Al Green got a lot done in a little more than an hour Tuesday night. The legendary soul singer, backed by a crackling band, performed some of his greatest hits at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, N.H.
Sixty-six years old and clearly not in the same shape he was back when he was posing shirtless for album covers, the Reverend had to pace himself. But his voice was strong, even when he soared into the upper register — a danger zone for many older singers. And throughout the concert he handed out roses to the ladies, a tradition that I’m pretty sure has been part of his act since the 1970s.
Green sang old hits such as “Take Me to the River,” “Tired of Being Alone” and — one of my personal favorites — “Love and Happiness.” He delivered a stirring rendition of “Amazing Grace,” and closed with “Let’s Stay Together,” perhaps his biggest hit. There was no encore, despite several minutes of clapping and stomping.
Mrs. Media Nation and I came away feeling honored to have had a chance to see one of the greats of 1960s and ’70s music — a performer of the stature of Otis Redding or James Brown. We’re lucky to still have Al Green with us.
No review from the Portsmouth Herald yet, but the paper interviewed Green last week. The Washington Post reviewed one of his shows a few days ago, and it sounds like basically the same concert.
Boston’s Jesse Dee opened. I have to confess I hadn’t heard of him, but he and his five-piece band delivered a soulful set of their own.
Photo (cc) by Mark Runyon/ConcertTour.org and republished under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
The media — all 15,000-plus reporters, photographers, editors, producers and assorted hangers-on who’ve descended on this unlovely, brutally humid old city — are having a nervous breakdown. And you’re invited to watch.
With the Republican National Convention making no news, and with the Democratic convention destined to be similarly vacuous, it seems the only story media people are talking about is the fact that there’s no story.
I wrote those words 12 years ago in Philadelphia, where I was covering the nomination of George W. Bush for the Boston Phoenix. If anything, the ennui that has come to permeate our national political conventions has grown even more pronounced since then. Nothing newsworthy will take place inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum this week or at Bank of America Forum in Charlotte, N.C., the following week.
But, once again, some 15,000 members of the media have showed up anyway, and most of them will be covering the same non-story. As the noted media observer Jeff Jarvis wrote on his blog, Buzz Machine, the financially strapped news business is spending some $60 million to attend two conventions even while cutting far more important coverage elsewhere. Jarvis continued:
Note that even while newspapers and news organizations have shrunken drastically, we are sending the same number of journalists to the conventions that we sent in 2008 and 2004. Why? Editorial ego: It’s fun to be there, in the pack. It’s fun for a paper or station to say, “We have our man/woman in Tampa/Charlotte.” Well goody for you. It’s a waste.
Yet it doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, way too many journalists are attending the conventions, and many if not most of the folks carrying press credentials this week should have stayed home. But I never found any shortage of news at the four national conventions I covered from 1996 to 2004. The secret — and it’s really no secret at all — is to get out of the hall and look for stories. I was a reporter for the Phoenix, an alternative weekly, during those years, so leaving the media pack behind wasn’t just tolerated; it was required.
In 1996, when I covered the Republican convention in San Diego, I was one of a surprisingly small group of reporters who took a bus to a rally at which Pat Buchanan made his last stand. No doubt other journalists were afraid of missing out on even a moment of Dole-Kemp mania.
In 2000, covering the Republicans in Philadelphia and the Democrats in Los Angeles, I followed protesters around the city streets and reported on two “Shadow Conventions” — left-leaning events organized by Arianna Huffington, who had only recently moved from the conservative to the progressive side of the political spectrum.
At the Democratic convention in 2004, on my home turf in Boston, I skipped Barack Obama’s keynote address because I was writing on deadline. So what? Yes, I missed a bit of history, but it’s not as though his speech wasn’t covered. What mattered was that my fellow Phoenix reporters and I went looking for news outside the building — and found plenty of it, from a meeting of gay and lesbian Democrats to a church service/rally in honor of the late senator Paul Wellstone, from demonstrations in the streets to panel discussions on the sad state of political journalism.
I have little doubt that Jeff Jarvis will be proven right, although there will be a few honorable exceptions. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All the media have to do is get off their collective rear ends and go looking for news. (And let me give a plug to David Bernstein and Chris Faraone, who are heading up the Phoenix’s Tampa coverage.)
I’ll close here as I did in Philadelphia in 2000:
Sure, the media will cover the horse race — who’s up, who’s down, who’s gaining, who’s losing — as well as the accusations and responses, the biographical retrospectives, and the gotchas. That’s all valuable stuff.
But they’ll almost certainly miss the biggest political story of all: the profound disconnect between average citizens and their elected officials…. A sign at the Shadow Convention put it best: “We Can Only Vote Every Four Years; Money Votes Every Day.”
It’s a story the media could have tried to cover during convention week, but — with rare exceptions — they didn’t even try. Instead, the story coming out of Philadelphia was that there was no story. There was. If journalists would start focusing more on the public’s alienation and less on their own, maybe they could start to tell it.
Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
As you can see, Media Nation took on a very different appearance over the weekend. I hope you’ll find that it’s cleaner and more readable. I thought you might be interested in why I made the switch.
For the past several years I had parked Media Nation at DreamHost, using free WordPress software as my publication tool. It was a fairly complex set-up — I couldn’t even contemplate changing WordPress themes without bugging my friend Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub, who knew how to delve into the CSS code so that my Google ads would show up properly. And such simple tasks as changing the header photo were labor-intensive enough that I would generally decide I had better things to do with my time.
I already had a number of websites (mainly for my students) parked at WordPress.com, a free publishing-and-hosting platform offered by the same folks who provide the WordPress software. I’d helped my friends John Carroll and Marjorie Arons-Barron set up their blogs there. WordPress.com doesn’t allow advertising, but my Google ad income was fairly minimal, and I found that the ads tended to be low-quality distractions. So I decided to make the switch as soon as my annual DreamHost contract was up.
I almost gave up before I started — it turned out that Media Nation was far too large to transfer to WordPress.com via the normal route. I posted a query to a WordPress support forum. Someone at Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, took an interest and did it for me without charge. So huge props to them.
Now all of my websites are consolidated in one place. WordPress.com is slightly limited in comparison to using WordPress with a hosting service. But it’s also a lot easier, which means that, for my purposes, I’ll be able to do more experimenting.
I’m not crazy about the theme, Twenty Ten. It’s attractive, but it’s so commonly used that it’s lost its distinctiveness. If I can’t find something better, I might at least look into messing with the CSS to make the rather enormous body type a little smaller.
The header photo, by the way, is a picture I took at the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in April 2009.
John Sununu makes a false claim today in his Boston Globe column, which he devotes to a tiresome defense of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
The former Republican senator writes that Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, had called on Harvard University to fire the historian Niall Ferguson over his recent Newsweek cover story on the alleged failures of President Obama. “A Berkeley professor more or less demanded that Harvard ‘fire his ass'” is how Sununu puts it.
That would be a pretty amazing statement by DeLong if it were true. Sununu is claiming, in effect, that DeLong, a member of the academy, is calling on Harvard to violate a colleague’s academic freedom solely because he doesn’t like what he’s written. As I said: If it were true. It’s not.
In the online version of his column, Sununu helpfully provides a link to DeLong’s blog post. And here is what DeLong actually wrote:
Fire his ass.
Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast.
Convene a committee at Harvard to impose proper sanctions on this degree of intellectual dishonesty.
In an “update,” DeLong clarifies his Harvard reference: “Not that I claim to know what the proper sanctions are, you understand. But we should be inquiring into what they are.”
Now, let me hasten to say that I’m troubled by DeLong’s actual position — that Harvard should look into disciplining Ferguson. But that is a long, long way from calling on Harvard to fire him.
And I should note that DeLong and a number of other critics contend that Ferguson went far beyond expressing anti-Obama opinions, veering into deliberate falsehoods in order to bolster his argument that Obama’s presidency is a failure. (Here is the full bill of particulars compiled by the Atlantic, which I found via the estimable Charlie Pierce.) That could be considered academic misconduct, so DeLong is not completely off the mark — though it strikes me as extreme and unwarranted under the circumstances. Banging out a screed for Tina Brown isn’t exactly the same thing as falsifying academic research.
My issue isn’t with DeLong or Ferguson, though. It’s with Sununu, who has blithely and wrongly slimed DeLong. Perhaps because he didn’t name DeLong, he thought it was all right. Perhaps he thought including the phrase “more or less” would get him off the hook.
Finally, what is up with the Globe’s editors? If I can click on Sununu’s link, so could they.
Josh Beckett and Kevin Youkilis meet President Obama at the 2009 All-Star Game.
I used to write about the Red Sox quite a bit here, but I’ve found that Facebook and Twitter are generally more than sufficient to express a few opinions and get a discussion going. Still, with the Sox having pulled off perhaps the biggest trade in team history, I’ve got to say something.
So here’s something: I like it. I’m thrilled to see Josh Beckett leaving, of course. I like Carl Crawford, but his body’s been breaking down since he got here. And though there are going to be many days when we’d love to see Adrian Gonzalez in the middle of the Red Sox’ lineup, the fact is that Ben Cherington, Larry Lucchino and company didn’t have the financial flexibility to fix what’s killing them — a lack of starting pitching. Now they do.
Bobby Valentine? I don’t know. I’ve got no problem with Bobby V. He’s not as good a manager as Terry Francona, but he’s been maligned since he got here for reasons that I don’t understand. No one was going to win with this team, especially with all the injuries.
The role of the sports media in the Red Sox drama this year deserves deeper exploration. Thanks to the competition between sports-talk radio stations WEEI and WBZ-FM, the environment seems more toxic than it has in many years.
No doubt there were and are problems with the clubhouse chemistry — Francona, Cherington and Valentine have all said that. And yes, more than four players certainly should have showed up for Johnny Pesky’s funeral. But is all the drama swirling about the team even remotely as important as the injuries and — beginning last September — the complete collapse of the starting pitching? (Insert obligatory reference to beer and chicken here.)
The craziness especially affected fans’ perception of Beckett. He seemed unwilling or unable to help himself in terms of public relations, and it strikes me as credible that his lack of physical conditioning is at least partly responsible for his miserable record this year.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if Beckett’s been concealing a significant injury — one the Dodgers presumably already knew about. Let’s not forget that another non-fan favorite, John Lackey, took the ball every fifth day last year despite having a torn ligament in his elbow. These guys want to compete. If it weren’t for Beckett, the Sox would never have won in 2007, and that should count for a lot.
The big loss was Gonzalez. Evidently the trade wouldn’t have happened without him. The fact that he was making way too much money and seemed a little soft when the game was on the line makes his departure more palatable. But the stories coming out about his supposed whining and lack of leadership should be taken for what they are until someone is willing to speak on the record.
The Boston Globe today admitted to “the use of material without attribution” in a recent editorial criticizing Vice President Joe Biden. The Aug. 17 editorial, which took Biden to task for his “put y’all back in chains” comment, tracks closely — very closely — with a commentary by Republican political consultant Todd Domke that was published two days earlier on the website of WBUR Radio (90.9 FM).
An editor’s note published by the Globe reads as follows:
An Aug. 17 editorial on Vice President Joe Biden’s comments on bank regulations contained some similarities in phrasing and structure to an opinion piece by Todd Domke on WBUR.org. The use of the material without attribution was inconsistent with Globe policies, and the Globe regrets the error.
Domke’s commentary is longer and better written than the Globe editorial. The problem is that the editorial tracks with Domke virtually paragraph by paragraph, with similar and at times identical language, while offering nothing that Domke didn’t come up with first. Even if it’s not actual plagiarism, Globe editors obviously believed it was close enough to warrant a mea culpa.
Which raises a few questions:
If this were a signed column rather than an unsigned editorial, wouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Wouldn’t we be wondering whether the writer had been or should be disciplined? Does the anonymity of editorial-writing mean less scrutiny than this would otherwise warrant?
And, more important, what are we to make of a partisan political argument written by a Republican contributor to WBUR becoming the official position of the region’s paper of record? The Globe editorial accepted the view that Biden’s comment was somehow racial in nature, even though Biden’s reference to “chains” was arguably a response to House Speaker John Boehner’s promise to “unshackle Wall Street.”*
As former conservative Charles Johnson wrote: “The right wing media are still shrieking about Joe Biden’s ‘chains’ comment, even though not a single one of these demagogues honestly believes there was a racial intent to it.”
Not to beat a dead horse. The Globe acknowledged its misstep. But really.
*Note: What Biden actually said was, “Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put ya’ll back in chains.” It was Obama campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs who later cited Boehner’s remarks.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Spain earlier this year.
The emotional heart of Bruce Springsteen’s three-and-a-half-hour show at Fenway Park last night came about an hour in. As the E Street Band played the opening chords to “My City of Ruins,” Springsteen told the crowd that he’d written it about his “adopted hometown” (Asbury Park, N.J.), but that it had evolved into a song about “living with ghosts.”
At that point, he asked that a light be shone on the right-field foul pole. No one had to be told what that was about, and we all responded with warm, sustained applause.
Trying to describe what happened next cannot possibly do justice to the moment. “My City of Ruins” is a pure gospel song. It’s by far the best Springsteen has written in the latter part of his career, and one of the very few that would hold up to his classic work of the 1970s and early ’80s. In the middle, he took a long break in order to recognize his bandmates. Then he called out — repeatedly — “Are we missing anybody?” The moment carried all the more power because Springsteen did not mention Clarence Clemons or Danny Federici (or Johnny Pesky, for that matter) by name. And he acknowledged that everyone in Fenway Park was missing someone. (David Remnick describes a similar moment in his recent New Yorker profile of Springsteen.)
It was chilling, moving, spiritual, inspirational — possibly the single most intense moment I’ve ever experienced at a concert. And I write that as someone who has a track record with Springsteen.
I’d brought my 21-year-old son and a lot of baggage with me to Fenway Park. I consider myself close to an original Springsteen fan, having been turned on to his second album, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle,” by Jon Landau’s famous review in the Real Paper. I’d seen him in 1974, ’75, ’78, ’80, ’84 and ’92, but not since. And I’ve thought his albums in recent years were hit-or-miss — mostly miss, marred by simplistic lyrics and hack production.
In truth, I also didn’t like the fact that Springsteen concerts had become places to be seen by swells who vaguely remember liking “Born in the U.S.A.,” though that’s hardly Springsteen’s fault. (This, though, is definitely David Brooks’ fault.)
Despite all that, our night ended up ranking with those earlier concerts. Springsteen skillfully mixed songs from his new album, “Wrecking Ball,” with a generous helping of his classics. Even the new stuff sounded a lot better than it does on the album, partly because the cheesy production was blown away, partly because Springsteen’s obvious enthusiasm for the new material overcame the weak spots. Besides, “We Take Care of Our Own” is pretty good.
Another high point was a masterful performance of “Thunder Road,” maybe the best song Springsteen has ever written. He seemed to be choked up at the end; I know I was. It’s hard to describe what that song meant to me when I was 19, waiting to escape from my own “town full of losers.” It means something totally different now, as most of those in the crowd were old enough and wise enough to know that there is no escape.
Finally, I have to mention “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which used to end with an embrace and a kiss with Clarence Clemons. I was a little uneasy with all the attention and cheering focused on Clemons’ nephew Jake Clemons, who’s taken over the sax parts. And I was worried that Bruce would overdo it with Jake — maybe not kiss him, but bring him out for a star turn. I shouldn’t have. At “the Big Man joined the band,” everything stopped, and a slideshow of scenes from Clarence Clemons’ life was projected on the video screens. Then the song concluded. Perfect.
There was so much else that to keep writing would be to devolve into list-making. “The E Street Shuffle,” an old favorite. A phenomenal cover of the old John Lee Hooker song “Boom Boom.” Rave-up, full-band versions of “Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99,” a couple of truly dangerous songs from his album “Nebraska.” Closing with “Dirty Water” and “Twist & Shout” (and fireworks!), complete with a James Brown-style collapse and revival on the stage. (Here’s the full set list.)
My only complaint was the venue. This was my first Fenway Park show, and it was less than an ideal place to see a concert. We were in the grandstands behind home plate. The net was never lifted. The band members, in center field, were barely specks. The video and sound were adequate, but no more than that.
Still, the show itself was nearly as thrilling as the first time I saw Springsteen in the old Music Hall, the night that Muhammad Ali would shock the world by beating George Foreman — announced on stage after midnight, just after Springsteen had finished his final encore. Back then, Springsteen was a skinny, bearded 25-year-old who came out and opened, audaciously, by singing “Incident on 57th Street” almost a cappella, accompanied only by a young woman on a violin. “Born to Run” was still in front of him. So were the covers of Time and Newsweek and all the fame and hype that have marked and occasionally marred his long career.
Last night he was 62, with the energy and stamina of a much younger man, still singing and playing and performing like his life, and ours, depended on it. Maybe it did.
Photo (cc) by Juan Ramon Rodriguez Sosa and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
OpenCourt, an innovative project set up to cover proceedings in Quincy District Court, has won another round, as Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Margot Botsford has ruled that it may expand its live-streaming to a second courtroom.
In so doing, Botsford rejected a move by Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey and public defenders to keep OpenCourt out.
Earlier item here; Boston Globe story here; the text of Botsford’s ruling here.
A lot of great tributes today to Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky, who died on Monday at the age of 92. I want to call your attention to one you might not otherwise see, written by Steve Krause of Lynn’s Daily Evening Item, Pesky’s hometown paper.
Krause, a fellow Northeastern News alumnus from the 1970s, is an old pro who probably knew Pesky as well as anyone in the sporting press. Krause doesn’t indulge himself, as he sticks to the facts. But the obit he’s written is suffused with his deep knowledge of Pesky’s life and career.
My own memories of Pesky go back to the late 1960s and early ’70s, when he joined Ken Coleman and Ned Martin in the broadcast booth. I can still hear him saying, “You’re absolutely right, Ken,” and referring to any and every member of the Red Sox as “a fine young man.” That latter appellation was particularly amusing when he used it to defend a player who’d been accused of drunkenly groping a flight attendant.
I will never be able to track this down, but I also remember an interview Pesky once gave about his new life as a broadcaster. When asked what the hardest adjustment was, he replied, matter-of-factly, that it was making sure he didn’t drop any F-bombs or other profanity on the air.
And yes, I recommend David Halberstam’s book “The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship,” about Pesky, Ted Williams, Dominic DiMaggio and Bobby Doerr, Red Sox teammates in the 1940s who remained close until their deaths. When I read it a few years ago, only Williams had died. Now Doerr is the only one left.
