New Ari Hest Release One of the Year's Best

ARI HEST

The Fire Plays

Project 4 Records

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Ari Hest is the best thing to happen to baritones since the emergence of John Gorka. It must be the harbor waters—Gorka is from metro New Jersey and Hest from the Bronx. And Paul Simon, whose pen prowess Hest sometimes approaches, is from Newark. Go figure. Hest’s newest release—his twelfth since 1999—is a small masterpiece, a blend of solid hooks, poetic imagery, and soulful vocals. Among its many impressive dimensions is the ease with which Hest moves from a simple acoustic guitar backed melody such as “Concrete Sky” to a textured composition such as “Know Where,” a big arrangement offering with anthem-like lyrical tag lines. The lust arrangements come when Hest sits down at the piano and dips his keys into an instrumental potage that includes brass, strings, drums, and electric guitars.  But one of the things that struck me was how easily he shifts from a song that could be a late Billy Joel arrangement to stripped down Gorka-like songs that are just acoustic guitar and voice. And what a voice it is, husky and edgy one moment, and as soothing as caramel the next. Check out tracks two through six, a five-song sequence as good as any I’ve heard in some time. This is one of my favorite releases of 2012.  (You may have to wait until November 13, its official release date.)

Here are a few links: “The Fire Plays” (audio only): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8FUvA6cEfk

“All Because I Love You” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS_4QiR1S9w

Lessons from Election 2012: A Baker’s Dozen

1. Time to toss the tea bags. The first lesson is that one can be conservative, but one cannot be stark raving mad. The Tea Party had its hissy fit moment in 2010, but it is what it is: a group of angry white folks whose passion is far greater than its collective IQ. The defeat of mouth-breathers such as Richard Mourdock (IN) and Todd Akin (MO) ought to serve as a wake-up call for the GOP. (Akin was so extreme he managed to make Claire McCaskill seem like a reasonable person!) Some Republicans are touting Paul Ryan for 2016, but he’s exactly the sort of extremist Republicans must avoid.

2. Morality is dead. No, I don’t mean that the nation has gone to hell in handbag. But votes for gay marriage, decriminalization of marijuana and similar ballot issues across the country show that social mores are changing and that old-style morality doesn’t have a lot of political traction any more. Single-issue voters can produce steam, but not fire. I’ve said for years that most Americans are de facto libertarians.

3. White people are just another voting bloc. Romney won a majority of both white men and women, but Barack Obama won more easily than pollsters predicted. It might help if pollsters left the lily-white suburbs to conduct their polls. Angry whites (see Tea Party) can make a lot of noise and they hold a lot of financial resources, but this isn’t 1956, and they can’t dictate elections any more. Whether whites like it or not, America is a multiracial, multicultural society and a candidate who can’t attract black, Latino, and Asian votes needs to practice concession-speech writing. Yes, roughly seven of ten Americans still identify as Caucasian, but quite a few of them are liberals and many are biracial or Hispanic. Any political contest that extends beyond a single (gerrymandered) district must appeal to a broad demographic swath.

4. The old-style media strikes out.  The pre-election polls were such an embarrassment that one suspects they were manufactured by media moguls for the sole purpose of creating a track event out of sack race. The old media has no clue on how to parse social media, cell phones, Facebook advocacy pages, and other such like. Polls varied widely in part because certain pollsters—will we ever trust Gallup again?—relied on mid-20^th century sampling techniques. And old-style media looked really old on Election Night. The PBS crew was so grey that it could have saved money by broadcasting in black and white, and ABC’s Cokie Roberts looked like she was on life support. Ditto Bob Schieffer on CBS. As for Fox News, its broadcast was far livelier than its competitors in part because postmortems tend to be grislier than postpartums. But have you ever seen so many blow-dried white boys and dyed blond gals in your life? Fox needs to see # 3 above.

5. The kids are alright. The media said that young people wouldn’t turn out. It was wrong. Pundits must have been thinking about their own youthful Baby Boomer non-voting behavior. Nearly 20% of the voters were under 35. This Baby Boomer offers this observation to youth: you guys rock!

6. Go Mid and West, young man. The electoral map is clear—for all the hoopla about the Sun Belt, the Midwest and West reelected Obama. Forget those coiffed white girls from Cobb County, Georgia; if you want to win you need to press the flesh in Iowa, drink coffee in gritty Michigan diners, and say nice things about the Badger State. And while you’re at it, keep heading west. Colorado isn’t red anymore, and neither is Nevada. Democrats have an opportunity, if they play their cards carefully, to turn Hispanic Arizona into the next New Mexico. They might even recapture parts of Texas.

7. The Solid South isn’t. Republicans might want to bury the old Kevin Phillips/Lee Atwater playbook along with their tea bags. Obama won Virginia, was very close in North Carolina, and won Florida (again). Hey GOP—take down the Confederate flags because the Old South is starting to look new. North Carolina, for example, has a large number of Latino voters. Okay, the old Cotton Belt is still rock-ribbed GOP, but this election shows you can safely ignore the NASCAR South and pick off states whose populace knows it’s the 21^st century.

8. Even a blind man can smell faux leather. Harry Truman once warned Democrats that if you gave voters a choice between a fake Republican and a real one, they’d choose the real one every time. Mitt Romney should have listened. In the end, Romney was exactly what Massachusetts residents who have seen his act said he is: a man with no real political center who says what he thinks people want to hear, not what he believes. Romney was a made-for-TV candidate who looked the part of president, but flip-flopped more than a seal on a water-slide. Who is Mitt Romney? Can anyone really answer that question?  

9. Mud sticks.  Talk about fake! Americans say they hate mudslinging, but it’s not true. Barack Obama may have taught Democrats a lesson they’ve been loath to learn: define your opponent before that opponent defines you. How many voters repudiated Romney because they thought him a ruthless job destroyer, a tax-dodger, and an elitist who doesn’t care about half (okay, 47%) of the population? Answer: Just enough.

10. The ‘burbs shot a blank. After decades of ignoring inner cities and kissing butts in suburban malls, Democrats did very well in places like Akron, Milwaukee, Detroit, Las Vegas, and Manchester, NH. Suburbanites might not like cities, but more Americans live there than in gated communities or leafy suburbs.

11. Corporations are the Bane [sic] of our existence. Big money came from Fortune 500 companies—much of it aimed at defeating Obama. Small business is who actually employs Americans, not corporate giants. In fact, 52% of all employees work in firms with fewer than 500 employees. Many of those over 500 are employers such as schools, hospitals, and government agencies—not Bane Capital. Score one for Main Street over Wall Street. If, as the Supreme Court insists, corporations are people, many Americans have decided that they are the variety that sucks!

12. Big government works! Notice how many of the paranoid Big Government types shut their traps when Hurricane Sandy hit? Notice how FEMA came back to bite Mitt Romney in the butt? Notice the complete absence of Chris Christie in the waning days of the GOP campaign?  It’s oh-so-fashionable to decry government spending, but when the chips are down (corporate bankruptcy, bank failures, disaster relief, terrorist attacks), one doesn’t see private enterprise filling the gaps. Hurricane Sandy blew Romney’s anti-government screeds out to sea.

13. Enjoy gridlock? I hope so, because with the Congress divided and some of the most rabid tea baggers still in the House of Representatives, you’ll see more of it.

A-Rod a Broken-Down Sports Car

Time to unload damaged flash and get a Scion. 

Yankees manager Joe Girardi did the once-unthinkable during a postseason game against the Orioles–he pinch-hit for Alex Rodriguez in the ninth inning while down a run. As every sports fan knows, Girardi came up smelling like roses when Raúl Ibañez smacked a game-tying homerun off American League saves leader Jim Johnson, and then won it with a 12^th inning blast off Brian Matusz. Girardi pinch-hit for A-Rod several more times (without success) before the Yankees’ season ended in Detroit.

Gutsy moves on Girardi’s part? Not really. Rodriguez hasn’t come close to driving a ball over the wall in quite some time. For those keeping track, his last homerun occurred on September 14 against Tampa. He hit a grand total of five since June. It’s time for the Yankees to face the inevitable–Alex Rodriguez is an unreliable sports car kept in the team garage for prestige purposes, not reliability.

Before anyone gets their back up, no, this is not another “Trash A-Rod” story. Rodriguez’s flamboyant personality, ego, womanizing, and admitted steroid use attract haters, but true baseball fans know that he has been one of the greatest talents ever to lace up cleats. This year’s postseason woes notwithstanding, if one consults the sabermetrics tool known as LIPS (late inning pressure situation), A-Rod ranks among the top 20 clutch hitters of all time. And, for heaven’s sake, the man has launched an astonishing 647 balls over enemy fences. He has been among baseball’s immortals.

Key phrase: “has been.” Remember when his agent, Scott Boras, justified A-Rod’s monster contract by promising that his client would break MLB’s all-time homerun record? A-Rod would have to hit another 116 to pass Barry Bonds. From where I sit, it’s increasingly unlikely he’ll even match Babe Ruth’s 714 for a share of third. He’ll need to crack 67 homers to join the Babe, one more than he’s hit over the past three years. If it takes him more than three years, he’ll be over 40, and therein lies the problem.

If Derek Jeter is a young 38, A-Rod is an old 37–a very old 37. It’s not his fault that he’s been injured, but this is what happens to aging sports bodies. To return to my sports car analogy, A-Rod is like a Jaguar, a high-cost high-performance vehicle capable of tremendous spurts of power. It also has the worst maintenance and repair record of any car on the road. Lots of guys want one. Some shell out over $100,000 and then wish they had spent $85,000 less and got the number one reliable car: a plain-wrapper Scion.

A-Rod might still flash occasional power and the Yankees had better hope someone else thinks so. General Manager Brian Cashman is well aware that his garage is filled with vintage Jaguars, Porsches, and Audis. He also knows that he needs to sell them before they go to the scrap yard so he can get some newer model Hondas and Toyotas. (As he knows that he’ll need to pay more to keep vintage Derek Jeter on the road.) It all begins with A-Rod. If C. C. Sabathia hadn’t been part of the package, A-Rod would be a Dodger by now. As it is, he’s a $30 million dollar drain on the budget–a guy who is statistically just the twelfth best third baseman in baseball, when he can even play the position.  Who’d you rather have these days, A-Rod at $30 million, or Chase Headley at $3.4 million?

A-Rod has been magnificent, but it’s time to trade down for several Scions. The Yankees might get lucky, as there is one natural suitor if the Bombers pick up about half of his salary: the Marlins. They only averaged 27,400 (18^th in MLB) in a brand new ballpark and that’s sure to drop significantly next year unless something dramatic happens. To put it bluntly, a star attraction such as A-Rod might determine whether or not MLB has a regular-season future in south Florida. Who knows? Against less consistent NL pitching, A-Rod might even look like a Jaguar on occasion. 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is Likely to Move You

THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY

By Rachel Joyce

Random House, 2012, 978-0812993295

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By outward appearances, Harold Fry is about as ordinary as they come. He lives in Kingsbridge, a small village in the English countryside of Dartmoor, where he spends time in his garden and largely avoiding his wife, Maureen. Harold is the poster boy for what Henry David Thoreau labeled “lives of quiet desperation.” Now an old-age pensioner (retiree), Harold has been the classic “must’nt grumble” Englishman who never made waves, and consequently never made a splash. He dutifully served a tyrannical boss at a local brewery–though he hasn’t had a drink in decades–sired a son who despised him, and managed to be such a disappointment to Maureen that the couple have separate bedrooms. At his own request, he had no retirement party at the brewery–not that anyone would have cared one way or the other.

If you can make such an individual the center of your debut novel and leave readers deeply moved, you’ve got a bright career in front of you. This book was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize; it didn’t advance to the next round, but Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, which did win, had better be damned good to make me believe it was more deserving. Harold Fry’s life changes when he gets a letter from Queenie Hennessy, a mousy former colleague he hasn’t seen in over 20 years. It’s essentially a goodbye letter, as Queenie is in a Berwick-upon-Tweed hospice, dying of inoperable cancer. Harold scribbles his condolences and walks down the road toward the postbox… and keeps on walking.

Thus begins Harold’s unlikely pilgrimage. A set of ordinary circumstances leads Harold to believe that he can walk to Berwick, over 600 miles to the north, and that his odyssey will save Queenie. And so Harold walks, an old man wearing a tie, a sports coat, casual trousers, and a pair of boat shoes. The rest of the novel details the people he meets, the questions he ponders, the things he learns, and the unlikely phenomenon he becomes. No one, not even Harold, knows exactly what he hopes to accomplish–maybe it’s just that something had to change, or maybe it’s something more profound. Maybe it’s a miracle.

This unpretentious gem of a novel is miraculous all on its own. It’s about an old man walking, but it’s also about how we lose the things we once held dear and whether it’s possible to recover them, and about the kindness of some strangers and the unutterable vileness of others. It’s about hope and disappointment, dreams and reality, things extraordinary and prosaic, courage and foolishness, and when to remember and when to forget. It’s also the most affecting and deeply moving novel I’ve read in quite some time.—Rob Weir

The Dog Stars Humanizes the Apocalypse

THE DOG STARS

By Peter Heller

Knopf, 2012, ISBN: 978-0307959942

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If you’re a fan of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, you’re likely to enjoy Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars. Like McCarthy, Heller sets his novel in the near future, just a few years after the world has gone horribly wrong. In this case, a flu-like pandemic has wiped out much of the world’s population—think the Doomsday scenarios associated with outbreaks such as SARS, AIDS, swine flu, and the West Nile virus. Entire cities die, governments collapse, most wildlife is extinct or endangered, and the law of the jungle prevails. Heller isn’t likely to be elected a future president of the Optimists Society. In his bleak world, survivors do not bond or cooperate; the world degenerates into vicious tribalism. The astute thing to do is kill anyone entering your compound rather than risk that that person is a disease carrier. Moreover, in this Malthusian nightmare in which resources of all sort are dwindling, chances are better that a wayward visitor is part of a murderous gang seeking to capture one’s food and supplies. Or so our protagonist, Hig, is told repeatedly by camo-wearing Bangley, the crusty old coot with whom he shares a fortified compound on the edge of an airport that once served a slice of Colorado Yuppie suburbia.

Bangley knows weaponry like the back of his hand and he’s handy with all manner of tools and machines. He might be a crafty survivalist, a psycho, or a hybrid of both, but if there’s such a thing as an apocalyptic Odd Couple, he and Hig are it. Hig has the heart of a tragic poet. He is haunted by his wife’s death some nine years earlier and yearns for the days in which he fished trout from Colorado streams. There are just two things that keep him going, the companionship of his ageing dog Jasper, and at least ten-years’ worth of usable aero gas for the Cessena he uses to get forage for supplies and search for something, anything, else that might be within a tank full’s range. In fact, he and Jasper take periodic hikes into the mountains, just to smell the pines, shoot the occasional deer, and fish for about all that’s left in the rivers: bottom-dwelling suckers.  Bangley thinks he’s a damned fool, and he might be right.

This is a novel about isolation, loneliness, and the nature of humanity. What is it that makes us human? Bangley thinks it’s a full stomach and a secure perimeter, but Hig is pretty sure that humans need something beyond the mere gratification of physical needs. We pretty much know from the outset that the Cessena is the book’s Chekov’s gun, and that Hig will eventually head out to see if he can rediscover his own humanity. Some of the ensuing adventures are terrifying, some deeply affecting, others highly improbable, and a few a bit hackneyed. But it’s hard to escape thinking about the question that occupies Hig: If life were reduced to its bare rudiments, what would any one of us need to differentiate ourselves from a dog or a trout?

Do I make this book sound a bit like The Road collided with A River Runs Through It? That wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, but The Dog Stars has enough original spark to make it more than a derivative mash-up. For a post-apocalyptic novel whose title riffs off a star constellation, Jasper, the heavens, and flight (of various sorts) it also contains–dare I say it?–a lot of humanity. –Rob Weir

  

Darlingside a Promising Band

DARLINGSIDE

Pilot Machines

www.darlingside.com

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You might expect wall-to-wall bluegrass from a band with a name such as Darlingside, especially given that it’s a string quintet that features high tenor vocals, cello, mandolin, banjo, guitar, and bass (plus a makeshift drum kit). Don’t get too comfortable with your label, though, as these Pioneer Valley residents also like to plug in their acoustic instruments—including a skeletal cello–and, as one of their songs puts it, “blow the house down.” Darlingside is an impossible-to-pigeonhole ensemble capable of pumping out bluegrass when the mood strikes, but also of venturing into progressive rock and spinning off some classical passages. A lot of the music is atmospheric in the way that musical renegades such as Bela Fleck like to mix it, with vocals subsumed in a thick mix in which frenetic cello, fiddle, and mandolin often punch through the mix. On song ssuch as “The Woods” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tly5ObwBOOo or “Drowning Elvis” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tly5ObwBOOo it’s as if McKendree Spring, a progressive folk band from the 1970s, reappeared and merged with Snow Patrol.  As documented in “The Company We Keep,” Darlingside was a group of friends before it was a band. There is an intuitive ease between instrument and voice that comes from such familiarity, and also moments in which results feel too interior—like a musical moment in which you had to be there to get it. But give the lads props for trying to evolve something unique. There’s plenty here to suggest we are witnessing the first step in what will become a long stride.   

Overlooked Doc on Amish Resurfaces

DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND (2002)

Directed by Lucy Walker

77 mins. PG-13, Documentary

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Quick. Who throws the wildest parties in Indiana? If you answered “the Amish,” you were either: (a) being glib and got lucky, or (b) among the very few Americans who know about the doctrine known as rumspiga, which is fascinatingly documented in Devil’s Playground. I don’t know how I missed this ten-year-old documentary first time around, but thanks to Netflix I finally got around to seeing it. It remains relevant; in a tradition-bound society such as the Amish that freezes time in the pre-electrical days of the late 17^th century, things don’t change very much.

The entire notion of “Amish Gone Wild” would strike most Americans as an oxymoron, but it’s actually quite consistent with Amish theology. The Amish are part of a Reformation tradition known as Anabaptism.  The ana (against) part of that is adult baptism; that is, Anabaptists believe that only informed adults can have conversion experiences—the decision to join (or not join) the church must be a free will decision. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as being “born” Amish.  At the age of 16, each individual raised in an Amish family is cast adrift and is free to live among the “English” (all non-Amish, no matter their actual ethnic background).  This is the rumspiga, the period of decision-making. There is no set time limit as to when one must decide whether to join Amish society or remain among the English (though most do so within three to five years) and during this period one can do as one wishes. Many Amish-raised adolescents do it all: drugs, booze, premarital sex, smoking, surfing the Internet for porn, wild parties… as if they were first-year college students! An Amish party socks in outsiders from miles around—the music booms (from high-end electronics no less!) and only the hormones flow faster than the booze.

The Devil’s Playground follows several Indiana teens through rumspiga, each keenly aware that a decision to join Amish society means that they must leave behind their current path forever. The film is a piece of documentary anthropology, but it plays like a taut drama. You will find yourself rooting for some of the kids to leave the Amish and others—such as a young man busted for drug-dealing and gang behavior—to save themselves and return to the fold. Most youth do return. One of my critiques of the film is that Walker could have explained better why that decision is made. (We can infer that the ways of the English lose their allure.) Another is that Walker doesn’t explain in much detail how kids with only eight years of education and no visible means of support manage to live among the English at all. But, then again, maybe she couldn’t or shouldn’t. (Once one is in the church, being filmed or even seeing a movie is generally off limits.) Give Walker, as an outsider, props for gaining any sort of access into closed Amish society, and kudos to her film for shedding tiny rays of light on the practice of rumspiga.

If you label yourself as a person who doesn’t like documentaries, do yourself a favor and check this out before you close the book on them. I think you’ll agree that there’s more drama and true emotion in this little gem of a doc than in 99% of the big-budget, no-heart pap emanating from that other closed society in our midst: Hollywood.