Category: Culture

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.

More progress on the “M”-word

Robert Bertsche, a prominent First Amendment lawyer in Boston, passes along the latest news from the AP Stylebook Online (yes, I’m too cheap to subscribe):

dwarf The preferred term for people with a medical or genetic condition resulting in short stature. Plural is dwarfs.

midget Considered offensive when used to describe a person of short stature. Dwarf is the preferred term for people with that medical or genetic condition.

My 2004 edition of the AP Stylebook does not contain an entry for either word. Clearly the dwarfism community is making progress in its efforts to educate the public about the “M”-word.

In 2009, the New York Times’ then-public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote that the Times had concluded the “M”-word was offensive.

I discuss the rise and fall of the “M”-word in Chapter Seven of my book on dwarfism, “Little People.”

You just can’t keep a bad word down

For those of us in the dwarfism community, it sometimes seems that the outside world is mainly interested in two things: how people with dwarfism are depicted in popular culture and the continued debate over the word “midget,” which is regarded as offensive by nearly everyone within the community.

Here is former New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s 2009 column in which he acknowledges that the “M”-word is offensive and would no longer be used in the Times.

Last week the “M”-word popped up when commentator Bernard Goldberg used it on “The O’Reilly Factor” while critiquing former MSNBC talk-show host Keith Olbermann. In observing that Olbermann’s relatively low ratings in comparison to Fox News were nevertheless higher than anyone else’s at MSNBC, Goldberg compared Olbermann to “the tallest midget in the room.”

My friend Bill Bradford, who’s the senior vice president of Little People of America, called my attention to it on Facebook, and we hashed it out a bit. My inclination was to give a pass to Goldberg on the grounds of his well-documented cluelessness. But another friend, Julie Holland, quickly discovered that Goldberg knew exactly what he was saying. Last February, in defending the use of such charming terms as “Negro” and “retarded,” Goldberg told Bill O’Reilly:

If you use the word midget, the little people community are going to jump all over you. I mean not literally, but they’re going to get on you.

That sound you hear in the background is O’Reilly snickering.

On Sunday, meanwhile, the Boston Herald ran a feature on a show at the Seaport World Trade Center charmingly called “Motorcycles, Midgets and Mayhem,” starring dwarf wrestlers called the Half-Pint Brawlers.

Another LPA friend, District 1 director Barbara Spiegel, is quoted as objecting both to the spectacle and to the use of the “M”-word. The story, by Renee Nadeau Algarin, is benign enough, and I’m not suggesting the Herald should have ignored it. But it’s accompanied by an extensive slide show and a come-on to buy reprints. The comments are about as bad as you would expect.

There’s no question that the way people with dwarfism are depicted in the media is far more positive than it was a generation or two ago. Reality shows such as “Little People, Big World” and “The Little Couple” have helped normalize dwarfism in the eyes of the public.

Yet in the more benighted corners of the media, it seems that things haven’t changed much at all.

It’s still news when a sportswriter comes out

I find it interesting that it’s 2011 and it’s still occasionally noteworthy when we learn that a journalist is gay. Today Boston Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley writes a heartfelt piece — teased on page one — headlined “Welcome to my coming-out party.”

No surprise. I’d heard several times over the years that Buckley was gay, though, as Buckley makes clear, he wasn’t fully, publicly out. What makes his sexual orientation newsworthy are two factors:

  • He covers sports, a macho world where such things still matter, if not nearly as much as they used to. You can be sure that if Buckley’s beat were the Statehouse, he would not have written about being gay.
  • He’s probably best known as a regular presence on sports radio station WEEI (AM 850), where homophobia has been part of the mix for many years. Here’s just a taste. I don’t listen to ‘EEI as much as I used to, and perhaps the gay-baiting isn’t as bad as it was in the past. In any case, Buckley’s coming-out may encourage the station to clean up its act.

This is actually the second time a Herald sportswriter has come out — Buckley was preceded by Ed Gray in 2003. So let’s not make too much of this. Still, it’s a good thing that Buckley has decided to be who he is in public as well as in private. Somewhere today there’s a gay teenager feeling just a little bit better about himself.

“Enlightenment” on the road from Providence

On Saturday night, during a long drive home from Providence, I listened to the pianist McCoy Tyner‘s “Enlightenment” in its entirety for the first time in a long while. It’s one of those albums that you approach with a degree of seriousness, so normally I tell myself I’ll listen when I can sit still and concentrate. But we all know how few those opportunities are.

Recorded live in 1973 at the Montreaux Jazz Festival, “Enlightenment” is similar in intent and spiritual approach to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” on which Tyner played. Each combines simple, repetitive melodies and rhythms with dense improvisations. There are some wonderful moments in “Enlightenment.” Among my favorites is Joony Booth’s bass solo at the beginning of the closing track, “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit.” After a few stumbles, he plays a passage so beautiful you’d swear he was singing.

I was introduced to “Enlightenment” when I was still in high school by the drummer in our band, who always had exquisite taste. Thus it’s more meaningful to me than “A Love Supreme,” even though the latter may be a greater achievement. I saw Tyner twice during the 1970s. The first time may have been at the Jazz Workshop near Copley Square, though I can’t be sure. The second was at the Paradise.

Tyner is a great artist and a great soul. I can’t recommend “Enlightenment” strongly enough.