Katherine First's Irish Kitchen Party

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KATHERINE FIRST & THE KITCHEN PARTY

Dancing Tables & Dancing Chairs

Fiddle First Music 002

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In Ireland, one of the greatest honors a family can bestow upon a visitor is to invite that person into their kitchen. The kitchen is considered the room of greatest physical warmth and personal intimacy; it’s also the room that's cleared of furniture for a dance party for friends and neighbors. Leeds resident Katherine First brings the same homespun ambiance to her latest fiddle-driven CD, one that also features longtime musical collaborators Buddy Downey (lead vocals/guitar), Jeff Hinrichs (percussion), Chris Haynes (piano/accordion), and Allen Belkin (lead vocals/banjo).  Most of this album’s ten tracks feature songs and tunes that will be known to acoustic and Celtic music fans, but they appear in unusual mixes and conform to the spirit of keeping the mood festive. The tone is established in the opening set of four tunes in which the quintet leads with Liz Carroll’s “Dancing Tables” and closes with First’s own “Dancing Chairs.” There are similar clever shifts throughout, such as a cover of David Mallett’s “Ballad of St. Anne’s Reel” that evolves into “John Ryan’s Polka,” or the Breton tune “Kerflank” as prelude to Robert Burns’ “A Man’s a Man For A’ That.” Perhaps the most audacious shift is to open a track with the well-known reel “Growling Old Man and Woman” and finish with the Grateful Dead standard “Friend of the Devil.” This album evokes a cold winter night in a bar hoisting a few with close friends. There is a small session in the corner, the fiddler is on fire, and the other musicians jump in with gusto that makes everyone gather ‘round to tap their feet and sing along. Before the evening ends, even the furniture is jigging.  If you close your eyes it could be a Galway kitchen….

Rob Weir

Ferguson, MO: I Have No Idea What Happened (and neither do you)

 

When I got out of college, my first professional job was as a juvenile probation officer. It was both awful and potentially dangerous. I briefly enrolled in a judo class just to have a skill that might help me protect myself. As it transpired, a very troubled kid happened to grab me in exactly the place on my neck we had practiced the night before. Completely by instinct, I flipped him­­—into one of those old-fashioned, free-standing, cast iron steam registers. He was taken to the hospital (for what turned out to be bad bruises and a small fracture), I gained an instant reputation for being badass, and I never went to another judo class because I didn’t want to be the kind of person who injured another.

This cannot be the standard of guilt

This brings me to Ferguson, Missouri. I’ve not beaten my chest over the shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, nor have I attended rallies demanding justice for him. It’s not that I think Brown deserved to die or that Officer Darren Wilson is innocent; it’s because I can’t be certain one way or the other. I wasn’t there. I got lucky when I had my little incident: my door was open and three people witnessed what happened. I also got lucky because if the kid had fallen in a different direction, he could have died.

Was Wilson a racist who seized an opportunity to kill a black kid? That could have been the case—not just because it took place in Missouri, a state with a deplorable racist past, but anywhere. I’ve worked with police and I’ve seen enough to assert that you should not automatically respect the uniform—some cops are little Nazis hiding behind a badge. But many of them are what we want them to be: fine (underpaid) public servants trying to do their jobs the best they know how.

Here’s another factor: Missouri isn’t Florida, a state in which criminal oversight is nearly as bad as its crooked-as-a-dog’s hind leg electoral laws. I’ve seen analogies between Ferguson and the George Zimmerman case. Just stop. They are not analogous. Florida’s stand-your-ground law was a disaster waiting to happen and it did. In Missouri, a grand jury is deciding whether or not to indict Officer Wilson for Michael Brown’s murder. That’s as it should be.  Officer Wilson can only be tried in a court of law, not the court of public opinion.

As I said, it’s entirely possible that Wilson is a racist murderer. It’s also possible, though, that like me he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and reacted in a way he wishes he had not. It’s also possible that Michael Brown attacked Wilson. He wouldn’t be the first kid to let his temper get the better of him, nor would he be the first to try to get some quick street cred by going rogue on a cop. There’s a video that raises doubts about Brown as an innocent victim. There is also blood evidence that needs to be sorted.

Speaking of doubt, that’s the standard by which Wilson should be judged. He cannot be convicted for being a racist or overreacting; he’s only a murderer if the prosecution can convince a jury that the preponderance of evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Wilson’s actions were either premeditated or reckless. If Brown grabbed Wilson, or if the blood on his uniform shows smear patterns consistent with being assaulted rather than splatter from a gun blast, Wilson’s defense team will have cast doubt on his guilt.

Count me among the last people who think we live in a post-racial society. America tragically remains a nation of stark black/white racial divides. It’s understandable that millions of African Americans would assume Wilson’s guilt. But I must remind everyone that the law presumes he is innocent until proven guilty. Michael Brown’s death was tragic. It’s also a reminder of how far we’ve yet to travel down the road to equality. But we cannot erase past injustices by perpetrating a modern-day miscarriage.

I know that my plea to allow the legal system to run its course raises the cynical hackles of many. How, they will ask, can one expect a justice system stained by institutional racism to give a black man a fair shake vis-à-vis a white man? I get that. But what’s the alternative? To throw Wilson under the bus to prevent angry riots? To make him personally responsible for centuries of racism? To allow public opinion polls to determine his fate? Do we do this even if he’s innocent?

Here’s what I know: I don’t! I wasn’t there. Neither were you. Here’s another thing I know: sometimes things don’t go as you intended them to go. That makes one unlucky, not necessarily a bigot. And still one more: American racism is alive and well. Who can judge which actually occurred in Ferguson? Not I. Not you.

The Alt Makes Old Music Excitingly New

THE ALT

The Alt

Under the Arch 002

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The Alt is an accidental trio that came together with a glorious result. Irish-born musician/vocalists John Doyle (guitar/bouzouki/mandola), Nuala Kennedy  (flute/whistles), and Eamon O'Leary (guitar/bouzouki) have assembled a well-crafted album bookended by songs that highlight the glories of a capella three-part harmonies. The first is a thorough remaking of the well-known "Lovely Nancy," with vocals acting as prelude to Doyle's bell-like guitar cadences and O'Leary's lead vocal. The album closes with a surprising voices-only cover of "The Letter Song," a 1930's Kentucky ballad. Stuffed between these are nine wonderful tracks in which each musician deals from strength. O'Leary has the most 'traditional' voice of the three and you'll hear his hint-of-a-rasp tenor on "Lovely Nancy" and "Willie Angler," the latter recorded by Silly Wizard as "The Banks of the Bann." Doyle's voice is lighter and his tones such that he naturally imbues songs with melancholia, no matter the subject. You'll hear this to fine effect on "Going for a Solider" and "The Eighteenth of June." Nearly everything on this album has been mined from old songbooks and Doyle's songs are no exception. The first is one of many reluctant warrior songs in the Irish tradition, but The Alt give it a faintly maritime feel, with Kennedy's rolling flute enhancing the mood. "Eighteenth of June" is a Battle of Waterloo song in which lyrics, instrumentation, and feel inhabit the sadness, madness, hope, and tragedy of war. Kennedy has the most delicate voice of the three, perfect for slower material such as "One Morning in May" and the Scots Gaelic "Cha Tig Mór Mo Bhean Dhachaigh," a man's lament for his deceased wife.

Today's challenges to covering traditional material include making it fresh enough for  younger folks with less experience with non-processed music whilst making it different enough so that diehards aren't tempted to draw comparisons. The Alt negotiates those slippery slopes with great aplomb. For example, "The Geese in the Bog" set is two jigs in F# minor that Ms. Kennedy soups up to the degree that her flute commands you to dance. She does this by smoothing out the edges so that the cadences flow and meld. Later, on "The Green Gowned Lass" set, she, O'Leary, and Doyle take three already fast reels and slow them ever so slightly to give them the punctuated feel of jigs. Nice touch–and very typical of the best accidents I've witnessed in some time. 

PS—The Alt moniker is not an attempt to be hip; it's lifted from a Yeats poem.  

Rob Weir

Stupid Machine Tricks

It’s been a mantra since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution­—machines produce goods and services more cheaply, more efficiently, and of higher quality. They also do things that people don’t want to do. That’s so true that it’s become an article of faith that’s never questioned. Too bad, because it’s not always the case.

How many machines doe it take to fix a sidewalk?

As I was strolling through town a few days ago, I saw four examples of how we’ve become so tied to industrial gear that we’ve made simple tasks expensive, inefficient, and environmentally unsound. The first and second of these involved the use of a riding mower. I take it as a given that no power mower is energy efficient but, in the same way that I think a rancher or plumber might actually have a need for a low-mileage pick-up truck, so too do I think that people who live in the country, grounds crews, and lawn maintenance companies make their jobs much easier by using such machines. I have to say, though, when you use a rider mower in spaces so small that you have to reverse out of them, efficiency bleeds into stupidity.

I saw that. There is a row of three down-market apartment buildings on West Street in Northampton whose frontage is devoted to macadam parking lots. The buildings are separated from each other by strips of land about the width of a desk and a depth of about twenty-five feet. There’s no lawn; not much grows in the shadows. Still, leaves blow into the spaces, which was what the mower was picking up. The space was so narrow and required so many reversals that it took about three times as long as it would have taken with a rake.

Speaking of rakes, it’s a shame about the rake shortage, isn’t it?  Of all the inventions of the late 20^th century, leaf blowers may be among the dumbest. They are loud, smoke-belching fuel hogs, but my main beef with them is that they’re very inefficient unless one is seeking to dislodge leaves from bushes, gutters, or garden beds. Here’s what I observed on the Smith campus—grounds crew personnel walking up and down blowing leafs into central piles. First, they could have done all of this with rakes and gotten some aerobic benefit that wouldn’t have made all that noise at 7 in the morning. Second, those piles took a half hour to make but only 10 minutes to rake. Third, another machine—a riding mower with a bag—came by to collect the piles. If you’re going to run the mower/bagger anyhow, why bother with the stupid blowers? Insofar as I can see the main purpose of leaf blowers is to scatter all the mulch that was carefully put down in the spring.

Still, those two projects were practically models of economy compared with a small project on a town road. Crews needed to get into a section of the water lines via an entry point (which we used to call manhole covers). In the old days, this would have meant some burly person with a jackhammer chiseled away the macadam enough so the cover could be prised up. After the job was done, another one or two people would have come by to restore a hot tar sealant to the cover. Not anymore! No! It now requires a mammoth vehicle that’s about the size of a water driller to pulverize the road surface so that one guy can open the cover. The drill takes out about four feet of the road. When the job is done, another truck arrives and several people throw some crushed stone into the hole and place a red cone over it until it can be resurfaced. That, of course, requires a paving machine, and then a steamroller. Good grief! No wonder the average road cost is now a million bucks a mile!

Don’t get me started on how inefficient and overly expensive it was to replace a section of a downtown cracked sidewalk. My dad used to do this with a sledge, 2 x 4 forms, some fresh gravel, Sakrete that he and another guy mixed in a wheelbarrow, and a pair of trowels. Now we’re talking one machine to break the pavement, another with gravel, a small backhoe  to level the gravel, and a cement mixer. They’ve not yet figured out how to replace the trowels. They have figured out how to write huge invoices.

Maybe a good way to restore health to the US economy and rebuild its infrastructure is to stop spending so much money on toys and more on labor. I’m no Luddite—machines can do wonderful things. But they don’t always make sense.   

Birdman: Best of 2014?

BIRDMAN (2014)

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Fox Searchlight, 119 minutes, R (language)

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Wrap the Oscars for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and perhaps Best Supporting Actress as well. Not since Synecdoche, New York (2008) have I seen a film this intelligent, provocative, and gloriously weird. At last––a film that's both playful and has a triple-digit IQ! See this one with friends as you'll be debating and discussing it for weeks to come.

The set up is deceptively simple: ageing actor Riggan Thomson(Michael Keaton) is directing a Broadway revival of a play based upon a Raymond Carver short story collection, What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Love. Riggan wants to change his image as the public knows him for one thing and one thing only: his blockbuster role as Birdman, a comic book superhero brought to the silver screen. Here we get a glimpse of what director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Amores perroes) intends to do. This film is everything thing a summer blockbuster isn't: complicated, reflective, ambiguous, and magical in ways that originate in the mind, not in computer-generated f/x. Don't look for simple good guy/bad guy scenarios in Birdman, and pay no attention to promo labels such as "black comedy," as there's way more going on here.

Riggan needs a hit for more than his career–he's bombed in his marriage to his soul mate (Amy Ryan), has been a lousy father to daughter Sam (Emma Stone), is in the process of driving away girlfriend Laura (Andrea Riseborough), drinks too much, and is slowly either going insane or being overwhelmed by real superpowers. If you needed a play for the Apocalypse, his adaptation of Raymond Carver would be it. Especially when his lead actor suffers an accident (or did he make it happen?) and Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) arrives the day before dress rehearsal. Mike might be a tortured genius, a total jerk, or Beelzebub. His creative destruction might be pushing Riggan to confront his demons, urge him to surrender to them, or push the poor sap over the edge. Similarly, Mike might be exactly what Sam needs to make her lose her self-destructive attitude, or he might be providing the ammunition for her to lock and load. He could be the force that turns Lesley (Naomi Watts) into a real actress, or he might just be a perverse satyr who can only get it up when he's on stage. He might be a font of wisdom, or maybe just a fountain of egoistic bullshit.

That's the thing about this film. It evokes Fight Club in the ways it subverts what we see. Or is it what we think we see? There's a sign on Riggan's dressing room mirror that says, "A thing is a thing, not what is said of the thing." Maybe. Watch Keaton's barroom dustup with Broadway critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan) and get back to me. Check out Riggan's dialogues with his Birdman alter ego (or is it Carver?) and let me know. Can Riggan fly, or does he crash and burn? Can he act, or is he really just the hack he thinks he is. When he stands on the stage and says, "I don't exist," does he? 

This is a beautifully written film (Iñárritu, Nicholás Giacobone, Armando Bo, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr.) and Iñárritu's direction is more imaginative than any superhero film you've ever seen. Michael Keaton is a tour de force who must simultaneously assume the roles of possessed director, failed lover, ineffectual parent, tyrant, shaman, charlatan, and wounded self-doubter. (It's hard not to muse upon Robin Williams as we watch him.) Edward Norton is always wonderful and he's at his incendiary best in Birdman. Iñárritu chose well for a film framed around comic book superheroes. Keaton, of course, was Batman and he reduxes that voice for some of the film's creepier sequences. Norton, on the other hand, was Hulk and co-starred in Fight Club. Emma Stone also has a breakout performance in Birdman in a role that might well be titled Millennial Forced to Grow Up. In a stunning departure from usual American movie fare, all of the secondary actors are strong: Watts, Duncan, Ryan, Riseborough, and Zach Galifianakis as Jake, who might be Riggan's best friend or might be just another sycophant hoping to cash in.

Is a thing just a thing? You'll be arguing over this film's ending for quite some time—one that I confess originally left me dissatisfied until having lunch with three other people, one of whom had an interpretation I find compelling. Yes, it's that kind of film. It's already been honored at Venice, where it carried off several major awards, including the Golden Lion. I'm ready to anoint the film, Iñárritu, Keaton, Norton, and Stone.  

Rob Weir

Restore Democracy Locally

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Last Tuesday was a very bad day for progressives nationally, but it wasn't so bad locally. No, I don't mean gun control bills or approval of recreational marijuana use. I was cheered by something that happened in Northampton, Massachusetts–the City Council approved step one of Mayor David Narkewicz's plan to reorganize city government. The mayor's first target was the much-despised Department of Public Works, a body viewed by many locals as an arrogant, unregulated fiefdom.

Northampton strikes back!

Before November 6, the DPW got a budget from the city that, in turn, had very little say in how the money was spent. The DPW took its marching orders from the Board of Public Works, which had the power to set local water rates, sign contracts with private firms, set DPW policy, and determine which projects it would take on and the scope of those projects. Got that? An unelected body headed by an unelected director took orders from an unelected advisory board. I cast no aspersions at any current official, but let's just say that there's high potential for abuses within such a non-democratic, idiosyncratic structure. Mayor Narkewicz put DPW under direct city control and one only hopes that all city boards will be similarly stripped of independence.

It's important to know how boards across America attained such autonomy in the first place. It's not the fault of any living person–unless there's a retired city official of about 120 years of age somewhere. Autonomous bodies were the brainchild of Progressive Era (roughly 1901-17) reformers. Lots of useful regulations were passed in the Progressive Era, the first of three major government-directed reform periods in American history. (The other two are the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1960s.) Progressives had numerous blind spots, though; among them a worshipful trust in experts and an abiding fear of socialism.

Progressives wanted to streamline government and make it more "efficient." Efficiency is a good thing, right? Well, not always; efficiency is most quickly achieved autocratically. Let's face it, democracy takes time and that's inefficient. Moreover, The People–a group elected officials tend to distrust mightily even as they wax poetic about them–often have different ideas about how things should work. Sparked partly by wishing to counter the corruption that permeated late 19^th century city government and partly by blind trust, many Progressive Era municipal reformers turned to what is known as commission-style government. That's what most places have these days–a mayor and a small board or city council that acts as a small Congress for the municipality. So far, so good. But what happened next wasn't so good. Progressives trusted "experts" so much that they allowed them to reorganize major parts of city government into independent and semi-autonomous boards. After all, wouldn't you want a civil engineer to run your water works? No–you wouldn't! You want that person's expertise, but you do not want him or her assuming political power.

Commission governments often become shadow governments inside of the elected bodies; in some cases, they are the real government in terms of wielding actual decision-making power. Elected officials often like this. After all, if the "experts" make the hard decisions and the electorate is angry about those actions, elected officials are insulated from voter wrath. (That's why, by the way, Congress set up an 'independent' commission to determine military base closings. They never have to go on the record and vote on them!) Fine, but we don't elect city councilors and mayors to pass the proverbial and literal buck. If your town has a passel of independent boards, it means you as a citizen have little input into their decisions. In many ways, it hardly matters who is on the town council as their only real power is to vote upon the budget of boards such as DPW. 

Nor was commission government entirely about efficiency. Between 1912 and 1991, 340 American cities elected socialist mayors, councilors, and other officials. In many cases, these socialists spearheaded the municipalization of city services such as water, sewer, electricity, power, transportation, and landfills. That is, they went from being private enterprises to being city-owned. Imagine a world in which the city regulated the power rates, not a group of investors. That happened and is still around in many places. Most of the time rates are lower in city-owned enterprises. Forget efficiency, you sure can get better rates when you remove profit from the equation. That's why so many cities are now looking into things such as their own Internet and cable services. (I dream of the day I can say sayonara to Comcast!)

I could cite numerous ways in which social democracy is superior to for-profit enterprises, but let me emphasize the democracy side of things. It's simply undemocratic to allow boards serving the public to act autonomously from that public. Moreover, it's an abrogation of duty for councils and mayors to allow this. It is, if I may be so blunt, their job to tell city boards what to do, not vice versa. Kudos to Mayor Narkewicz.

I'd also like to suggest that those of you who live elsewhere should put the heat to local government to follow Northampton's lead. Do it for democracy's sake. Maybe we can restore some sanity to America one town at a time!  

Sandcastle Girls a Good Way to Start Thinking of Armenian Massacre

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THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS (2012)

By Chris Bohjalian

Random House, 299 pp.

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Not the most effective cover art (or title)

Call it unplanned synchronicity. Just as I was getting ready to prepare a lecture for my immigration class that included the Armenian genocide, I picked up a copy of The Sandcastle Girls. In all honesty, I didn't know its subject matter; I only knew I needed a novel to read and that I liked some of Chris Bohjalian's other books. In fact, the title and cover art nearly led me elsewhere as each suggested a teen coming-of-age-at-the-beach book. It's not; it's a harrowing fictionalized treatments of the 1915 murder of 1.5 Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

Bohjalian calls it "The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About," and so it is. The Turks would prefer you call it "Self-Defense Against Internal Traitors and Terrorists," but that's sheer rubbish–unless you think small children and their mothers took up arms against a defenseless Ottoman Empire. Actually, Turks would prefer you don't know about how they butchered Armenians like roasting chickens. If you know about that one, you might start asking questions about how they treated Azerbaijanis, Greeks, and Kurds as well. But back to the novel.

It's set in 1915, the year of the massacre and the early days of World War One. (If you need another history lesson, the United States will, in 1917, enter the war on the side of Britain and France against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turks.) Boston Brahmin and recent Mt. Holyoke grad Elizabeth Endicott decides to accompany her father to Aleppo, Syria, where he will coordinate the regional efforts of the Friends of Armenia. The FOA is a do-good but totally ineffectual relief agency that the Turks brazenly lie to and ignore, and which even the U.S. consulate thinks is just in the way. Elizabeth, though, is undeterred and resolute in her desire to do some good. She may be naïve, but she's not blind and she knows not to trust the Turks when they say they are 'relocating' women and children to keep them out of harm's way (as in a mass grave). Her efforts eventually lead her to take into her household an Armenian woman named Nevart, and a small girl named Hatoun who doesn't say much and is prone to disappearing. As it turns out Hatoun doesn't say much because she witnessed the Turks behead her mother; she latched onto Nevart in a refugee camp. Elizabeth will also eventually meet and fall in love with Armen Petroisan, an engineer who once believed in the Ottoman Empire–until the racists took over and, he is forced to conclude, murdered his daughter and wife.

The novel plays out Elizabeth and Armen's relationship against a backdrop of war and murder–think Dr. Zhivago without the ice palace. There are some fine plot twists, including the unlikely but true story of how the Armenian holocaust was documented through the efforts of two German soldier/photographers who got their images smuggled out the region. There are also harrowing tales from the infamous Battle of Gallipoli bloodbath, peeks inside orphanages, and suggestions that the U.S. pandered when it should have pushed. Elizabeth is also a nice mix of a Braham and the New Woman.

The novel is strongest for what it tells us about "The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About." In telling it, Bohjalian uses a device of which I'm not overly fond–using a present-day narrator/snoop to uncover the secrets of the past. In this case, it's Elizabeth's granddaughter and novelist, Laura Petrosian, who recalled her grandmother's "Ottoman Annex" home in Pelham, Massachusetts, but not much about her grandparents. Laura's character and story feel contrived. There are a few too many coincidences and, let's face it, a novelist character from the hands of a novelist feels pretentious. The book's central metaphor, the sandcastle, is itself built upon loose ground, a small incident in the book that you could easily miss if reading late at night.  I also couldn't help think of Eleni, which uses the deep, dark family secret trope more effectively. But when we are in Turkey in 1915, the story tells itself. This book won't win style points, but give Bohjalian props for blowing the lid off Turkish silence. If you know little about the Armenian genocide–and that would be most people–this is a good place to start your own snooping into an atrocity whose hundredth birthday we shall soon commemorate. 

Rob Weir