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Cultural Indifferences

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The wonderful thing about having a well-run auditorium in town is opportunities it provides. If you follow Paul Simon or were listening to pop music in the mid-1980s you know of his album Graceland, which introduced to the West the South African men’s chorus that was in Fayetteville last weekend. Its name can seem a mouthful: Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

  • Ladysmith — hometown of the Shabalala family, who comprise most of its nine members.
  • Black — the area’s favored farm oxen.
  • Mambazo — Zulu for ax, perhaps more in the metaphorical Christian sword sense. (Thanks, program notes.)
  • Dinkelspiel — a smaller auditorium at Stanford University — or one of the bigger lecture halls, depending on whether it’s night or day.

So help me, I kept thinking Dinkelspiel during Saturday’s performance of the extraordinary men’s ensemble. In the late 1970s jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins played at Dink. In a still-memorable moment of my college years, the microphone clipped to his sax went out. Mr. Rollins hesitated for the briefest moment then resumed the piece. He sounded great before but now, astounding. To be heard in the last row of the 700-seat hall, not to mention over his combo, he changed his breath support and his embouchure (how the lips and teeth hold the mouthpiece). It made me realize how artificial amplification is, even when allegedly live and otherwise acoustic. In a couple of minutes though Mr. Rollins’ mike got repatched, and the wall of sound was re-erected.

The Mambazo band is known for dancing during its songs. They had no accompaniment. It was a cappella all the way, not even a hand drum. So when they kick or squat, they move from the microphones on stands.

The group, with few staff changes, has been together for over 40 years. Their words fading in and out must be deliberate. Maybe the fellows were playing their microphones like instruments; pros do that.

We had balcony seats, and I do have hearing problems. I’d have them hooked into wireless lavalier or headset microphones. Recalling Mr. Rollins, though, you know Mambazo would be more incredible sans amplification. (Continued)

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Columnist Sympathizer

Thursday, February 18, 2010
Card-Carrying Columnist Card

Card-Carrying Columnist Card

A nice thing just happened. On Jan. 31, I was elected vice president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I’ve been a card-carrying columnist since 1991, joining during the run of my column Mirthology, in the old Arkansas Democrat. The post is interim, to cover after a resignation, until the annual membership meeting in July in Bloomington, Ind.

VP should be just another officer and not particularly noteworthy. First I was archivist from 2005-07, then elected secretary and last summer re-elected minutes-taker. It’s cool that it’s a national group, but also comfortable in not being too big, around 300 members in a given year.

But veep is not just another officer. According to the motion, I am “to be willing to be on the slate as a nominee for president at that meeting.”

That’s what I’m in for. And barring nominations from the floor — a qualified candidate could get my vote — I’ll be out front for 2010-12.

Here’s the thing. I am a former newspaper columnist. My last print-published column, Loose Leaves, was dropped when I was downsized from that newsroom, in fall 2001. I’ve repeatedly made the fact known to board and lay members alike. For several years, different people have suggested I make myself available to the nominating committee, but I’ve insisted the NSNC president has to be a columnist. It’d be like the Bar Association run by a subpoena server, the Teamsters headed by a CPA, the American Veterinary Medical Association led by a Shih Tzu.

Times are changing. (Continued)

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Man and Superboy

Monday, February 8, 2010

Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock

Seeing the backstage drama Crazy Heart down at the Malco on its opening weekend here in Northwest Arkansas gave me lots to think about, being a good movie.

It’d be fine to wait for a home viewing, but leisurely, panoramic views of New Mexico increase the worth of a cineplex screen (Houston’s skyline? Big deal).

The featured country & Western music was more Western than country. The plot though overrides that. It’s the old “star performer on the way down may be redeemed by the love of a good woman.” Last year’s middle-aged male star vehicle The Wrestler was another verse of the song. Both beg the question of what the female lead, who’s always much younger and beautiful, ever sees in these guys — in both flicks we should be grateful technology is not pursuing Smell-O-Vision.

There’s a certain reality to this hoary fictional device: artists who hit success early tend to coast later on. Perhaps it’s laziness, or burnout, or that their audience demands more of the same. It may not be alcoholism or other addictions.

Insight: If you’re coasting, you’re by definition coasting downhill.

The protagonists of both these movies recognize and love good women, whatever role groupies play. This brought to mind a recent column of Little Rock colleague Gene Lyons, writing in Salon.com about Tiger Woods, a golfer at the peak of his games. Gene writes, “At the expense of repeating myself, I first formulated Eugene’s First Law of Sexual Dynamics covering a pro bass fishing tournament in Tennessee:

‘If there’s something one man can do better than another, there’s a woman who’ll sleep with him for it.’”

Part of Gene’s argument is where there’s consent there’s often complicity. But not always. That makes not just for attractive fiction (for artists) but career-costing facts (for other public figures).

There’s more to solid movies than relationships. Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart uses the greatest subtlety to show how his character Bad Blake inflated into his on-stage confident self. As does Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. That made me think of Myrna Loy. (Continued)

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iStumblebum

Sunday, January 17, 2010

I miss smoking.

Yes, quit pipes and the occasional cigarette or cigar 22 years ago. Don’t mean miss my own smoking. I do miss how smoking helped the dexterity of nearly everyone — that is, people who smoked, which was nearly everyone.

That was not obvious until a few weeks ago. My office moved from little Lowell to working-class Springdale. The 14-mile, one-way commute became 11. It’s two exits closer on the interstate from the Shady Hill manse. But instead of 16-20 minutes’ drive, it’s 20-30, due to more stop-and-go distance to reach the new newsroom.

More time on city streets provides lots of defensive-driving workouts as well as seeing clearly what motorists are doing to cause speeding up and slowing down for no apparent reason, with the occasional crossing of a lane stripe. They’re on their phones.

If only these people smoked, they’d competently drive while fidgeting, often in the form of trying not to burn their fingers or mouths. The nicotine habit would be good practice for the chatting and texting masses.

In the Mad Men days when nearly everyone smoked, it took a knack while steering to pull a cigarette from a pack, tap one end flat, light the other and so on. If you were talking with a passenger and also tuning in a radio station, (Continued)

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Positive Positions Perhaps

Wednesday, January 6, 2010
“Think, men, think.” — Prof. Harold Hill, The Music Man

New Year’s Resolution No. 1 for 2010 is modest: Keep a book list. Then in a year there’ll be a better best books Brick.

One could say that if the books I read were memorable then I’d remember ‘em. It’s not as if I read that much, a couple of ink volumes a month at best, and about 1.5 recorded books a month heard while commuting. Quantity though measurable is relative. So this isn’t very many compared to either of my late parents, who read two or three novels or mysteries a week. All from the library, like me.

My Beloved prefers books on faith and spirituality — serious ones not glib pop — while I tend toward comic novels or Stephen King. It may mean I’m not deep anymore, but I’d rather claim that my mystical curiosity is on sabbatical because my set of live-by philosophies is working right now.

So when called upon to recall my favorite volumes of 2009 — and I’m the only one who’s asking — I recall King’s Duma Key (fun with great craftsmanship) and Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked for its wit and character development. Those were absorbed via audio; I read Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter because of good reviews. I’m hard on comic novels and this one did succeed but it still was on the frothy side. Hornby’s still the contemporary writer to beat on making a reader giggle and think.

Some nonfiction titles hit me so strongly that this roundup is really about them.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, is A micro look at Hurricane Katrina, featuring a paint contractor, residential but some commercial, and his family and friends. Its twist is that the fellow is Syrian so the post-Katrina Keystone Kops operation naturally takes him for al Qaida. Zeitoun brings home how the leadership high in Washington is interpreted and made gospel on the ground. Turns out the Bill of Rights can be a luxury when it should be obvious how it’s most needed in crisis. The founding fathers knew this (Franklin: “Those who sacrifice liberty for freedom deserve neither.”) Long-form journalism is tricky, but Eggers paddles smoothly between all obstacles. This book should be required reading in high school.

Mainly, though I want to shout out Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, read in the summer, and Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. (Continued)

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Wild Things in the Air

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Brick doesn’t usually have movie reviews. But it’s the turn of the year — not the decade as it actually ends Dec. 31, 2010 — and a couple are worth a shout. It’s far from a complete assessment, as I often wait to see movies on DVD. Also, this comes from Northwest Arkansas where so many of the movies we hear about won’t arrive until the Oscar nominations are announced, in early February. From the reviews, though, I  can’t wait for Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man.

Besides, there’s a need to even out the vitriol that Avatar caused me. It wormed under my skin like a Pandoran parasite.

What comes to mind are Up in the Air for grown-ups and the family-friendly Where the Wild Things Are. Neither show will be hurt by seeing on video when they’re released, but the big screen (Continued)

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Ptop Gun, or Savants Seal

Monday, January 4, 2010

Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock

Show me your hands. Good, they’re clean. Thumb check, everyone. Twitching and ready to turn up or down? Yes, it’s movie day.

I haven’t caught any stories that note James Cameron is the kind of director who sometimes drops into a shot a wink at a movie that inspired him or relates to that particular scene. The homages in his Avatar, though, were the first thing that caught my mind. My attention, not my mind, stayed arrested by the latest in fantasy visuals. But every day since I saw the epic, its memory grows sourer.

Avatar’s beginning, where hero Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) awakes and sums up his immediate circumstance, looks and sounds similar to Martin Sheen’s first morning in Apocalypse Now. Impressive, until one realizes that Cameron inverts the plot and theme of Coppola’s 1979 retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

You can see elements of many recent war, fantasy or ptrek movies in Avatar, and that’s one of the fun things about it. It’s either Cameron ptipping his hat in respect, or there’s only so many ways a militaristic fantasy like this can go. The show has Transformer like robots, and there’s several pties to PTop Gun, hence the ptitle of this Brick. Ptop Gun has jets, not running and flying horses. Avatar’s planet (or moon) Pandora has an assortment of ground-hugging creatures, furry or scaly, and the winged cold- and warm-blooded creatures have some pterodactyl in them. My Beloved saw links to Dances with Wolves and the Matrix movies. I do advise paying the $2 extra to see Avatar with 3D glasses; the spectacle is a mental and nearly a physical roller coaster.

Now that I’ve dismounted and my head has stopped spinning, I’m mad. (Continued)

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Box of Nickels

Friday, December 18, 2009

Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock

My relationship with money sometimes irritates people. It would be none of their business of course, except when it comes up in conversation. I’m one who avoids specifics, but I try to be supportive of stuff that people say casually. Yet every once in a while I bite my tongue when people talk about what things ought to be worth or how much their collectibles will bring, should they sell them.

History and literature are full of stories of people exchanging a gold ring or an unset diamond, sewn into a coat hem, just for a meal. We forget than when we’re desperate, the people around us are, too. The worth of an object is what people offer when you want to sell it. Price tags in stores is rather new, and Western.

We must have been in junior high when my neighbor Dana and I were talking about the relative value of things. At that time, the early 1970s, Radio Shack sold remainder cassettes. It’s where I bought jazz tapes, to teach myself what happened after Big Band, which is what Dad still played. I had read about John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, and found tapes of them there. (Dana liked Newhart and Cosby comedy LPs.) So the cassettes there on Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith were a couple of bucks and buying new ones at Elmore’s (locally owned) or Madcats (a mall chain), three times that easily.

What struck us is how for the price of lunch for both of us at Sandy’s (which became Hardee’s) you could buy cut-outs. With care, albums could last forever. The burgers, fries and shakes last until dinner time. I still don’t understand why a hot meal costs the same as a 44-minute tape, but one incident as an adult helped.

Some 15 years later, in about 1988, I decided to sell my dad’s coin collection. This was not the plastic-mounted set of a collector. We’re talking about a shoebox full of mainly buffalo nickels.

From the late 1940s to 1967 when bankruptcy was declared, my dad managed a dry cleaners owned by his big brother. After ‘67, Uncle Al retired, and Dad took a series of jobs including office manager, Realtor and income tax preparer. As part of the Model Laundry & Dry Cleaners of Fort Smith, Dad and Uncle Al owned two coin-operated washaterias. When Dad saw an interesting coin while emptying the machines he pocketed it and put in a newer one in its place. (Continued)

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Pillow Talk

Thursday, December 10, 2009

My memory foam pillow remembers everything. It sees too much.

Maybe my sleep has been less sound recently, and maybe it’s the pillow’s fault. That’s what I thought when I read an article on bed pillows filled with buckwheat hulls, instead of closed-cell foam, feathers and polyester fluff. Before the special foam pillow bought over two years ago, I came to prefer a “better” (Sears memorably used to sell similar items in good, better and best categories) polyester pillow, ideally bought every year for under $10. Inspired this week by The Wall Street Journal story, I’ve Googled up buckwheat pillows and placed an order online.

Disturbed sleep may not be the fault of the pillow but the stresses of the day. I can’t blame it on the bedroom, a healthy mix of Hers and His. Most of the wall decorations are hers. Still left are two of my singleton posters, Pier 1 (back when it was closer to Spenser Gifts than Crate & Barrel) reproductions of vague nudes by Matisse and Picasso. There’s one wedding photo (Continued)

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NAN Better

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

One more “A” and NAN would be tasty flatbread. As it is, it’s Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC, and the acronym was created, logo’d up, and announced by the new company. One suspects that was to delay unhappy people creating a snide abbreviation or nickname, as happened when the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was formed in 1991 (my name for it never caught on, Demzette).

NAN comprises the Northwest Arkansas edition of the Demzette along with the daily newspapers of Fayetteville, Bentonville, Springdale and Rogers. Dozens of colleagues — and I’ve been around enough years to know and appreciate many of them — have been laid off. It hurt to see them go. NAN still employs me, but that could change in the new year, or this afternoon. Blame the nation’s Good Depression that started a year or two ago.

When Ozarkers have had a chance to speak to me in the last month, they uniformly hate the merger, specifically the look of the four city papers. They’re not vague, not ambiguous.

Until I tell them what could’ve happened: The papers could have been shut down entirely. I alway hope that is a reminder, not news, but to a one, friends, acquaintances and people I do business with (doctor, barber etc.) do not connect the national newspaper crisis — with big city newspapers in bankruptcy, ending print editions or out-and-out closing — with home. Some don’t know about San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul and so on. Today: The New York Times Co. “expects its print advertising revenue to decline 25 percent in the fourth quarter.”

A quarter in a quarter is a bunch. (Continued)

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