Liberals like new experiences

I don't really have time to develop a proper post, but I watched Jonathan Heidt's Ted Talk about The Real Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives on my lunch break, and I think it's an interesting place to start a discussion about how democrats might alter their message to appeal to more of those moderate voters who are nervous about all this talk of change.

7 weeks or less

Sarah Palin's relationship to the Alaska GOP establishment and state government has precisely mirrored her relationship to the Wassila town government: take people's support on her way up, then discard them as soon as politically convenient to do so. Her lasting friendships were formed in high school: she has appointed numerous high school classmates to top positions in Alaska's government. But she has hung onto her resentments from that time as well, and it's not clear that she ever matured beyond high school. A consistent theme of her public life has been loyalty to nobody outside her immediate family, demands for fealty from those under her authority, and a fervent pursuit of vendettas. As mayor and later as governor, she fired everyone who crossed her.

Palin has always campaigned on a platform of clean government and ethics reform. She filed ethics complaints against those above her while she was on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She publicly scolded Ted Stevens for ethical violations when it became expedient to do so, after knowingly depending on those suddenly unethical tactics for years. Advocating for ethics is admirable, but it's clearly just a hunting blind for political attacks when her own ethics are so lacking. Long before the numerous lies she has been telling as a candidate for vice president, she was claiming per diem travel pay for hundreds of nights spent at home, doing something on her tax returns that she's now hiding, appointing utterly unqualified friends to overpaid government posts, and being so vicious in attacking her sister's ex-husband while child custody was being worked out that the judge described her actions as child abuse.

All of this suggests that Sarah Palin's exit from the 2008 presidential campaign, whether it is before or after Election Day in November, is likely to be spectacularly nasty. She has a long potential future in politics, while John McCain does not, so she doesn't need him any longer. Once she leaves the campaign, she will be casting blame in any direction but her own. Campaign managers put words in her mouth. The media was unfair. Bloggers were unfair. The campaign didn't listen to her ideas for campaign strategy. And John McCain lied to her or to the public, whether it was about the vetting process, his campaign positions, her campaign positions. We're already seeing the groundwork laid for a scorched earth exit, as Sarah Palin's husband drops new hints that the vetting process by the McCain campaign was incomplete and rushed. All we need to do is convince Sarah Palin that her political future will be brighter if she leaves before the election, citing ethical problems with the McCain campaign that she is unwilling to tolerate. If she believes that McCain will lose the election anyway, she will certainly get far more press by leaving early. Electus interruptus may not be a foolproof strategy, but it's been so much more fun than abstaining from the race to start with.

Rainbow at Stellwagen Bank

Photo by Michael

Primary Day next Tuesday

If you live in Carl Sciortino’s district and are voting on the Democratic ballot, the only name you’ll see on the ballot is Robert Trane. But you can still vote for Carl, who is a great state representative (and a really friendly, kind, and interested-in-the-world person). Just write in “Carl M. Sciortino, Jr., 17 Orchard St., Medford” in the next empty box and connect the arrow or fill in the bubble. See www.writeincarl.com for details.

I’ll be doing the same for the Register of Probate position for Middlesex County. Solves the problem of how to vote against John Buonomo. Carl for everything!

Our only other serious choice on the ballot is for Governor’s Council, which rubber-stamps reviews judicial and parole board nominations. I’m voting for Michael Callahan, because his opponent scares me.

This is how I choose to take note of 9/11. Please vote.

How the Huntington Lost the Audience

The Huntington’s first production under their new artistic director is a world premiere of How Shakespeare Won the West, by Richard Nelson. A group of actors decide to leave New York for California during the Gold Rush, having heard that the miners are desperate for entertainment and that they love plays, particularly Shakespeare. This sounds like a great premise, and the program contains some fun historical anecdotes about the popularity of Shakespeare in 19th-century America. After finding our seats and looking through the program, we settled in for the ride.

Well, traveling across the country in the 1840’s was wearying, stressful, and generally joyless. Just like the play!

The story, it turns out, is narrated by the entire company. Non-stop. I mean, they really won’t shut up. And the constant bouncing in and out of role does neither the actors nor the audience any favors. It feels like a Christmas pageant in which each child has been given Very Important Lines so that nobody feels left out.

—Look, now they’re telling the story of how they looked for a comic actor for their troupe.
—Oh, now they’re acting out a scene where they find the comic actor.
—Yeah, it’s a shame he’s not funny, but at least he’s not really trying to be funny, is he?

Of course, in a Christmas pageant, the kids are cute, loving family members are in the audience, and there’s an upbeat story. And, with any luck, there’s more than one song.

The fundamental problems with How Shakespeare Won the West lay squarely at the feet of the playwright. He spends far too long setting up the journey across America and not enough time on the journey. You can see the outline he first developed for the story because so much of it remains in outline form and the later pieces are hurried through. (Though I hesitate to suggest that the play should be longer, because I certainly wouldn’t want to see more of it.) The characters are labeled instead of developed, and there’s no relationship between most of the characters because they’re too busy talking to the audience to interact with each other. In fact, the only complex network of interactions happens during the 15 minutes of dumb show as the characters arrive on stage before the curtain.

There’s one powerful set piece where an Indian chief who does not speak English is deeply moved by a performance of King Lear. The distancing of the constant narration is finally overcome for a few moments, though the playwright steps on the emotional climax in a desperate attempt to segue to the next item on his outline.

By the time the characters arrive in California, they are broken, and so is the interest of the audience. The climax of the play felt like an epilogue, and even then the playwright tacked on a secondary ending that just made it all worse. There was no standout performance. I left with admiration for the settlers and prospectors and performers who sought their fortunes or sought new lives in the great American West, sympathy for the actors who worked so hard to accomplish so little, and a deep and abiding hope that I never have to sit through another Richard Nelson play.

Ask me for money

As an arts council, we have to decide on how much funding to give each project. There are theoretically many different ways we could do this. Even if just one person were making the funding decisions, do you try to spread your funding among as many projects as possible or focus on giving more support to better projects? Do you strictly rank all projects by various criteria, or just put them in buckets of good, better, best? If two similar projects ask for different amounts of money, do you give more money to the project that asked for more money (since they asked for more) or equal amounts (since they are similar projects) or more money to the project that asked for less money (since that project is more efficient or is more likely to happen)?

Each of us can individually make these decisions, but how do we make them as a council of 5 to 22 people? Do we each make our own allocations of the complete budget and then average those allocations? If a majority of the council agrees on a particular level of funding for a particular project, should they just vote to allocate that amount and then let us move on to the remaining projects and the remaining money? Should we assign $15,000 of the funding through an averaged allocation (the first approach), and then allow each council member to allocate $500 of funding? I like variations on this last idea because it makes it more meaningful that each individual person is on the council, and allows a project to be fully funded if a few council members feel strongly about supporting that particular project. On the other hand, the first approach allows a few council members who feel strongly that a particular project should not be funded to reduce the amount of funding that the project receives.

As a further complication, how do we deal with conflicts of interest, since one or two council members may not be allowed to vote on particular grants? And how do we ensure that we meet our guidelines of floors and caps on particular types of grants?

We need a process that is comprehensible, easy to implement, doesn’t require endless rounds of voting, and keeps each council member feeling that their voice matters in the process. Opinions are very welcome.

Rose mallow in our garden

Photo by Michael

A time of renewal

The arts council is changing. Our chair resigned in the spring, and our current treasurer and chair (one person) is leaving before the end of the year. Three new members have just joined the council this summer, so along with the three of us who joined last fall there is little continuity. And in the next two weeks we will rethink our funding priorities and procedures, taking into account this summer’s survey results.

Far more people mailed back the survey than completed it online, and we ended up with around 100 completed surveys. We can pass this along to other councils as a positive example, since gathering community input can be difficult. And once we’ve collated and analyzed the results, we’ll have some good information about our community’s priorities and interests.

What we then need is a sense of ourselves: who are we as council members, what are our individual and collective strengths and weaknesses, who should we call on to handle particular tasks, and who would it be helpful to recruit to join us? Do we need someone who has experience in the outside grants world, or with local or state politics, or with the school system, or with PR and marketing? Or do we already have those bases covered? In a way we need to do a collective self-interview, and that may be more difficult than interviewing our community.

Olympics

Tivo recorded about 180 hours of Olympics for us, sometimes more than 20 hours in a day. We’re almost done watching the recordings, four days after the closing ceremonies, and we were certainly able to see more Olympics this way than we ever have in the past. I used to hate watching non-live sporting events, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it. It was sometimes frustrating to know the results ahead of time, since I don’t have a Firefox extension that can redact the sports results from news pages.

NBC didn’t do as many sob story retrospectives this year, showing how every athlete has overcome horrendous personal tragedies. That was really the only improvement this year. NBC still skips blocks of points in the middle of matches, provides nonstop repetitive chatter, rarely explains fine points of the rules or scoring, and complains about the judging whenever possible. Watching online would be a far better choice if only the frame rate weren’t so poor (and the screen so small), because then you can watch entire matches without the commentators, check the rules and scoring guidelines, and not wear the print entirely off the Tivo remote’s skip forward button while trying to bypass 8760 commercials and 17 hours of gymnasts sitting around waiting for their scores to be posted. Oh, and maybe see more than 10 minutes of badminton.

If we had the Tivo connected to broadband, there may have been some better ways to record individual sports rather than 4-hour to 8-hour mixed blocks. But when you do have to record a huge block of time as an individual program, Tivo really needs a way to let you delete part of a program. Even a limited functionality of that would be tremendously helpful.

Despite those frustrations, there were many amazing events to watch. Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt are tremendously fast, but there were some swimming finals where almost the entire field was ahead of world record time for much of the race. The Cuban women’s indoor volleyball team dominated their first match against the US, playing at a very high level. The new gymnastics scoring had gymnasts trying more difficult and impressive routines, which bodes well for the progression of the sport in the future. And I’m always blown away by the diving.

I can has royaltiez?

Oxford University Press has published a new book by David Crystal on the language of text messaging, cleverly titled Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. The executive summary: Chill, white-haired dudes! Language isn’t being weirded too much.

Aphrodite frittilary

Photos by Michael

Sweet, sweet eucalyptus

A Reuters article about DEET smelling bad to mosquitoes (and the more DEET the better as a repellent) also mentioned that the key neurons in their antennae

also reacted, even more strongly, to compounds known as terpenoids, which help make up the distinctive aromas of eucalyptus, cloves, menthol and camphor.

Time to adjust our garden plans.

Tubes

Photo by Michael

Curves in architecture

What would you do with 50 kilometers of white polypropylene string?



Closer to home, John Kostick created the ultimate pergola.



Our house is mostly straight lines. But perhaps in the back yard we could someday afford a non-rectilinear shed, also built by John Kostick:

For my father

Falling,
falling,
falling.

We fall into place, fall into line,
fall asleep, fall apart. And sometimes,
we just fall.

Nightmares have always been a part of my life,
like migraines or heartache or any other life-defining trait
that nobody else can see. The self,
alone,
falling.

We lift our spirits, lift our gaze,
lift our burdens, and set them down again.
We create the lives we want, and wonder whether
these are the lives we want, and wonder when
we will fall.

Vertigo too, invisible, inevitable. Always
falling. I seek the edge, prove the nightmares
wrong, prove the vertigo
wrong, prove the edge
wrong.

Offset words and offset lines,
parallels upon parallels.
Words line up,
and scream,
and fall silent.
The book unread, the story untold.

The story untold is not truth.
Neither is the story fully told.
Truth falls between the extremes,
slipping into consciousness
and into nightmares
and still we are falling.
The truth is falling.
The sky is falling.
The world is falling.