A pal and a confidante
Another of TV's "Golden Girls," Bea Arthur, died during my blogging absence last week.
Here's Slate's critic Troy Patterson on why the Emmy-winning NBC sitcom of the 1980s was such a great show.
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Alas, it was back to work today after a marvelous 8 days away. I was the one in the office wearing the surgical mask.
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I'll be babysitting for my 5-year-old sister on Sunday. (She turns 5 on Saturday.) She's a rather energetic child. Last time I watched her, I had to put the house on lockdown and search for weapons.
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I don't want to say that New Orleans is a great town, but if I lived there, I would probably have just a 1 DVD at-a-time Netflix subscription.
La Nouvelle-Orleans
I just returned yesterday from a trip to New Orleans and the city's annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. The Paulin Brothers Brass Band wailed at Preservation Hall Thursday night, and our group took in the Festival on Saturday and Sunday.
Jazz Fest is always about making hard music choices. Despite having attended three days of the event over the last two years, the list of artists I
didn't see just on those three days must rival the best of any of the other great music festivals around the world: Elvis Costello with Allen Toussaint, Al Green, Tim McGraw, Delbert McClinton, Hot 8 Brass Band, James Taylor, Wilco, Erykah Badu, Galactic, Dave Matthews Band, Etta James, Better Than Ezra, Mavis Staples, and Hugh Masekela.
This year I dedicated myself for the most part to seeing full performances of jazz figures appearing on stage in their most natural habitat-- that is, New Orleans. With few exceptions, jazz music should rule above all at the festival, and those that bring it here are saving their best for the city that gave it birth.
Trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, who has scored every Spike Lee film going back to "Mo' Better Blues," is carrying on the hard bop spirit of Miles, Monk, and Coltrane in the 21st century, chanteuse Stephanie Jordan covered half my karaoke songbook in her rousing tribute to Lena Horne, and A-list drummer Herlin Riley of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, played the Jazz Fest for the first time as leader of his own quartet and closed Sunday with a New Orleans classic, Sidney Bechet's "Petite Fleur." Blanchard, Jordan, and Riley are all New Orleans natives, as are about 80 percent of this year's Jazz Fest performers.
The highlight of the fest for me though this year was the Saturday evening performance of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by-- with respect to Blanchard-- the current trumpet/cornet king of New Orleans, Wynton Marsalis. You got the sense that most of the festival dignitaries were under the tent for the Lincoln Center performance, even though James Taylor, Wilco, and Erykah Badu were all playing elsewhere. (Marsalis also led the band there Friday night.) This year marks the 40th Anniversary of the New Orleans Jazz Fest and Marsalis led his group Saturday through an entire reading of Duke Ellington's "New Orleans Suite," a piece that was originally commissioned for the very first festival back in 1970 and performed at that time by Ellington and his bandmates. Marsalis introduced each individual movement of the suite, punctuating the performance with colorful oral perspectives on the history of jazz, the city, and the important figures of New Orleans. (Ellington's composition includes individual pieces with such titles as "Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies" and "Aristocracy a la Jean LaFitte.") When they bounced into the final movement of the Duke's masterpiece,"Portrait of Mahalia Jackson," a beautiful girl with a bright smile and long white gloves came out and lit the stage with her Mardi Gras-inspired parasol dancing.
One of the featured and standout performers in Marsalis' 15-piece band-- a collection of musicians, by the way, that also provides one of the best reasons to visit
New York City-- is trumpeter
Ryan Kisor, who Marsalis introduced on stage as one of the three great trumpet (or cornet) players ever to come out of Iowa-- the others were one I hadn't heard of and Davenport's legendary Bix Beiderbecke. After watching Kisor, with his shades on, blow his muted horn from the back row of Marsalis' bandstand, I'm convinced he has to be the coolest Iowan of all-time, right up there with Johnny Carson and Cloris Leachman.
Baritone sax player Joe Temperley, a veteran of Ellington's band, played a solo on one of the three songs that followed the New Orleans Suite, and he had many in the audience in tears playing a tune for his wife (seated in the audience) on the occasion of the couple's 25th wedding anniversary. As the trio (bass, piano, and drums) played the rest of the Lincoln Center musicians off-stage and most of the audience members out the door at the end, Marsalis wasn't done. Packing his horn away too slowly, he whimsically rejoined the trio with his trumpet, improvising (it seemed) a number that wove in and out of the refrain of "When the Saints Go Marching In," perhaps the best-known of several New Orleans theme songs. I doubt I'll ever see anything again at the Festival that quite compares, and every city should be so lucky as to have a global ambassador on par with the one New Orleans has in Marsalis.
As the aforementioned big music names imply, there's more than just jazz at the annual festival. Since the time New Orleans-style rag and "jass" music replaced parlor piano music as the American standard, almost all music that's come after owes something to this region of the country, and is therefore welcome on the festival schedule. You haven't lived until you've sung along with Pete Seeger on "Turn, Turn, Turn!", "Midnight Special," and "This Land is Your Land," as we did on Saturday afternoon, just eight days before Seeger's 90th birthday party in New York City. (Seeger's Newport Folk Festivals of the 1960s were the forerunners of Jazz Fest.) And you also haven't lived until you've grooved, as we did Sunday night, with about 60,000 people to the funkadelic sounds of "Earth, Wind & Fire."
Let's groove tonight!New Orleans must be the world's greatest city. It's certainly America's greatest, and
increasingly so as the rest become more and more homogenized. The French Quarter offered more culture, color, and entertainment to us in three and a half days than you could find in a dozen trips to other popular U.S. vacation destinations. The two-hour walking tour of the Quarter on Friday was a blast, and our traveling party engaged Rue Bourbon in just enough carnal decadence as to not be out of step with the Quarter's rich social and cultural heritage. After all, it was that great literary figure, Blanche DuBois, who proclaimed (lamented, actually) that the bells of St. Louis Cathedral were the only thing holy in the Quarter.
Ce soir, nous vivons!New Orleans was so much damn fun I may have to make it back the next time
before the commencement of next spring's festival. Once a year is proving to be less than enough. (In fact, it might be a gas sometime to experience
the old Orleans.) If you're feeling the buzz too, the second of two Jazz Fest weekends for this year begins tomorrow.
Is this what we were promised?
The Des Moines Register headline online today reads "House passes less controversial health-reform bill", but I gather that depends on how one chooses to measure controversy. A scaled-back health care bill
passed the House today 91-3, a vote that, mathematically, is certainly on the low end of a sliding scale of "controversy," but considering that polls show roughly
two-thirds of Americans believe government should
guarantee health insurance and that 90 percent believe the current health-care system needs either fundamental change or to be entirely rebuilt, the case could probably be made that the changes in the House, from the originally proposed bill to the one that passed today-- changes that maintain more of the status quo-- will wind up being more "controversial."
Many of the details of today's bill are not yet known, at least to me. The rush to vote didn't even allow paper copies of the bill to be given to House members, but we know this much from the Register's stellar reportage:
1) The new bill was written in private, and the vote was hurried, but Rep. Mark Smith had time to meet with private interest groups, including private insurers, to a point where he felt afterwards as if he "could give a master's thesis on (the) legislation."
2) Insurance and business lobbyists were able to get more concessions from Democratic leaders, by those leaders' own public acknowledgement, allowing more of these corporate predators to keep their greedy, grimy hands on our human right to health care coverage.
3) Though we were promised less bureaucracy with the late-session changes, a nine-member "work group" panel has still been set up that
will include a place at the table for private business and insurance interests.
4) The revised bill excluded limits being placed on the gifts that physicians and health care providers can accept from representatives of drug companies.
5) Even though almost every Democratic member of the Iowa House ran an election campaign last fall promising health care coverage for all children in the state, the bill that came out of their chamber today, during what's expected to be the last week of the session, with the Democrats in the majority, provides no money to that end.
Hey you kids, get off my lawn!
Don't try to convince me that the traditional Washington press corps is out of touch. This week, D.C. pundit/symbol of reverence
George Will tackled the scourge of blue jeans.
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If Texas decides to secede,
as their governor warned they might this week, I fear that Oklahoma will be overrun with illegals trying to steal a piece of my way of life.
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I've been as critical of the Democratic Party and its leadership as anyone around, but there are no words to describe how heroically Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal
has behaved publicly in regards to the protection of gay marriage in this state.
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Stay classy, New York Yankees.
The teabaggers
Happy Tax Day!
This year's April 15th has brought with it hundreds of "tax party" protest rallies across the country, including
one here in Des Moines that concluded about a half-hour ago. I can get behind some of the anger directed at the federal bailouts, but if the Des Moines rally is indicative, these protests seem to be more of a "catch-all" by the Right for all of their causes than simply taxes, perhaps a way for them to come together and prove to themselves that they're not all out in the political wilderness after a series of electoral poundings.
They're speaking out in support of any and all of their issues today, including abortion restrictions and the ban on gay marriage, even though the latter, ironically, extends tax relief to more Americans.
Republican activists have been taking a lot of public jibes from the Left for having organized these "teabag" tax protests. Some showed up at the state capitol this morning with teabags hanging from their caps, others have been mailing teabags to their representatives in Washington at the urging of the interest groups. The party planners (Fox News, basically) evidently were not aware of the urban dictionary definition of
teabagging, and they're being mocked for it in every media corner from basic cable television to expanded basic. MSNBC's David Shuster may have had the line of the week in reference to Fox New's Neil Cavuto. "In Cavuto's defense," he said Tuesday, "If you are planning simultaneous teabagging all around the country, you're going to need a Dick Armey."
I'm going to fight the temptation to join in on the hilarity, however, out of respect for the activists' well-meaning fervor. It's obvious they have a bad taste in their mouths.
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Reason #292 why the internet is the best source of news and information:
The Des Moines Register published a story in today's Metro/Iowa section about a manure bill that's being debated in the Iowa House. An Elkader farmer named Larry Stone is quoted in the piece opposing the spread of manure on fields that have frozen over because of the increased runoff into the waterways.
Though it has no way of appearing in the paper's print edition, an anonymous reader comment in
the online thread charges that Stone is a former reporter for the Register. I don't know if this is true, but a quick internet search reveals that
a Larry Stone of Elkader worked as an outdoors writer and photographer for the Register for 25 years. If that is indeed the same Larry Stone, that relationship absolutely has to be disclosed in the story.
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Emotionally-unburdening quote of the day: Huffington Post reader 'Loki" in the comment thread of
a story about why men and women are scientifically attracted to strangers,
"But its not always. My now X was dating her fetish, a younger black guy who had no money. Thats why she tried to take all my money before I tossed her out on her arse. She now her fetish boy, and keeps asking me for money like Im supposed to feel sorry for her being broke."
The GOP leader
One of my best friends from high school, Matt Strawn, was elected chairman of the Iowa Republican Party in January. Matt was a year older than me in school, but we shared a passion for sports and politics. I have a photo of the two of us on the field during Camera Night at the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Summer of '93, it was. We're pretending to warm up our arms down in the right-field bullpen. (Naturally, he portrayed the righty, and I was the lefty.)
This past weekend, Matt faced questions from a panel of reporters on the statewide public television program "Iowa Press." He showed he's going to be a force to be reckoned with for Iowa progressives-- experienced, energetic, and smart. Here's
a transcript of that broadcast, along with an audio and video link.
Matt has always been a prince of a guy, but even in high school-- maybe
especially in high school-- his right-wing bent was a bit disturbing. He grew up watching "Family Ties" on television but didn't get the joke.
Harry Kalas 1936-2009
The voice of the Philadelphia Phillies, Harry Kalas,
died today at the age of 73. Better known to national audiences perhaps as the distinctive voice of NFL Films and a series of football-inspired Campbell's Soup commercials, Kalas went out at the top in a manner of speaking-- in the broadcasting booth just before the Phillies afternoon game today in Washington D.C., and of course, with the Phillies as defending World Champions.
I had the privilege of watching Harry Kalas get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002 thanks to the happenstance of his getting inducted the same year as Ozzie Smith. Cardinals and Phillies fans made up about 90 percent of the audience in Cooperstown that summer afternoon, and I met Harry the previous day. He was having his picture taken in the Hall itself, and he stopped to pose for my camera as well. (This was prior to my participation in the digital camera revolution so I don't have the snapshot available to show you today. But stop by the house.)
When the Phillies won their previous World Series in 1980, network agreements in place at the time prevented local broadcasters from calling the action of the World Series games. The public dissatisfaction expressed by Phillies fans upon failing to hear Kalas helped to lift that restriction beginning in 1981.
Kalas, a former student at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, was a member of the graduating class of 1958 at the University of Iowa, and he was the voice of the self-guided tour of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. I'll always remember him best, though, as one of Ozzie's companions along his Yellow Brick Road.
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The latest fad at Wrigley Field-- coupling with the established neighborhood pastimes of drinking to forget and threatening the kid with the headphones-- is hanging
a bloody animal carcass from the Harry Caray statue. Results of an autopsy are pending.
Piracy
The cable television news outlets have gone almost wall-to-wall now in their coverage of the Somali 'pirate' attack, but here's
a perspective on the standoff they're not giving us, courtesy of ace reporter and author Jeremy Scahill. And here's
Scahill's latest from this afternoon.
Failed states don't come much more failed than Somalia, and the U.S. has hardly been engaged with this country except as the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean to its north and east serve a transport route for getting oil to the West.
Scahill's book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army", is a must-read also.
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I'm not quite finished on the gay marriage topic in Iowa.
This sparkling editorial in the New York Times on Wednesday almost made me want to get married, to run out and marry the first man or woman I saw in the street-- just to say that I got married in Iowa.
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Even that stalwart of conservative talk radio, prig Dr. Laura,
has come out publicly for gay marriage. Apparently she's just into the two-parent thing. I actually happened to be watching Larry King when she made these comments. That's quite rare. I don't think I've watched that show since Tammy Faye Baker died.
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"The Ed Fallon Law" was passed in Iowa during this legislative session to prevent political candidates from using campaign contributions to pay family members as campaign staff, but evidently
it's OK if Governor Chet Culver uses his campaign donations to pay for a personal trip to the Masters golf tournament.
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This photo of Cardinals greats Stan Musial and Albert Pujols, "The Man and El Hombre," snapped just before Monday's opener, should really take home the Pulitzer.
Quotes of the day 4/8/09
Heroic quote of the day: Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, in a floor speech that's making the rounds
on YouTube,
"One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and her particular workplace at that moment in time there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage. They were talking about discussions going on across the country. And my daughter Kate, after listening to it for about 20 minutes, said to them: 'You guys don't understand. You've already lost. My generation doesn't care.' I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I've talked with other people about it and that's what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that. Is that so wrong? I don't think that's wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know I've been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other. No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you."
Wry quote of the day: Sardonic online commentator "icemilkcoffee" in a comment thread about actor Nicholas Cage having to sell off his castle in Bavaria due to the global economic crisis, "Glad he still has another castle to fall back on. Otherwise he would be castleless."
Humorous quote of the day: Film critic Roger Ebert in an open letter to Bill O'Reilly in yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times, "Bill, I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say that you are more powerful than any politician? That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out, 'Raise the bridge! I have an erection!'"
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Bonus link to other reading material: Two investors swindled by Bernie Madoff have exacted their revenge.
Opening Day 2009
The St. Louis Cardinals opened their season this afternoon with a wrenching loss in the ninth inning to the long-inconsequential Pirates of Pittsburgh. The Birds' rookie closer, Jason Motte-- he of the 98-miles-an-hour fastball and no other discernible big-league pitch-- surrendered four runs and a two-run lead in the top of the 9th.
Any game that the Cardinals' bullpen blows during 2009 will not be on the head of any one relief pitcher, however-- it will be on the team general manager. John Mozeliak failed to sign or trade for an established stopper to protect the final inning even after the Cards' bullpen led the league with 31 blown saves last year, flirting with the all-time single-season record. Mozeliak's solution was to sign two 30-plus-year-old lefty specialists, let their most reliable middle-inning man from a year ago, Russ Springer, walk away, and nothing else. I can't deal with another summer of these semi-nightly late-game collapses. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Motte was loudly booed when he left the field tonight after the 9th inning, but the boos being hurled at my television were directed at management.
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I hope that he's learned to emotionally-distance himself from the action better than I have in
my old age. Otherwise, this is the type of game that could kill
Stan Musial.
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In less-sacred sports news, tonight is the NCAA men's basketball championship game pitting Michigan State against North Carolina. I can understand the excitement people feel about the NCAA tournament. It starts with 64, goes to 32, then 16, 8, 4, 2, and finally one. It's just like General Motors stock.
Revolution on the prairie
Today is one of the extraordinary days in the history of the state of Iowa. The state Supreme Court has
unanimously confirmed the fundamental principal of equal protection under the law by striking down the state legislature's 1998 law banning same-sex marriage.
The ruling is a monumental victory for gays and lesbians, for the nation's civil rights movement, and for the state of Iowa, which stands today as a beacon to 47 other states that don't currently allow same-sex marriages.
Maura Strassberg, a Drake University law professor in Des Moines, told the New York Times that she was not surprised by the ruling, "What is really stunning (though) is that it's unanimous. It's a very bold, confident opinion," she said upon reviewing the 69-page decision, "It affirms a certain notion of what Iowa is and what Iowa means."
Hear, hear. If I may be equally as bold, I'd like to point out that there was only state legislative campaign in the Des Moines area, and probably in the state, that made gay marriage rights a key issue of its platform last year, or probably any other year. There was just one political campaign that was going door-to-door in the capital city with literature touting unequivocal support for
full marriage rights for gays and lesbians. There was only one political campaign for any level of state or local office with a public presence at last fall's Capital City Pride celebration in Des Moines. In each case, that one campaign was mine.
Support on the Hill is still in doubt. It remains to be seen whether the Democratic-led legislature or the governor, another Democrat, will allow the court ruling to stand. Governor Culver offered no enthusiasm or even support for the ruling in his media release today. It read, "The decision released this morning by the Supreme Court addresses a complicated and emotional issue, one on which Iowans have strong views and opinions on both sides. The next responsible step is to thoroughly review this decision, which I am doing with my legal counsel and the attorney general, before reacting to what it means for Iowa."
Does he mean a legal review, or a political one? I guess it can't hurt the governor politically to wait and see which way the wind is blowing before deciding whether these same-sex marriages should be the equal of his own.
This is a joyous day for Iowa, a state that struck down slavery rights 17 years before the Dred Scott/U.S. Supreme Court ruling of 1858, and the first state that allowed women to practice law almost a century and a half ago. Now it's the first state located in America's heartland to recognize same-sex marriages, a decision that will have both a national and international impact for human rights.
Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.---
Reverend Keith Ratliff, president of the Iowa/Nebraska state conference of the NAACP, began the week lecturing State Senator Jack Hatch on tolerance at the minister's North Side church. This morning he was out in front of the Iowa Supreme Court building praying with other bigots that the state's gay marriage ban might be upheld. Disgraceful.
God, don't touch the Queen
Controversy erupted Wednesday when Michelle Obama reciprocated a "back touch" of Queen Elizabeth during the Obamas' state visit to Great Britain. Evidently, touching the Queen is an almost unprecedented gesture, even if the Queen is the one that initiates the physical contact. It works the same way at Big Earl's strip club on Des Moines' north side.
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The Iowa Supreme Court's long-awaited
ruling on same-sex marriage will be made public on Friday morning. Iowa would become only the fourth state in the union to recognize same-sex unions.
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The Major League Baseball Players Association is opening
a new retail outlet store in the New York Mets' recently-constructed stadium, Bailout Park. Am I the only fan that would be interested in a Marvin Miller bobblehead? What about a likeness of Curt Flood on a Nano Ipod case?
Sticks and stones
The latest dust-up in the Des Moines news media regarding the state legislature
stems from a comment made by my home district's senator, Jack Hatch, to my district representative, Ako Abdul-Samad, on the floor of the house chamber last week.
Hatch, who is white, used the word "nigger" during a conversation with Abdul-Samad, who is black. The senator used the word to describe how he felt the two men were collectively being treated by the party leadership over a proposed plan by the pair to make health care more accessible in the state. Hatch has issued multiple apologies in the wake of the incident, and Abdul-Samad said that the incident had provided what he called "a teaching moment."
"The village isn't OK," Abdul-Samad was quoted as saying in the Des Moines Register, "What has happened... is that through Sen. Jack Hatch that we do still have some issues. And the key is once we've realized these issues are still in effect, what do we do? Do we take it and take our anger and send it one direction, or do we take our anger and make it a teaching moment, an educational moment?"
Abdul-Samad's spirit of conciliation is spot-on. This is indeed a teaching moment. But what exactly is the lesson to be learned? Words have power, yes, but they only have the power that we allow them to have. In this instance, in fact, I'm not sure why Hatch even feels compelled to apologize. He didn't call Abdul-Samad "a nigger," or use the word in anger towards him. He used the phrase in what we refer to as a "context"- a context, in this case, that seems to me actually acknowledges the historic impact of the word. Words themselves can be only neutral.
The Register won't print the word "nigger" in reference to this story I guess because either they feel we don't know it, because they're being politically safe, or because they think that the word actually has a chance one day of going away. Well, as to the latter, guess what-- the word will never go away as long as it continues to be supplied with so much power. That's the one way, in fact, to make sure that it never goes away.
A new generation of young people,
particularly African-Americans, have come to
realize this. They've been busy creating the next American society in which this label and others, like "white trash" and "fag", have been claimed by the people who were once almost always on the receiving end of the epithet. We're all the better for this evolving standard.
Hatch's use of the word, a dirty bomb of distraction in the local news media, may go to show-- more than anything else-- just how much it's the new generation of Iowans that are most underrepresented in the legislature.
Local Reverend Keith Ratliff, president of the regional NAACP-- ironically, an organization whose name itself suggests a preferred group label now out of public favor-- lamented Monday that people "still use derogatory language against other individuals," as if such a thing could
ever be eradicated, and Linda Carter-Lewis, president of the Des Moines NAACP branch, warned that Hatch would still "suffer the consequences for his actions."
Any words placed together for the purpose of expressing a thought or idea have the potential to offend, and African-Americans in a position of political leadership don't have a monopoly on providing enlightenment to the general populace. Bigots come in all colors and creeds, as the public campaign for California's Proposition 8 last year demonstrated.
Sadly, I fear that Hatch's offense-- one that was committed, incidently, by one of the state senate's most committed and progressive members-- will somehow linger longer in the memories of the local NAACP leadership than will the offense of the Democratic majority leadership stripping Hatch's expanded health care proposal, the action that led to Hatch's comment to begin with and that will actually wind up hurting African-American residents of Iowa worse than a simple uttered word.
