Basically Bree

Obama's Inauguration Passes Smoothly, Bumps and All

2009-01-20T11:27:00.000-08:00

Something peculiar always happens to me the night before inaugurations. Presidential elections are the same, for that matter. I can't sleep. It might as well be Christmas Eve for all my nervous, jittery excitement. And it doesn't matter who the outgoing commander in chief happens to be, whether I liked him or loathed him. Transitions make me anxious. There's something both fundamentally unsettling and thrilling to the psyche to watch the national figurehead come and go with the simple raising of a new right hand, the repeating of an oath.

So I'm always relieved when the ceremonial pomp is over, even if it has a way of proceeding like institutional clockwork what with the prayers and patriotic songs and speechmaking. Not that inaugurations are error-free. Despite it's historic nature, the 56th one was far from perfect, proving that even the so-called smartest and most prominent among us have their off days.

Who would have thunk that the best-selling author and mega church pastor Rick Warren, all controversy aside, would deliver such a flat and uninspired invocation, his only nod to the sublime coming in the inclusion of the Lord's Prayer, penned by decidedly loftier hands than his. Or, that the wunderkind, Chief Justice John Roberts, the nation's legal smarty pants in chief, would flub in his task of swearing-in the new chief executive, opting to forgo notes and thus marring what should have been a crowning moment for now-President Obama. Sadly, Mr. Roberts, there is no inaugural do-over. Though I'm sure poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander would have liked one. Her inaugural poem "Praise Song For the Day" was a tedious bore, a clunky mix of quotidian image and historical reference which might have been penned by any garden variety MFA student. She delivered it in painfully flat, unmodulated tones. Somebody get this woman a speech coach, or at the very least, a better editor.

Obama's inaugural address itself was smooth and inclusive, if perhaps a bit too campaign derivative and heavy on the 'roll up your sleeves and get to work' spirit. These are hard times and I appreciate the nuts and bolts approach, Mr. President, but the soul could have used a titch more poetry (though preferably not that of Ms. Alexander) at moments like these.

All in all, inauguration days are good days. The old passes for the new. A helicopter bears one president away. While a bittersweetness hangs in the air for what might have been, the best days are always those just around the next bend. And, as we all know, things are never so good as they might be as in the beginning.

Barack Obama: The Movement President?

2008-11-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

Minutes after President-elect Obama’s victory speech Tuesday night, the text message arrived on my mobile.

“Why didn’t he mention 911 in his speech,” a friend in New York asked. “He was talking about the hard times America has faced.”

There were several reasons I could think of. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were, perhaps, too closely associated with George W. Bush and his unpopular presidency, and the country having spent the past seven years being reminded of them repeatedly was suffering from 9/11 fatigue. Or maybe Obama didn’t want to invoke an event whose aftermath had generated a fair amount of controversy both here and abroad.

But there is another possible explanation for the omission.

Obama has cast himself not just as a transformational leader, but as a movement leader. The national trials and upheavals he referenced in his speech when discussing the life of centenarian Ann Nixon Cooper – the Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the struggle against communism – all led to sweeping societal changes that were brought about by the mobilization and cooperation of entire generations. September 11, 2001, the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, has not led to any mass movement for the improvement of social well-being. Rather, its primary legacy (aside from the horrible personal tragedy to the families involved) has been an ill-conceived and executed war, a broad curtailment of civil liberties and nonsensical limitations on toiletries in carry-ons. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Americans didn’t join the armed services en masse or plant victory gardens or band together to re-build their communities. They went to the mall.

Obama won the election by capturing the imagination of Americans from diverse backgrounds – poor and rich, black and white, educated and uneducated. For the moment, he enjoys the goodwill of a broader cross-section of the public than did Bill Clinton, who twice won election with a plurality of the vote, or George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote in his first bid and squeaked by with the narrowest of margins, thanks to a motivated base, to win re-election. Many minorities in particular, long-alienated from the U.S. political process, are newly invigorated and filled with optimism for their country's future. And for the first time in my adulthood, I witnessed general jubilation at the results of a presidential election. In cities, people were literally dancing in the streets. Just about every newspaper in the country was sold out Wednesday morning. School children were even leaving messages to the president-elect on the National Mall. During the campaign, John McCain had opted to talk about fighting. But Americans were apparently tired of fighting, whether it be their neighbors, colleagues, the specter of terrorism, or the world at-large. The country, reeling from 16 years of highly partisan and often divisive leadership, voted for Obama’s promise of change, conciliation and unity.

Obama, a figure skilled at attracting unprecedented crowds and delivering stirring speeches, must now turn to the nuts and bolts of governing. Despite the challenging times, he has many advantages. He appears to possess a beneficent combination of attributes: Franklin Roosevelt’s temperament and determination, Kennedy’s cool-headed intelligence and Reagan’s charisma and talent for communicating big themes. Add to these characteristics a dash of the old-time preacher that none of those presidents ever possessed, and Obama has the potential to outdo them all.

Expectations are high, but that means the disappointments, when and if they come, will be far more bitter. Right now Obama has the country and the international community on his side. But harnessing this energy to ignite the wide-scale change he says he desires will be a daunting task.

Will the “movement candidate” become the “movement president”? It remains to be seen.

The “W.” Review: Of the Pointy-headed and the Privileged

2008-10-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

This is cross-posted.

If you are among the 25 percent of Americans who still approve of President Bush’s performance, Oliver Stone’s “W.” may not be a film for you. That said, the remaining portion of the U.S. population may leave the movie theater similarly vexed. A mix of satire, biopic and pop psychology, “W.” frequently is as flip and disconnected as its namesake is often accused of being. It’s also profoundly unsettling, contrived and at times surreal. Case in point: Bush and his merry band of yes men marching cluelessly in an open field at his Crawford ranch to the tune of “Robin Hood,” having lost their way; a blithely unaware Bush offering a maimed and bloodied soldier a T-shirt to thank him for his service.

Josh Brolin as W. is a determined fool, chomping bologna sandwiches while declaiming his “decider” powers to the tight-lipped Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), whining to Laura (Elizabeth Banks) about his father (James Cromwell) while on the pot, inhaling pretzels, sports shows and alcoholic beverages with a primitive glee, invoking God to justify his temporal lusts whether it’s the presidency or the ass-kicking of Saddam Hussein. He is Bush at his most crass, only magnified to an almost unbearable folly by the silver screen. For instance, in a recurring shtick, Stone places him in an empty baseball stadium listening to the applause of a non-existent crowd. In some ways, it’s a useful metaphor for the real-life presidency.

Indeed, Bush, as presented here, is a simultaneously repulsive and sympathetic character, a neglected child of privilege with a low IQ and major father issues. His lone moment of shining achievement comes early in the film when during a vodka-drenched fraternity hazing at Yale (which bizarrely foreshadows the torture techniques that would be used by his future administration), he alone is able to recite the frat brothers’ names from memory. (It’s a rare glimmer of political aptitude for the boy who should never have been king.) And it’s more than a little sad that his interactions with his vaunted parent seem to occur only in highly formalized meetings that often conclude with the elder Bush expressing his “deep disappointment” with junior after rescuing him from yet another scrape related to girls, booze and career flops. Significantly, both his parents and his pastor recoil in an almost palpable horror when W. mentions running for office. No wonder he insisted on doing so, the film suggests, if for no other reason than to prove them wrong.

Artistically, W.’s supporting cast of characters is uneven – some outstanding, some bizarrely cartoonish simulacrums of the real thing. Plaudits go out to Dreyfuss’ Cheney who projects the perfect balance of circumspect calculation and understated cunning and also to Toby Jone’s Karl Rove, who comes across here as a doughy but far more likeable genius than his real-life caricature has previously allowed for. In contrast, Thandie Newton’s highly forced Condoleezza Rice is a nerdy, sniveling, simpering sycophant (yes, the triple alliteration is called for…she’s beyond awful), while Jeffrey Wright’s Colin Powell is a weak-willed toady who vainly attempts to slow the rush to war but quickly caves when the majority of Bush’s top advisers doesn’t share his views.

Along with the usual Bushisms and rehashed campaign legends — Bush driving the car through the garage door after Laura criticized an early political speech, Bush bowing his head in prayer during Cabinet meetings, Bush mumbling his way through an incoherent press conference – Stone injects his own woo-woo musings on the so-called Bush theocracy. That Bush believes he was called by God to be president and go to war in Iraq will likely be a hypothesis easily swallowed by his real-life secular detractors. But it’s an overly simplistic explanation. More tellingly, in one scene, after losing his Congressional race in Texas, a stewing Bush avers that he’ll never be “out-Christianed” or “out-Texaned” in politics again. This brief exchange aside, Stone skips over the potential realpolitik motivations underlying Bush’s loudly proclaimed born-again status, preferring to paint this dim but determined W. as a devout fundamentalist.

It’s an interesting theory, but one that seems increasingly shaky eight years later as the final days of the administration spiral to a close, and the usual litany of failure and temporal corruption rears its head. Bush the Christian family man was a nice, effective little story to sell to the base, useful to mobilize the true believers for two national elections but it’s a storyline that now seems mostly forgotten in the post-2004 landscape, where the real Bush appears more preoccupied with bailing out billionaires and cavorting with scantily clad volleyball stars while his “mission accomplished” war drags on day after day after day — often unnoticed.

Strangely enough, Stone seems to be among the people who bought it.

Did You Ever Wake Up, With Them Bullfrogs on Your Mind?

2008-08-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

In the 1960s, the band Canned Heat had a couple of monster hits, including "On the Road Again" and "Going Up the Country," which would become the de facto theme song of Woodstock and hit the top of the charts in 25 countries.

Today, three of the original five members are dead, and only the drummer, Adolfo "Fito" de la Parra, still plays with the reconstituted group. Instead of the thousands that its appearances at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock attracted, Canned Heat's free concert earlier this week at the Lane County Fair (a venue that also featured Alaskan pig races and enough funnel cake to make you lose your lunch on the Super Orbiter) drew at best a couple hundred mainly graying 50-somethings.

Whenever I need a reminder about the fleeting nature of fame, I go see some aging rockers.

It was a bleak comeuppance -- and not a respectable groupie in site. As we waited for the concert to begin a large woman with varicose veins read a romance novel, another woman arranged her seat cushions. Next to me, a pasty-white couple with earplugs played with a Dr. Seuss Rubik's cube; while a few rows back I overheard a pair reminiscing over the last time they saw Eric Burdon.

Surprisingly, once the band came on, they sounded pretty damn good. Their rendition of Rory Gallagher's "Bullfrog Blues" brought out the tadpole in the short stocky man in a green T-shirt in front of me, who jittered his ankles obsessively throughout. By the end of the first set, though, people were already exiting, including a teenage blonde and her boyfriend. When at last, Canned Heat played its theme song -- "Going Up the Country" -- the remaining attendees at least made an attempt to boogie, including a woman in a pinafore and Mary Janes. And if you closed your eyes, you could pretend you were gyrating in an historic field in New York, instead of a parking lot in Eugene, Ore.

Despite their decades-long dry spell, the band seemed surprised at the lackluster turnout for the concert, sponsored by Bi-Mart, a Pacific Northwest discounter. "With all the hippies in Eugene, we thought this place place would be packed," said frontman Robert Lucas. "This shit's for free."

The sparse numbers didn't stop a handful of enormous security dudes with beer guts and grim stares from patrolling the crowd with a Gestapo-like severity-- just in case the meagre and increasingly enfeebled attendees tried to pull anything.

As for groupies, I stand corrected. A long-haired woman wearing a pink mini-skirt, a butterfly necklace and a dip-shit grin had set up a tripod way in the back, fencing it off with a circle of chairs she'd strung together with masking tape. She coudn't get her video camera to fit on the tripod so she taped them together. She was determined not to miss a moment of the magic.

Too bad she was long past the age when short skirts and wild-eyed adoration are attractive attributes in the female gender.

On “Dark” Summers, Batman and Heath Ledger’s Final Role

2008-07-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

This is cross-posted.

The summer of 2000 was hardly a happy time for me. I had just graduated from college, friends had scattered, and I was living in a run-down boarding house in Friendship Heights with a stingy landlord who seemed good for little except coming up with excuses as to why the air conditioning wasn’t working.

It was a summer of discontent, Bush v. Gore and soul-crushing loneliness. It was also the summer Heath Ledger first came to my attention. I went to see “The Patriot” one afternoon in June and walked away in some kind of a trance. It was love at first sight.

Ledger, the shining young Adonis, with his golden locks and exquisitely sensitive eyes, had transformed Mel Gibson’s otherwise mediocre Revolutionary War drama into high art. Or at least an effective summer tear-jerker.

He was a welcome distraction. A brief crush ensued, primarily involving me pouring over every magazine story I could find on him. (The Vanity Fair feature that appeared in August that year with Ledger in faded blue jeans and a clean white shirt is forever etched in my mind – bless you, Graydon Carter.) My Ledger fixation didn’t last long, but it certainly ranks among the most intense of my silver screen obsessions.

So I suppose it’s understandable that when the news broke in late January of Ledger’s accidental overdose, I was shaken and weepy for days. There’s something profoundly unsettling about the death of a generational cohort – even one you didn’t know. And Ledger was so beautifully alive. The notion of death (with its gloomy finality) didn’t jive with his essential energy and talent. Everything was still before him.

Since then, I’ve been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” mainly because the notion of watching the late Ledger in his final role – the demands of which (it’s been suggested) may have contributed to his untimely death – struck me as an exercise in morbidity.

And on some levels it is.

Ledger’s Joker is so dark, so gruesomely subterranean and freakishly artistic, it’s as if he’s bubbled up from the bowels of hell itself. His lip-smacking scenes, with their all-consuming creepiness, are a film within a film. The other characters drift in and out of the frame, going through the well-choreographed motions necessary to execute a high-throttled action movie (car chases, punchy one-liners, eardrum splitting explosions and firefights), and they do a great job – don’t get me wrong. This is an excellent example of the genre. Yet they never quite shake the flat two-dimensionality of their comic-book archetypes.

But the Joker…you worry he’s coming after you next.

There’s one scene so jarringly bizarre, it would be equally at home in a Matthew Barney video installation. As the Joker stumbles out of Gotham General Hospital, a building he wired to detonate, it erupts into a flaming fireball. Wearing a nurse’s uniform, smeared make-up and wild hair, he clods away from the site of his greatest destruction in a state of ecstatic derangement. After I saw it, I woke up in the middle of the night, struggling to shake the image of that crazy, cross-dressing clown from my mind.

Ledger aside, this latest in the Batman franchise certainly stands out for the extent it explores the nature of darkness and wanton evil. “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) says at one point. As such, the movie seems more theologically derivative than previous installments, with the Joker casting himself as the Satan-like “agent of chaos” and Batman willingly taking on himself the enmity of the world in order to save it. “The Dark Knight” is also heavy on political topicality. The plot involves a Chinese villain, the ethical conundrums posed by civil liberties/surveillance/terrorism issues, and even offers a subtle plug for universal health care. (A cop turned bad blames her mother’s hospital bills for her moral failings. Where was HillaryCare when Gotham needed it?)

Then there’s the film’s most unsettling line – “You either die the hero or live to see yourself become the villain.” I’m not sure Ledger died a hero exactly (the iconic generation-defining role that would have assured his immortality never quite happened), but the recognition he deserved in life will almost certainly now be headed his way. A posthumous Oscar nomination for Ledger’s last picture show would be a good start.

Going, Going, Gonzo

2008-07-19T12:41:00.000-07:00

Hunter S. Thompson’s life was a breathless, head-spinning spectacle fueled by the abundance of swell drugs and non-stop “experience” that typified the height of 1970s self-actualization. He was cunning and attractive and brilliant -- the sort of guy who couldn't be expected to cover the American Dream “from a Volkswagen.” A limo, he told his editor, Jann Wenner, would be so much more appropriate.

It’s that out-sized bravura which makes the documentary, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” released earlier this month, so addictively compelling and so ultimately tragic.

The doc, drawing on a pastiche of interviews, home movies, past documentaries and scenes from the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” paints a picture of a precocious talent in possession of a rapier wit and a boundless appetite for pushing envelopes.

Thompson also emerges here as an early moralist, the consummate outsider raging against the oppression and evil in American life. He starts out a purist (or at least presents himself that way), a true believer in the notion that the right argument will prevail, that America can be saved from her demons, real or imagined. He takes on Hells Angels and Nixonian corruption and unjust wars, exposing sins -- right and left -- even if his Gonzo truth requires more than its share of fabrication, i.e., Ed Muskie is addicted to Ibogaine; Nixon is a vampire who roams the D.C. streets. Thompson finds liberation in drugs, and for a while, rides this freedom to the edge of mental exploration, producing crisp, cutting prose that has rightly earned its place in the literary pantheon.

But like other waves before it, his crests and breaks. The drugs scramble his mind into a plate of almost inedible lunacy. And he soon settles for the temporal rewards of rock star and circus attraction, effectively squandering whatever substantive impact he might have had.

Ultimately, Thompson is an excellent example of the old axiom that one should be careful in one’s hatreds. Thompson’s work is filled with bile toward the establishment, the ruling powers-that-be. And then, poof, everyone around him becomes the establishment, the monied set, the privileged few. And gee, look at that, nothing that was wrong with America has changed a bit. Funny how that happens.

That said it’s painful to watch the film’s final scenes. Our once beautiful prophet has exchanged his idealism for an all-you-can-eat buffet aimed at sating the darker angels – with its usual nihilistic array of guns and sex and drugs and money. The adulation is terrific. But it is the empty adulation of the whore. And I don’t think for a minute that Thompson, given his intellectual prowess, didn’t recognize this.

So there it is. America’s great original thinker-patriot-junkie finds himself reduced to a flabby geriatric, snarfing an orange straight from the peel, muttering his incoherent argot with the jittery popcorn beat of the chemically snapped mind. The first wife is long gone, having fled his insanity. His existence rambles along though, even if it is long past the stage of being a joke. By the time the camera gets around to his second wife -- the age of a daughter -- he’s become a parody of the dirty old man archetype, you know, the one who just can’t help screwing his secretary. By the way, the new Mrs. Thompson invokes the kind of pretty, empty-headed girl you might find working at a nursing home in a small town for minimum wage…just until she can find a way out or maybe a man who will pay the bills.

In the final reckoning, the gun goes off and the fireworks explode. The rest, as they say, is history. Thompson’s ashes burst into the night air lost forever to their cosmic destiny. Below, on terra firma, the “club,” the insular global society of fame and fortune, is all there to pay homage to their wild-eyed god. There’s the bizarre little actor Johnny Depp, who played the Thompson alter ego in “Fear and Loathing” and narrates him in this film. Oh, and over there…Sen. John Kerry, the presidential candidate Thompson campaigned for in 2004. A wooden Kerry stands in the midst of this “in crowd,” an uncomfortable and awkward reminder that Thompson has been fully co-opted.

Municipal McNutts

2008-07-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

I love it that the Eugene City Council -- our very own municipal mad house which for years has been content to let the town go to pot (holes) while it dickered the treasury away on ill-considered land deals and other unsuccessful "development" projects -- meets in the McNutt Room at City Hall. Love it. If you have ever lived here for any length of time, you too will find this so uproariously funny you may have difficulty concentrating for the rest of the afternoon.

Capitalism and the Counterculture in Wonderland

2008-07-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

(This is cross-posted.)

Belly Bells: $24

Bamboo incense holder: $55

Carved wooden bowl: $275

A day spent communing in the wilderness with half-naked white people can really put a dent in your pocketbook.

Over the weekend, the Oregon Country Fair, a major event on the counterculture circuit, convened outside of Eugene on the sprawling, 280-acre wooded parcel it calls home for its annual extravaganza of peace, love and weirdness. As an uninitiated native, I thought it was about time I took a look.

I grew up in Eugene, a university town known for its hippie/progressive aesthetic, so I wasn’t that surprised by the sartorial (or should I say sartorial-free) diversity on display – but more on that later.

The sticker shock was an entirely different story.

My “experience” began Friday morning waiting in the ticket line at a local Safeway. A girl in front of me – wearing dirty pink cutoffs, ripped fishnets and clutching a grimy journal to her chest – was talking loudly on her cell phone. Sample grab: “I just got back from chillin’ in the Redwoods on acid. It was awesome.” Her hair was matted with grease, she was bone-thin and apparently had no place to stay, but she had the dough for a ticket: $21 for a single; $47 for a three-day pass purchased in advance.

The next day when I arrived at the fair, which bills itself as “a radical experiment in communitarianism,” I was greeted by clever “Change Comes from Within” signs posted at the ATMs and at least half a dozen pirates heckling us on stilts. I sat through a fashion show of clothes entirely created from broken umbrellas and other garbage, and passed by a “pledge of allegiance” to the Earth and a bus where you could share your “global warming stories.” I overheard an earnest conversation about the importance of “graywater” and listened as a serious, bearded man in tie-dye extolled the virtues of “intentional communities.”

This “fair” may have been launched back in the late 1960s as a barter-based event, but today (like the Woodstocks in the 1990s and a host of other happenings that trade in nostalgia for the Age of Aquarius) it is in many ways an exercise in cold, hard capitalism…albeit with a twist. In addition to inquiring about one’s sexual identity, the “public fair survey” handed out this year included a string of questions related to money spent and household income. Plastic of the Visa or MasterCard variety was more than welcome. Most of the vendors had the requisite sign indicating they gladly accepted either – which was a good thing, considering a flowing silk dress went for $195, while a clay soup tureen clocked in at $109.

Among the offerings in my price range, a chocolate “truffle buzz” ($2.50) and fake roses crafted from used condom wrappers ($5). I decided to pass on both.

I’ll be the first to admit that I err on the conventional side (I found the women-only urinals, i.e., glorified troughs, to be a stretch), but as they say, when in Rome…so after I left my more rhythmically inclined pal at the Drum Tower for a mass “pa rum pum pum pum” of sorts, I set off to learn some “dances of universal peace” at the Community Village. Before long, I was standing in a circle arms linked with about a dozen other strangers (including a woman dressed in a Dutch peasant ensemble and green felt headpiece that resembled a flying saucer) chanting supposedly soothing lyrics in various foreign tongues that I had a hard time identifying, while envisioning “the sacred” in the air around us. I had just about made it through my third song when the intrusion of a man in a flying carpet contraption broke the spell, and I drifted away from the group.

Next up was a workshop on “instant songwriting for causes” – you know, in case you get caught unprepared at a spontaneous mass rally. While I waited for my tutorial to begin, a young man next to me started lamenting the discord in his astrological chart. “Mars and Saturn are conjuncted on Pluto…that would explain my intestinal illness,” he bemoaned to his interlocutor. Through the entryway of a nearby teepee, two lovers with feathers sprouting from their hair and legs entwined gazed into each other’s eyes. Across the way, in a yurt, a modern-day Titania bedecked with a floral wreath rested her head on the stomach of her Oberon.

As the day progressed, I took in more naked breasts, adorned with hennas, sequins and stickers than I have in a lifetime in women’s dressing rooms and lockers. I stumbled into a moon lodge, advertised as a sacred space for women, but was told I would have to leave unless I removed my shoes. I opted to bail – sitting around with a bunch of fat chicks painting each other and wearing cowboy hats is generally not my idea of a good time. (Note to readers: the counterculture life is a cruel mistress for the over 50 set; the dangers of a lifetime of unbraed breasts are not to be pooh-poohed. Anyway you dice it, there’s nothing attractive about a love-handled mid-section crowned by a pair of rainbow-painted nipple mudslides. And let this be a warning to you, too, “rainbow man.” The day is fast approaching when a strategically placed green pouch and a pair of faded Converse won’t cut it anymore.)

By late afternoon, my head was swimming. My nose and eyes were stinging from the strange brew of heavy incense and other substances hanging in the air. The heat pounded down, and I found myself pushed and prodded by a human wave of tens of thousands of the unwashed and malodorous. The scene was reminiscent of a Fellini film. There were hooded druids, trees on stilts shouting slogans, men and women sporting fairy wings and tutus, blue pinafored Dorothys, horned gals in sheepskin and little else, even a lone Jimi Hendrix wannabe. Periodically, a colorful brass band snaked its way through the throngs. “I’m a salmon,” one woman shouted amongst the cacophony.

One could only hope for such a metamorphosis.

At last, we escaped to the Blue Moon stage, where an all-girl acoustic cabaret called “The Bad Mitten Orchestre” was warbling on about “beggars and borrowers, harlots and jokers.” A large witch – broom in hand – plopped down next to me. A dreadlocked ballerina bopped to the beat. The group moved on to a song about loving “the twigs in your hair and the dirt on your hands.” Above us, from his perch in a tree bough, a parrot cast a wise eye over the proceedings.

I can’t even begin to imagine what he was thinking.

Taste Factory: Art and the Lemmings

2008-07-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

Register-Guard art critic Bob Keefer makes some excellent points in his review today of the Portland Art Museum's exhibit showcasing the annual "Contemporary Northwest Art Awards," aimed at highlighting up-and-comers in this neck of the woods. Of the lackluster and mostly forgettable show he writes:

"The problem was, and is, that this really isn't a show about Northwest art, or even Oregon art. It's a show about Portland and Seattle academically trained artists, whose work is so narrowly conceived that it's almost bloodless. Four of these five artists, not surprisingly, has a master of fine arts degree."

Keefer, who goes on to decry the "thin air of the university MFA factories," is spot on. I've long felt that these MFA programs were to blame for the suffocating conformity in the nation's artistic and literary circles. The whole bloody lot of contemporary art and so-called "literary fiction" has largely blurred into a morass of the overly introspective, ponderous and interchangeable. Hence, all the lengthy meditations on "loss" and various other forms of victimization. The cabal needs to be broken, or at the very least learn to keep an open mind.

Basically Bree Expands Blogging Offensive

2008-07-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

Hey there, Basically Bree fans, beginning today I'll also be blogging at RobertEmmet, co-founded by my long-time friend and former colleague Robert Schlesinger and veteran Washington editor John Farrell. Please continue checking me out both here and there and everywhere.

Below is my first posting to the new site. Cheers, BB

Senator Obama’s Girl Problem

Memo to Obama: Stay away from the girls. And that goes for loose-lipped daughters, too.

When your opponent is a man’s man, an ex-government-sanctioned killer and a former POW, the last thing you want to do is surround yourself with too many women. You’ve already got youth and inexperience to contend with. Don’t be a sissy, too.

Every time you’ve stood patiently, hands clasped reverently before you, head crooked attentively as the smug Hillary prattled on condescendingly, I cringed a little inside. (Mark my words, if you make her VP, she’ll be measuring for new curtains in the Oval Office before the week is up.)

That flap over the extent of your “relationship” with the starlet Scarlett Johansson didn’t help either. She made you out to be her enamored little BlackBerry buddy, like she had you at her beck and call. You said it wasn’t true. But shucks, the damage had already been done.

Then your wife and daughters mocked your sartorial acumen and annoying habits in that truly awful Access Hollywood interview. (Reminder: you’re competing for the presidency, not first chair in the Oprah symphony, although I can see how it’s easy to confuse the two.) All the while, you sat meekly, shrinking in your seat, as your three female family members more than eclipsed you. We all know that’s true in private life (as it should be), but a little machismo for public consumption wouldn’t kill you, would it?

Oh, and please, please, stop calling Michelle “the rock” of the Obama family. If you aren’t the “rock” of your own family, how do you expect to lead the nation and the world? And I’m not even going to get started on the horrors of that “Obama Girl” musical train wreck.

I know it’s a difficult balance. You’re surrounded by an alpha female wife, a superstar in her own right, and two precocious daughters. You were raised by a single mother, another strong woman. Beyond that, though, I’m starting to think there’s something about the XX combination that has an inherently cowing effect on you.

This does not scream Jack Kennedy.

A girl almost trumped you in the primaries – first time that’s ever happened to a guy presidential contender. And she still thinks she should have won.

I hate to quote New Kids On The Block, but are you tough enough?

Get Hitched, Get Cool Stuff

2008-07-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

Another season of ABC’s “The Bachelor/ette” wrapped up last night with DeAnna Pappas picking professional snowboarder Jesse over dependable account executive Jason, a divorced single father (ah, too bad for him…insert pause for tears, ice cream runs, various other emotional withdrawal techniques). While I haven’t watched the show with any consistency since 2005 when Bachelorette Jen Schefft was driven to tears deciding who to give “the final rose” to (mainly because she didn’t care a lick for either bloke), I will admit to occasionally tuning in to the various finales for old times’ sake. I mean, what girl isn’t a sucker for a tearful proposal set in an exotic clime at sunset? It’s porn for the X-chromosome.

“The Bachelor” is probably the most banally predictable of the “reality” shows – the guy always proposes, the couple always breaks up within two to three months of the conclusion (since its launch in 2002, there’s been only one actual wedding), and the dialogue from season to season is utterly interchangeable. The show’s recipe for wedded bliss: add a handful of “I think he/she’s my soul mate,” sprinkle in a dash of “I was so ready to be in love,” and then mix in a pinch of “spend forever with me.”

More and more, it seems this on-camera matchmaking charade (a wildly durable formula in the ratings department) with its cliché heavy drivel and romantic over-the-top getaways (“let’s spend the afternoon on a private island in the Caribbean, then we’ll cuddle at the chalet in Vail”) masquerades for the broader society’s idea of love. On screen and off, it’s easy to confuse matrimony with materialism – Americans spend an estimated $161 billion a year on weddings. The happiest DeAnna looked all night was when the show’s host mentioned the cool free honeymoon to Greece they’d receive as a parting gift – not to mention the likely cool free wedding “event” and baby shower to follow…should they hang on that long.

It’s hardly a new trend: Marriage by incentive – get hitched and get cool stuff. It’s just never before attained the current level of gimmickry. What happens when the cool stuff dries up? Or when snowboarder boy breaks his leg and can’t foot the bills? No pun intended.

“When I first came into this, I could never have thought that this process was real,” says Jesse of the lovely locks, in one of the show’s more revealing lines. Then he heads out to propose -- on cue -- to his sweetie in an exquisitely choreographed exchange.

It’s not real, Jesse dear, and yet it is.

The unreality of it all has sadly become our reality.

When We Get Done Bombing Iran, Don't Forget to Shoot Grandma Before the Government Takes Her Money

2008-07-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

Obama may be doing McCain a favor by declining his offer for 10 joint town hall appearances. Despite the popular conception that the format is McCain's forte, it has also proved his Achilles' heel. Remember last year at that town hall in South Carolina, where McCain started singing (as a joke of course) to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" — "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran." (Geeze, it was so funny then, I'm still crying as I type this.)

Well, today, a disjointed, warbling and at times defensive McCain appeared at a town hall in Denver aimed at showcasing his economic plan. Responding to a question about the estate tax, McCain worried what would happen if the estate tax repeal was allowed to expire at the end of 2010 as scheduled.

"I'm afraid there might be a lot of unexplained deaths on Dec. 31 or Sept. 30 or whatever it is," he quipped, flashing an impish grin, and adding: "I'm not pointing at mothers-in-law." Of course, you weren't Johnny, but then, again, we can never be too vigilant when it comes to keeping money out of the national treasury -- even if it means cracking a few skulls from time to time.

P.S. I'm officially deeming this the campaign of the great "Jackie O dress-off." Michelle Obama started strong, no doubt, with her fabulous shifts and silhouette suits. But score one for Cindy McCain today with her green belted dress and pearls right out of the pages of Women's Wear Daily circa 1963. With potential first ladies like these, it's going to be hard to remember which decade we're living in.

So this Guitarist Walks into that Bar in 'Star Wars'...

2008-07-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

I have a weakness for the formerly famous and/or washed-up rock bands of the 1960s and 70s. Musically, I was always out of sync with my own generation, writing my high school thesis on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and mooning over the likes of Todd Rundgren and Mike Love.

So naturally when I heard that Nokie Edwards -- a long-time Oregon resident soon moving to Arizona and hawking his motor home on his personal web site -- would be playing at Springfield’s Island Park on the Fourth of July, that’s where I headed. (You may not have heard of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, but thanks to a string of instrumental hits with The Ventures in the 1960s, including “Wipe Out,” “Walk Don’t Run” and Hawaii Five-O,” he’s sold over 100 million records.)

Anyway, I took a seat on an empty park bench next to a large, characteristically silent ex-marine and waited for the show to begin. First, we suffered through The Tones, who more appropriately might have been called the “Deaf Tones” – I wouldn’t have minded at all if the Feds had appropriated their vocal chords, locking them away in Gitmo as a public menace and throwing away the key. Yikes. (Apparently Chuck Berry, who the group once opened for, shared my opinion. They jokingly mentioned that he told them to “get a job” upon hearing their act. Ha.)

Springfield has always played the poor step-sister to Eugene, a role that only intensified after the mill closures in the 1980s. It’s economically depressed and about as hard-luck of place as you’ll find anywhere in America. The deprived and the debased -- everywhere you look. It was like being beamed into that crazy Star Wars’ bar scene. There were women wearing high-heeled satin hooker shoes despite the grassy park setting, teenage mothers oblivious to their bared butt cracks pushing baby carriages, tattooed shoeless men with shaved heads, grandmothers with cellulite-heavy legs in short shorts, women with massive behinds and small chests or massive chests and small behinds usually with some sort of patriotic face paint, men sporting red, white and blue casts, old ladies with stringy gray hair whizzing about on motorized chairs, toddlers with mohawks, even one elementary school-age cross-dresser. Lord knows what the tiny Mexicans in cowboy hats and boots -- by far the best-dressed people here – thought of the crowd.

Finally Nokie came on. He’s a quiet, understated man, who sat and played unassumingly music that is so much a part of the consciousness of being an American that you can feel it in your bones. I watched as a mentally challenged man grabbed his ass with one hand and waved his other about in the air, bopping to the beat. Meanwhile, the marine next to me proved something of a Nokie expert, giving me titles for all the tunes I knew but couldn’t put a name to.

Nearby, a pair of hippy Obama volunteers, likely from Eugene, vented their frustrations to each other, recalling an evening of futile attempts to register voters among this collection of Harley, hot rod and America-loving attendees.

Obama Volunteer: Are you registered to vote?

Overweight Concert Attendee: Nope.

OV: Can I ask you why not?

OCA: Waste of time.

Apparently, notions of civic duty did not extend beyond red, white and blue color schemes.

She's a Grand Old Flag and So Long Helms

2008-07-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

Happy 232nd Birthday America! Even if you don't always live up to your ideals, I'm still glad you've got 'em. Here's to brighter days ahead.

P.S. Anyway you look at it (left or right), it's ironic that ex-Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) chose July 4th to check out. The Senatorial afterlife just got a whole lot more interesting for sure. I was at his tribute party in Crystal City back in Sept. 2005, interviewing colleagues and friends about the so-called "Senator No" for a Roll Call story. The level of devotion from his admirers bordered on the religious -- there was a man there, a retired school teacher and hardly affluent, who earnestly told me: "I always gave him more than I could afford.”

I also thought former Helms chief of staff Jimmy Broughton's remarks provided an interesting insight into this most controversial of figures. As I wrote in Roll Call, "Broughton remembered his old boss as a stickler for grammar who 'didn’t like split infinitives,' as a thrifty money manager who once sent back a sheet of Senate letterhead with a note commanding 'order no more' on account of its expense, and as a good neighbor, who would postpone important Senate business to call a colleague and let him know he had a flat tire."

Bach Comes to Lake Wobegon, Learns to Love Pies and Petroleum Jelly

2008-07-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor, the long-time host of public radio’s “A Prairie Home Companion” has a voice as rich and all-consuming as the hot drinking chocolate at the MarieBelle tea salon in SoHo. It’s a voice you want to jump into and roll around in – a voice you’d go to sleep under if only you could get your hands on it and spin it into something resembling a proper covering.

I’ve been listening to him since I was two, and my mother rocked me to sleep in front of the Hi-fi, his old-time variety show meandering along comfortingly in the background as the night wore on outside our small apartment on Mill Street. A few years ago, I interviewed him by phone for a story I wrote for Roll Call, but I’d never seen him live. He’s even better in person. If you’ve got a bucket list, add seeing one of his shows to it. He’s the closest thing we’ve got to a contemporary Mark Twain -- a literary humorist, who also sings and writes some of the wittiest lyrics around.

On Monday night, he was at the Oregon Bach Festival, emerging from the anonymity of the OBF orchestra, sporting a dark suit and red tie and a pair of retro red sneakers, a nice nod to the Olympic Track and Field Trials going on in Eugene at the moment.

He brought with him his tales of the mythical Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon and its hilariously self-effacing ruling Lutheran class, weaving them into and sometimes on top of Bach’s masterpieces. So the choir sang about the joys of homemade pies and noodle dish recipes to sacred music, and reflected on pre-nuptial jitters – “it’s not so bad, it could be worse” – to the classic wedding march. There were also reflections on the storied Aunt Eva, a woman not quite right in the head, who wore a cotton print dress and sensible white shoes split in the back for comfort, her hair pulled into rubber bands sticking up all over her head. She is a woman who children adore because she is so much like them. His characters are not fashionable, but they do cultivate marvelous tomatoes, the kind you bite into on a hot summer day and the juice dribbles down your chin, he’ll say. And Keillor is a character himself, with a face for radio and a tall lanky build which he holds taut on the balls of his feet, like a vigilant ski jumper.

It’s all very nostalgic, yes, and if you don’t have at least one misty-eyed moment during a show, maybe there is life on Mars after all. But Keillor is also edgy – poking fun at the very small-town American existence he celebrates, “ostentatious,” he says, only in its humility. He’s likely the only guy in the country who can swing between renditions of “Jesus Loves Me” and references to petroleum jelly and broken condom tips without offending anyone in the process.

And then, when it’s all over, he disappears into the dying darkness to the strains of “all day, all night, angels watching over me, my Lord,” asking only that you keep these songs, these American songs, that you might remember from some mosquito-plagued summer camp, in your heart.

Of Mice, Men and the "Steinbeck Super Ball"

2008-06-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

Think presidential speechwriters are a cadre of colorless drudges, toiling in anonymity for their fearless commanders-in-chief? Well, yes and no.

As long-time CUB (Chum of the Blog) Robert Schlesinger, an editor at U.S. News and World Report, demonstrates in his new book "White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters," since the advent of FDR, a remarkably glamorous stable of notables have chipped in to help craft the words and images of the man in the Oval Office.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood, who would go on to win an Oscar for his screenplay for "The Best Years of Our Lives" (among this scribe's all-time favorite films) scribbled for Roosevelt. Actor Robert Montgomery coached Ike for television appearances. Dick Goodwin joined the Kennedy team after gaining notoriety investigating the infamous "quiz show" scandals of the 1950s. John Steinbeck weighed in on LBJ's 1965 inaugural address, then continued to provide his "two-cents" on policy, urging, for instance, that the administration strike at the "basic food factory, the rice paddys [sic]" of the North Vietnamese with "weed killer" and suggesting the deployment of the "Steinbeck super ball" (similar to a baseball filled with napalm) as "the natural weapon for Americans" in Vietnam. Jack Valenti would leave Johnson's staff to head up the Motion Picture Association of America. Ben Stein, comedic star of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" wrote for Nixon. Gag writer Rob Orben, who had worked for the "Red Skelton Show," would eventually become Ford's head speechwriter. Gordon Stewart was directing "The Elephant Man" on Broadway before joining Carter's team. And Mr. Moviegoer-in-chief himself, Reagan, employed Landon Parvin, who'd written for comedian Rich Little.

The White House speechwriting shop may have also inspired a future Hollywood blockbuster. Peter Benchley, a disgruntled ghost who was dismissed from LBJ's speechwriting operation, would pen the novel "Jaws," even naming one of the great white shark's first victims after a colleague.

Celebs aside, Schlesinger, who turns 36 today and will mark the occasion Saturday night with a birthday-book party in Georgetown, has written a remarkably readable tome, offering a compelling mix of historical insight and gorgeous detail reminiscent of the late Teddy White's insidery accounts in his "Making of the President" series.

The speechwriters here are brought to life in all their very human glory -- from personal tics to family commitments. Schlesinger even recounts a Halloween night when a Bush I speechwriter, Chriss Winston, was about to take her son trick-or-treating but was called on to perform a last-minute re-draft of a speech on the 1990 budget deal. "Winston rewrote all half-dozen iterations of the ... address as her son, the mouse, nodded off on the couch. She finished well past midnight and decided then that the job was not worth the hassle."

Her young rodent, I'm sure, was appreciative.

Supreme Court to Poor Peons Everywhere: Drop Dead

2008-06-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

It's official -- ExxonMobil's profits will be even higher this year. The U.S. Supreme Court, the latest subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, took another courageous stand yesterday in defense of the little guy. Umm, right. Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled Wednesday to slash the punitive damages paid by Exxon -- which last year raked in more than $40 billion and has already pulled in $10 billion in the first quarter of this year -- for the massive 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill along the Alaskan coastline. Instead of $2.5 billion (a U.S. appeals court had earlier reduced the award from an initial $5 billion), the oil giant will pay only $507 million. Alaskan fishermen and other locals who effectively lost their livelihood over Exxon's employment of a drunk ship captain end up with a paltry $15,000 for their apparently insignificant pain and suffering. What's really important here is the pain and suffering of a company making so much money that it's become more powerful than the majority of countries on earth.

Of course, it was all very predictable as this court clearly views the business community (and big business in particular) as its most valued constituency. Dana Milbank's piece in the Washington Post which ran back in February http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022703207.html lays it all out in brilliant, if tragi-comic terms. So while we all sit at home this summer stranded in our living rooms stoned on mind-numbing reality show reruns cause we can no longer afford to fill that gas-guzzling dinosaur rusting in the drive, don't forget to say a prayer of gratitude for the wise "brethren" which ensure that we here in America continue to have "justice for all."

RIP, Tasha Tudor

2008-06-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

Tasha Tudor, beloved children's book author and illustrator, always seemed to have hailed from a time so long ago, I was a little surprised to see her obit in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/books/20tudor.html this week. The nanogenarian lived a full and long life and is to thank for many happy memories. I still have "A Time to Keep: The Tasha Tudor Book of Holidays" on my bookshelf and occasionally dip into it to see her dispatches from a simpler 1800s sort of world -- one that even predated herself. She brought us the joys of the Sparrow Post, precocious corgis, floating birthday cakes and the Labor Day Dolls' Fair. And she practiced what she preached -- she was a sort of early precursor to Real Simple magazine with her weaving and gardening and barefoot living. It turns out she also had some rather spicy views on reincarnation to boot. RIP.

Peter Noone disses room of overweight Oregonians

2008-06-20T23:43:00.000-07:00

Legendary Herman's Hermits frontman Peter Noone ventured into the heart of the "rustic" Oregon coastal community taking to the stage at Florence's Three Rivers Casino Friday night with pitch-perfect renditions of "I'm Henry VIII, I Am" and "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter" topped off with a dash of acidic British wit for good measure. Playing to a room of mainly sixty-somethings, most with asses the width of yardsticks and brains foundering under the complexities of alphabetically assigned seating, Noone repeatedly mentioned what a "good-looking" crowd it was. Ha. The visor and slot machine masses didn't seem to get it.

He went on to ponder whether when coming to these parts if it would have been wiser to bring eight-track tapes to hawk instead of CDs and wondered aloud how his agent had come to book this particular gig. His crowning insult: noting that all the Portland International Airport employees he'd encountered on arrival in the glorious Beaver State appeared as if they were "original cast members of the Beverly Hillbillies." Tsk-tsk. Didn't you know, Peter, those are what pass for sophisticates around these parts.

Keep up the good work Herman, even if I was the only one laughing.