Blogs Available in Book Form

Tides in the Affairs of Men, a new collection of these blog postings, is now available for sale at www.lulu.com. (Search under book title.) The new book contains material published over the past 2-1/2 years, including most of the essays from Sand Point Chronicles, which will no longer be sold. The first two collections, Searching for Joan Leslie and Lines from the Beachcomber, will still be available.

Inside Information

We are in the late innings of a Congressional push to enact financial reform, based on the notion that the game has been rigged and that we need to change the rules. That’s no doubt true, but I wonder about the process. Reform is needed, but who’s watching the reformers?

Let me explain. The courts are clogged these days with insider-trading cases, the assumption being that those who buy or sell stock with the advantage of material information about the company are illegally profiting by these actions. The alleged profiteers are usually securities analysts, hedge-fund managers, or others working for financial institutions or publicly owned companies.

The cases are rarely open and shut. On Wall Street, rumors are thick as flies at a garbage dump. Harry passes a story along to Joe, who passes it along to Steve, who buys 10,000 shares and scores a direct hit. Or maybe not; the story may be spurious, so he loses his shirt. Of course, if the story comes from the company’s chief financial officer, that’s another kettle of fish, but that’s very, very rare; most CFOs are too smart to act so foolishly.

Inside information flows through subterranean channels. The financial press is one such channel. Reporters have access to many insiders at trade shows, press conferences, etc. A fragment here, a fragment there, and the cat’s out of the bag.

But the biggest conduit for inside information may not be the financial world or the press, but the thousands of bureaucrats who regularly have knowledge of information that’s worth millions to any stock trader. The stories with the biggest impact on stock prices often originate at some government agency. Think of the opportunities. You work at the Food and Drug Administration, and you know that in a day or two the FDA will report that a new drug, potentially a blockbuster, has failed a phase 3 test. Or you work at the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission, and you know that the Government will file suit against such and such a company for illegal trade practices. Or you work at the FCC, and you know that a pending sale of TV stations will or will not be approved.

For that matter, members of Congressional committees regularly sound off on CNBC and have a built-in opportunity to attack a company in the course of a televised hearing. Most of what they say is just political grandstanding, but they have the power to move the market, and only they and their aides know in advance what they will say.

I don’t know of any such malfeasance, but that’s the point. Is it possible, in this era of rampant corruption by elected officials, that the entire federal regulatory apparatus and our Congressional watchdogs are squeaky clean? Or is it possible that a torrent of inside information flows from the corridors of federal power to trading accounts in the names of girlfriends, brothers-in law, friends of friends, and others outside the monitoring zone?

If there had been one or two front-page stories about such leakage, I would not be so suspicious. But if there have been such stories, I missed them. And so we are left with the politically correct conclusion: Wall Street is filled with crooks, and the Government is filled with honest people who work hard to protect us from the crooks.

Maybe.

What Price Privacy?

No better illustration of the confused state of public discourse these days is this: At a time when everyone is worried about identity theft and loss of personal privacy, the same everyone is also using social networking sites like Facebook to tell everyone everything about themselves. “Look at me” or “Listen to me” seems to be the new universal mantra.

There was a time, not too long ago, when privacy was a mark of decorum. There were certain things you just didn’t tell others unless you knew them very well. Women were especially discreet, in dress as well as in conversation, and a gentleman would never betray a confidence. I am not talking about characters in Masterpiece Theater. Ordinary people like my parents valued privacy in the 50s and 60s.

Then something happened. Candidates for office were expected to disclose their income tax returns, and peccadillos were fair game for reporters. All this was in the name of fair disclosure. A senator who cheated on his wife would cheat on his constituents, the story went, and those 1040s would enable us to know whether someone was a crook. Suddenly we felt entitled to know everything about office-holders and candidates, whether or not the alleged facts were relevant.

Now the revelations have hit the digital fan, and there is no turning back. Worst of all, the public is getting in on the action, in its search for 10 minutes of fame. Anybody can be an American Idol or put his or her face and voice on YouTube. Tonight’s news told of young girls who were lured to meetings (and, in some cases, to their deaths) by on-line pedophiles. Identity thefts are rampant. Did you know that copying machines have hard drives? How many tax returns and other documents are waiting for someone to mine that data? Do you really believe your credit card and social security numbers are secure?

Last night I placed about 15 books in an on-line basket. Then I read the privacy policy of the merchant, who ran a network of bookstores, each of whom would have access to my credit card number. I didn’t buy the books.

I don’t care about Governor Spitzer’s hookers or about Barack Obama’s tax return. If the hookers meant Spitzer was malfeasant, well, there are people whose job it is to find that out, and Barack Obama is entitled to the same privacy as I am with respect to his tax returns. (One of the Kennedys – Ted’s son Joe, I believe- once suggested that everyone’s tax return should be a matter of the public record, but we’re not there yet, thank God.)

I am not on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or any of the others, and I stonewall the many invitations I receive to join the crowd. Of course I do have a blog, and that inevitably causes some loss of privacy. I will have to think about that one.

Snow Cake

Alex Hughes had a fling with a girl named Rebecca a long time ago. A son was born of that fling, a son Alex never knew. Then, years later, he found out, and he arranged to meet his son for dinner at a restaurant in London Alex had never married, and there would probably be no other children, so he waited for his only offspring with great anticipation. But his son never came. He had been killed by a motorist while crossing the street. An enraged Alex found the errant driver, hit him, and knocked him down. The motorist died, and Alex was sentenced to several years in prison for manslaughter. He serves his time and is released, but the totality of the experience leaves him a desolate man, with little to live for.

Desperate for some kind of closure, Alex searches for Rebecca and finds that she is living in Winnipeg. So he sets out for Winnipeg, not by the most direct route, but by flying from London to Toronto, renting a car, and setting out overland for Manitoba.

All this takes place before the movie opens. You will find it out, piecemeal, but I am not spoiling the story by telling you that much. The movie is called Snow Cake. It was made in 2006. It was written by Angela Pell and directed by Marc Evans. And almost nobody has ever heard of it.

Which is a shame, because it’s an engrossing, well written, brilliantly acted story about what happens to Alex Hughes on the way to Manitoba. To tell you more would be wrong, because it is a story best appreciated when you don’t know what’s coming next.

The leading roles are played by Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver. Emily Hampshire is memorable in a key supporting role. The movie cost petty cash to make and was filmed in about a month. In the era of mega-movies, Snow Cake reminds us that a good story, well acted and well written, need not cost a fortune. The corollary is that a $100 million movie without a good story well told can be a turkey. Some years ago, as we left the theater after seeing Titanic, Jill summed it up thus: “There were 1500 people on that ship, and they couldn’t find a story better than that?”

Strange Times

Here’s the deal: You buy a one-year Treasury bill that will pay you $100,000 at maturity. It costs you $99,952 (T bills are prediscounted). Your broker charges you $60 to execute the transaction. Since the fee exceeds the interest, you have actually lost money for your trouble.

Or try this: You invest $100,000 in one of Fidelity’s government money market funds. After a month goes by, you check your account and find that in return for the use of your $100,000 you have earned the grand sum of one dollar.

Now you see why, despite the dreadful economic numbers, the stock market keeps climbing. There are, for most people, only three reservoirs available for storing wealth: stocks, bonds, and real estate. Real estate, long regarded as a sure-fire investment, is now poison. Bonds pay next to nothing unless you accept high risk or go long-term. So it’s back to the stock-market casino. The CNBC anchors tell you that the economic numbers are not dreadful at all, ignoring (1) the unemployment rate, (2) the national debt, (3) the budget deficit, and (4) the balance of trade.

There is another reason for the Dow’s ascent: If you are a wealthy European, do you really want your money sitting in pounds or francs or lira? No, so you buy dollar-denominated assets. You tell yourself that your wealth is safe in the U.S. because the U.S. is too big to fail. (Where have we heard that before?)

Buying stocks of good companies is not stupid. If you are worried that eventually runaway inflation will eat you alive, consider this: If you buy one share of Apple stock, you own one 910-millionth of the Company. Now, assuming that Apple doesn’t have to sell more stock ($23 billion in the bank says they won’t) you will still own one 910-millionth of the Company no matter what happens to the dollar. So, in a sense, Apple is an inflation hedge. The same can be said of other companies that have strong balance sheets and good growth prospects. Alas, there aren’t many companies that make it through that filter. And remember, some respected economists say that deflation, not inflation, is the more likely danger.

These are strange times, the strangest I’ve seen in a half century of market-watching. The federal government is selling zillions of short-term bills and notes at zero cost. Banks can get almost as good a deal, thanks to the Fed. Borrowing at less than 1 percent and lending at, say, 6 percent is nice work if you can get it.

It reminds me of an old joke about the fellow who shows up at his school’s reunion in a private helicopter, much to the surprise of his classmates who remember him as the dumbest kid in school, especially in mathematics.

“How on earth did you amass such wealth?” one classmate asks him.

“It was easy,” he answered. “I make these gadgets for 1 cent and I sell them for 5 cents, and you’d be amazed at how that 4 percent adds up.”

Clarence and Melissa

a short short story

Clarence looked up from his New York Times and asked, “Melissa, must you sing during breakfast? It’s really quite annoying.”

“Sorry, father,” Melissa said. Melissa was 19 and a sophomore in college, home for the Christmas holidays. She had been singing a popular song unknown to her father (or to most people of his generation). In fact, Melissa’s knowledge of the lyrics was spotty, so that at key parts of the narrative (if there was one), she drifted into “la la di dum dum.” Clarence’s objections could be summarized thus: first, her voice was flat or sharp (he couldn’t tell which, but he suspected it was both, if such a thing were possible); second, she sang everything fortissimo, if not fortississimo, which was like getting a generous helping of bad food; third, her repertoire was limited to songs written in the last six months. no Kern, no Rodgers, no Gershwin. If he asked her who wrote a song she was singing, she would say something like The Bad Boys or Crazy Red Poles or The Hairy Grape.

One should add that Melissa was very serious about her singing. At college, while she had the good sense not to enlist in the glee club or one of the many a capella groups on campus, she did join the Dramatic Club, where she had small parts in their undertakings. In The Importance of Being Earnest, for instance, she played Algernon’s manservant Lane, a role recrafted as a female for this production. In these efforts Melissa was quite adequate, because she was given no opportunity to sing. But she enjoyed singing, more than she enjoyed anything else in life.

Clarence was a patient man, and his outburst at breakfast was unusual. Clarence’s wife had died the year before, and he had not yet learned how to be both parents. Clarence was still in his forties, an age that invited thoughts of exploring new social frontiers, but there was no hurry. His work as a lawyer kept him busy, and then there was Melissa, an only child. Beautiful Melissa, with her mother’s eyes.

“I’m sorry to be sharp with you, Melissa,” he said. “I know you like your music.”

“Maybe we could do something musical together,” she said. “You know, go to a concert, maybe.”

The word “concert” struck terror into his heart. He knew what young people meant by concerts, and it was not Rachmaninoff. Still, it was an opening he could not resist,

“Sure,” he said. “Pick something out and we’ll go.”

And so it was that father and daughter went to a concert give by a touring group of Irish singers, 20 in all, young men and young women, singing Celtic and contemporary pop songs. Clarence was greatly impressed by their musicianship, and Melissa was so taken with the concert that she sang two or three songs over and over as they drove home.

“That was a very good show,” father said to daughter. “Didn’t you think so?”

“Oh, yes, Dad. I’d love to join a group like that.”

“Well,” he said doubtfully, it probably takes a lot of time, which is something you don’t have much of these days.”

“Not during the school year,” she said earnestly, “but summers I could find time. This summer I’ll look for some job where I can sing. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Clarence said guardedly. Maybe you could try out for something in summer stock. On the Cape, maybe.” It wouldn’t do to discourage her from singing, but he might encourage her to study acting. Or set design or costumes or props. Anything but singing.

And so, after Clarence talked to a friend who summered at Chatham, he found a friend of that friend who knew the man who ran a summer theater on the Cape, and Melissa was taken on as an acting apprentice. She was ecstatic about her good fortune and above ecstatic when she was given a nonspeaking part in The Most Happy Fella, the first production on the summer’s schedule. Actually, she told her father on the phone, she was a member of a crowd, but they all were to join in a chorus of “Abbondanza!” She was going to SING! Hearing this, Clarence hoped the chorus was a large one.

Clarence drove down to the Cape for opening night, and noted that Melissa’s singing was not only drowned out but that she was positively aglow on the stage. Was it fatherly pride, or was Melissa the most involved person in every scene, reacting with intelligence and energy? Maybe, he chuckled to himself, she was born to be the greatest actress-in-a-crowd-scene who ever lived.

The next summer, the summer after her junior year, she returned to the Playhouse, and was given small parts in all five productions - two musicals and three straight plays. The leads were all taken by members of Actor’s Equity, and one of them gave Melissa the name of a voice coach who summered in Hyannis, and soon thereafter Melissa was singing scales at the home of the coach, a woman of Wagnerian proportions and an intimidating demeanor.

“You want to sing for a living?” the woman asked incredulously.

“Yes, I do, very much,” said Melissa.

“Mmmmm.” the woman said. “Your voice is strong. But it is also flat.”

“Flat?” Melissa said, as if her questioner were speaking Swahili.

“Flat. It is, to be blunt, painfully flat.”

“Can you teach me to sing?” Melissa asked urgently, so urgently that the coach was moved.

“I will give you two lessons. Then we will decide.”

In the life of every success there is a moment that serves as a hinge of fate. If it swings one way, opportunity follows opportunity. If it swings the other way, there is nothing but failure and frustration. Melissa’s hinge swung providentially when Madam Domine said, “I will give you two lessons.”

At the first lesson, Madame Domine taught Melissa to sing softly. Her normal voice was loud, and her natural flatness was amplified a thousandfold. “When we eliminate the flatness – if we can – then you will learn to modulate. And then, and only then, can you open up again."

Melissa worked – hard – all the next week, on exercises she had been given, and at the second lesson, Madame Domine was startled to hear the flatness all but gone. She was witnessing the triumph of determination over nature. The girl’s ears and vocal chords were the same as they were the week before, but where there had been noise, now there was music. The coach was intrigued – no, challenged, just as Henry Higgins was challenged by Eliza Doolittle. The lessons would continue.

By now you must have guessed the ending of our little story. Melissa graduated from college and then moved to New York to start her assault of Broadway. While at home, she rarely sang, and she did not mention her voice lessons to Clarence, who attended several plays at the Playhouse, mostly straight plays in which Melissa had small parts.
He realized that her ambition burned as ardently as ever, and he bankrolled one summer’s expenses in New York. By the end of the summer, he was sure, she would return to Boston, a sadder but wiser Broadway Baby.

But Melissa’s voice had lost its flatness and was now strong and true and ready for prime time. There were auditions, but not many before the word got around: Here was a comer. First, she was an understudy to the second lead. Then she won the lead in a road company of She Loves Me, scheduled to open in Boston. By this time she had told Clarence about her voice lessons, and he was mildly interested. Now she phoned him to say there would be two tickets at the Colonial box office in his name on opening night, and that she was playing THE LEAD!

Clarence brought along a woman who was an attorney at his law office, and they settled into their fourth-row seats. On stage, Melissa was dazzling, and by the time Amalia Balash (her character) sang “Dear Friend,” tears were rolling down his cheeks. Later, when her unmiked voice filled the theater with “Ice Cream,” he was dumbfounded. Where did she get that voice?

After the show, in her dressing room, he repeated the question. “Where did you ever get that voice?”

“Is that your way of saying I was pretty bad before?”

“Well----“

That’s okay, Dad, I know I was awful. But I had two things that made all the difference. I must have gotten them from you and Mom.”

“And they were?”

“Determination and persistence, Dad. Without them, talent isn’t enough. With them, a little talent can take you a long way in this business,”

The Day the Dow Dropped 1000

At one time today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1000 points. Then it rallied and finished the day down 300-plus. Several factors were listed by the evening pundits: the situation in Greece, a couple of glitches (including a trader’s entering an order for a billion dollars when he meant a million!), and general market nervousness. The three Gs, we'll call them: Greece, Glitches, and Gloom.

First, Greece: The TV screens were filled all day with scenes of phalanxes of Athens policemen facing off against mobs, made up mostly of public-sector union members. When a government is threatened with bankruptcy (as Greece surely is) and must resort to an austerity program, public-sector employees are high on the cut list, because their unions have demanded and won outsized pay and benefit packages over the years.

In this country it is no different, and when the federal government and the states bite the bullet and declare their own austerity programs, the public-sector employees will take to the streets. (The private sector, presumably, will be at work.) The new governor of New Jersey, squeezed by his State’s miserable finances, spells out the stakes: A 49-year-old public-sector retiree in New Jersey will get $3.8 million in pension and health benefits despite having paid only $124,000 for them. “Is that fair?” he asks. The unions no doubt would answer with a resounding “Yes!”

General Motors illustrates where such largesse leads you, but if you don’t sell cars, you don’t have a job, whereas you will always need teachers, policemen, firemen, and social workers. Only maybe not so many of them, as Greece will now find out.

Glitches: Computers are a wonderful thing, but is the power to buy or sell a million shares at a click of a mouse a good thing? Trading regulations have not caught up to technology, and until it does, we need circuit breakers. Remember them? It used to be that whenever the Dow fell by 250 points, all trading was stopped for some period of time (10 minutes, I think). We are in an era where speed is all. Today's Times has a long article bemoaning the fact that a Red Sox – Yankees game averages about 3-1/2 hours. So what? The game starts at 7, and 10:30 is hardly an ungodly hour to head home, especially if the game is exciting, as most Sox – Yanks games are. Similarly, would the world end if it took 10 seconds to trade a stock, rather than a microsecond?

Gloom: It is true that most stock-market traders are worried. They are worried about their jobs, about the chance of terrorist attacks, about the national debt. But underlying everything they are mindful that their government is not on their side. The President rails against “fat-cat” bankers, dishonest insurance companies, and Wall Street bonuses. Watching Congress questioning the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, etc. is like watching the lions devouring Christians. The starting assumption in most public debate these days is this: The people managing your money are a bunch of crooks, and we’re going to get them, by gum.

If you have money to invest and believe this, you will not invest it in the stock market. You will put it under your mattress.

Life is still comfortable for most people in the United States because of the flywheel effect. For decades – from the Second World War to about 1990 – we had the most productive, enterprising, dynamic economic engine in human history. That engine is still spinning, but it is slowing down, like a flywheel deprived of its power. Unless we quickly resuscitate the risk-taking spirit and start cheering for those who create wealth instead of beating them up, the flywheel will stop, and Washington will resemble Athens.

Rally 'Round the Beach, Boys

An epidemic of paranoia has broken out at Goose Rocks Beach. The disease is familiar to everyone who owns oceanfront property and everyone who does not but wants to share in the pleasures of the seashore. “The beach belongs to everyone” goes the chant, and it is taken up one year in Long Island, another year in Nantucket, and another in New Jersey. This year it is Maine’s turn.

It began when about two dozen beach-front owners, noting that their deeds defined their property as extending to the low-water mark, claimed the right to eject trespassers from that part of the beach they owned. “Nonsense,” said the Town of Kennebunkport, “people have been walking Goose Rocks Beach from end to end for many decades, and the beach is now public by prescriptive easement.”

In olden times, when Maine was part of Massachusetts, the public was said to enjoy the right to walk, fish, fowl, and whatever else passed for recreation in the seventeenth century – in the area between the high and low water marks. The Town dismisses any such constraints, holding that modern beachgoers should be free to indulge in such twenty-first century pursuits as Frisbee throwing, picnicking, and volleyball.

Wherever the War of the Beaches is waged, the press stands ready to frame it as a holy war, a battle between the privileged few and the deserving masses. For law firms, of course, the few and the masses are just so many billable hours.

The paranoia is especially virulent in these contentious times. What at core is a rather prosaic legal point – whether deeds trump long-standing usage or vice versa – has turned into a crusade, with the crusaders marching under a banner emblazoned with SAVE OUR BEACHES. One side paints pictures of fences sprouting up and down the beach and KEEP OFF signs on the beautiful sands of Goose Rocks. The other side warns that if the beach is surrendered, hordes of drunken teen-agers will converge on Goose Rocks at spring break, with dune buggies not far behind.

A crucial battle will be fought in June, when the Town will vote to approve (or not) a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees to flight the 25 property owners. This is a considerable sum in a Town whose population is about 3500. With appeals, it could become more considerable.

It all reminds me of a 50s novel, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys, by Max Shulman. The fictional town of Putnam’s Landing is chosen as a missile launch site, splitting the community into the hawks and doves of the day, and ending with an accidental (and hilarious) launch of an ICBM. The book was very funny, the movie (with Paul Newman) less so, but the idiocy of extremism is as ridiculous at Goose Rocks today as it was at Putnam’s Landing a half century ago.

__________________________________________
For the record, I live at Goose Rocks, but not on the beach front. As I see it, both sides have reasonable arguments. And when the smoke clears and the lawyers have been paid, nothing will have changed.

American Political Idol

At the prodding of my children, I recently watched American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, and I can report that both are (1) not as good as the younger generation claims and (2) not as bad as I had feared. Much is made of mediocrity on these shows, and the occasional talented performer is treated like The Second Coming. Most of the judges understand that they are there to feed the audience frenzy, either by overhyping the singer or dancer or by delivering a deserved panning (boos and hisses from the performer’s claque).

The shows are enormously popular, and, since they are relatively cheap to produce, ring the cash registers at Fox and ABC. So mine is a minority opinion, but that’s okay; I am often out of sync with popular taste. Some say it’s a generational thing, and that could be true.

I will have to admit that the format of American Idol and Dancing With the Stars is interesting and may be applicable to weightier subjects.

Like, for instance, politics.

Consider the possibilities. The Republican Party, wishing to field the strongest presidential candidate in 2012, has each candidate deliver his or her best stump speech before a panel of judges, all eminent political consultants.

First, ladies and gentlemen, we will hear from that bombshell from Alaska, Sarah…..PALIN!!! (enthusiastic applause)

Palin does her best frontierswoman speech, punctuated liberally with homey touches and unflattering references to Harvard.

Judge 1: I knew you had it in you, Sarah, but you really hit it out of the park that time. A big YES! (ecstatic screams from the audience)

Judge 2. I think you need to work more on that accent, Sarah. You sounded too much like a Midwesterner. I’m afraid it’s a no. (loud boos)

Judge 3. Well, Sarah, you got my vote. That story about looking across the Bering Strait at Russia did it. A big big big YES! (hysterical cheering)

Now let’s hear our second contestant, Senator John McCain.

McCain: My friends, this country is in trouble. The country is bankrupt my friends, and yet our President has been saddling our children and grandchildren and their friends with a huge new entitlement. My friends, it’s time for a change. (and on and on in this vein)

Judge 1: (is caught by the camera, snoring)

Judge 2. Senator, that was the best I’ve ever heard you, and it was still terrible.

Judge 3. I think you need to liven it up, Senator. Maybe you could do a soft shoe, or do some rope tricks, like Will Rogers.

Now our final candidate for tonight, Mike Huckabee!

Huckabee: I’m going to sing a little tune I wrote on the way over tonight, and I hope y’all like it. (sits on a stool, plucks guitar)

(singing) You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You’ll make me happy by choosing me
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you
Oh please give your vote to Mike Huckabee.

(wild, uncontrolled cheering from the audience)

Judge 1: Well, that says it all, Mike. A huge, huge YES!!! (more cheering)

Judge 2: I thought your singing was awesome, and you sure could play that guitar. And that song was the catchiest tune I’ve ever heard! (crowd yells “yes!”)

Judge 3: You just blew me away, man. I got all choked up when you sang that song. Mike, you are the greatest. (audience erupts, singing chorus of “You are my sunshine”)


Is that a show, or is that a show?

The Politician

The President touched down in Maine today, presumably as a “let’s be friends” gesture to Senators Collins and Snowe, two Republicans seen as possible allies in future political battles. Then it was off to Massachusetts, to share a “video op” with Governor Patrick (up for reelection this year) and to raise funds for the Bay State Dems. Officially, it was a swing north to survey the wreckage from the recent rainstorms, but Rhode Island, the hardest hit State, was not on the itinerary.

Does all that sound cynical? Well, I’m sorry, but there is no other way to put it. Barack Obama, whom I once praised as a latter-day Cicero, has shown himself to be just another pol. “I don’t believe the American people want to put the insurance industry back in the driver’s seat,” the President said today in Portland. Okay, Mr. President, we get it, we get it: The insurance companies are crooks. This follows the following stump statement: “I didn’t come down on the side of the banks and financial institutions; I came down on the side of the people.” We get that, too: Bankers are not to be trusted, because they are conniving “fat cats.”

Since the President is too smart to believe all that, a cynical reading is the only possible explanation. He demonizes banks and insurance companies because his pollsters tell him that’s the best line these days and it is much, much safer than talk about the deficit or Afghanistan or Netanyahu or the unemployment rate.

The thing he is missing, I think, is that when a businessman hears the President attacking banks and insurance companies (with gusto!), he takes it as an attack on all business. The President just doesn’t know that he sounds as if he has it in for the entire private sector – the sector he needs on his side if we are to mend our economy. He doesn’t get it, because, alas, this President has never run a business. Or even worked for a business.

Or take his speech the other day on reforming student loans. He bemoaned the fact that students too often graduate from college handicapped by a heavy debt load. So, said the President, he is riding to the rescue, capping a graduate’s annual repayment to 15 percent of his or her income. But, he added, if the graduate goes into public service - if he becomes, say, a politician or a community organizer - the cap will be set at only 10 percent. What kind of message does that send to the private sector?

But, to return to the point, this is a political animal, pure and simple. The timing, the self-deprecating humor, the over-all level of oratory is pure music, and you have to admire it. But when you listen to the lyrics, you understand that this is a committed leftist, dedicated to shifting as much power as possible from the private to the public sector. One hopes that the economy survives the assault, but the issue is in doubt

The Centrist President

“I don’t trust him.”

Those were the last words I heard from my wife on the subject of Barack Obama. They were not the words of a woman who was politically naïve. They did not derive from the distance between his eyes, much less the color of his skin. They were the words of a serious student of the political process, a woman who kept a copy of the Constitution by her side for ready access.

She had made the point before. As she saw it, he was a masterful actor, playing the part of a centrist, because it was the only way he could be elected President. But she heard enough tip-offs to convince her it was all an act. Being much less politically savvy than Jill, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I was bowled over by his oratorical skill, which, I thought, would enable him to lead a divided nation. Jill, on the other hand, held that once he was in the White House, we would see the real Obama. She was, as usual, right as rain.

Barack Obama’s historic victory convinced him and his team that the country had declared itself ready for a leftward swing. It was a watershed event, he reasoned, signaling that people were fed up with the excesses of capitalism and ready to yield more control to Washington. But the election was not about that at all. Barack Obama won because he was not George W. Bush. And George W. Bush wound up a pariah, not because he was a capitalist, but because he allowed himself to be maneuvered into invading Iraq, and all the terrible baggage that came with it. The people who orchestrated the election of Barack Obama were the neocons behind the WMD fiction. Without them (and a pliable President), the White House and Congress would still be in Republican hands, because we are still a center-right nation. Nice going, Dick Cheney.

Now it is the evening of President Obama’s great victory on health care. No one is talking much about the centrist President now, about the great healer who will unite a fractured country. The atmosphere is poisonous tonight, and people are angry. The President may well feel that by November the acrimony will be forgotten. He may be right, especially if the economy improves. But if it doesn’t, he will confront a Republican Congress with one thing on its mind: payback.

One thing is sure: Jill saw right through Obama the Great Centrist, Obama the Great Orator. He fooled a lot of people, including me, but he couldn’t fool Jill.

Chess, the Musical

One night in early 1986 I found myself in London’s West End, looking for good theater. A marquee announced a musical called Chess, and I, a musical theater fan and a chess player, was hooked. A review posted in the ticket lobby gushed that one of the show’s songs, “I Know Him So Well,” was one of the finest book songs the reviewer had ever heard. That reeled me in.

The show was – I strain to be kind here – passable. The setting was a world chess championship, the protagonists the current title holder, an obnoxious American, and the challenger, a Russian. You have to bear in mind (1) that the Cold War was in full flower in the 80s and (2) that the memory of the famous championship match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer was still fresh. The political overtones heightened the drama of that match (which Fischer won) and cried out for a theatrical treatment.

Tim Rice, who had collaborated with Andrew Lloyd-Webber to give the world Evita, tried to talk the composer into a project based on a chess championship match between an American and a Russian, but Lloyd-Webber was deep into other projects at the time, and passed. Rice then (in 1981) joined with half of the (then dissolving) Abba team, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, and a musical called Chess started taking shape.

The problem, as I remember it, was a clumsy book and an inadequate score. (“Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln….”) The staging was another minus. The stage was dominated by a large chessboard, tilted at an angle, which managed to upstage the actors. Only two songs were memorable: “One Night in Bangkok” and “I Know Him So Well.” Rice should have waited until Lloyd-Webber’s calendar was free.

The show ran in London for three years, but was still a financial and critical failure. Still, the basic idea was good, and Rice sat down to rewrite in preparation for taking Chess to Broadway. One good song (“Someone Else’s Story”) was added, and the character of the American was softened. The massively rewritten Chess opened in New York in April 1988 – and died 68 performances later, losing millions.

So why am I telling you about such an all-out floperoo? Because it has resurfaced again, this time as a so-called concert version, staged at London’s Royal Albert Hall and available to Americans on DVD. And it is very, very good.

First, don’t let the words “concert version” fool you. This is a huge production, with a philharmonic orchestra, a large chorus, dancers, and rear projections to suggest Italy (Act 1) and Thailand (Act 2). The cast is topnotch, notably Josh Groban as the Russian and Adam Pascal as the American. The music has been greatly improved over the years, or maybe the original was better than it sounded; that orchestra and chorus may have made the difference.

Rice hasn’t forgotten the touches that made Evita so riveting. Who can forget the tableau of the Buenos Aires upper class, gliding en masse from one side of the stage to the other while denouncing Peron’s mistress? In Chess, a group of “old boys” at the British embassy cluck their displeasure at all the asylum-seekers cluttering up their offices. And a character called “The Arbiter” serves much the same purpose as does Che in Evita.

Some plotting weaknesses still show, especially in Act 2, and the song “Someone Else’s Story” is inexplicably given to the Russian’s wife rather than to his girlfriend. But these flaws are outweighed by the effect of what is, over-all, a dazzling production.

Rice is rumored to be planning another go at Broadway, but a Chess on the scale of the Royal Albert concert would be financially impossible in New York. My suggestion is to grab the DVD, because Chess will never be this good again.

China's Great Leap Forward

Barack Obama is confronting the same problem that all his predecessors confronted: He knows too well what the long-term solvency of the country demands, but he can’t act, because our political system won’t allow it. The majority rules, and the majority wants to live on the cuff, because that’s the way it has always worked, and if President Obama told us the hard facts – that we’re broke – the voters wouldn’t stand for it. So we are treated to the same old “the richest country on earth ought to be able to give everyone___________.” You fill in the blanks.

Some people in other countries have grown up wanting a system like ours, but now they are not so sure. Maybe, they are thinking, China has got it right. They have the fastest growing economy on earth, but....their government is COMMUNIST! You know, the system that says the state owns all the land and the means of production. The system that says “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Well, not quite. The new breed of Chinese communist is shopping for Mercedes and BMWs in Beijing showrooms, while America is giving “cash for clunkers” to prod people to buy new cars with money that comes from the U.S. government, which borrows it from…..China!! What’s wrong with this picture?

For a quarter century, from roughly 1960 through 1985, we had it made: The transistor (Bell Labs) begat the semiconductor industry (Fairchild, Intel, TI, Motorola), which begat the computer industry (IBM, DEC, H-P), which begat the personal computer industry (Apple, Compaq, Dell). I was there, and it was a wild ride, a once-in-a-lifetime high.

The chief perceived threat in 1980 was Japan, and there was widespread anxiety here about the Japanese obsession with quality. They took what American quality gurus had taught them and then raised the bar. If anybody was looking for other threats, there was Korea, and possibly Taiwan. Nobody, but nobody, was thinking about China. China? You’ve gotta be kidding!

I’m sure a lot of books will be written about China’s leap into high-tech, but here’s my take: Like many others, I had visited our sales offices in Singapore, Taiwan, and pre-1997 Hong Kong often, offices that were staffed by expatriate Chinese, and in my dealings with them one distinguishing characteristic stood out: They were all capitalists down to their bone marrow! The Chinese were deal-makers, whatever government was in control. And it occurred to anyone who thought about it that if the government in Beijing ever decided to adopt a market-based economy, it would need a very short runway, because they had a billion born capitalists ready to roll, The decision was made around 1980, and within a relatively short time the Chinese machine was airborne.

It remains to be seen whether Chinese capitalism can coexist with centralized control. But I believe (and have heard this echoed by Chinese in Beijing) that there is no turning back. Economic liberalism breeds political liberalism, especially now that the Chinese people have a taste of market success. Only two outcomes are possible: (1) The Chinese authoritarian government will soften and eventually be indistinguishable from our government (which has been drifting leftward, in case you haven’t noticed) and (2) The Chinese leadership, feeling threatened by an increasingly assertive, increasingly acquisitive middle class, will try to force the genie back into the bottle, leading to widespread instability. I don’t know which option will prevail, but I would probably bet on (1). Things are going well in China today, and Hu Jintao doesn’t need to rock the boat.

And he doesn’t have to worry about getting this or that bill through Congress. He doesn’t have to fret about filibusters and blue states and red states. When he decides that something makes sense for China, he just does it, making a few phone calls to get his ministers on board.

Meanwhile, when Barack Obama decides that something makes sense for the United States, he has to deep-six it because it won’t play in Chicago or on CNN, and he could never get it through Congress anyway,

Democracy is messy, but people will put up with the mess – as long as they are winning.

Too Many Papers, Too Little Time

For a span measured not in years but in decades, I have been a subscriber to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. Good newspapers all, each deserving of more time than there is in my day. (I know, when you’re retired you’re supposed to have oodles of free time, but I don’t.) And they’re getting pricey, because their business model, based mostly on advertiser revenue, has broken down. I don’t mind paying for value received, but paying for newspapers that I don’t read is just plain stupid. So something has to go. But which one?

The New York Times is still a fine newspaper, though it no longer deserves its “All the news that’s fit to print” mantra. “All the trends that are fit to print” would be more like it. The Times sponsors or co-sponsors polls, and this leads them to tell us endlessly about – us. It is as if the Times newsboy is shouting, “Wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about rising discrimination against women!!” Or middle-aged mid-western factory workers. Or the plight of the uneducated or the poor or the needy.

And the Times is becoming more provincial. Today, while most of page 1 told us that New York’s Governor has an aide with a shadowy past, news about a political assassination in Dubai was given one column on page 4.

The Times still has a good crossword, especially toward the end of the week, and it has by far the best sports coverage of the three publications under review here. Its Arts section is very good, reflecting the fact that New York is still the cultural capital of this country. Its financial pages are so-so and can’t compare with the Journal’s. The decision to drop TV listings, made years ago, was a mistake,

The editorial page features some very good writing, notably the columns by David Brooks, surely one of the best political writers around. Of the op-ed crowd, Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins write more for entertainment than for enlightenment, Tom Friedman has taken up a cause (energy), and this is his blessing and his curse. As for Paul Krugman, the less said the better. He does have a Nobel Prize, but unless you are as ardently liberal as he is, you will skip his columns, for the writing is tendentious.

The paper’s main editorials are strongly, often passionately, a mirror of the Democratic Party’s platforms, but their extreme positions are no more fanatical than those of the Journal. Most of the times I just hurry by the editorials of both papers without reading them.

The Wall Street Journal has improved dramatically since Rupert Murdoch took it over. It now covers world news even better than the Times. Having feet on the ground in Yemen and Beirut and China and Venezuela costs money, and the Journal is ready to spend it. Indeed, you will find out more news from more places on the planet in the Journal than you will in the Times. Ten years ago, such a statement would have been impossible.

The Journal, however, does have its problems. The biggest one is the three-page editorial section, called “Opinion.” Except for a token moderate, the franchise seems to belong entirely to the American Enterprise Institute, whose members apparently have total access to the pages. They – John Bolton, Frederick Kagan and other neocon exiles – beat the war drums as hard as they can, but no one in Washington, I devoutly hope, is listening.

The Journal’s drama and movie critics are excellent, and the weekend paper is a particular treat, with Peggy Noonan and the not-to-be-missed de gustibus column.

The paper is trying gamely to mount a sports section, but so far it is a waste of space.

Carps: The Journal’s Friday edition contains a good crossword puzzle, but it is not designed for the eyes of mere mortals. The same editor who is responsible for those teeny squares must be the culprit who reduces the excellent Pepper and Salt cartoons to microscopic size.

The Economist is by far the most literate and the most insightful of the three newspapers. Yes, it has a week to prepare each issue, but it is still impressive. From the often witty cover to the in-depth stories from all over the world to the technology quarterly surveys, there is too much to feast on, but I leave the accumulating back issues on the coffee table with promises to myself that I will return to this or that story.

The Economist is of course a British publication, so it devotes a fair amount of space to Old Blighty, but I’m probably more interested in this material than I am in Governor Patterson’s cronies.

The newspaper (as it calls itself) is organized by geographic sections
(Middle East and Africa, The Americas, Europe, etc) and by subject matter (Science and Technology, Finance and Economics, etc). The constant is the quality of the writing. In this, it leaves the Times and the Journal in the dust.

What the Economist offers is information of value, presented by masters of exposition. That, and not crosswords or fiery editorials or lifestyle columns, is what I look for in a newspaper. So I will drop the Times and the Journal and give each week’s Economist the time it deserves. As for the rest – sports, movie reviews, stock-market news – I’ll pick that up on television or the internet, thank you.

John McGlinn and The Song

John McGlinn was an orchestra conductor and musical archivist. His lifelong passion was a quest for the original orchestrations of musicals, some well known, others long forgotten. He was, in fact, a musical archaeologist, rummaging through old warehouses and attics in search of history. In 1982, McGlinn made his biggest find, in an abandoned warehouse in Seacaucus, NJ - the original orchestrations for Showboat, the 1927 Kern-Hammerstein production that arguably was the most significant musical of the twentieth century. “It was like finding Tut’s tomb,” he said at the time.

McGlinn’s special mission was to find the original versions of songs written by Jerome Kern, regarded by many as the inventor of the American popular song. Many of Kern’s songs were written in collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II (best known today for his later collaboration with Richard Rodgers). The Kern-Hammerstein partnership produced, in addition to Showboat, two other hit shows, Sunny and Music in the Air. Then, in 1939, the masters gave us Very Warm for May, which featured what I believe is the best love song ever written, “All the Things You Are.” The original orchestrations for this song were among the treasures that John McGlinn saved from obscurity.

The melody line is harmonically inspired. If you are in the mood for a dissertation on the song’s chord progression, you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Things_You_Are with a piano within reach. The bare-bones melody line doesn’t begin to explain the song’s appeal; it’s the harmony that raises the goose bumps, and that is why McGlinn’s discovery was so important.

The lyrics are Hammerstein at his best. “You are the promised kiss of springtime that makes the lonely winter seem long” may not seem special if you have never spent a lonely winter in Maine, but trust me, it rings the bell, as does “the breathless hush of evening that trembles on the brink of a lovely song.” That’s the kind of writing that drives would-be writers like me to desperation.

In 1990, the Boston Pops Orchestra devoted an hour to recreating songs from old Broadway shows, and they put that “Evening at the Pops” in the hands of guest conductor John McGlinn, proving that there is justice in the world after all. Luckily, I taped the program, so I can report that the beatific smile on McGlinn’s face as he conducted spoke volumes about his love for these orchestrations, especially the grand finale, the original Russell Bennett orchestration of “All the Things You Are” - just as the opening night audience heard it 50 years before, said hostess Kitty Carlisle-Hart.

The song is a double duet, with one couple singing the verse (rarely heard today), expressing frustration at their inability to “let my heart find its voice,” followed by the other couple’s all-out declaration of love. In the show, the hit song was sung by the foursome early in the first act, then reprised twice in the second act, suggesting that the producers knew where the gold lay. In the Pops concert, the two couples were joined by the Tanglewood Chorus. Talk about giving a great song its due!

Very Warm for May, despite a huge cast, lots of talent (June Allyson, Eve Arden, Vera Ellen), and the creative energies of Kern and Hammerstein, lasted only 59 performances. But it did leave behind a song that will live forever.

And John McGlinn must still be smiling – from above. A heart attack took him last year, at age 55.

Cinderella Squared

Back in the 30s, a popular radio show called The Major Bowes Amateur Hour lifted a lot of entertainers from obscurity to fame. Among the shooting stars were opera singers Lili Pons and Beverly Sills, comedian Jack Carter, pop singer Teresa Brewer, and a young singer named Frank Sinatra. The Major Bowes show was enormously popular, because the public always had an insatiable appetite for Cinderella stories. It was even better when they could help choose Cinderella (“call Murray Hill 8-9933”).

Major Bowes died in 1946, and one of his assistants, Ted Mack, carried on the tradition and brought it to television. Ted Mack’s show was also a big hit, proving that it was the concept, and not the moderator or the talent, that registered with the public.

That brings us to the “Idol” series, American and British, that so many viewers are hooked on, and its latest mega-star, Susan Boyle. This middle-aged Scotswoman was launched, as if you didn’t know, by her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Miss Saigon. It was a good, but not a great performance, musically speaking. But the whole package was a blockbuster, the kind of thing that PR people dream about.

The package, you see, includes the fact that Susan is a rather plain-looking woman, the kind you might find next to you in the checkout line at Wal-Mart (if not doing the checking out). One doesn’t expect to find that kind of voice in that kind of package. So you have Cinderella squared. Be honest, now: If Susan Boyle looked like, say, Nicole Kidman, would you be that excited about the fact that she sings well? (As a matter of fact, Nicole sings in the forthcoming film musical Nine, and it is a safe bet that as a singer she is no Susan Boyle.)

Susan, admirable though she is, is not a trained singer of theatrical songs like “I Dreamed a Dream.” Lea Salonga, who introduced the song in Miss Saigon, is a professional, with both the voice and the emotional range required for such a dramatic song. The same might be said of Bernadette Peters, Sarah Brightman, Elaine Paige, and Audra McDonald – but not Susan Boyle. I know that millions of records say that I am wrong, but that’s my story and I am sticking with it.

But, of the several songs I have heard Susan sing, one stands out as perfect for her: “Cry Me a River,” a torchy blues song that she absolutely nails. If I were her manager I would be scouring the music files looking for other torch songs for Susan. She can handle them vocally, and she is a believable victim.

Major Bowes would love her.

Tides in the Affairs of Men

When I was in college, I dated a girl who was a free spirit, the kind you find in tales of Celtic fairies who live in places like Brigadoon and Glocca Morra. She would dance barefoot on the green in her home town and start singing "Honey Bun" while walking along the street (it was the season of South Pacific), and this, of course, added to her appeal. After graduation she took a job teaching in Texas, and I lost track of her for a few years. Then a mutual friend told me she was in New York, a sometimes actress. Since I went to New York often at the time, I called her and asked if she’d like to have dinner. Yes, she would very much like to have dinner.

The free spirit was still there, but now she had become serious about it. She was, some religious authority had convinced her, a true mystic with vast metaphysical powers, which waxed and waned with the positions of the stars and planets.

At first I thought she was pulling my leg. But as we talked on during dinner, it was clear that we occupied different planets.

“You don’t really believe in astrology, do you?” I asked.

“Yes. And it’s pretty obvious you don’t,” she said.

“No, not a bit of it.”

“Look, do you believe that the position of the moon is responsible for pulling whole oceans of water around?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But if the moon can do all that, then why can’t the positions of the planets affect the fluids in your body – in millions of bodies, for that matter?”

The rest of the conversation was centered on her acting career, such as it was. She had brought along a scrapbook, which told of her parts in a few off-off-off Broadway plays. But our evening effectively ended with her moon-talk. I cabbed her back to the Barbizon for Women, and promised to keep in touch. I still remember how, in my bed that night, I couldn’t sleep, thinking of billions of tons of water being sloshed around by one little moon, so far away.

I never saw her again, and I heard that she died a few years ago. But I have never forgotten her earnest profession of faith in the power of planetary alignment to influence human behavior. I think of it often, now that I have a front-row seat to the comings and goings of the Atlantic. It seems preposterous that the moon can move enough water to change the depth of the ocean by 10 feet every six hours, but it does.

It seems that mankind goes berserk at certain times in history. The American Revolution and the French Revolution occurred at roughly the same time, though there is no causal connection. In our own time, there were public upheavals here and in Europe in 1968. Younger readers may not remember it, but take my word for it, 1968 was a nasty time, when the fabric of society was badly torn.

Today’s news tells of a horrific bombing in Iraq, student riots
in Iran, bombings in Pakistan, a military coup in Honduras, a war without end in Afghanistan, the bombing of a Moscow - St. Petersburg train, the Philippine Army at war with thugs empowered by the Philippine government, anarchy in Somalia, genocide in Sudan. Some of these events are connected, most not. The world seems to be lurching out of control, and it is a much smaller world than ever, a world charted by Google maps, spanned by Skype, and circumnavigated by hundreds of satellites, all looking down at every one of us.

And it is a world influenced by forces not yet understood. Tides in the affairs of men, Shakespeare calls them.

That's Entertainment?

The Times tells us that a new Kander-Ebb musical is in the works. Ordinarily this would be a cause for celebration, and not just because Fred Ebb died a couple of years ago and anything in his trunk is worth preserving. This will be the second Fred Ebb musical to be staged posthumously, the first being Curtains, a clever play-in-a-play having to do with a stage-struck police detective called in to investigate a murder committed during a musical’s Boston tryout run. John Kander’s music was, as usual, very good, and the Ebb lyrics stylish. I didn’t see the show, but I have listened to the CD often enough to remain convinced that Kander and Ebb belong right up there with the other great collaborators of Broadway’s Golden Age.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noted the “ordinarily” in the second sentence, a word that suggests that a celebration may not be in order. You see, the new Kander and Ebb show is called The Scottsboro Boys, after the defendants in a gang-rape trial that took place in Alabama in 1931. Let us pause a second to recognize that Kander and Ebb’s two blockbuster hits, Chicago and Cabaret, dealt with offbeat subjects, though in a definitely musical-comedy format. And let us acknowledge that great musicals like Les Miz and Miss Saigon can deal artistically with profound subjects. Ragtime dealt squarely with racial tensions, and No Strings and Kwamina had black-white romances. Still – a musical with gang rape at its core?

You may offer Sweeney Todd as a successful (sort of) example of depravity glorified, but Sondheim deserves to be placed in his own category. Sondheim plays are unhappy plays, maybe because Sondheim thinks that life is unhappy, and he is simply being true to life. Even when the composer gives us a good, look-on-the-bright-side song, it is presented as pastiche (see Follies). But the real Sondheim comes through in his Assassins, which invites us to listen to Lee Harvey Oswald and other assassins explain themselves. Sondheim is an enigma. The man was “adopted” as a youth by Oscar Hammerstein, whose musicals are filled to the brim with hope (walk on, walk on), June bustin’ out all over, a hundred and one pounds of fun, and a hundred million miracles – none of which seems to have influenced young Stevie.

Forget all that, some people say. Hammerstein was a realist, who wrote about miscegenation (Showboat), racial prejudice (South Pacific), and other themes that were ground-breaking in their day. Granted. But Hammerstein the ground-breaker was a man not capable of writing a Sweeney Todd. Hammerstein had exquisite taste, which his protégé lacks. One guesses that Sondheim would throw up at the mere mention of taste.

The problem I have with the whole ground-breaking theology is that it treats what came before as too silly for words. We hear, endlessly, that no show before Oklahoma! ever began with a lone cowboy on a stage, singing about a beautiful morning. Before that, we are told, musicals began with (if you can believe it) a chorus line of beautiful girls. And the plots were not credible. The shows of the 30s, shows like Anything Goes and Girl Crazy and The Boys From Syracuse, had one thing on their producers’ minds – entertaining the audiences. How lowbrow can you get?

Look, I loved Les Miz and Evita. But I also loved 42d Street and Do Re Mi and Little Me and She Loves Me, none of which had a message but all of which gave their audiences a wonderful two and a half hours.

One of my favorite movies is Preston Sturgis’s Sullivan’s Travels. In it Sullivan is a successful Hollywood director of slapstick comedies who now wants to move beyond all that to direct an Important Film, which will be called O Brother Where Art Thou? So he takes off on an odyssey to sample the life of the oppressed masses, about which he will then write. But on his voyage he discovers that the best thing he can do for the masses is to keep making the kind of silly movies that make people laugh.

“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh in this cockamamie world,” Sullivan says at the end. And, I might add, for musicals that lift your heart and set your toes tapping - and that leave the messages for Western Union and gang rape for Fox News.

2000 Acres of Sky

The British are the masters of the miniseries. The Americans may be the masters of musical theater and fast food, but when it comes to miniseries we aren’t even close. The Masterpiece Theater franchise alone gives them the cup, but then there are also the likes of Brideshead Revisited and Monarch of the Glen and Traffik and Ballykissangel and countless others. The British seem to have an unlimited supply of good writers (many of them long dead) and an unlimited supply of (live) leading men, leading women, and character actors, all of whom seem to have flawless diction and experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Old Vic.

Every viewer seems to have his or her favorite in the miniseries treasure chest. One believes there will never be another Upstairs, Downstairs, another prefers Tinker,Tailor, while a third votes for Foyle’s War. My own favorites are all the aforementioned, plus one newcomer, whose praises I now wish to sing.

The series is called 2000 Acres of Sky, and if this produces a sea of blank stares it is not surprising. The series, produced in Scotland, has never made it across the Atlantic. Never, in any form. No DVD formatted for U.S. television, no Netflix, no PBS airing. That’s a crime, because this is one compelling drama, with intelligent writing and some of the most fascinating characters and plot turns you’ll ever see, all played against that awesome Hebridean scenery.

Here’s the situation that launches the series: On the fictional island of Ronansay (near Skye) the small community faces a crisis, as the school population has dropped to three – two fewer than the minimum required by the Scottish school authority. If the school closes, as seems likely, the three remaining students face a long ferry ride to and from Skye. Worse, their parents will probably leave the island, driving one more stake into the heart of the island as it fights for survival.

The solution, Ronansay’s people decide, lies in attracting a family with at least two children. What the island can offer the family is an abandoned B&B and help in making a livelihood on an island that is quite beautiful and attracts a fair number of tourists. So they run an ad in the British papers.

To Abby Wallace, a mother of two small children, living in noisy, crime-ridden East London, the ad’s prospect of a Better Life for her and her children seems irresistible. The catch: Abby’s husband abandoned her and her children years before. The ad says Ronansay is looking for a married couple with children, and Abby is a single Mom. But living down the corridor in the tenement is Kenny, a buddy of Abby’s – nothing more – whose ambition, to the extent he has any, is to be a rock star. Kenny will never make it, because he doesn’t have the talent, but he is a close enough pal (who loves to tell Abby’s children outrageous bedtime stories) so that Abby asks him to join her in answering the ad (and sending a staged photo of “the family”).

What happens if Ronansay chooses them from all the applicants? We can sort that out later, says Abby, implying that once the children are installed in the school, Kenny can safely return to London and his gigs.

The starting premise is obviously promising, and before long we meet and come to know the characters that make life on Ronansay miniseries-worthy. But it is the development of the character Kenny that makes this series so worth watching. Writer Timothy Prager (who wrote 21 out of the 22 episodes) transforms Kenny the born loser, with his freaky face and crucifix earring, into Kenny the magnetic centerpiece of the drama. Kenny, played to perfection by Paul Kaye, is forever wondering what his purpose in life is, and we wonder too, while we become captivated by his essential goodness. To tell you more would be unforgivable.

The series played in the U.K from 2001 through 2003, and it won its share of critical praise and awards. Its failure (so far) to find an American outlet may have something to do with those Scottish accents, though captions are available. (Monarch of the Glen was also filmed in Scotland, but most of its principal actors spoke BBC English.)

You could write a book about the cultural differences that assign most British miniseries to PBS, while commercial TV gives us The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives. De gustibus, non est disputandum.


P.S. You can buy Region 2 DVDs of this series from dealers in the UK, and you can play these on “multi-region” DVD players. (Ask at the store.)

Talk is Cheap

Before television (BT), you had to have talent to command the public’s attention. And you had to work for years to develop that talent. Comedians like Jack Benny, George Burns, and Bob Hope, singers like Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, and Jimmy Durante, dancers like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Eleanor Powell had to spend a long apprenticeship practicing their craft, sharpening their timing, learning how to play to an audience.

Then came television, and a new kind of “talent” appeared: For want of a better word, we’ll call it personality. People with no discernible talent in the traditional sense sought to make it by talking to an audience. In the earliest days of television, when the networks were desperate for something to fill time, there was a late-night show called “Broadway Open House,” with a comedian, sort of, named Jerry Lester. Steve Allen (who actually had talent), Dave Garroway, and Jack Paar followed, building a following, not by singing or dancing or playing an instrument, but by talking. Arthur Godfrey was cut from the same cloth, and of course Ed Sullivan was the embodiment of the no-talent star. He had less talent than your third-grade teacher or your plumber, but he became a sensation simply by attracting and introducing talented people like the Beatles.

Years before television, a talker named Will Rogers was immensely popular for his humor and, yes, personality. Rogers had a talent – rope-twirling – but that was beside the point, and he was the first to prove that one could parlay wit and political commentary into national fame and fortune. But Rogers was a one-off phenomenon in the BT era. All the others needed to be able to do something to achieve stardom.

Johnny Carson occupies a special category: the talented comedian who channels that talent into a late-night variety show, in which a singer or comedian or pianist performs, then sits and banters with the host. No one could do that like Carson.

Another special category is reserved for Oprah Winfrey. I shouldn’t even comment on Oprah, since hers is not a prime-time program, and since I haven’t watched her enough to comment intelligently. But if she has any performing talent I’m unaware of it. She obviously connects with her audience, as Arthur Godfrey connected with his audience.

That brings us to Jay Leno and David Letterman, each of whom has a skosh more talent than Ed Sullivan but not enough for you to notice. NBC has just moved Leno to the 10 PM slot to revolutionize evening television, they say, but in fact to save money. Talk is cheap. A talker like Leno costs a fraction of the money it takes to produce a drama, with all those actors, writers, cameramen, special effects, etc. No one really expects viewers’ habits to change much, except that more people may decide to see what’s on PBS or the cable channels at 10 o’clock. More likely, they’ll log onto the internet.

Letterman, once he finishes his opening monologue (that others write for him) is no Will Rogers. He is not even a Jack Paar and he is not remotely a Johnny Carson. He is in the news today for his admitted dalliance with female subordinates, but whatever credit he claimed for “fessing up” was wiped out when he used his embarrassment as the basis of a one-liner. No talent, no class.

But the fade-out of late-night talk was bound to happen, just as the decline of newspapers and magazines had to happen. A digital earthquake has hit the media world, and the aftershocks keep coming. I keep getting magazines even though my subscriptions expired long ago, and the publishers try to lure me back with $10 “special” subscription rates. I don’t bite.

When Leno and Letterman are gone (which, happily, may be soon), it would be nice if television rediscovered the value of talent. The kind of talent you used to see on The Bell Telephone Hour, Your Show of Shows, The Jackie Gleason Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. A show like any of those would cost money, but I’ll bet it would wipe out the prime-time competition. If I’m wrong – if most people would rather watch Jay Leno or “Reality TV” or American Idol, then our collective taste has sunk so far that it is beyond salvation.

September Song

The summer is almost gone now. The sun's arc is a little lower, and a few formations of geese are winging south, ahead of the crowd. The beach isn’t as crowded, possibly because the temperature has been in the 60s lately. But the cool weather heralds what are in fact the most beautiful months of all in Maine, glorious September and October, when the sky is a bright, clear blue, and reds and yellows light up the maples and the birches. Tonight the weatherman is talking about frost warnings; the gardening season is short in Maine.

“Oh it’s a long, long while
From May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September”

So wrote Maxwell Anderson in 1938, for a Kurt Weill melody. The song has been recorded by dozens of pop singers, from Frank Sinatra to Jimmy Durante, usually as a lament sung in the twilight of one’s life. I am old enough to appreciate the metaphor, but I am also hopeful enough to look forward to another spring.

Soon most of the people who live on the Point will pack up and head for lower latitudes. I used to look upon that as a sign of frailty; now I see that it’s a sign of sanity. So eventually I will join the snowbirds, but first there is that beautiful New England autumn to savor. The days may be dwindling down, but they are indeed precious.

The Passion Play

Today is Jill’s birthday, and one cannot let the day pass without notice.

I first met the girl who would become my wife in 1953. We met in a passion play, a fact that usually produced gales of laughter in the years that followed. The priest who wrote it (with help from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) was a born impresario, who hired a professional director and staged it in downtown Boston. The play, called The Christus, had a cast of 125, which offered a part to virtually anyone who could breathe. Fresh out of the Army, I played the title role, and Jill was a member of the mob, credited as Julia in the program. Years later, Jill and I would howl as we recalled the fractured ad libs from that mob – things like “If He is the Son of God, why don’t He come down from the cross?”

There were bacchanalian scenes with Herod (with Ketelbey’s “In a Persian Market” setting the mood), a nativity scene (the infant Jesus was the winner of a widely publicized contest run by the impresario to promote the play), and a climactic ascension scene, with the Christus hoisted by cables to the sky as the curtain fell (the scene was played behind a scrim to obscure the cables).

About two months of rehearsals were needed to pull this epic together, and during that period I was careful to avoid any conduct unbecoming a Deity. In other words, no dating. But with the show behind us, we all gathered in the church hall for a mammoth cast party. I decided to ask the best-looking girl there to dance, and it was the best idea I ever had.

We were married on February 22, 1955. It was a good year, as all the Eisenhower years were, and we cheerfully began married life in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment. A year later we bought our first house, a tidy Cape Cod south of Boston. We moved north of Boston a few years later, and in 1965 we (now a family of five) settled into a big, 100-year-old converted schoolhouse in the center of historic Concord. That was our home for the next 30 years. Then, with retirement, a final move to the coast of Maine, where we had summered since 1968.

The last dozen years were probably the best of all, with nothing to do but watch the tides come and go, the seasons change, and our grandchildren grow. And consider how far we traveled since that anonymous member of the cast shouted, “Why don’t He come down from the cross?”

Random Thoughts on August

The weather has improved lately, which the weather gods owed us after a miserable winter, spring, and July. When I say “improved,” that should be qualified. The temperature has topped out in the 70s on most days, though they say it will reach the 80s tomorrow. So you can’t call it a heat wave, but the vacationers are flocking to the beach before the window closes and the weather gets wretched again. Yesterday was sunny and crisp, a beauty, and today started out well, but there is now a dark grey sheet from horizon to horizon. More rain is coming, they say.

A local fence company has just installed a cedar post and rail fence along the south side of my lot. This replaces one that had seen better days. One problem was rot, the other was the sightseers who drive down my dead-end street, then use my driveway as a turnaround, occasionally clonking the end post. The clonker, a few weeks ago, was a Mercedes with New York plates, and the driver, after destroying the post, attempted to sneak off, but a neighbor hailed the miscreant. A sort of justice was thus served.

The new fence, a new upper deck made of composition material (no painting!), and a refurbished lower deck have smartened up the place considerably. Jill just missed it, more’s the pity, but I know she would have approved. And there’s plenty still to be done, especially to the grounds, which were Jill’s particular obsession. I am whatever the opposite of a green thumb is called (a black thumb?), so I will hire the work done.

Although I scan the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal every day, I depended on Jill to fill in the blanks, to keep me posted on the gossip she picked up on cable while I watched a movie, read a book, or listened to music. So now I am missing the wifely commentary that added spice to the daily news. She had strong opinions on politics, but she was also very smart, and her strong opinions were always worth listening to.

We are already well into August, and I have mixed feelings about that. It is always sad to see our short summer slipping away so swiftly, but this has been a rotten year, all things considered, and I will not be sad to see the end of it. As the months fly by, I know that by January I must escape this wintry Siberia to preserve my sanity. Someplace where it never snows, the only ice is in your drink, and the weather reports are always boring.

The Health -Care Debate

Give President Obama credit. In tackling health-care reform, he is opening a can of worms that he doesn’t need. With Afghanistan going badly, with the economy on life support, with political sniping from all sides, why stir up the health-care hornets’ nest?

On the other hand, maybe his crusade isn’t as courageous as it seems. Although he claims that we can pay for reform mostly by eliminating waste, he refuses to touch one of the biggest waste-makers of all: defensive medicine undertaken to avoid lawsuits. This deference to the power of the lawyers’ lobby can’t be explained by anything other than political expediency. It smells bad.

The waste argument is flimsy on other counts. It is said that the insurance system creates an incentive for needless tests, and that is undoubtedly true - in hindsight. But if you have a medical problem and the doctor prescribes four tests, and two are said to be unnecessary, how does the doctor know – in advance – which two are valid? By studying outcomes, they say. So your doctor suggests four tests, runs them by a computer, and tells you that you qualify for only two of them. There. You feel a whole lot better, don’t you?

A modern jetliner has two sets of avionics. One set is almost never used. Yet we pay for the redundancy – the inefficiency – because human lives are at stake. So it is with the health-care system. You want it to be efficient, but if it’s your life we’re talking about, you want all the tests your doctor thinks you need. Period.

The health-care debate boils down to a couple of issues. First, most people in the U.S. are satisfied with the health care they receive. They are being asked to pay for the addition of 30 or 40 million people to a government-run insurance system. Because we are a generous nation, we think it’s a good idea – if the quality of our own health care doesn’t suffer in the process. There’s the rub. The idea that my primary-care physician can increase his patient load by 15 percent by working more efficiently is nonsense. He already works hard and makes full use of his computer. And we can’t magically increase the number of medical professionals by 15 percent. The math is inescapable: Universal health care will mean longer waits to see one’s doctor. Maybe we are willing to tolerate the inconvenience in order to do the right thing. Maybe we’re not. No one is raising the question.

The strongest case for health reform is the financial case. Medicare and Medicaid are in big trouble, and something must be done. Delaying retirement till 67 or 68 makes sense, given increasing longevity (itself an argument for the quality of our health care). Reducing the incidence of malpractice suits makes sense, too. And yes, there is some waste, though almost certainly not as much as the President claims. The financial argument is bulletproof, but it applies only to Medicare and Medicaid. There is no financial case for universal health care, only the moral case. And that, given the state of today’s economy, is a hard sell. So the President is trying to package it as a financial imperative, and that’s disingenuous or dishonest, depending on your politics

The Rain in Maine

The rain started in early June and stopped a few days ago. At least that’s how it seems. And it has been much colder than normal, with temperatures touching 80 only a few times, even though we’re through most of July. The water table is high, and the Saco River looks like the Mississippi. The sump pumps are working overtime to keep cellars dry, and for some cellars it’s a losing battle.

Maine’s economy depends – far too much, I fear - on tourism, and the tourists don’t like rain. A smarter state would work hard to attract manufacturing, but Maine people are ambivalent about manufacturing, especially when it means big plants owned by big companies. We are all for small business, so that’s the only kind we have. We have thousands of small businesses catering to tourists. If a big company threatens to build a plant that might employ two or three thousand workers, there will be a referendum, a mighty battle between good and evil. A greedy out-of-state company presumes to come into our beloved state and upset all that we hold dear. Yes, there will be jobs, but there will also be more traffic, more crime, and the first thing you know we will be on the road to – I say, on the road to depravation. Our River City is Augusta.

That’s the way it is in Maine, which is almost defiantly proud of its poverty. The politicians will tell you that we are disadvantaged by geography, being at the end of the distribution chain. That might have been true a century ago, but in the age of the internet, no one is at the end because there is no end. No, Maine’s economic distress is self-inflicted. We have high taxes, a business-unfriendly legislature, and an apathetic electorate. Our brightest graduates emigrate because they are bright enough to know the score.

The people up north, in “the County” (Aroostook) know the score, too, but there aren’t enough of them. So their attempts to develop some of their abundant land are stymied by the passionate preservationists in Portland, who may never visit the north woods but say they want to save them “for our children and grandchildren.” But their children and grandchildren will be living in Austin or Atlanta, because there weren’t enough good jobs in Maine.

Maine is a beautiful state, and I am very happy to live here (except in winter). And I would not like our coastline to resemble the stretch around Fort Lauderdale or Miami. So I tip my hat to past preservationists who kept growth rational. But things are tough right now, and it is time to put out the welcome mat. Small business is nice, but big business – the kind that can hire people by the thousands – is better. The only kind of small business worth having is one that aspires to be a big business. What would Maine be like today if Bob Noyce or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates had decided to pitch his tent in Portland? It would be different, and to many Mainers it would be worse. But they are wrong. It would be better, with or without all that rain.

A Letter

Dear Jill,

I know that you never had any use for e-mail, because you thought that only paper and ink constituted a real letter (and you wrote at least one letter a day to someone or other, it seemed), but I don’t know the zip code for Heaven, so I’ll have to communicate through cyberspace.

The weather at the beach has been abominable – a soggy summer following a dreary spring following a beastly winter. They say that in June we had a period in which it rained 23 out of 27 days, but I don’t remember even four rainless days. On the fourth of July, a Saturday, the beach population was the smallest I’ve ever seen on that holiday. The merchants are ready to commit mass suicide.

Our children and their children have been here every weekend. One weekend there were nine of them, which is one more than the place sleeps, but we managed. And they leave the house in immaculate condition, because you taught them the importance of keeping the guest rooms tidy, since they are the first thing a visitor sees, the “windows on the house” you called them.

That’s not all you taught them. As a matter of fact, you taught us all the entire book of virtues. You left us a moral compass, and whenever we come across a dilemma, we know a simple way forward: WWJD. What would Jill do?

Cathy still comes every month to give the house a top-to-bottom cleaning. The new upper deck is complete, the lower decks have been painted, a new post-and-rail fence has been ordered, the gardens have been weeded. You’d be proud.

Food. Well, I still can’t cook at all, but I am not starving. The neighbors have been kind (what’s that line about “depending on the kindness of strangers”?), the TV dinners aren’t bad, and once in a while I rustle up franks and beans or spaghetti. The freezer has been emptied of all the old food and defrosted. I really don’t need a freezer, any more than I need the new car I bought while you were in the hospital. That was to have been your car, but now this house has more cars than people. In fact, it has more of everything than people, and if this were the Russia of Dr. Zhivago, some commissar would force me to share the space with the masses.

I went with Lucy and her gang to see a play at the Grange Hall the other night. It was essentially a solo performance, based on the music of Patsy Cline, and it was excellent. You’d have loved it, because the lead’s voice was good and the notes were all true.

You still get a lot of mail. Magazines like Real Simple, solicitations from politicians, surveys (which are really solicitations), catalogs, etc. In fact, you get more mail than I do, which is pretty funny when you think about it. I throw most of it in the trash unopened.

Your desk and sewing machine and all those bobbins and spools and yarn are as they were when you left. They will probably stay that way for a long time. The same goes for your pictures on the walls and the knick-knacks on the shelves and all those crossword-puzzle books. I don’t dare touch any of it, because I know you are watching.

The days pass quickly – and silently, when I am alone. I talk to you often, out of habit and because, well, just because.

It’s time to turn in now. I think of you all the time, and I wish you were here.

Fred

Franks and Beans Frederick

Here’s a great recipe for all you food fans. You might think I don’t know much about cooking, seeing as I’ve been at it for only a few weeks, but I have always been a quick study. Anyhow, the results are what count, and this is really a meal fit for a king.

Here’s what you do: First, get a pot and put it on the stove. I use a small green pot with a black inside. Then you open a can of baked beans. I use the smallest size can, since I want only one serving, and if I opened a large can the unused beans would be a problem. I use Bush beans, because I like the design on the can.

Then you take two Kayem frankfurters out of a package you’ll find in the freezer. The package will have six or eight frankfurters in it, and if it’s been in the freezer a while, you may find that they’re all stuck together. If a knife won’t pry them apart, I find that a chisel and hammer work fine.

Find a small frying pan and put it on the stove. Then put a piece of butter in the pan so that it will melt when it heats. Then put two frankfurters in the pan. As you see, this is a fairly simple recipe, which I personally prefer.

The next part is slightly tricky. You want the frankfurters and the beans to be ready at about the same time, but the beans will cook faster than the frankfurters, which are frozen. So you turn the burner under the frankfurters to LOW, and wait 10 minutes before turning the beans on to, oh, 4 or 5.

I almost forgot the brown bread. If you have two pieces of brown bread in the fridge, put them in the microwave for about 30 seconds. Mine were wrapped in tinfoil, which MUST be removed before you put the brown bread in the microwave.

After another 5 or 10 minutes, you will have a delicious dinner. Garnish to taste, with ketchup, mustard, and relish. A good cabernet sauvignon will complement this entrée nicely.

Bon appetit!

The Music of My Life

If there is anyone out there who has been reading these posts for the past few years, he or she knows that my wife was an exceptional person. You have read about the way she befriended a Russian youngster on the streets of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), how she shrugged off being attacked and bitten by a 700-pound sea lion in Argentina, how she concocted the most delicious crab bisque known to man (this man, anyway). But what you don’t know about was her musical talent, because that’s not the kind of thing that translates well into a blog. Well, let me now try.

Jill had an unworldly knack of picking out the right notes and the right chords for anything that anyone could hum. She read music, of course, but at a family get-together she never needed to. She would just sit at the piano (after being coaxed, usually) and noodle around songs like “Crazy,” “Edelweiss,” “A Small World After All,” seamlessly segueing from one to the next. The arrangements were her own, with flights of fanciful fingerwork that defy description. And that touch! Her fingers didn’t maul the keys, they strummed them.

She had perfect pitch, verified by an audio engineer long ago, and, more impressively, a unerring knowledge of chord structure that left me (a klutzy piano player) speechless. “How did you know,” I would ask her, “that an E seventh chord belonged there?”

“I don’t know,” she would answer, “it just had an E seventhness about it.”

If it all sounds ad lib, it wasn’t. Underneath it all was a solid musical foundation that enabled her to direct college productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, arrange music for the Crocodillos, a Harvard singing group, and work with the Handel and Haydn Society. “She was the most talented person I ever knew,” says a classmate of hers through high school and college. But she kept that talent well hidden, because she saw her mission in life to be, not a musical whiz, but the best wife and mother possible. In this she succeeded brilliantly.

Jill died on May 24.