NUALA KENNEDY
Tune In
Compass 7-4534-2
* * *

The latest recording from Irish-born, Edinburgh-based Nuala Kennedy is, depending on your point of view, either eclectic or inconsistent. In a remarkably short period of time Kennedy has established herself in the top tier of Celtic flute and whistle players; sets such as “Footsteps,” “Thíos Cois Na Trá,” and “The Blooming Bright Star of Belle Isle” offer plenty of evidence that her reputation is well-earned. Kennedy’s breath control and fingering are glorious, as is her timing with accomplished players such as hurdy gurdy artist Nicolas Boulerice and guitarist Phillipe Guidat. Like many younger players Kennedy mixes musical styles freely. Purists are likely to adore the aforementioned tunes and be distressed by Kennedy’s other choices, especially her pick of songs. Kennedy certainly has a fine voice, as she demonstrates on an intriguing rendition of “My True Love,” an arrangement textured by Lea Kirstein on cello, Brian Kellock on piano, and the late Oliver Schroer on fiddle. Individual taste, however, will dictate how listeners respond when Kennedy veers to the pop end of the musical spectrum. I enjoyed her composition “The Books in My Library,” a song that parallels a book shelf to paths taken (or not). It reminded me a lot of something Sally Rogers might have in her repertoire. I’m less enamored of her take on “The Waves of the Silvery Tide,” a duet with the warble-voiced Bonnie Prince Billy. (To put a point on it, I can't stand his operatic voice and wonder why weirdness so often gets more attention that singers with much better voices.) The album’s concept is to “tune in’ to various voices and influences. That’s admirable, but it also means that it sometimes lacks a foundational identity.

Celebrity Encounters of the Off-Putting Kind

He should have considered this before he had children!


It was a gorgeous May weekend, so Phoenix and I hightailed it to southern Maine to celebrate our anniversary. We booked a Saturday night table at Grissini, a fine Italian restaurant in Kennebunkport. In addition to scrumptious food we enjoyed watching a parade of flamboyantly dressed young people: local kids armed with their parents’ credit cards having a formal dinner before heading off to the prom. All it took was one bad encounter to take the edge off the festivities. Just as we were finishing dessert Phoenix exclaimed, “Oh my God!” Up the ramp came a Secret Service agent steadying a tottering old man, George H. Bush. White-haired Barbara was close behind, as was another agent and a younger couple we presumed to be Bushes of some ilk or other.

Americans generally like vicarious celebrity encounters, but this one nearly put us off our feed. Did we feel sorry for the obviously frail former president? Nope. He’s just an old fool now instead of the younger fool he used to be. He was always a fool, from his early days in which he used his oil companies as CIA fronts, to his misdirection as head of that agency, to his involvement with Enron, to his hold-your-tongue about “voodoo economics” and be Ronnie Reagan’s lapdog, to his dishonoring of the presidency. For Clarence Thomas alone he’s due a national flogging. But there are two things for which I can never forgive him: poor parenting and Iraq.

George and Babs sired a nest of vipers. We hear so much about the 2008 bank bailout. How quickly we forget that it’s peanuts compared to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s occasioned by Reagan-Bush deregulation. Front and center was son Neil Bush, whose Silverado fiasco was among the most expensive missteps in what ultimately cost tax payers a whopping $14 trillion. Good old Jeb got a piece of that action too—he was heavily invested in a Florida S & L that ran aground—but instead of the jail time he deserved he got to be governor of Florida and help steal the 2000 election for his numskull brother George W.

Dubya will be forever associated with the war in Iraq but, lest we forget, it was his old man who started the damn thing. For reasons that have more to do with supporting oil sheiks friendly to the Bush family than with national security, we invaded Iraq in 1990-91. For some odd reason, we called this a “victory” because it only cost the deaths of 294 U.S. soldiers, 87 coalition troops, and around 30,000 Iraqis. Plenty of reason for Dubya to order up round two in 2003. The tab on this one as of May 19 is 4397 U.S. dead, 318 coalition fatalities, and between 100,000 to 600,000 Iraqi dead (depending on whose propaganda you want to believe). Boy have we brought “democracy” to Iraq! Too bad 2.1 million refugees can’t enjoy it and that those who stayed are more fixated on 50% inflation and 28% child mortality rates.

When I see George H. Bush, I don’t see one old man about to shuffle off this mortal coil; I see 4691 American ghosts, over 39,000 wounded vets, and millions of distressed Iraqis. And I think about our $1.4 trillion deficit and how much easier it would be to retire if we hadn’t spent $900 billion and counting on Iraq. I also think of the bad seed that continues¬—all of Jeb’s and Dubya’s kids have had encounters with the law. What I mainly think is, “Will someone please save America and sterilize this family?”

The old fool sat three tables away from us. I hurried my coffee and got out of there. Apparently we weren’t alone in our distaste; two other couples beat us out the door.

Texas School Board and the Abusable Past

As they so often do, Tom Tomorrow's cartoon hits the nail on the head!


The great French historian Marc Bloch once defined history as the “event, plus the various interpretations of that event.” Interpretation is important and contemporary scholars use the phrase “the usable past” to describe the ways in which long ago events inform the present. As a college history professor, it’s sheer joy when a young person comes to my office to confess that they thought they hated history, but against all odds they seem to love it. That act of contrition is usually sparked by their own discovery of the usable past. In the course of animated discussion I invariably field this query: “Why didn’t I learn any of this in high school?” I patiently explain that many people don’t acquire the ability to base their thinking upon abstract principles until they’re in their teens, so an eighth-grade teacher would have done them no service to exact from them deep levels of moral reasoning. Or we talk about how standardized testing is often more content-heavy rather than thinking-based.

Leave it a bunch of bloviating Texans to ruin a good thing. The Texas Board of Education has just revised its history curriculum for public schools and, based on its actions, we now must reference an “abusable” past, one in which Bloch’s “events” are ignored altogether. Go straight to “interpretation” (singular, not plural). Do not pass go, lean to the left, or deviate from the service of a right-wing political agenda. In the future I’ll have to tell students they didn’t learn a whole lot of good history because their textbooks are filled with lies perpetrated by a handful of zealots and bigots. Among the utter garbage masquerading as “balance” in Texas are these gems: the “slave trade” is now called the “Atlantic triangular trade,” “imperialism” has resurfaced as “expansionism,” and references to capitalism will be cleansed of greed associations by using the phrase “free enterprise system” instead. Oh yes, not all slaves resented bondage, the speeches of Jefferson Davis deserve equal weight with those of Abraham Lincoln, the violence associated with the civil rights movement will get more play, country music (but not rock or hip hop) will be deemed a national cultural legacy, Ronald Reagan will be dubbed a “great American,” condemnations of Senator Joseph McCarthy will be tempered with revelations of domestic spying (as if to say Tail Gunner Joe was right all along). A particularly obscene example of Good ‘ole Boy history was the defeat of a proposal to add more Hispanic history to Texas textbooks. Instead, the board voted to reduce the coverage given to César Chavéz and Thurgood Marshall so that room could be made to discuss Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority, the NRA, and the Heritage Foundation. Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute! In a state that’s one-third Hispanic and 12% black you can’t find space for Chavéz or the first black Supreme Court justice, but you can find it for Phyllis Schlafly? Good God in Heaven!

An appropriate phrase that last one, because this is what it’s really all about in Texas. Once again we see the Christian Right turning to politics to compel people to believe in that which their proselytism has failed to convince the masses to profess. Let me zero in on just one of the Big Lies in the new curriculum. Texas kids will now learn that the Founding Fathers set up the new nation in accordance with Judeo-Christian principles and never intended a wall to be built between church and state. The Board even cooked the books by removing most Thomas Jefferson references because, well, he didn’t even pretend to be a Christian. What else can you do with a man who coined the phrase “separation of church and state” and remarked that “the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter?" Nor does the Board mention that Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were Deists, that a Bible had to be fetched for Washington’s swearing-in ceremony because he didn’t have one, or that Washington did not say “so help me God” at the end of that ceremony. (That folktale didn’t come into existence until 1850.) Let’s just look at a few (of many) quotes from our “Christian” founders:

--“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any other church…. My mind is my own church.”—Thomas Paine
--“All national institution of churches…appear to me to be no more than human inventions, set up to terrifying and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.”—Thomas Paine
--An alliance between “Government and Religion [has]…a corrupting influence upon both parties.”—James Madison
--“Religion flourishes in greatest purity without the act of government.”—James Madison
--“…strongly guarded…is the separation between Religion and Government…”—Alexander Hamilton
-- “The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.”—John Adams
--“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by the difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be depreciated.”—George Washington

To the above let us add a few other facts: Roger Williams called for a “wall of separation” between religion and politics in 1647, and by the time of the American Revolution, this was prevailing wisdom. The Declaration of Independence has four references to God—“Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Supreme Judge,” and “Divine Providence”—standard Deist language. Neither the Declaration nor the Constitution has a single reference to Jesus. The original state constitutions of Delaware, Georgia, New York, South Carolina, and Tennessee expressly forbade ministers from holding political office.

I’m all for discussing the role of religion in America, but that includes a thorough look at its ideological uses as well. Or are we to believe that the Salem witch trials broke up a Satanist cult, that Gilded Age “muscular Christianity” was just a physical education movement, or that adding “In God We Trust” to U.S. currency had nothing to do with the Cold war and was simply sound fiscal policy rooted in the promoting the “free enterprise system?” And I’d like to discuss—that’s “discuss,” not pontificate—a few other things as well. Among them: What were the commodities exchanged in the Atlantic triangle trade? What was the global impact of U.S. expansionism? Should Jefferson Davis have been hanged as a traitor? Was Senator McCarthy a demagogue? Do the accomplishments of Ronald Reagan the president warrant iconic status? How do we define "greatness?" Is the Moral Majority an oxymoron? What percentage of Texans is clinically insane?

Okay, cheap shot on the last line. I wish this travesty was only a case of Lone Star Loonies. Here’s the worst of the bad news. The Texas textbook market is HUGE—so large, in fact, that most publishers are likely to cave in rather than insist that their books be accurate. In other words, the Texas standards will become the national narrative that gets thrown into the lockers of most American kids.

The last bit is the good news in this piece. When I’m asked “Why didn’t I learn this in high school?” I often smile and say, “You know, it’s possible you were too busy being a teenager and weren’t paying attention!” If my undergrads are an example, the content of their texts doesn’t matter because they won’t read the damn things anyhow. For once, education is better served by blissful (as opposed to willful) ignorance.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a Gem as is

Get out your reading glasses and see the film in its original langauge before Hollywood ruins it!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
Directed by Niels Arden Opley
152 mins. in Swedish with subtitles (graphic sexuality and violence)
* * * * *

From Hollywood comes the news that an American remake is planned for the Danish/Swedish film Män som hatar kvinnor—in release on North America under the title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and based on the Stieg Larsson novel of the same name. Rumor has it that Brad Pitt is being considered for the lead and that all of Tinseltown’s pretty young things are lining up for the female lead. What a waste! No; this isn’t another slam at Hollywood—which is child’s play—rather an acknowledgement that the original film is so good that there’s no need to mess with it. It is claimed that Americans simply won’t watch films with subtitles. To this we say, get over it. We can’t recall a single European film that was better in remake than in the original, but we could supply quite a long list of fabulous films that were as bland as three-day-old porridge in their English-language garb.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a disturbing, but brilliant film and part of what makes it work is that its principles are solid actors who are not Hollywood-style eye candy. We follow the travails of investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), who works for a crusading liberal magazine. He’s just lost a major libel suit to a well-heeled industrial giant and is facing six months in jail. In the period between his conviction and when he begins his sentence he’s hired by another powerful magnate, Henrik Vanger, to see if Blomkvist can unravel a forty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of Vanger’s beloved niece, Harriet, from the family’s island compound. Each year Henrik receives a talisman in the mail that suggests that Harriet’s killer is still on the loose.

In a parallel story that soon merges with Blomkvist’s, we meet Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a damaged young woman under close court supervision. Her former guardian has just been replaced by a respected politician and at first glance, it looks as if Lisbeth needs a lot of guardianship. She looks like a cross between present-day Goth and late 70s’ punk—her hair is sliced into severe angles, her body is crisscrossed with piercings and self-inflicted insignia, and her back is covered with the tattoo of an angry dragon breathing as much smoke as the cigarettes Lisbeth is seldom without. We learn that in her youth Lisbeth set a man afire and the years have done little to tamp down her simmering anger. She is, however, a hacker extraordinaire. When Lisbeth hears of Blomkvist’s conviction, she investigates him and hacks into the Vanger files upon which he’s working. In one of the few things that is predictable in this film, Blomkvist and Salander soon begin to collaborate. What they learn is far more disturbing than Harriet’s disappearance—a serial killer of women is at large, probably someone whose misogyny is linked to fascism. We give nothing away by telling you this: all of the film’s surface impressions are important because almost no one in this film is exactly as they appear to be.

Already we see pitfalls involved in a U.S. remake. How do we explain what’s common in Scandinavia: allowing a prisoner to defer serving jail time to get his affairs in order? Not trying a juvenile murderer as an adult? The legacy of Nazism? Moreover, to work well Blomkvist has to look protean and rumbled, and Lisbeth needs to be scary, scared, and scarred (literally and psychologically). And what on earth will Hollywood do with themes such as graphic sex, torture, sodomy, and dismemberment?

This is not an easy film to watch by any stretch of the imagination. On a scale of one to ten with Mary Poppins on the low end and Silence of Lambs on the other, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a nine. So why anyone would want to see this movie? First of all, it is a heart-palpitating thriller that will leave you white-knuckled. Second, although it’s graphic, it is never gratuitous. That is to say, everything disturbing is in the service of greater questions that make us contemplate issues of gender, justice, greed, power, and (ultimately) humanity. Third, the central performances are riveting. Nyqvist is pitch perfect as he tiptoes between world-weariness, cynicism, and zeal. Rapace is a revelation—a smoldering cauldron of revulsion and desire who makes us want to look away, yet we can’t take our eyes off her. Finally, Opley’s off-balance direction is intelligent and engaging. Think of the tension of a Hitchcock film, the intricacy of Memento, the squalor of Pulp Fiction, and the misdirection of Black Widow.

Put on your reading glasses and see the Swedish-language version. Why re-cut a perfect gem?

New Crooked Still Album Pushes Bluegrass to New Heights

CROOKED STILL
Some Strange Country
Signature Sounds
* * * *

Normally I’m not a fan of invented terms such as “nu-folk bluegrass,” but I’ll make an exception for Crooked Still, one of a handful of bands that are taking bluegrass well beyond anything Bill Monroe envisioned. Gone are the nasal vocals and endless virtuoso breakouts of yore; in their stead is the gorgeous voice of lead vocalist Aoife O’Donovan and a rich instrumental tapestry in which Tristan Clarridge’s cello factors as prominently as Greg Liszt’s banjo or Britany Haas’s fiddle. And with a repertoire that includes covers of The Rolling Stones (“You Got the Silver”), Jerry Garcia (“I’m Troubled”), and a Child Ballad filtered through Nick Cave (“Henry Lee”), this is definitely not your Appalachian grandmother’s bluegrass. O’Donovan’s reedy voice is perfect for this lineup in that she opts for intonations that meld rather than stand out distinctly. The manner in which her tones resonate often has the effect of acting as another instrument, one adding a swingy backbeat to arrangements featuring great tension between instruments. This effect can be heard in its edgy glory on “You Were Gone.” This band blows new life into everything it does, even a shopworn standard such as “Golden Vanity.” Crooked Still is a testament to the ways in which tradition is at its best when it synchs to the calendar.

Check out the opening track of their new album: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hbm4XUZ1Xs

Tax Cuts Cause Deficits

Little tax-cutting piggies grow up to be big deficit hogs!

Am I the only one amused by the Republican Party’s obsession with the national debt? After all, their boys Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are the ones who racked up the largest deficits in American history, the latter handing it off to Barack Obama who is now being circled by the very hogs who once suckled at the deficit-leaking teat. The GOP reminds me of a drug addict who converts to a fundamentalist religion—either way you look at it they’re still obnoxious.

Adding to the hypocrisy is a new study that appeared in the Cato Journal, which reveals that one of the very worst things one can do to reduce deficits is cut taxes. William Niskanen looked at the economy from 1981 to 2005 and discovered a startling correlation—cutting taxes did not reign in government spending; in fact, the more taxes were slashed, the more spending increased. In other words, Niskanen’s study refutes a core assumption of supply-side economics as articulated by Jude Wanniski, George Gilder, and Arthur Laffer, key architects of what came to be called Reaganomics. Part of their argument that progressive income taxes needed to be rethought rests on a belief that high taxation supported non-productive economic activity that, in turn, caused rising prices and unemployment. Slash taxes and spending must follow, they argued.

It turns out that this is the sort of “voodoo economics” that George H. Bush said they were back in 1980—tax cuts are almost always accompanied by increased spending and bigger deficits. David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, later admitted what Niskanen just proved. (Niskanen’s scholarship was independently verified by University of Alabama professor Michael New.)

I can hear the complaints now—just another disgruntled liberal who can’t get over how Ronald Reagan saved the American economy. It won’t wash! William Niskanen, like Stockman, was a Reagan insider; he was a member of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors. The Cato Journal isn’t exactly a screaming lefty rag either—it’s put out by a libertarian think tank. So read it and weep. The new economic math is tax cuts = increased spending = bigger deficits. Maybe we ought to try something different—like taxing the hell out of rich people and multinational corporations.

VINCERE IS A LOSER

I'd rather watch "Springtime for Hitler!"


Vincere (2009)
Directed and written by Marco Bellocchio
In Italian with subtitles, 128 mins. Not rated (nudity)
*


Does this sound like a promising movie premise? How about a film about the love life of Benito Mussolini? You know—the good old days when the twentieth century dawned and dashing young Benito was a revolutionary socialist atheist with enough fire to burn the candle at both ends with a wife and a mistress. Then let’s snip away all the connective narrative tissue that might ground viewers in the story and jump to World War I. Then let’s jump again to when Mussolini comes to power in1922—with the help of the Catholic Church—and finds it expedient to stick Ida Dalser, his mistress (and perhaps bigamous second wife), in a mental institution and her son, young Benito, into a boys’ academy run by nuns. Now let’s watch both Ida and young Benito go insane. Sound like a great movie? Let’s not mince words: Vincere, Italian for “win” is a loser of a film. In fact, it flat out sucks—easily one of the year’s worst films.

Oddly, it has gotten some critical acclaim. Part of this is because some American and British critics think that any director from continental Europe must be an auteur. The real reason, though, is that the film looks stylish, as long as you don’t probe very deeply. Director Marco Bellocchio has been making films since the early 1960s, but only Enrico IV (1984) and Elena (1997) have made much of a splash. Despite nearly fifty years of filmmaking Bellocchio does the sort of things one might expect of a film school student. Vincere looks good, but only upon first impression. Bellocchio superimposes cartoon graphics, newsreel footage, and flashbacks over the main narrative. He also drains the color from frames to give a film noir feel to telescoped time sequences. There are also several painterly moments; one scene of Ida climbing the bars of an outdoor asylum porch in a raging snowstorm is stunningly beautiful.

Good stuff, yes? Well… like a film student, Bellocchio doesn’t seem to know that a one-trick pony is only good for one spin around the ring. Like this stuff the first time? How about the second? And the third? And… Equally amateurish is the manner in which he tried to break conventional narrative. It’s as if someone told him that it’s oh-so-cool to do that these days. This works well for an interior mystery such as Memento, but the technique simply makes no sense whatsoever for a biopic. If you don’t walk out—not a bad option—you’ll spend much of your time trying to figure out who’s who, where you are in time and space, and whether you should care.

Even more damning is the utter lack of character development. I suppose it’s a talent of sorts to make a monster like Mussolini (Filippo Timi) boring, but it doesn’t make interesting viewing. At least Ida (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) shows some emotion in the early steamy sex scenes—poor old Benito doesn’t even seem plugged in then (so to speak). And once Ida is dumped, she spends the rest of the film having things done to her and ceases to be anything other than a cardboard character. Even more baffling is young Benito. The film takes us through his life from age nine to twenty-six at lightening speed. His transition from sunny, dutiful son to stark raving mad takes place in an instant and makes no sense whatsoever.

Don’t even dream of seeing this film unless you first read about Mussolini’s life because there’s not enough narrative thread in Vincere to knit an infant’s sock. After you have read about Mussolini, another question will arise: What’s the point in making this film? It’s not a love story, it lacks the development necessary to make it a tragedy, there’s not enough depth for a character study, and—the clincher—the very notion of humanizing Mussolini is repulsive. What Mussolini did to Ida Dalser was horrific, but it ranks fairly low on his rap sheet. The crowning moment of Il Duce’s career came in 1945, when partisans of Free Italy lined him against the wall and shot him. I don’t wish this fate for Bellocchio, but the world would no worse if a page was torn from the Fascist playbook and every copy of this film was burned.