Isbell, Waldon, Tenpenny, Lanco and Also Rans

 

The reviewer’s conundrum: How do you write about everything else when several of the artists in your queue are on a different level than everyone else?

 

Case Number One: Everything I hear from Jason Isbell comes from the top drawer. I recently got my hands on another 4-song sampler of material from his early career (2009) that was already more polished than 90% of the current pretenders. “Alabama Pines” is mildly evocative of John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” in that it’s tender without being sticky toffee. “Tour of Duty” has shopworn country images–a train, pain, settling down–yet coming from Isbell, none of it rings false. I absolutely adore “Codeine,” with its litany of things he can’t stand. But hone in on his juxtapositions of the banal and important things, such as bad cover bands and the sound a woman makes after her heart breaks. Check out “DaisyMae,” an acoustic tale which you could be forgiven for thinking was a lost mountain ballad. All of this was 11 years ago and all Isbell has done since is take things to higher levels.

 

Case Number Two: Kelsey Waldon. Her 2019 album White Noise, White Lines deservedly shot up the charts fast; this Ballard County, Kentucky singer songwriter is the real deal. Her Appalachian origins invite Loretta Lynn evocations, but I’m going with young Dolly Parton. From the moment Waldon opened her mouth on “Anyhow,” I was hooked. Her backwoods tones are robust and the way she works with her band is very impressive. The song’s boldness matches its mantra: You just do it again…You do it anyhow. On “Kentucky, 1988,” Waldon sings about where she’s from with a refreshing and unapologetic candor. There is no attempt to tone down her nasal accent, and hints of nostalgia are counterpunched with doses of reality and a stoic shrug. The title track is another take on this. But just when you think you’ve got Waldon pegged, she throws out “Very Old Barton,” which is old-time country from the roadhouse era.

 

Mitchell Tenpenny looks to be a fast riser on the country scene. His 2018 CD Telling All My Secrets climbed to #5 on country charts. He’s working on a new project, but details are sparse at present. Tenpenny is that rarest of birds, a country singer who is actually a Nashville native. His single “Drunk Me” path-to-sobriety message sounds autobiographical, especially given that he’s also composed “Alcohol You Later.” I’ve heard two versions of “Drunk Me”–album and unplugged–and it’s as if they are two different animals. I like them both; the album version is catchy and jangly, while the acoustic is more earnest and suits his voice better. Tenpenny has a sweet voice with a country pop/John Mayer in feel. When I hear songs like “I Love You All Over” or “Unravel,” some of the accompaniment seems like overkill. But let’s reserve judgment until we see how they sound when they make it out of the studio.  

 

Lanco is a quintet fronted by lead vocalist Brandon Lancaster–the band name is shorthand for Lancaster and Company­–and is billed as a country band. It is, though “Born to Love You” evokes indie rock with twang. It does, however, trade in country nostalgia in incongruous ways. Lines like I was born in a town full of red pine trees/ County sign says "follow your dreams"/ Westbound train makes the whole town shake/ Friday night lights decide your fate don’t exactly jibe with a video of a rooftop stage and a city skyline in the background. Lancaster is charismatic and has a powerful voice, but after listening to other songs– “What I See” and “Greatest Love Story”–his stroll through yesterday’s values could be viewed as artifice. Some grit wouldn’t go amiss.

 

I have mixed feelings about the Los Angeles band Magic Giant. Lead singer Austin Bisnow is gutsy. On the new single, "Outta My Head,” he slides into falsetto, though he’s actually an on-the-light-side tenor, as we hear on “Jesse’s Song.” That one flirts with a folk/folk rock vibe rather the alt.rock label the band has assumed. If you poke around you can find a “campfire version” or “Disaster Party,” their 2019 single, as well as the airplay cut.

 

 

 

I’d never heard of Australian pop/rock performer Ali Barter and was surprised to learn she’s charted Down Under and is often as explicit as Ani DiFranco used to be. Mainly I was gobsmacked to find she’s 34, not 20 as I had her pegged. On “January,” she sounds young, or maybe I was thrown off by her (very) minimalist guitar work. Was she aiming for satire on “History of Boys?” To me, the lyrics sound immature. Not sure what I think of Barter. 

 

 

 

 

I have a low-bar standard for young bands: The lead vocalist has to sing way better than I was that age. So, it’s thumbs-down for the London band Honey Lung; Jamie Batten simply doesn’t have the chops. The band was apparently inspired by Jesus & The Mary Chain, though “Name” and “Be My Friend” come off as low-fi. But maybe that’s because I kept hearing flat notes.

 

Rob Weir

 

Just Like You is Childish

 

Just Like You (2020

By Nick Hornby

Riverhead, 368 pages.

★

 

 

 

Once upon a time there was a promising writer from Britain named Nick Hornby. He wrote a fine debut novel, High Fidelity, and followed with another good one, About a Boy. When the second one came out, Hornby was 39. Apparently, someone forget to tell him that About a Boy should not be an aspirational goal. In his latest novel, Just Like You, the 63-year-old Hornby has gone full bore Peter Pan.

 

The subtitle of the book could be The Cougar and the Black Kid. It centers on a middle-class Londoner named Lucy. She’s an English teacher and a not-quite-yet divorcee with two sub-teen sons. Her husband Paul abuses alcohol and is a total jerk when plastered; there is no salvation for their marriage. Lucy is 40ish, but is still “hot”–a word that Hornby uses a lot–and friends and associates urge her to get back in the game. What they are mostly saying is that she should get laid. Quite naturally, Lucy recoils at such childish talk–until she doesn’t.

 

Lucy buys nice cuts of meat from a local butcher, one of whose employees is a good-looking young man named Joseph. He’s 20, loves football–that’s soccer to Americans–dreams of being a hip-hop deejay, and is a black youth who still lives at home. On the spur of the moment Lucy asks Joseph to babysit her sons. They adore him because of his love of football and Xbox video games. Before you can say rib roast, though, he and Lucy begin to have sex. And why not? Joseph thinks she’s “hot,” she thinks he’s “hot,” and together they have lots of hot sex. Besides, she was set up for a blind date with Michael Marwood, an urbane, successful writer with kids. He’s also almost divorced, but is in his 50s, seems more appropriate as an intellectual friend, and admits he sometimes can’t rise to the occasion, as it were. Well, that’s not “hot.”

 

This novel seeks to be a 21^st century update of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner set against a background of Brexit and a 20-year age gap. Joseph, by the way, doesn’t follow politics and plans to vote “out” just because his construction worker father Chris–who is estranged from the family–says it will get rid of foreigners and create more jobs for working-class stiffs like himself. Lucy and all her middle-class circle are voting “stay,” and her pleas (sort of) sway Joseph. Like I said, he doesn’t follow politics, though he does have a unique way of resolving his confusion over Brexit. Nor does Joseph read much that isn’t about music or football, and he surely doesn’t peruse the highbrow stuff Lucy likes. But there’s always the hot sex. It’s so hot that he moves in. Lucy thinks it will be a short-time thing until he finds someone his own age–until she doesn’t.

 

See a pattern here? What an awkward novel! How can it be other that, aside from a random cop, the white people in this book–including Paul–never mention color? The biggest discussion of race takes place inside Joseph’s family, but they’ve never actually met Lucy. Let’s see: Lucy is in a deep relationship with a guy who has more in common with Lucy’s kids than with her, sets up house with a black guy in a London neighborhood that’s entirely white despite the objections of his family, is sleeping with someone closer in age to her students, doesn’t know much about Joseph’s age cohort or interests–though she’s willing to learn–and thinks she can hang out in his world. And I’ve not even begun to catalog the absurdities of Just Like You.

 

I suppose the title is supposed to be ironic, as everything about the book shouts out that Lucy and Joseph are not alike. Not in age, not in life experience, not in interests, not in social class, and not in race. Any one of those themes explored in a serious way could redeem an otherwise lamentable work. Too many reviewers have been kind to Just Like You, perhaps because they imagine it as a frothy farce; the word “funny” appears frequently in those reviews. Maybe others simply think race shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t, but I’ve spent time in England and it damn well does. What’s the “joke” in this novel? When it’s not being Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? it comes off as a gender-reversed My Fair Lady that crosses the patronization border.

 

Just Like You is a WTF novel that becomes more unbelievable and condescending as it goes on. The less said about its contrived 2019 code the better. The best adjective to describe this work is immature. Grow up, Nick!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

Pain and Glory: An Almodovar Autobiography on Screen

 

Pain and Glory (2019)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Sony Pictures Classics, 113 minutes, R (sexuality, drug use)

In Spanish with subtitles

★★★

 

There are many more good biographies than autobiographies. That’s because individuals are often not the best judges of their own lives. This is magnified on screen, where time constraints limit how even skilled filmmakers can explain themselves. Pain and Glory is Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s thinly veiled autobiography. It won two awards at Cannes and several publications–including Time Magazine–hailed it the best film of 2019. In my estimation, it’s more middle of the pack than top of the heap.

 

We come in upon Almodóvar’s avatar, Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), an aging director whose signature film Sabor (“Flavor’) has been dusted off after 32 years for a showing at a film festival. A longtime friend (Cecilia Roth) has asked him to appear at a post-screening Q & A along with the film’s lead actor: Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia). That’s a problem, as they had a major falling out over Alberto’s heroin addiction and haven’t spoken since the film’s release. To further complicate things, Salvador’s identity is so tied into making movies that he can’t cope now that excruciating backpain and a complete lack of ideas have shelved him. Nonetheless, he seeks out Alberto and makes odd amends by beginning to smoke heroin himself. We also learn that Salvador is gay, but has been celibate for a long time. 

 

There’s nothing like nostalgia, discontent, and the Big-H to induce flashback memories. The film’s title is ironic in that it reverses the usual scraping bottom-to-redemption formula. Salvador’s “glory”–that is to say, 71-year-old Almodóvar’s–lies in the past. We go back in time to meet Salvador as a sunny, precocious child growing up poor in Paterna (Spain’s Valencia Province). His father keeps losing jobs, but his doting mother Jacinta (Penélope Cruz) does her best to maintain dignity–even when the family moves into a cave. (This is a thing in parts of southern Europe and isn’t quite as bad as it sounds.) We get hints of young Salvador’s sexual stirrings and love of film before we are thrown into Madrid in the 1980s, a time in which Salvador’s identities crystallize.

 

The film’s narrative is non-linear, though most of it focuses on the present. Think of it as a disassembled book in which beginning, middle, and end are snipped apart and partially reassembled in an order that’s neither entirely random nor entirely logical. We hear of a serious former lover, Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), who exists only in name before showing up in Madrid for a quick visit after decades living in Argentina. He is now married with children, yet still comes on to Salvador. Since we know little of their previous time together other than a few jovial tales over glasses of wine, the “now” doesn’t cohere. There is another tale involving a drawing done by a peasant lad whom young Salvador once taught to read that is abruptly dropped and just as abruptly resurrected. The same is true for Jacinta, whom we meet as young and vital, but not again until she is elderly.

 

The charitable thing would be to say that memories are like that; they form, get shoved aside, and reappear when we least expect or desire them to do so. Another way to look at it, though, would be to compare Almodóvar’s filmmaking to looking at a photo album in which the images are inserted out of chronological or contextual order. As often happens in autobiographies, authors/auteurs forget that their memories may not make sense to those whose who haven’t lived those experiences. It should also be said that, though Almodóvar has never hidden his sexual preferences, screening them no longer packs cinematic wallop. No one watching an Almodóvar film is shocked or cares any more. If you know his oeuvre, you also know that he has often explored–either overtly or via a surrogate–his relationship with his mother. This suggests that Mallo’s director’s block is an admission of Almodóvar’s own conceptual staleness.

 

Why bother watching? First, there is Antonio Banderas as you’ve never before seen him. He won best actor honors at Cannes, a prize he richly deserved for a note-perfect portrayal of a man on the verge of an ennui breakdown. Why does he do heroin but pass up a sexual conquest? Why does he take no pleasure in his amazing home filled with art and wonders? As Mallo, he couldn’t explain, but it takes serious acting chops to make us care about someone just marking time.

 

Another reason is the score from Alberto Iglesias, which won for best soundtrack at Cannes. When you’ve had your fill of obtrusive soundtracks, it’s a joy to hear one that actually fits the film you’re watching. Penélope Cruz doesn’t have a big role, but she’s always luminous and strikes the perfect balance of fire and ice. Plus, Almodóvar films always look stylish, even when they’re total rubbish. If I might return to the photo album metaphor, you might not like all of Pain and Glory, but there are images that jump off the page/screen and force you to take notice. But maybe it’s time for Almodóvar to stop making movies about himself.

 

Rob Weir  

Anxious People Another Fredrik Backman Delight

 

Anxious People (2020)

By Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 336 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

This is a story about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.

 

Who, other than Fredrik Backman, could write such words without irony? From the time A Man Called Ove was translated into English in 2013, to his latest, Anxious People, he has been unparalleled in his ability to make us see profundity in simple things while making us laugh at idiots. The joke, of course, is on us. The content of Anxious People is encapsulated in its title, though Backman could have easily subtitled it “A Cross-Section of Humanity.”

 

What’s it about? It’s about a man standing on a bridge, though Backman encourages us to, “Think about something nicer. Think about cookies.” It’s about a bank robbery and a slogan-spouting realtor. Plus, a hostage crisis, bumbling small-city cops, hostile witnesses, and how “Stockholmer” is code for everything from pushiness to gayness. It’s about how, “We lie to those we love.” And a whole lot more, including “truth,” a word that needs to be enclosed by quotation marks.

 

The skinny is that someone who never planned to rob a bank is pushed to levels of desperation so deep that this individual ends up trying to stick up a cashless outlet. To compound matters, the bank robber blunders into taking hostages because, well… it’s complicated. To add further confusion, none of the hostages recall much of anything specific about the about the robber or the experience of being a hostage. And what a collection of “victims” they are.

 

London was the bank teller in question, though she is filled more with attitude than answers. The realtor showing the apartment where the hostages were taken is even less useful, except to opine that the robber’s gun was a toy. And these are the good witnesses!

 

Add to the mix a nasty misanthropic female investment banker, a retired couple who go to apartment showings and badmouth the properties so they can pick them up cheaply and flip them, a lesbian couple about to have a baby but seem to have nothing in common, a surprise interloper who locks himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and an 87-year-old woman who is akin to a storybook grandmother. Try getting useful information from that lot.

 

The novel’s post-release interviews are hysterical and the reaction of the father/son police team trying to crack the case is a close second on the laugh scale. (Who sends pizza to a hostage taker?) This is a whodunit in which not even the victims seem to know or care who did it. They’re not even sure what “it” was. One of the mysteries is what happened to the realtor when the bank robber was waving a gun? (No, she wasn’t the gunman!) Why even tell us about a man on a bridge, an episode that occurred a decade earlier?

 

If you know anything about Backman, you know that his surfaces are set ups for deeper things lurking inside human psyches. That’s why he titled this book Anxious People. You also know that Backman is not a misanthrope; he loves people despite their mistakes, sticks, foibles, and flummoxes. Nor is he afraid to count himself among the “idiots.” Several moving things will happen in Anxious People before all is resolved, and I doubt very much you will anticipate them.

 

The previous paragraph suggests something that’s very special about Fredrik Backman. All writing is difficult, which is why most mysteries are either Pink Panther-like farces, or as hardboiled as Robert Parker’s head. Some in the latter vein contain wisecracks and snaps, but how many mysteries have you read that rocket you from disgust to empathy to gales of laughter to moist-eyed emotional release? Who else writes about the gun-toting hostage-takers and makes you feel uplifted by the tale? If you surmise from all of this that I am one of Backman’s biggest fans, I wouldn’t exactly call you Sherlock Holmes Junior, but you’re right. Anxious People is Backman’s eighth full-length novel, and in my estimation seven of them or literary gems. I anxiously await his ninth.

 

Rob Weir

 

Border Tales Part Two

 

Why Borders are Useless

 

For these border tales sagas I used pseudonyms to protect the identities of informants. They can out themselves if they wish! 

 

James grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts on the border with New Hampshire. Two large public beaches were nearby, Salisbury Beach, MA and Hampton Beach, NH. It wasn’t much of a choice for a young man. Salisbury had broad sands and nature reserves, but Hampton had glitz and nightlife. Plus, as James recalled, New Hampshire had “cheaper beer and they sold it on Sundays.”

 

Carrie lives in New Hampshire and doesn’t appreciate how it’s a playground for Bay Staters: “Every Friday afternoon… I-93 North is like a parking lot for all the people trying to escape the confines of Massachusetts. It goes on for miles and hours.” Holiday weekends are “worse,” and she wonders why all of those involved in the constant “exodus” don’t just move. The flip side can be found in perennial Boston Globe rants about New Hampshire residents commuting into Boston for work but skipping out of Massachusetts taxes.

 

Jenny lives in Vermont but crosses into New Hampshire to go shopping. She notes, “There’s no sales tax … but we go there mainly because there are more stores.” She also adds that the COVID pandemic complicates matters. “Both states let us go back and forth because out infection rates are low, but Vermont requires us to bring our own bags but New Hampshire didn’t allow it.”  (It’s now okay.)

 

Janine had a different take. She and her ex-husband had three children and gravitated from the Greater Boston area to Winchester, New Hampshire. For a time, her husband commuted into Boston “but when it came time for the oldest of our three kids to start grade school… we knew that we had to move to Northfield, MA.” In her words, it was “just over the border and a world away.” 

 

As a teenager, Christine lived in New York State on the Pennsylvania line. She noticed that Pennsylvania “had no sales tax on clothing, sold fireworks… and the first day of deer season was a school holiday.”

 

The above stories fall into the category of old state rivalries that have mellowed over time. For instance, Vermont and New Hampshire once had very different politics, even when both were Republican states. New Hampshire Republicans had a decidedly rightwing tinge, while the Vermont GOP was more pragmatic and genteel. Vermont also shifted toward environmental laws and progressive politics sooner than New Hampshire. When I lived in Vermont, a regional barb aimed at New Hampshire held, “What can you expect from anyone living in a state that’s upside down?” These days, border differences are more about opportunity than anything else.  

 

There remain keener differences. When Valerie moved from Vermont to Virginia, she liked the friendliness of Virginians but had little time for their nosiness or pushy religiosity. When her then-boyfriend stayed over, the next morning one of her neighbors asked if she was alright because, “there was a strange car parked in your driveway overnight.” Valerie also wearied of repeated offers from various people to “visit our church.”

 

Ron recalls that the western Wisconsin/Illinois border along Lake Michigan was once “toxic.” It was “notorious for late night crossings, especially on Friday and Saturday,” as Wisconsin had a drinking age of 18, whereas it was 21 in Illinois. This resulted in “hordes of young people driving to the beer bars and back, often drunk.”

 

Bill reminds us international borders can be settings for shady dealings. He teaches in northern Minnesota and one of his students lives part of the year on an island in Rainy Lake, which straddles the US/Canadian borders. Her research shows how Rainy Lake has long been a favorite among smugglers. It’s near International Falls, Minnesota, which was once where Canadian booze came into the United States during Prohibition. These days it’s drugs.

 

The Detroit River is another leaky boundary, but don’t blame Canada. Smugglers always cross borders, which is why there’s a veritable Montreal/Boston/New York heroin pipeline that flows both directions. The sad fact is that big cartels have more resources than law enforcement.

 

Sandy lived in Yuma, Arizona for three years. She recalls, “I liked the option of shopping in Mexico. We met many very nice people that lived in Mexico…. I cut hair of border patrol guys [who] said it was a dangerous job. We did have some illegals [from El Salvador] staying with a friend. Our pastor flew them to Los Angeles. I heard later they returned to El Salvador. The language barrier was too much for them. Their mother had left El Salvador after her husband was killed … by a guerrilla army. The boys later went with a snow bird family to live and attend school in Montana. His wife, sister and brother-in-law came up the Colorado River one night. There were always vultures sitting in the area of the border by the river. Yes, there was some drug smuggling.”

 

Are border battles serious, friendly, smug, or all three? Take your pick. Personally, I grow weary of those overly fixated on “Southern heritage.” It’s a loaded concept that’s often code for unsavory things. Then again, we New Englanders have a reputation for arrogance and coldness that’s often deserved.

 

A likely moral is that border is a mix of convenience, desperation, and opportunism. On the unsavory side, tons of heroin come in from Mexico, but you couldn’t stop it with an impenetrable 100-foot wall along the entire border. Wall-building fantasies remind me of the French who thought that their World War One Maginot Line would protect them from Hitler’s armies. There are these things called airplanes! They and a visa are how an estimated 40% of illegal aliens got to America.

 

Rob Weir

Border Tales Part One

Shouldn't there be more?

 

I have lived my entire life on or near borders. I spent my formative years in Pennsylvania, just a dozen miles from the Maryland border and just 40 from West Virginia. I recall how disappointed I was the first time my parents drove into Maryland and there was just a stupid sign. In my childhood head, I wanted a major demarcation: columns, an arch, or at least dotted lines like those on my maps.

 

Later I moved to northwestern Vermont and lived hard by the US/Canada line. I was on a border of sorts even when I lived in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s at the tip of the North Island, a ferry ride from the South Island. These days I’m in Western Massachusetts, a half hour from three states– Connecticut, New Hampshire, or Vermont–depending on which direction I point my car.  

 

I’ve had lots of chances to muse over which borders matter and which ones don’t. The Pennsylvania/Maryland border was inconsequential, though Hagerstown, Maryland, was/is more diverse and, back then, racial tensions were high. Crossing into West Virginia was more of a jolt. Its state slogan used to be “Wild Wonderful West Virginia.” The first part was decidedly true; the second a matter for debate. It was/is a place of played-out mining towns, deer-jackers, rough bars, rusted pickup trucks, and a higher percentage of poor folks than any state should have.

 

In 1978, I moved to northwestern Vermont. New York State was just 12 miles away, but you had to cross or go around Lake Champlain to get there, so I seldom went. Most of my border crossings were between Vermont and Québec. Montreal was just over an hour away, which made it the go-to city. My French was rudimentary, but uttering the phrase “J’habite au Vermont” usually unmoored English that Québeçois refused to waste on anyone from Ontario. Separatist sentiment remained high in the early 1980s, though Montreal had shed much of its old skin and had become a major global city. I enjoyed Expos games, despite Olympic Stadium's earned reputation as a terrible place to watch baseball. One of the first things one notices crossing into any part of Canada is that civic and personal pride exist at higher levels there. There is little litter in evidence, most people maintain their properties, being stupid is nothing to brag about, and in Québec Les Habs (Montreal Canadians) have more followers than the Catholic Church. But you can take Montreal drivers. Please!

 

Some of my Canadian border experiences involved alcohol. As a high school teacher, I often chaperoned events. In Vermont, you had to be 21 to buy alcohol; in Canada it was 18. On Friday nights, some students crossed the border to buy booze, with Molson Brador a perennial favorite. Smuggling wasn’t hard to pull off, as so many families had relatives across the border, could drop by to say hello, and could truthfully tell the Border Patrol they were paying them a visit. At events, I was of a see-no-evil disposition, but I needed to watch those ducking in and out of school events, as it often meant that students were pounding down Bradors in the parking lot. Not everyone handled it well, especially since Brador has an ABV of 6.2%. On a few occasions, I had to rat on someone for safety’s sake. 

 

You might think there’s not much difference between New Zealand’s North and South Island, but you’d be wrong. Crossing the Cook Strait from Wellington took me from a hilly city to an island whose spine is dominated by tall mountains that earn their nickname: The Southern Alps. The South Island is more rugged, less populated, and has its micro climates, which is why most New Zealand wines are produced there. North Island cities like Wellington and Auckland are international in character, whereas Christchurch is quite English and Dunedin is Scottish. The Maori presence is heavier in the North, and scattered small South Island towns often evoke the Wild West.

 

It’s surprising how much borders matter where I now live. Hartford is just an hour away, but the moment one drives into Connecticut, 28 miles distant, the traffic grows heavier and faster in pace. Frankly, Connecticut drivers terrify me, though I live in a state whose motorists are called “Massholes.” The opposite occurs when I travel the same distance north and cross into Vermont. It feels relaxed and residents of southern Vermont towns such as Brattleboro take themselves way less seriously–in a good way. To me, Hartford is harried, Northampton political, and Brattleboro as comfy as an old flannel shirt.

 

Until one gets to Keene, a drive into New Hampshire via Northfield, MA is not a Granite State tourist brochure. It’s one of the few places in New England where one finds auto racing, but don’t think Darlington. Most of the towns along Route 10 have seen better days, and their stately official buildings stand in marked contrast to battered commercial districts and dilapidated homes. The only reason to live in them is that most taxes are lower or non-existent in New Hampshire (though real estate taxes are higher). New Hampshire has some stunning landscape and picturesque towns, but not near my border.

 

Tune in next time to see what others have said about border experiences.

 

Rob Weir

Forgettables and Lamentables: People and Things To Be Put to Rest

 

 

--Assuming the Election of 2020 is actually over, here are some things about which I’d like to forget.

 

·      Ranked choice voting: If you think Joe Biden won decisively, think again. Biden owes his presidency to Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian candidate. Libertarians are on generally on the right, so we can assume that without Jorgensen, most of her votes would have gone to Trump. Look at the margin-of-victory numbers vs. her voting support:

 

            Arizona:     Biden +11,645      Jorgensen 51,057

            Georgia:   Biden + 24,000   Jorgensen, etc. 72,000

            Pennsylvania:  Biden +53,219  Jorgensen 78,083

            Wisconsin        Biden +20,040  Jorgensen 38,415

 

·      Bernie Bros cost Hillary the 2016 election. See the above bullet and get back to me. Democrats have issues they must resolve. Overall, progressives did better than moderates in 2020. Biden came close to losing, so compost all the “need-moderates” barnyard exhaust. Then explain how Sarah Gideon lost to Susan “The Waffler” Collins.

 

·      Partisan Polling.  It should be banned. How many pleas did you see from Amy McGrath or Jamie Harrison showing they were either ahead or just slightly behind? McConnell trounced McGrath by almost 20% and Harrison spent over $10 million and lost by 10%. If their campaigns were appliances, they’d be busted for bait-and-switch.

 

--I would be happy never want to hear these names again:

 

·      The Clintons: Bonkin’ Bill is one of the biggest frauds of my lifetime. A liberal Democrat? His name is on legislation not even Reagan could get passed: NAFTA, DADT, DOMA, IIRIRA, PRWORA, repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Omnibus Crime Bill, the US-China Relations Act, the Telecommunications Act, the pardon of Marc Rich, war in Somalia (but not Kosovo or Rwanda). If you don’t know about this stuff, look it up! 

 

    Hillary had public sympathy on her side during the Lewinsky scandal, but went full Tammy Wynette in exchange for access to power. She was a run-of-the-mill senator; a decent,  though bellicose, secretary of state; and squandered a huge lead in 2016. 

 

 ·      Nate Silver: Speaking of frauds! Here’s a guy who got the 2008 election right and hasn’t been in the money since. Now he pleads that his data points were wrong. All that means is that his polls were never scientific in the first place. Silver is merely an aggregator, though not a discerning one. Truly scientific polls–if they still exist–have margin errors in the plus or minus 2% range, not 9% or more. Even Nostradamus was better at predictions.

 

 ·      Sarah Gideon: If you can’t beat Susan Collins, you’re in the wrong state.

 

 ·      Gus Bickford: The head of the MA Democratic Party is accused of telling UMass students to go public with allegations against Congressman Richie Neal’s primary opponent, Alex Morse. Bickford claims he broke no laws. Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean he’s not crooked. 

 

 --I don’t need to hear these names again unless proceeded by modifiers such as fired, indicted, arrested, or sentenced:

 

·      Donald Trump: There are prostitutes with more morality than Trump. We know this from their testimony.

           

·      William Barr: He has no respect for the law, so maybe the law should show some disrespect toward him.

 

·      Mike Pompeo: He is despised abroad and unloved at home.

 

·      Betsy DeVos: Can she even spell “education?”

 

·      Jared Kushner: Sleaze? Flunky? Asshat? Take your pick.

 

·      Mike Pence: Machiavelli fell on his sword for 4 years. Let him bleed.

 

·      John Bolton: The “brave” man who didn’t tell the truth when it actually mattered.

 

·      Steve Bannon: Move to Russia; you and Julian Assange deserve each other.

 

·      Elaine Chao: Time to return this perennial toady to the muck.

 

·      Rudy Giuliani: Once a very good mayor of NYC. Must have met the Devil at the crossroads and traded his soul for slime.

 

·      Eugene Scalia: Antonin’s son as secretary of labor? How about Willie Sutton as secretary of the treasury?

 

·      Trump’s interchangeable eye candy: To Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany, Stephanie Grisham, Sarah Sanders, Hope Hicks, etc. Don’t lose you looks ladies, or Fox News won’t keep you around very long.

 

·      Mitch McConnell: As honest as your average Kentucky basketball coach. So vile he might be Jesse Helms risen from the grave.