital signs, no pulse, and no blood pressure, with “every blood vessel leading to the heart damaged irreprably.” He tried to hand-pump Lennon’s heart, but there was no hope, and when he gave Yoko the news, she at first couldn’t accept it, and then pleaded with him not to announce the news until she could get home and ensure that their five-year-old son Sean was not sitting in front of the television.

That image alone should cause any so-called Lennon fan who’s dissed her over the years to just shut up. I’ve written about this elsewhere but we should all be as lucky as they were in finding each other. It choked me up. Lennon’s death was my generation’s equivalent of the Kennedy assassination, I suppose, one of the events that you remember just where you were. It was certainly more than a celebrity death; Lennon was not an ordinary celebrity, and the way he turned his back on fan expectations and the industry to raise his child and spend time with the woman he loved genuinely touched a lot of people. It’s still hard to listen to a song like “Watching the Wheels” without wishing he’d had more time to enjoy what probably would have been the better half of his life. He was just a few months younger than I am now when he was killed, in fact, 40 and change.

The surgeon’s interview is not available on NPR’s web site, and NPR is as usual not responding to customer questions (part of the overall attitude problem at that place which is diverting more and more of my radio money to WBAI and WBGO and WFUV and WKCR), but they do have a clip from a Dick Cavett interview in 1971 in which he talks about his hopes for his old age. And he jokes about not wanting to be “dragged onstage playing “She Loves You” … when we’re 50.” In a scratchy old-man voice, he mocks the idea. “Here they are again,” he cackles, and then starts singing, “Yesterday…” and the studio audience breaks up laughing. If he were alive today, I’m sure he would not be headlining nostalgia-fests at Madison Square Garden. The loss of the things he would have done, and would still be doing, is just incalculable.

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