Category: Culture

Richard Ford’s taut, brilliant anti-mystery

Normally I don’t get much of a chance to read fiction. Even a book that’s not about the media is a luxury.

Earlier this summer, though, I read Richard Ford’s latest novel, “Canada,” and recommend it highly. I had read and admired two of his earlier works — “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” the latter of which won a Pulitzer Prize. So when the New York Times Book Review gave “Canada” a rave (by Andre Dubus III, no less), I decided to dive in.

“Canada” is divided into two parts — before and after, if you will. The first part is as brilliant and perfect a piece of writing as I’ve read in a long time. Ford plays with and blows apart the notion of suspense with his first two sentences:

First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

All of part one is given over to Ford’s telling us a little bit more, then a little more, then a little more. Everything is foreshadowed. There are no surprises. And it is brilliant.

Part two, in which the murders take place, is just slightly uneven, at least in comparison to the taut, seamless quality of part one. But without part two, Ford wouldn’t have had a story. And at its best, it is very good indeed.

Sasha Baron Cohen’s smugly unfunny humor

I detested “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s best-known movie, for making vicious fun of good people who’d done nothing more than try to be polite. So I can only imagine how bad “The Dictator” must be if, as A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, it doesn’t even reach that low standard.

I absolutely love this line from Scott:

Unlike his precursors Brüno, Borat and Ali G, Admiral General Aladeen is not meant to fool anyone into thinking that he is real, so viewers are denied the full measure of smugness that is Mr. Baron Cohen’s special gift to bestow.

When I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan, three years ago, our cab driver couldn’t wait to tell us how much he liked “Borat.” “But it’s not really Kazakhstan!” he quickly added.

E-books and the privatization of the village square

This commentary has also been published at the Huffington Post.

Tomorrow I’ll be part of a panel on e-books being organized in Boston by the Association of College and Research Libraries. We’re supposed to talk about what we like and don’t like about them, and I can do that. But what I really hope to discuss is the place of e-books in a world in which what we used to think of as public space is increasingly being turned over to private, profit-making entities.

Let me explain what I mean with a couple of non-book examples.

In 2003 I bestowed a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award on Crossgates Mall, in the Albany, N.Y., suburb of Colonie, for calling police and having a man arrested because he was wearing a mildly worded T-shirt in protest of the war in Iraq. The protester — actually, he was just having a bite to eat in the food court after picking up his purchase from the mall’s T-shirt store — was quickly released.

But there’s almost no chance he would have been arrested if he’d been hanging out in the village square rather than a mall. The trouble is that in too many cities and towns, we no longer have a village square except in the form of enclosed spaces owned by profit-seeking corporations. What happened to that protester said a lot more about our privatized idea of community than it does about that one particular incident.

In 2008 the Beverly Citizen, a weekly newspaper on Boston’s North Shore owned by GateHouse Media, discovered what can happen when you turn over some of your publishing operations to Google. The Citizen had posted a video of the annual Fourth of July “Horribles” parade, which included an offensive float that featured a giant, water-squirting penis. The float mocked an alleged “pregnancy pact” involving girls at Gloucester High School, a much-hyped story that turned out to be not quite true.

Although the Citizen’s judgment in posting the video could be questioned, there was no doubt that the float was newsworthy, as it had been seen by hundreds of people attending the parade. Yet Google-owned YouTube, which GateHouse was using as a video-publishing platform, took it down without any explanation. It would be as though a printing company refused to publish a particular edition of newspaper on the grounds that it didn’t like the content. YouTube is an incredibly flexible tool for video journalism. But Google has its own agenda, and hosting content that might offend someone is bad for business.

What’s that got to do with e-books? A physical book, once printed, enters a public sphere of a sort, especially if it’s purchased by a library. But an e-book remains largely under the control of the corporation that distributed it — most likely Amazon, Apple or Barnes & Noble.

We all remember those horror stories from a few years ago when some books people had purchased suddenly disappeared from their Kindles because Amazon was involved in a rights dispute. (Ironically, the books included George Orwell’s “1984.”) In some cases, students lost books they needed for school, along with their notes.

More recently, Apple refused to carry in its iTunes store an e-book by Seth Godin called “Stop Stealing Dreams.” The reason: Godin included favorable mentions of — and links to — other e-books that were available only through Amazon. “We’re heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores … and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing,” Godin wrote.

And I’m not even getting into the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of alleged price-fixing by Apple and several leading book publishers.

Another concern I have involves the rights of authors. Several years ago Rodale, the publisher of my first book, “Little People,” reassigned all rights to me after the book had reached the end of its natural life. I published the full text on the Web, which led to my hometown high school’s adopting it as its summer read — which in turn pushed me to create a self-published paperback edition with the help of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. “Little People” has had a pretty nice second life for an out-of-print book. (I wrote about the experience recently for Nieman Reports.)

But now that e-books and e-readers have become ubiquitous, I’m worried that publishers will simply have no incentive to let authors benefit from the full rights to their own work. If a publisher can make a little bit of money by selling a few e-copies each year, then it might just decide to keep those rights to itself. This is long-tail economics for the benefit of corporations, not authors.

And have you ever tried to lend an e-book to someone?

There is a lot to like about e-books. As someone with terrible eyesight, I like being able to adjust the type to my own preference and use my laptop’s or iPhone’s backlighting rather than depend on iffy room lighting. And my iPhone, unlike whatever book I might be reading, is always with me.

But when unaccountable corporate interests maintain control over what shall take place in the village square, what content shall be deemed suitable for public consumption and what rights the authors and even the purchasers of books shall have, we have put our culture at risk in ways we couldn’t have imagined a generation ago.

Thanks to Twitter followers @jcstearns, @JimandMargery and @BostonGuyinNC, who responded quickly to my pleas for help with research.

When Christopher (maybe) met Henry

I did not realize until reading one of the many obituaries about Christopher Hitchens that he’d written a short book about Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.” I think I’ll make it my next read.

There are a lot of well-deserved tributes to Hitchens today. I was especially moved by Ian McEwan’s in the New York Times. Turned out Hitchens was a man who faced death with bravery and even scorn right up to the end.

In March of 2001, I wrote an overview for the Boston Phoenix of Hitchens’ devastating portrayal of Henry Kissinger, first published in Harper’s and later turned into a book titled “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.”

Which calls to mind my one and only Hitchens anecdote. I can’t remember where I picked it up, and it has the ring of something that ought to be true rather an actual occurrence. But, supposedly, Hitchens was once introduced to Kissinger at a party. Kissinger’s eyes narrowed while Hitchens waited nervously to see what the former secretary of state would say.

“So, you called me a war criminal,” Kissinger told Hitchens.

Hitchens averred that, yes, he had, but that he’d also called Bill Clinton a war criminal because of his air strikes in the former Yugoslavia.

“Bill Clinton,” Kissinger was said to have replied, “doesn’t have the moral courage to be a war criminal.”

If it didn’t actually happen, it damn well should have.

Why small cities may hold the key to the future

There’s nothing quite listening in on a smart conversation by two old friends. In this week’s Boston Phoenix, Catherine Tumber talks with Jon Garelick about her new book, “Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.”

Cathy’s big idea is that down-on-their-luck cities like Lowell and Springfield may be due for a revival as economic and environmental constraints make urban living more appealing. And unlike major metropolises such as New York or Los Angeles — or Boston, for that matter — small cities have the capacity to develop their own self-sufficient ecosystems, including locally grown food.

The book is based on an essay Tumber wrote for the Boston Review in 2009 titled “Small, Green and Good.”

I read “Small, Gritty and Green” in galleys last spring, and I recommend it highly. Cathy also has given me invaluable advice for my own book-in-progress on the New Haven Independent and other community news sites, tentatively titled “The Wired City.”

Barry Crimmins to be roasted tonight

Wish I could make this: local comedy legend (and friend of Media Nation) Barry Crimmins is back in town, and will be roasted by the Boston Comedy Festival tonight at 8:30 p.m. at the Charles Playhouse Lounge. Details here. From the festival website:

The Boston Comedy Festival is cooking up a welcome back roast and toast for Barry Crimmins, the comic and producer whose hard work, vision and terrific sense of humor helped bring the Boston Comedy scene into the modern era. Crimmins founded the fabled Ding Ho Comedy Club in Cambridge and then later was pivotal in starting Stitches in Boston. These clubs were where Steven Wright, Paula Poundstone, Bobcat Goldthwait, Kevin Meaney, Jimmy Tingle and many, many others cut their comedicteeth. Crimmins has gone on to make a name for himself as an internationally renowned political satirist. He is the author of “Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal” (7 Stories Press).

This tribute will be hosted by Boston comedy legend Tony V. The dais will be jammed with noted wits rarely seen on the same stage, including: Jimmy Tingle, Steve Sweeney, Mike McDonald, Randy Credico, Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman, The Steamy Bohemians — Niki Luparelli, Lainey Schulbaum and John Ennis (Mr Show, Studio 60). This lineup of all-star talent is sure to fricassee your funny bone so expect great laughs, celebrity surprises, topped off words from the wizened and hilarious forefather of our Boston comedy scene.

Barry also says on his Facebook profile that he’ll be at Occupy Boston today at 4 p.m.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

This is a sad day. Steve Jobs has died. He was a visionary and a genius — a genius of design, and of knowing how we wanted to work and play long before we had any idea. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve,” said Apple in a company statement, according to NBC News. It’s true, and how many people can you say that about?

Gay marriage trickle needs to become a flood

Gay marriage advocates march in San Francisco

Following New York’s legalization of gay marriage, more than 11 percent of the U.S. population — 11.37 percent — now lives in an area where same-sex marriage is a right, according to U.S. Census data. New York, with a population of nearly 19.4 million, was a huge victory in the movement toward marriage equality. Take away New York, and the percentage drops to just a shade over 5 percent. Jurisdictions where gay-marriage is now a right, with populations, are:

  • New York, 19,378,102
  • Massachusetts, 6,547,629
  • Connecticut, 3,574,097
  • Iowa, 3,046,355
  • New Hampshire, 1,316,470
  • Vermont, 625,741
  • Washington, D.C., 601,723

The total U.S. population is 308,745,538.

To this day, the largest setback was California’s Proposition 8, which killed off that state’s nascent right of gay marriage. If California’s more than 37 million people were added, then the proportion of the country where gay marriage is recognized would rise to 23.4 percent, or nearly one-fourth of the national population.

According to the New York Times, the next most likely states to recognize gay marriage are Maryland and Rhode Island. That would inch us up to nearly 13.6 percent. Progress, yes, but slow progress. Although I don’t believe the majority should hold sway over basic human rights, the fact is that 53 percent of Americans now favor same-sex marriage.

Gay marriage harms no one, and is a vitally important substantive and symbolic benefit to gay and lesbian couples. A trickle isn’t good enough. Let’s hope that what happened in New York opens the floodgates.

Photo (cc) by AJ Alfieri Crispin and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Sparks fly on E Street for Clarence Clemons

Clarence Clemons

Clarence Clemons spent most of his career in the awkward position of having been the key to a musical idea that Bruce Springsteen lost interest in early on.

Clemons, who died on Saturday at the age of 69 after having suffered a stroke last week, was the heart of the great horn section that played on 1973’s “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.” It was unlike any album Springsteen made before or after — an amalgam of rock, folk, soul and Latin music played by a first-rate band with lots of room for stretching out and soloing.

This early version of the E Street Band featured two black musicians — Clemons and keyboard player David Sancious — and a drummer, Vini Lopez, who was fired after a fight with the brother of Springsteen’s manager, but who on “The E Street Shuffle” plays with a wonderfully loose, propulsive feel that is the opposite of Max Weinberg’s hard-rock pounding. It may or may not have been Springsteen’s best album. I do think it’s the greatest summer album ever.

But Springsteen decided to go the rock-god route, although he continued to grow as a songwriter and, especially, as a lyricist. His next album, the elaborate, rococo “Born to Run” (1975), carved out large spaces for Clemons, especially on “Jungleland.” But “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978) is a traditional hard-rock album, with scarcely any room for Clemons at all. For the most part, Springsteen has stuck with a spare, stripped-down approach ever since.

What to do? Clemons and Springsteen were friends, and Clemons was the biggest draw at the live shows other than Springsteen himself. The solution was to keep him, let him play percussion and sing back-up, and of course play sax on the old songs — as well as on the occasional newer songs Springsteen would write to give Clemons something to do other than bang a cowbell.

It was a workable and honorable solution. But I always thought it was too bad that Springsteen abandoned his original (in more ways than one) idea of having an integrated band play integrated music in favor of becoming just another white rocker — albeit the best in the world for a time — with a black foil/sidekick on stage.

Tuesday is the first day of summer. Sparks fly on E Street, and I know what I’ll be playing in my car that day. God bless you, Clarence Clemons.

Photo (cc) by Martin Olbrich and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.