End ot the Tour: The Genius as Tortured Artist

THE END OF THE TOUR (2015)

Directed by James Ponsoldt

A24 Films, 106 minutes, R (for language)

* * *

What do we do about Kurt Cobain Disease—that dreaded malady that rears its head when society anoints a new celebrity who’d rather be dead than accept such an accolade? The End of the Tour probes turns its gaze to writer David Foster Wallace, whose 1996 novel Infinite Jest made him into the literary equivalent of a rock star. Wallace was declared a “genius” and a flesh-and-blood avatar of the postmodern novel. Was he? Confession time: I never made it through Infinite Jest, a 1,079-page dystopian tome (with footnotes) that’s (sort of) about a tennis academy, depression, obsession, substance abuse, and mass culture without really being about any of those things per se. Wallace resisted the genius label, but does it really matter what any one of us thinks? I recall Paul Simon’s line in “The Boy in the Bubble”: It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts/Medicine is magical and magical is art.”

The End of the Tour follows Wallace (Jason Segel) from his home in Bloomington, Indiana—he was an English/writing professor at the University of Indiana—to Minneapolis/St. Paul, the last stops on the Infinite Jest promo trail. His companion was New York-based Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), an erstwhile fiction scribbler in his own right, who wheedled permission to shadow Wallace on the tour. Lipsky, whose memoir is the basis for the script, approaches Wallace through a combination of New York arrogance and envy. He can’t imagine that such a genius can be holed up in a backwater like Bloomington (apparently unaware that the university has over 40,000 students). In his heart of hearts, though, he’d like to be Wallace. Or at least the Wallace he imagines before he arrives in the frozen winter prairie and encounters a person who confounds his expectations.

Wallace, as it turns out, is much better at relating to his dogs than other human beings. He can converse on everything, but takes nothing all that seriously—least of all himself. He is amazingly lucid and profound one moment, distracted and disinterested the next. As Lipsky tries to pry open Wallace’s soul, he keeps running into walls. It’s not that Wallace is secretive—more that he finds himself a dull subject, and absolutely nothing bores him more than the legends gathering around himself. His past mirrors the randomness of his present: a nondescript ranch house haphazardly furnished/maintained and odorized by dog pee, a stubbly face and long hair framed by an ever-present bandanna, and a Zen-like explanation that all of it simply is and has no deeper significance. In psychological terms, Wallace occupies the recluse end of the sociopath scale. This  makes him a hard read for Lipsky, who is a piece of work in his own right—obsessed, envious, ambitious, vain, and trending toward amorality.

At its best moments, The End of the Tour is a pas de deux between two individuals whose natural proclivities would hurl them in different directions. Jason Segel is very good as Wallace, and there are nice cameo roles for (the always delightful) Joan Cusak and Mamie Gummer. Eisenberg plays Lipsky in a manner that makes him very hard to like. I suppose we can see him as a dogged reporter, but he comes off more as a stalker/creep.

So be it. It’s much harder, though, to overlook some of the film’s sugarcoating. Its most honest moments come when Wallace grows annoyed with attempts to put any reading on his flaws other than the fact that he has struggled through periods of deep depression. It stretches the record, though, when the script has him admit to no addiction other than to television. There is also an overall patina of Wallace as Misunderstood Genius, the likes of which he himself rejected. He wasn’t just misunderstood; the man was damaged goods. We’re talking substance addiction, electro shock therapy, sleep-with-your-students, stalk women, impulsive violence, hang-yourself-at-age-46 damaged. Was he also a genius? Perhaps. That is an externally conferred status, something whose workings both Wallace and Cobain tragically misunderstood.

Rob Weir  

Joy of Living: Triumphant Tribute to Ewan MacColl

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VARIOUS ARTISTS

Joy of Living: A Tribute to Ewan MacColl

Cooking Vinyl 7-4867-2

* * * * *

Looking for a last-minute gift? Anyone who loves acoustic music will thrill to Joy of Living, a two-CD collection of the songs of Ewan MacColl in time to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Tribute albums disappoint when cover artists make one or two bad assumptions: that they need to do something radically different with the original songs, or that the performance is about them rather than the honored artist(s). Two of MacColl's sons, Calum and Neill, did an extraordinary job of finding musicians who understand their father's place in the folk pantheon. Many of them owe their careers to his influence, but that could be said of legions of English and Scottish artists of the past 80 or so years.

Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) was never an easy bloke—just a brilliant one. It surprises many to learn that he was actually (sort of) English. He was born to socialist Scottish parents, but as James Henry Miller and in the gritty industrial Lancashire town of Salford, whose slums he immortalized in one of his most famous songs, "Dirty Old Town." (It is incisively performed on the album by Steve Earle—a guy who knows a few things about life's downside.) He adopted the name MacColl in 1945, by which time he was caught up in the Lallans movement, a 20^th century attempt—via Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson—at a Scottish Renaissance, including the insertion into everyday communication of a blended English/Lowlands dialect language.

But one could say MacColl began reinventing himself at a tender age. He dropped out of school, kicked around the Salford slums, and was a devoted communist by the time he was 17—the age at which he got put on a watch list for his role in organizing a mass trespass on public lands that ultimately opened much of the UK's private land for hikers and walkers. Call it the praxis of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land." His deep involvement with agit-prop theatre—especially a form known as the "living newspaper"–led to his first marriage (of three) to director Joan Littlewood. Another little-known fact: many of MacColl's most-beloved songs began life as accompaniment for plays.  

MacColl's career is often compared to Pete Seeger's and not just because his third wife was Pete's half-sister, Peggy. Like Seeger, he was a collector/promoter as well as songwriter. Many of the Child ballads and other public domain songs today performed come from the collaboration between MacColl and Bert Lloyd. Alan Lomax was another mutual connection; Lomax's 1950 visit to the United Kingdom inspired MacColl to champion traditional music on the radio, in publications, and on the stage. On the later score, he took inspiration from Seeger and The Weavers. MacColl's Soho Ballad and Blues Club opened in 1953 and soon became an epicenter of the British folk revival, and a place where British artists adopted as their own American-style accompaniments.   

MacColl made over a hundred albums, something of an irony for a guy who despised commercialism and denounced Bob Dylan as a "10th-rate talent" and probably a capitalist tool to boot. Like I said—a difficult bugger. Still, all one has to do to appreciate MacColl the artist is sample the glorious songs he left behind—compositions that run the gamut from overtly political to the achingly sentimental. How many contemporary love songs can even be mentioned in the same breath as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face?" Paul Buchanan gives a particularly wonderful performance of this classic. Who else makes us feel nostalgic for disappearing ways of life without romanticizing them in the slightest? Eliza Carthy skillfully captures the glories and the challenges of the tinker's life in her cover of "Thirty-Foot Trailer," and Seth Lakeman gives the performance of his life on "The Shoals of Herring," MacColl's no-sugarcoating look at the testosterone days of small-time trawling.

Every performance on this 21-track collection is tastefully and appropriately performed—as indeed one might expect from a cast that includes stalwarts that looked to MacColl for inspiration: Paul Brady, Billy Bragg, Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan, Christy Moore, Martin Simpson, Norman Waterson….  There is also a nice mix of crossover artists such as Damien Dempsey, David Gray, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, The Unthanks, and Bombay Bicycle Club, the last of which is anchored by Jamie MacColl–Ian's grandson. David Gray does a fabulous job on the title track and the amazing Karine Polwart serves up a shiver-and-quiver cover of "The Terror Time." I'd rate the latter and Lakeman's interpretation of "The Shoals of Herring" as personal favorites, though singling out anything is the equivalent of declaring one sip of vintage wine superior to the rest of the glass. If you buy this as a gift, purchase a spare for yourself.  

Rob Weir  

Postscript: As much as I love the song "Joy of Living," had I named this collection I would have picked "Freeborn Man," which squares and sums MacColl to the core!

Silly Debates over History

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Princeton students recently discovered that Woodrow Wilson was a racist, which induced a "No shit, Sherlock" response from just about anyone who took US history in a public school. I'll overlook ignorance, I guess, though Princeton should reconsider the policy of admitting unprepared dummies from hoity-toity private schools. I'm less sympathetic to the belief that renaming things bearing Wilson's name is a good way to address racism in American society.

Okay, Young Tigers, vocabulary lesson: History = the study of events from the past and the various interpretations of those events. Sociology = study of social behavior, social groups, social problems, and social institutions. One studies the past to learn from it but—news flash—you can't change it. That's why we also study sociology. You put the two together to work out an agenda for the future. Got that? Past, present, future….

Wilson was indeed racist; so much so that a body of speculative history postulates he would have been a future president of the Confederate States of America, had the South won the Civil War. It didn't and we ended up with a racist president. Want to demonize him further? He put his signature on the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which rode roughshod over the First Amendment during World War One. After the war, Wilson cooperated with a vicious Red Scare that sent a very decent man, Eugene Debs, to jail. Wilson also sent US troops into Mexico during its civil war, so let's add Hispanophobia to his vita. For all of that, Woodrow Wilson was also a monopoly-buster, and signed into law such landmark bills as the Clayton Antitrust Act, an improved Interstate Commerce Act, the Federal Reserve Act, a landmark federal farm loan bill, and another that would have outlawed child labor had not the Supreme Court struck it down. Insofar as reforming presidents go, Wilson ranks just below Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Kennedy. He was also an idealist whose League of Nations was the forerunner of the United Nations.

None of this excuses his racism, nor does the fact that he was in the white mainstream during the days when Jim Crow reigned supreme. We should—from a sociological perspective—deplore his bigotry. Then we should move on because there is simply no changing the past. We can (and should) hate his racism, but Wilson was also a distinguished academic, an ambassador, the president of Princeton, the governor of New Jersey, and two-term POTUS. That makes him important, whether we like him or not.

I've had it with the PC push to sanitize history. Human beings shaped the past and one simply cannot rewind and make it cuddly. Sainthood is not required to make history. Karl Marx famously remarked, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please…." Ooops, scratch Comrade Karl from future discussion—he made gender-specific references. We've had a solution to history's warts for decades—it's called "teach the controversy" (and I don't mean it in a silly Creationist way).

What would sanitized history look like? Step one is reworking state competency exams because there's a host of folks we can't talk about anymore. Banish the slaveholder presidents—all 18 of them, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Polk, Andrew Johnson, and U.S. Grant. (Yes, the last had control over slaves owned by his Missouri-born wife. I'm not sure whom we will now credit for commanding the winning Union troops with Grant out of the running, but one mustn't offend.) We could consider dumping all the racist presidents, but that would only leave Obama, so perhaps we settle for tossing active racists like Pierce, Buchanan, Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Nixon, and Reagan. Oh, shoot: Abe Lincoln and FDR probably have to go as well.

How about other sinners? Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on his wife. Bye, bye. Ditto FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, that divorcee Reagan, and all of Congress for all of time. Very few groups were as sexist as the Black Panthers, so thou shalt never reference them. The Radicalesbian movement often slammed men and straight women, which brings me personal pain, so I can't allow any mention of lesbians in my courses. Betty Friedan said terrible things about housewives. Be gone, insensitive elitist. Walt Disney was racist, sexist, and a snitch, so padlock those theme parks. The GOP claims that labor unions are anti-capitalist, so no more labor movement, but it works both ways. I frickin' hate those robber barons and the heartless employer class that kept my ancestors and parents in economic thralldom. I cannot allow you to discuss exploiters like Henry Ford, Andy Carnegie, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, or The Donald. Let's just skip economic history.

Oh sheesh, I forgot to mention mistreatment done to Native Americans. Custer's practically a choirboy compared to folks like Chivington and Sheridan. The safe thing is to never mention any white male who ever set foot on Indian land, as well as banning everyone that exclusively uses the term "Native American." Many indigenous people actually prefer the term "Indian." How could anyone be so racist as to not know that? Now let's (not) discuss nativism related to immigration history. Being of Scottish heritage I must insist that England not be part of any discussion near me, and I bet a lot of those with Irish ancestry feel the same way.

We have two viable options: teach PURK history (Puppies, Unicorns, Rainbows and Kittens); or grow up and wrestle with history from the perspective that bad shit happened, but lots of decent folks tried to make things better. They didn't always succeed for two reasons: they don't get to write the script, and they are a flawed species. Just like history students and their teachers. That's why we teach the controversy. Otherwise, silence writes history, but not a pleasing one.

Mr. Holmes Proves Sherlock Has Been Overdone!

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MR. HOLMES (2015)

Directed by Bill Condon

BBC Films, 104 minutes, PG-13

* * ½

It took me a while to view Mr. Holmes because I'm among those who think that Sherlock has been done and redone so often there's nothing left to say. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation is said to be the most portrayed fictional character of all time. Holmes has appeared in comic strips, video games, manga, offbeat comedies, stage, radio shows, screen, and television. There has been a Greek version of Sherlock and, more recently (speaking of overdone!) a zombie Holmes.

Conan Doyle wrote four novels and 57 short stories between 1887 and 1927, with a ten-year break (1893-1903) in which Holmes allegedly died alongside his arch-enemy, Moriarty, at Reichenbach Falls. Blame the hiatus; in 1889, Connecticut actor William Gillette honed an act that gave us most of what became Basil Rathbone's shtick (pipe, deerstalker hat, cape, cocaine use, gruffness). Holmes knock-off novels appeared, the first penned by J. M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame! This is to say that Holmes was re-imagined even before his creator resurrected him in 1903 in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Excuse the diversion, but the Sherlock back-story is more interesting than Mr. Holmes the film­–a much better idea than movie. In the film, it's 1947 and Holmes (Ian McKellen) has just returned from Japan, where he called upon Tamiki Umezaki (Hiroyuki Sanada) to procure some prickly ash, whose boiled sap was believed to improve memory. Holmes desperately needs help on that score, as he is 93-years-old and suffering from memory loss bordering on dementia. Nice premise—imagine the world's keenest, most rational mind being unable to recall basics, let alone nuanced detail.  With prickly ash secured­–from the charred ruins of Hiroshima­–Holmes goes back to Sussex, where he has spent the past 30 years tending bees in his retirement. The film script is adopted from Mitch Cullin's novel, A Slight Trick of Mind, but Conan Doyle was the source for this detail; he too had Holmes collecting honey in Sussex.   

Homes tends to his bees and Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), a World War II widow tends to his cottage in a role that's essentially a countrified version of Baker Street's Mrs. Hudson. The twist is that the semi-literate Munro has a whip-smart young son, Roger, who is more attracted to what's left of Holmes' once-sharp mind than to his mother's forever-dull one. You could probably predict where this is heading, and you'd be right. Among the many problems of Mr. Holmes is the utter conservatism of the plot. It spins off another common trope: that Sherlock Holmes and his cases, as publicly perceived, were largely the product of Dr. Watson's literary license. Ninety-three-year-old Holmes isn't the man in the books, though he was a very clever detective who now has unfinished business: remembering what it was about his final case that made him put down his magnifying glass and set up an apiary.

Sherlock the detective would have spotted this logical inconsistency in a New York minute. Surely he knew the answer to this mystery the moment he retired, and if he truly wanted to expiate guilt, he wouldn't have waited until he was 93! Instead we get flashback sequences as recovered memory that takes us back to the Edwardian age and a muffed attempt to resolve the case of why Thomas Kelmot (Patrick Kennedy) is being deceived by his wife, Ann (Hattie Morahan). It is stitched, with rather large clumsy sewing, to a mystery of why Holmes' bees are dying, his attempt to recover his memory, and young Roger's assistance in helping him do so. Add the last detail to the discard pile of overworked tropes: precocious young lad helps crotchety old man rediscover joy.

Any production with McKellen and/or Linney is probably worth watching, but let's just say you're more likely to think of Gandalf in tweed than Sherlock Holmes in McKellen's case. Two things we know from Conan Doyle's stories–and brilliantly captured in portrayals by Benedict Cumberbatch  and Jeremy Brett (the nonpareil Holmes)­­–is that Sherlock was not a nice person, and that the misfortunes of others never induced sentimentality. Its simply too much to ask for viewers to see Holmes as a secularized version of a tortured ex-seminarian. McKellen's aged Holmes rings as false as another detail: on screen it was never cloudy or rainy in Sussex, a region that features one, the other, or both roughly two days out of three. Bah! Mr. Holmes is a sunny movie about a character whose character was defined by tempestuousness. I wasn't moved to reconsider Holmes, nor have I budged from the view that it's time to stop trying.

Rob Weir 

Brooklyn: Saoirse Ronan Soars

BROOKLYN (2015)

Directed by John Crowley

Fox Searchlight, 112 minutes, PG13 (mild language, milder sex)

* * * *

Here's what several friends told me before I saw Brooklyn: "It's not my kind of movie, but it's really good and I liked it a lot." That's my take as well. I normally gravitate toward films that inspire adjectives such as realistic, gritty, and challenging; Brooklyn is more sweet, sentimental, old-fashioned, and fairy tale-like. But I really, really liked it.

The year is 1951 and Ellis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) is about to leave her County Wexford Irish home for America. There's simply no opportunity for her in depressed post-World War II Ireland—unless she want to continue as a veritable indenture to the misanthropic and vitriolic shopkeeper Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan). Ellis isn't a willing émigré; as the youngest, she's a burden on a family reduced to an older sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott), and their widowed mother, Mary (Jane Brennan). Rose has a job, so it's off to America for Ellis, where Father Flood (Jim Broadbent) has arranged a job and lodging in a heavily Irish part of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn pretty much unfolds as one would expect—a sad goodbye between Ellis and her best friend Nancy (Eileen O'Higgins), a teary dock scene before the ship departs from Cork, on-board tips from an established émigré, settling into a boarding house run by the devout and set-in-her-ways Madge Kehoe (Julie Waters), heckling from the older residents, and struggling to overcome loneliness, shed her greenhorn skin, and adapt to America. One of the things that makes Brooklyn a good film—courtesy of Nick Hornby's treatment of Colm Toibin's novel—is that all of what I've just said is communicated clearly, but in telescoped time. It is pretty much the standard (if romanticized) immigrant narrative, so why dwell on it?

Director John Crowley doesn't. The story is really about Ellis' transformation from an awkward Irish lass to a confident young Irish-American woman who learns how to present herself publicly, discovers her intellect, and perfects the art of dishing out quips and snark as needed. She even transgresses her Irishness by taking up with an Italian boyfriend, Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), an ethnic leap that was still viewed as mildly scandalous in the 1950s.

The film's dramatic crisis occurs when the Americanized Ellis makes a return visit to Ireland a year later. Things have changed in the village, or have they? The restless Ellis—who now has bookkeeping skills—finds temporary employment to occupy her spare time, and she finds herself being wooed by Jim Farrell (Domhnail Gleeson), a sweet man from the Irish upper crust. To return, or to stay; that is the question.

The film's glories begin with Ms. Ronan. She is the real deal, folks—perhaps the finest young actress to emerge since Jennifer Lawrence. She's all of 21, but she's already dazzled in films such as Atonement, The Lovely Bones, The Way Back, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. She's not classically beautiful—more like irresistibly intriguing—but her enormous talent allows her to engage in a chameleon-like transformation from dowdy to desirable. When she's on screen you simply must look at her. It's hard to imagine that anyone could have played Ellis as well as she.

All of the acting is strong. Waters is delicious as Madge Kehoe. Hers is a superb blend of goodness, saltiness, and prudishness. She even chews a little scenery, as when she hysterically warns her lodgers they are not to discuss "our Lord's hygiene habits." Jim Broadbent is always solid, Domhnail Gleeson strikes the right chords of being provincial yet different, and Brid Brennan ought to be the go-to gal the next time someone is casting for the Wicked Witch of the West. 

The performances alone make this film a treat, but credit must also go to Crowley. His past directorial work has been largely in theatre and he brings to the screen theatre's sensibility that it's okay to truncate tales and trust your audience to fill in the gaps. His light-handed direction allows the actors to infer past action emotively rather than bludgeoning us with the obvious. Call it a classic less is more approach.

The film is a nice slice of the early 1950s, a reminder that Irish immigration was/is an ongoing phenomenon, and a subtle consideration of the myriad push-pull tensions between one's homeland and one's adopted land. And yes, it's sweet, sentimental, old-fashioned, and fairy tale-like. Call me an old softy, but my skeptical hackles dissolved amidst its charms.

Rob Weir

Are We Serious about Terrorism?

Here’s the big test. Will President Obama pass this time, or will he once again drop the ball into the conciliatory goo that passes for statesmanship these days? The issue is terrorism—of the domestic variety. Put directly, the question is whether the United States has the stomach to tackle its homegrown death merchants. If not, it’s pretty hard to imagine it can effectively stare down the pure evil of ISIS or al-Qaeda.

What makes this more acceptable than ISIS?

The latest Born-in-the-USA monster is named Robert Lewis Dear, though he has a few Frankenstein-like creators behind him. Dear is the Christian jihadist who shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and left three dead and nine wounded. Dear won’t ever see the light of day again: one of the dead was a cop, as were five of the wounded. He’s irrelevant in the larger question of what is to be done with the terror groups that are culpable: Operation Rescue, the National Rifle Association, and the extreme rightwing of the Republican Party.

Operation Rescue a terrorist group? It pains me to say so, but yes. I know several earnest individuals involved in anti-choice movements. They are people of conscience willing to put their own bodies on the line, but would not harm another. They are not the problem any more than all Muslims are members of ISIS. That is why, as in the case of extraterritorial terrorism, we need to go after the heads, not the feet of terrorist groups like Operation Rescue. It belongs on the same terror watch list as other sanguinary anti-choice movements such as the Army of God and the Phineas Priesthood. One can try as hard as one wishes to argue to the contrary, but the broader anti-choice movement meets all the criteria of a terror group: random murders (20 since 1997); intimidation (380 death and 655 anthrax threats since 2000); destruction of property (41 bombings and 173 arsons since 2000); non-lethal violence against individuals (153 convicted assaults, 100 acid attacks); and three kidnappings. Robert Lewis Dear is not indicative of a typical anti-choice activist, but neither is he a Lone Wolf. At some point all activists must be held morally culpable for the fact that their rhetoric inflames individuals such as Dear, but until that enlightened day all groups must be monitored carefully and intensively.

That starts with the heinous Troy Newman, the current head of Operation Rescue. It extends also with holding GOP mad dogs such as Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Chuck Grassley, and Bobby Jindall accountable for their incendiary words. They are among those who whipped up hatred for Planned Parenthood by jumping onto a “they sell baby parts” bandwagon without checking any facts, let alone the facts. What is it that Dear muttered as he was led away? “Baby parts.” Do we think he made an exhaustive study of that claim? How about a censure motion against irresponsible Republican fear mongers?      

And how about a STFU restraining order for the NRA? We are already witnessing backpedaling from the NRA terrorist elite. How, we are asked—for the 12,071^st time this year—can we hold all gun owners responsible for the action of a lone assassin? We are asked, yet again, to imagine that Dear is mentally ill. He might be, but at what point does the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario take over? Is there a tipping point in which we must say that the American species is simply too dangerous to have unfettered access to all the firepower they want? The 12,071 figure is the number of Americans killed this year by guns. If there is any solace at all, it is that Americans are also the Gang that Can’t Shoot Straight; the death toll represents just one-quarter of the total number of shooting “incidents” as of November 30, 2015. I fear ISIS, but I never feared the late “Jihadi John” as much as I fear NRA head Wayne Lapierre. Let’s face it,  one of Wayne’s boys is much more likely to harm me than one of Jihadi John’s.

 I give President Obama props for his recent linkage of the Colorado Springs carnage to the larger issue of gun availability. I wish I could believe the president will do something about this, but his track record doesn’t inspire confidence. Obama was on the right track back in 2010 when the Internal Revenue Service was scrutinizing rightwing groups. That should have been done and should be reinstated. Intensive oversight has happened—but only to leftwing groups. Don’t take my word for it—check out COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram), the FBI’s take-down of the radical New Left. The justification at the time was that any law-abiding organization would have nothing to fear from surveillance. Alas, President Obama caved to GOP pressure to call off the IRS offensive on the right. If we can’t look at their finances—which are supposed to be public--how hopeful are we that Obama would subject them to greater oversight,  or that he will give us substantive gun control? (If he does, I will gladly eat crow and admit I was wrong.)

Something needs to happen, or we may be heading for another Stonewall moment. Can you envision an Operation Rescue protest that gets routed when clinic supporters rally and beat the crap out of the protestors? I can, and I don’t want to see it happen. After Colorado Springs, President Obama pulled a page from Bernie Sanders’ campaign and announced, “Enough is enough.” It was enough decades ago. So what will it now be? Will we do something about terrorism on American shores or continue to hide behind ISIS-colored blinders? Will it be the rule of law, or the law of the jungle? Will we clean our own house, or simply demolish foreign homes?

Patty Griffin Servant of Love a Stunner

PATTY GRIFFIN

Servant of Love

Thirty Tigers PGM 001

* * * * *

Patty Griffin is beloved among music fans and rightly so. The only open question about Griffin is why she's only a medium-sized deal instead of the biggest thing to hit country music since Dolly Parton's hair. Servant of Love—widely interpreted as her post Robert Plant break-up album–helps explain why. Like Emmylou Harris, to whom Griffin is often compared, she doesn't play according to the rules. That is, she's almost impossible to categorize. Is she a delicate folk princess, a Texas (via Maine) country girl, a roll-up-the-sleeves rocker, a PTL gospel roller, an introspective chanteuse, or a pop diva? She's all of them, though the Celine Dion-like outlandish glam headdress she dons for an inside-CD airbrushed photograph is no doubt intended as ironic mockery of pop pretense.

Griffin is about the size of a New York minute but my goodness, what a voice pours out! The title track is as smoky and enigmatic as a Jacques Brel composition—just nighttime piano and Griffin's emotive voice. In the next breath, though, she slides into the rockabilly "Gunpowder," which is what what a cowboy hepcat might have dreamed up in the mid-50s. Need more? "Hurt a Little While" and "There Isn't One Way" are Mavis Staples goes secular. "Snake Charmer" is a country song wrapped in Jim Morrison-like imagery, and songs such as "Rider of Days" and "You Never Asked Me" will simply knock you off your pins through sheer beauty and the power of the embedded emotions. This is especially true of the latter, which is one of the more poignant songs of lost love in recent memory. When Griffin finishes one stanza with the line As we glide along the bends of time/Falling for little tricks of mind/With memories of Eden now so far behind/And the taste of melting snow, then slides into the opening line of the next verse–I don't believe in love like that anyway–you can just rip out your heart and toss it on the bedroom floor. Luckily Griffin takes us out on a high note, the bluegrass-flavored "Shine a Different Way." You'll cry because it's so damn pretty, but it's move-on optimism will bring a simultaneous smile.  And here's hoping Ms. Griffin never compromises her art for anyone.  Rob Weir

PS: Craig Ross (of Lenny Kravitz band fame), who also guests on the release, produced the album. He deserves kudos for captaining a truly remarkable recording.