Ritch Workman is an Idiot and Other Political Rants

Lead candidate for bunghole of the year!

You’ve got to hand it to the Republican Party: in Herbert Cain it managed to find an African American who is even whiter than Clarence Thomas! Cain’s recent lampoon of the Wall Street occupiers as a bunch of unemployed people trying to take money from those who earned it is straight out of 19^th century Social Darwinism in its callousness. He also missed the point. They are unemployed, you damn fool—that’s the entire point of the occupation.

Speaking of Clarence Thomas, expect to hear him complain again of being “lynched” by the left. (Only someone craven would use the term as cavalierly as he.) It seems that the press is finally getting around to raising a question or two—albeit with kid gloves—about the seed money the Supreme Court Justice provided his wife to form a Tea Party group. Justices are, in theory, banned from engaging in partisan politics as they are expected to be impartial (yeah, right!) when cases appear before them. Thomas is now disingenuously saying that he knows little of his wife’s political activities or the $1.6 million he helped raise for Tea Party causes. What he has done isn’t impeachable (or believable), but if he has a scrap of decency he’ll recuse himself from future cases with even a hint of ideology attached to them. Don’t hold your breath, though; Thomas is a disgrace to robes once worn by Thurgood Marshall.

In an older blog I suggested that shock jock Michael Graham wasn’t very funny in making dwarf jokes. I’m ready to declare Graham a saint in comparison to Florida Representative Ritch Workman, who has actually argued that Florida should repeal its law on dwarf-tossing. This mean-spirited jackass actually had the moxie to suggest that a repeal would create opportunities for unemployed dwarves, who could get jobs in bars servicing patrons who get their jollies from hurling small folks around the joint. I’ve got a better idea—one that could go a long way toward alleviating the national debt. How about a bill that allows citizens to fling dung on legislators? How much would you pay for that privilege?

A last rant, this one directed at liberals. I’ve been approached by numerous people to sign petitions asking that the government halt the deportation of illegal immigrants and that it launch legal challenges to draconian laws such as that of Arizona and Georgia. Sorry, folks, but I won’t put energy or money into a lost cause. We need a debate over immigration law, but it’s not going to happen in this Congress and it has zero chance of occurring until 2013 at the earliest. I must also say that the United States is about the only nation in the world where a debate over illegal immigration would even take place. I know that there have been heartbreaking cases of families torn asunder, but this is truly a case in which risk assessment is part of the equation. I have personally known illegals—mostly from Ireland and Scotland—and each was well aware of the consequences of being apprehended. As I said, I’m all for a revamp of immigration laws–legal immigration laws. But kneejerk defenses of illegal immigration strikes me as muddled liberalism that’s out of touch with current law, prevailing politics, public opinion, and common sense. It is, simply, a cause with no future.

Mini Picks, Including a Classic!

Truly one of history's greatest films.

I had heard about it for decades and avoided it for all the reasons I generally avoid all things hyped. Take the word of one who was foolish but is now wiser: Les enfants du paradis (“Children of Paradise,” 1946, 163 mins. French with subtitles) deserves its status as among the greatest movies ever made. Directed by Marcel Carné at the very end of the German occupation of France during World War II, the film is set in Paris in the 1820s, a time in which class distinctions were as sharp as a noble’s sword. It centers on the character of Garance, a model/prostitute/courtesan and the four men who love her: a romantic mime, an egoistical actor, an arrogant duke, and an amoral criminal, each of whom is based on a real-life character. It is a film about the thin and porous lines between admiration and obsession, love and lust, ambition and egotism, passion and cruelty, and celebrity and notoriety. There are parts of the film that are more surrealistic than anything Fellini ever imagined, and others that are more sumptuous and sensual in black and white than a Crayola factory could manufacture. The film’s stunning final scene has been often copied, but never equaled. Don’t wait to see this, even if you think an old black-and-white film in French sounds dreary. There’s a reason why it has been praised to the skies.

Also in French is Sarah’s Key (2010, directed and written by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, PG-13, 111mins.) This one isn’t likely to make its way onto any classic films list and there are bits of it that are exceedingly contrived, but give it credit: it at least tries to do something new with the Holocaust. I mean nothing condescending in that remark, only that it’s hard to tell that story without drowning an audience in horror, pathos, and sadness. All three are present in Sarah’s Key, but the film humanizes the scale of the Holocaust in ways that, in many ways, makes the tragedy more impactful. The central character is Sarah Starzynski, a child rounded up in the seldom-discussed Parisian roundup of Jews in 1942. The story switches between Sarah in 1942, and investigative journalist Julia Jarmond in the present. The fully bilingual and always impressive Kristin Scott Thomas plays Jarmond. This film is still in theaters as well as on DVD. It’s worth viewing.

A music pick. If you want a night out that involves a break from the present and tongue-in-cheek mayhem, go see the Sweetback Sisters, a delightful retro band that culls the Country music backlist from the days in which slickness meant hair grease not studio tricks. We caught them in a West Whatley, MA concert recently and reveled in their hijinks, energy, tight harmonies, and crisp musicianship. Okay, we could have done with fewer histrionics from the lad playing electric guitar, but what’s not to like in a repertoire that draws from Patsy Cline, Hazel Dickens, and loads of other earlier Country and bluegrass stars and supplements them with superb originals?

Looking for something quite different musically? I just caught up with Wu Man recently, whom I had not seen in a while. Wu Man is the mistress of the Chinese pippa, a four-stringed, 23-frets instrument whose sound you will recognize, though you’ll not hear many who can play it like Wu Man. At times she makes her instrument sound like it came from some royal court thousands of years ago; at others she’s so wild and expressive that she’s been dubbed the “Jimi Hendrix of the pippa.”

NBA Fails to Open and the Public Yawns

Who cares?

November 1 was supposed to be the first regular season game of the National Boring Association, sorry--National Basketball Association. The impasse between the filthy rich players and the even filthier, even richer owners has delayed this. Aside from vendors, advertisers, and a handful of service-industry workers, does anyone really care? The lack of a public hue-and-cry for the NBA contrasts greatly with the angst associated with last summer’s possible pro football cancellations. The NFL lockout was front-page stuff news; the NBA is relegated to the internal columns of the sports pages. Why? And how can we salvage the NBA?

First of all, now that the NBA finals extend until late June, it’s not like we’ve been without NBA basketball for very long. The NBA is overexposed and that’s not good news because…

The second problem with the NBA is that its product is unattractive. NBA marketers do their best to manufacture heroes, but the millionaires it seeks to promote are too flawed or too immature to play their roles. The league’s best is Kobe Bryant, who has never recovered from rape allegations leveled in 2003. That leaves LeBron James, who is overhyped, underperforms under pressure, and who made a total ass of himself in his televised decision to bolt Cleveland for Miami. In a recent poll James ranked as the sixth least-liked athlete in the United States. Guess who was number five? Yep--Kobe Bryant. You know the NBA has an image problem when you’re as likely to see past and present players on America’s Most Wanted as on ESPN. Among the lowlights (lowlifes?): twice-convicted Allen Iverson, Ponzi-schemer Tate George, jail birds Isaiah Rider, Charles Smith, Sly Williams, and Sean Banks, and gun-toter Gilbert Arenas. Oh yeah, the guy Arenas pulled a gun on is Jarvaris Crittenden, under investigation for murder. And these are just the tip of the iceberg. And the NBA Players’ Association thinks the public gives a damn what percentage of basketball revenue goes to this lot?

Athletes are seldom saints--Michael Vick is a starting NFL quarterback for heaven’s sake--but the road to redemption is to thrill audiences in the arena. This leads to the NBA’s third problem: it’s just not a very good product at present. Blame owners and management for that. They’ve gotten it in their collective heads that “athleticism” and “an NBA body” is more important than the ability to score, the possession of skills, or actually understanding the game. There are millions of kids in playgrounds and gyms across the world and the NBA can’t find more than a dozen who can knock down a 15-foot jump shot? Don’t tell me about how good the defense is these days--I’ve seen the footage of Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird, Dave Cowens, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, George Gervin, Michael Jordan, and Dr. J draining shots with guys hanging on them like a Cadillac hood ornament. Don’t get me started on the lack of ball-handling ability; let’s just say that in the old days if a team trailed by ten going into the 4^th quarter, the game was over.

Here’s my proposal to solve the NBA impasse. First, as anyone who has viewed the game in the past decade knows, the first 46 minutes are irrelevant. They also know that the final two minutes will take an hour to play with the constant time outs, fouls, feigned injuries, etc. So let’s forget salaries altogether. Negotiate a TV contract based on a series of one-hour broadcasts of the final two minutes of NBA contests. Let’s pretend 46 minutes have been played, start with a good modern NBA score of 73-73, and play the final two. An alternative would be to say that the first team to 80 wins--though networks would have to be prepared to extend the one-hour timeslot. Players and management split the TV revenues 40-40, with 20% going to support the underfunded high schools that supply NBA talent.

Second, create a round robin of two-minute games to determine who gets to the playoffs and finals. The entire season could be played out and filmed in about two weeks and replayed on TV according to a seasonal schedule with the first “games” aired in November and the “finals” in late April. Players would sign sworn affidavits not to reveal the outcomes in advance; anyone doing so would be barred for five years from the main revenue-enhancing outlets of NBA players: endorsing sneakers, fast food, or Gatorade.

Because the NBA season would actually be played and filmed in its entirety by late August, those athletes who wish to play entire games would be free to go elsewhere to do so. This would be additional income for them and they’d still get U.S. TV revenue money. Kobe could go to Italy and LeBron to China, where apparently people still care about pro basketball. The rest of us just want to see the circus finale, not the plumed prancing horses.

UMass Football: An Expensive Delusion

UMass gambles despite stacked odds against it. This article originally appeared in The Daily Hampshire Gazette October 18, 2011.

Western Massachusetts is about to place a wager with high potential to lose millions, bring an influx of unsavory characters, and leave social wreckage in its wake. No, I’m not talking about casino gambling; I mean the deluded belief that the University of Massachusetts can become a profitable Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) powerhouse. Recent shakeups in football conferences threaten to cancel or limit UMass’s entry into the Mid-American Conference (MAC) and confirm that the university is betting on desperation odds. It’s time to give up football fantasies and concentrate on things that matter more.

I came to the Valley twenty-five years ago to get a Ph.D. at UMass. I love UMass, stayed here to be close to it, donate to it, and often teach courses there. But I grew up in Pennsylvania, where Penn State was a focal point of Commonwealth pride and was/is well-funded by the legislature. I was shocked to see how little Boston cares about UMass. I have taught in buildings with plywood nailed to the first floor to prevent people from falling to the basement. Campus wags say that the school motto is “Deferred Maintenance” and that its mascot is a classroom rain bucket. I can take you to places where jerry rigged plastic sheets and tubing is all the stands between dry land and a new campus pond. I can enumerate departments that have been understaffed for decades.

It’s shameful how the Commonwealth ignores its flagship but—as the slogan goes—it is what it is. UMass athletics suffered an $850,000 cut to its $23 million budget just last year, the region is losing population, we’re likely to shed a Congressional district, and the UMass board has a single regional representative. Western Mass will lose clout in Boston, not acquire more. Need I remind everyone that big-time basketball was going to bring prominence to the university? That the Mullins Center—now hemorrhaging money and managed by an outside firm—was going to replenish university coffers? Did the Commonwealth help that program? Will it rescue UMass if the MAC decides it doesn’t want the Minutemen, or boots them two years hence for insufficient attendance? (It’s no slam-dunk that UMass will average 15,000 fans for two years. It barely averaged that in 2010, even with a big- attendance “home” game vs. New Hampshire in Foxborough. Think UMass will draw 32,000 for that big rivalry against Ball State?)

Football is a money drain, though you have to decode the university budget to see it. In 2010 UMass budgeted $4.3 million for football; it brought in $1.2 million, but the books were “balanced” because student activity fees subsidized football (and other revenue-losing sports). Expect fees to skyrocket if UMass joins the MAC and football costs swell to nearly $7 million. Expect also that any residual revenue will go to Eastern Massachusetts, not Amherst. There will never be a large stadium on the UMass campus; local infrastructure cannot sustain it. UMass students will pick up the tab for Boston-area entrepreneurs.

And here’s the clincher. Even if UMass managed to build a respectable program comparable to that of neighboring Connecticut, big-time college comes at a social cost comparable to that of casino gambling. The NCAA is a cartel that’s as self-interested as the American Gaming Association. Money is made, but seldom by the schools involved; the NCAA admits that just 22 FBS schools actually made money on football during 2009-10. Big-time gamblers love college football, payoffs abound, and athletes are used like poker chips. Don’t take my word for it; check out what recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic, and Forbes have to say about it.

UMass uses “benchmark” schools to measure its academic and student life standards. Among its peers are UConn, Michigan State, and the University of Maryland. They’re fine schools but, with all due respect, I’d much rather UMass used universities such as Brandeis, NYU, the University of Vermont, and the UCal system (sans Berkeley) as benchmarks. Each is a topnotch academic institution with healthy enrollment and no football team. I call upon new UMass President Robert Carnet to shut down the Amherst football/craps game before millions of dollars are lost and academic excellence joins building maintenance on the “deferred” list.

Visit from the Goon Squad Undeserving of a Pulitzer

Diverting, but nothing more.

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010. ISBN 978-0-307-94835-9

There are certain awards--film’s Palme d’Or springs to mind--that have more to do with how much one has impressed peers than how good the product is. I’m beginning to think that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is one of them. I haven’t agreed with the committee’s choice since Richard Russo won in 2002 for Empire Falls, but the 2011 choice, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, leaves me especially perplexed. It is, at best, a middling effort that hardly deserves to join exalted ranks such as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Confessions of Nat Turner. It’s not a bad book, just one I could see a group of aging committee members honoring in the mistaken belief that they are being “hip” and “relevant.” It must be “now,” right? There are PowerPoint slides in the book and some of the characters text and tweet. Wow!

Egan takes us inside the chaos of the 1970s, a time in which punk rock was in the process of transitioning from an expression of underclass anger into a commercial commodity. In fact, one of the book’s two main characters, Bennie Salazar, is helping make that happen. He’s a failed musician-turned-record executive seeking to bask in the star glow of his discoveries. The other central figure is the enigmatic Sasha, his kleptomaniac assistant, who is either a free spirit, a true punk bad girl, or just seriously screwed up. Their various friends, acquaintances, lovers, drug dealers, and hangers-on populate the rest of the book. Kudos to Egan for probing a topic few have previously explored: what happens to punk rockers when they hit middle age, parenthood, and artistic irrelevancy? Bennie’s case is dramatic; his very raison d’être is built around having his finger on the next pulse. What does one do when one’s own pulse weakens, both literally and aesthetically?

Egan moves back and forth in time in good postmodern style; that is, never sequentially and never in a cause-and-effect fashion. That structure has led some critics to cry foul over a Pulitzer for literature. They assert that the work is really a short story collection rather than a novel. I disagree; the stories are so interdependent that none could stand alone in a comprehensible way. My brief with the novel is that it isn’t (novel); that is, aside from the idea mentioned above, it’s not terribly original. Does anyone still feel that a story must be told chronologically? Not that many books and movies wouldn’t be all the better for doing so, including this one. The book’s structure seems contrived rather than unique or necessary, but this may be because Egan is not a great stylist. The book is diverting, but not one that will make you marvel over the elegance of its language, its evocative imagery, or its unforgettable characters. The latter, in fact, are so vacuous and shallow that days after you’ve read this book, you probably won’t remember any of them.

So why read it at all? I’d say for the same reason you read a fan magazine or a work of pulp fiction--it’s breezy, mildly entertaining, and easy on the brain. If that makes it sound like classic beach reading, that’s what I think it is. A Pulitzer Prize winner? Oh dear! I suspect that ten years from now this selection will be considered in the same what-were-they-thinking? category as awarding the 1976 Best Picture Oscar to Rocky. It might be a good idea to get some real readers on the Pulitzer committee; discussion groups formed around the book are far less effusive in their praise than critics. Many of the readers have the audacity to call this a rather ordinary book. The nerve!

Ian Green Autobiography for Friends and Foes Alike

Ian Green, Fuzz to Folk: Trax of My Life, (Edinburgh, Luath Press, 2011), 334 pp. ISBN 1-906817-69-3.

Scotland is a land of strong music, strong drink, and strong opinions. Readers of Fuzz to Folk will encounter all three. It is the autobiography of Ian Green, the founder and proprietor of Greentrax Records. Green inspires great loyalties but, by his own admission, is also viewed by some as a “grumpy old man.” (319) In his defense, he was grumpy before he was old! And for the same reasons he’s so beloved: Green has always been an implacable foe of pretense, incompetence, and dishonesty. Like all great ventures, Greentrax has deep roots. Green acquired some of his love of Scottish music from his father, who was a piper, but if it hadn’t been for the Korean War, he might have taken up his father’s other trade: gardening. Military service sharpened Green’s national identity, but it also led to a civilian job with the police force. In addition to rounding up miscreant, Green helped organize a police-sponsored folk club nicknamed “Fuzzfolk.” Through it he became friendly with performers such as The McCalmans, The Cotters, Jean Redpath, Dick Gaughan, Eric Bogle, Silly Wizard, Nic Jones, and Brian McNeill. Greentrax didn’t occur until after retirement from the police in 1985; in between lay activities such as editing Sandy Bell’s Broadsheet, involvement with the Edinburgh Folk Club, and running Discount Folk Records as a moonlighting job.

Those looking for revelations into the Scottish music scene will be disappointed. Music takes up less than a third of the book, Green is no gossip, and his attitude toward artistry has always been pursuing what he likes rather than analyzing or pigeonholing music. His assessment of performers seldom goes beyond adjectives such as “excellent,” “terrific,” and “distinguished.” The book’s most-revealing chapters are those that highlight Scottish life in the 1950s through the 1970s, a time in which Britain was still very much in the post-World War II doldrums, but opportunities existed for those with more moxie than credentials. Some of circumstances and terms Green discusses may be unfamiliar to North American audiences but they’re not his target audience. Number me among the Ian Green fan club brigade, but even if you conclude he is grumpy, thank your stars for the music you know because of him.

The Hedgehog a Gem and a Delight

Is a future star peeking out from that frizzled mane?

THE HEDGEHOG (2009)

Directed by Mona Achache

100 mins. (French with subtitles)

* * * *

The Hedgehog is that rarest of stories: one that works as well on the screen as it does on the printed page. Those who loved Muriel Barbery’s novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’élégance du hérisson) will find a few changes in the film, but most of them work brilliantly. It’s now in distribution across North America and you should rush to see it.

Those unfamiliar with the story may find the story line troubling. The film centers on Paloma Josse (Garance Le Guillermic), the precocious eleven-year-old daughter of an upper-class dysfunctional Parisian family. She lives with a disinterested father, a neurotic mother, and a narcissistic older sister in a ritzy apartment complex supervised by a widowed concierge, Renée Michel (Josiane Balsako). Paloma identifies with the family’s goldfish and sees life as an exercise in frustration akin to bumping into the sides of the bowl. Life is so futile, in fact, that she plans to kill herself on her twelfth birthday, has stockpiled pills pilfered from her mother’s stash, and is busy videotaping her thoughts on the shallowness of existence and her own impending death.

Does this sound like fun? It is! I don’t want to give away too much, but let’s say that it’s not a suicide film; it’s about social class, philosophy, art, and literature. It’s about the ways in which class status and being classy is not the same thing. Above all it’s about the things we don’t see even when they’re right in front of us. Le Guillermic is riveting as Paloma--a frizzy-haired, stripped-shirted bundle of contradiction who is all of eleven in one moment, but wiser than her elders the next. The frumpy Renée is the film’s hedgehog, prickly on the outside, but possessive of an inner intellect, kindness, and curiosity that can only be seen by those who bother to look: Paloma and a new Japanese neighbor, the widower Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa). The three make up a mismatched set of musketeers, but a trio that slices away pretense to reveal essential and aesthetic truths.

Novel readers will notice that Paloma has been transformed from a diarist to an artist and videographer. This works spectacularly. The film’s small details come together as a gorgeous visual mélange and relieve the screenplay--cowritten by Barbery--of the difficulty of filming a writer’s inner thoughts. There are a few things readers will miss. The film doesn’t probe philosophy with the depth of the novel and key relationships between Renée, fellow domestic Manuela, and their mentally challenged neighbor, Tibére, are pared to the bone.

But one can only do so much in 100 minutes and the film does a remarkable job of preserving the book’s essence. Watch out for young Garance Le Guillermic; she who bears the first name of the heroine of the classic Children of Paradise looks as if she’s capable of a few classics of her own.