Dave Shiflett: News

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Dolley Madison really was a cupcake.
She also was crucial in second husband James Madison’s political success, brought style and decorum to the festering mud hole of Washington, D.C. and created the role of First Lady, according to “Dolley Madison,” which airs on PBS March 1 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Eve Best plays Madison -- a raven-haired, red-cheeked babe with a soft southern accent and a dramatically heaving bosom. Yet she’s no whining southern belle and could easily deck Scarlett O’Hara while sipping a cup of tea.
Her family moved from Virginia to Philadelphia in the 1780s after her father, in accordance with his Quaker religion, freed his slaves. His new life was disastrous, including what appeared to be shady business dealings and struggles with alcohol.
Dolley’s first marriage was similarly cursed: Her husband and youngest child died in the city’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic, leaving her with one son, Payne, whose profligacy would plague her throughout her life and even after her death.
The immensely enjoyable 90-minute docudrama also stars Jefferson Mays as James Madison, who was shy, sickly, short and allegedly fond of dirty jokes. He was 17 years Dolley’s senior, and when they married she was apparently some time in feeling the earth move, signing a wedding day letter “Now Mrs. Madison, alas.”
Yet a panel of authors and historians, including Cokie Roberts, Richard Norton Smith and Catherine Allgor makes clear she and Madison developed a deep and abiding love, though one that was challenged from without and within.
When the Madisons arrived in Washington the town was swampy bog. Cokie Roberts, looking eternally 50ish, says a mosquito infested creek that ran along the main street had been grandly named “The Tiber” and Congress often resembled the Roman senate in total upheaval. Canings and dueling were common.
Dolley, whose desire to placate may have been the result of living in an alcoholic home, opened up the executive mansion for weekly parties called “squeezes” where opposing politicians sipped port and wagged relatively civil tongues.
She sent plenty of tongues wagging with her fondness for bright clothes and large feathered bonnets. Then there was that heaving bosom. Newspapers and political opponents accused her of being “overly” sexed and romantically involved with a phalanx of congressmen.
She could care less, saying of one diatribe: “It was as good as a play.”
The film credits her as being the “first” First Lady. Besides her high profile parties and behind the scenes politicking she was the first presidential wife to embrace a charitable cause – an orphanage to which she donated money and a cow. She also played a major role in keeping Washington the capital after the British burned it during the War of 1812. While a growing congressional consensus wanted to move the capital to Philadelphia she set out on a lobbying crusade, largely conducted at dinner parties, that helped turn the tide.
The film also focuses on her long, losing battle with Payne, a heavy drinker and gambler whose sole expertise was draining the family’s accounts.
Though the retired president and first lady owned a vast Virginia estate complete with 100 slaves, all that would slowly disappear, with Payne siphoning off a good portion. After Madison’s death Dolley was forced to sell all the property, including the slaves.
In a heart-rending scene, a slave begs Dolley to sell the slaves to neighbors so families would not be ripped apart. “Think my dear mistress what our sorrow must be.” She fell into abject poverty; one former slave, who had bought his freedom felt obliged to bring her food when he visited to keep her from starving.
Her final years were better, though bittersweet. Congress bought some of her husband’s papers which gave her some cash, and she moved back to Washington in the 1840s.
She died in 1849 at age 81 and was celebrated with a massive public funeral. Yet her wishes to be buried beside her husband could not be met for ten years, thanks to Payne, whose debts continued draining the estate. He died two years after his mother.
While not as well known as Abigail Adams or Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison was a remarkable woman – another historic figure worth a mini-series.

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By Dave Shiflett
Many television shows aspire to path-breaking status, but “La-La Land,” which has been airing on Showtime since late January, has actually delivered.
This has been one of the dumbest shows ever. If you haven’t tuned in, the last chance is Feb. 28 at 11 p.m. New York time. Shows like this don’t come along all that often. The finale may be worth a look if only for historic purposes.
Marc Wootton, the comic sensation from the UK, stars as three characters trying to make it in Los Angeles. It’s billed as a cross between a comedy and documentary; Wootton’s characters interacted with people who are allegedly “completely real and utterly unaware they are talking to an actor.”
That’s been a bit hard to believe. After all, Wootton, in his several guises, has always been shadowed by a camera crew. In any event, the “real people” have been at least as funny as the star and supposedly haven’t been reading from a script.
The three alter-egos are Gary Garner, an annoying actor on the make; Shirley Ghostman, an annoying psychic on the make; and Brendan Allen, a profoundly stupid wannabe documentary filmmaker whose jokes are every bit as lame as Gary’s and Shirley’s. If there’s genius at work here, it’s that Wootton created three characters who are impossible to like.
Gary, who favors a lime green shirt and sports a greasy porcupine haircut, does have the virtue of being a loyal son to his departed mother, a porn star who never made it to Tinseltown, at least under her own steam. He brought her ashes along to scatter, though his inane banter makes you wish someone would torch him.
Shirley is a prissy moron who dresses like Captain Kangaroo and whose funniest gag is belching, while Brendan is a thoroughgoing dope. All three characters are the equivalent of a bad leper joke.
On a positive note, the show has had one discrete charm: It is so dumb you might find yourself tuning back in to see if it could get any dumber.
The final episode includes segments that rival the preceding slop, which included a scene in which Shirley fell into a trance in a private investigator’s office and wet himself. At the time, I found myself wishing the PI would drive a stake through his heart. Then there was Brendan’s trip to Malibu State Park where he hoped to film a pre-mediated rock-climbing disaster. The worst part of that episode was that Bigfoot didn’t come out of the forest and eat him.
The closer includes an exorcism involving the spirits of Colonel Saunders and Princess Diana. All told, it confirms the suspicion that just when you thought inanity has reached its peak, another summit rises in the distance.
The series was less like entertainment and more like water-boarding. To end on a positive note, Sunday night’s episode may be far from grand, but it is the finale.

By Dave Shiflett

Elvis wasn’t nothing but a horndog.
That’s the word from country music journalist Alanna Nash, who has produced a blow-by-blow and sometimes lurid account of the King’s sex life (“Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him” (!T – Harper Collins, 704 pages, $27.99). Another book, by Presley friend and subaltern George Klein ( “Elvis, My Best Man; Radio Days, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nights, and My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley;” Crown, 320 pages, $25), makes something of the same point, though in a vastly more understated way.
Elvis, who would have been 75 last week, was blessed with golden pipes – though Nash is primarily interested in the one south of his beltline. It seems no thrust or parry goes unrecorded in this massive book, based in part on interviews with former flames – all of whom, if laid end to end, would likely have circled Vegas a few dozen times.
Nash, hailed as the first journalist to see Elvis in his casket and who has also written about Jessica Savitch, Dolly Parton, Col. Tom Parker and other luminaries, provides enough detail to gag all but the most intense fans, including an anatomical description of the king’s mighty staff, its given name (Little Elvis) and accounts of early arousals and latter peccadilloes, including a fondness for 14-year-old girls and lesbian sex, including simulated versions featuring his young wife Priscilla, whose legendary status as a virgin bride is also given intense scrutiny. We even learn that inanimate objects could get Elvis’s motor running: he would sometimes become aroused, Nash informs us, “when his pants rubbed him just so” (90 ).
There are no doubt readers, and perhaps lots of them, who will pant while absorbing this information. For those who wonder if reading Nash’s book represents a prolonged act of voyeurism, she argues that Elvis’s famed pelvis was a culture-shaking machine and that he was “the most important star of all time.” (74).
Yet the book can be numbing – the flames’ names change but the game remains the same – though thankfully Nash comes up for air from time to time to revisit Elvis’s tough upbringing and some of the interesting people he met along the way, including his rapacious manager, Col. Tom Parker, a Dutchman without a passport or excessive scruples. Prior to hooking up with Elvis, Nash writes, he ran several scams, including selling foot-long hot dogs that were meat on the tips with slaw in between.
Yet the main thrust is sex and intimacy. “How could Elvis Presley, one of the most sexual and romantic icons of his time, never have enjoyed a long-lasting, meaningful relationship with a woman?” (Intro, xvii) Nash wonders. She blames an overly-close relationship with mother Gladys – no woman could compete with Ma – enduring grief over the death, during birth, of his twin, and, eventually, a debilitating drug habit.
Whatever the reasons, Elvis definitely makes Tiger look like a monk, though not all his women came away satisfied, especially when the King restrained himself to “heavy petting,” which he apparently did with some regularity.
“I thought he was supposed to be the king of the sack!’ Natalie Wood railed after an encounter at the Beverly Wilshire. “But he doesn’t want to screw me.” (182). Wood also wondered aloud if Elvis and members of his entourage were gay, though Nash insists otherwise. “Elvis was not homosexual,” she states, explaining somewhat cryptically that his “testosterone levels, coupled with his grounding in the importance of the southern male, never tempted him to act out sexually with another man.” (24).
George Klein, who knew Elvis from childhood, provides an alternate view of why his pal and later benefactor bedded so many women: He simply could. In his much thinner and breezier book (written with help from Chuck Crisafulli), Klein explains that one of his jobs was to procure babes for the boss, which did not constitute heavy lifting. Even early in Presley’s career, Klein writes, women would scratch at the walls of his house and beg to be let in. He was simply letting nature take its course.
Klein’s is more interesting for his insider’s view of how Elvis was ill-served by his managers, especially Parker, who didn’t care that Presley’s films were often most notable for their mediocre songs and lame scripts. So long as the money flowed, Parker was pleased. While it’s impossible to kick this colonel too often, Klein’s book will likely to be overshadowed by Nash’s, despite its chirpy blurb from Priscilla: “You told your story with class, mister. Elvis would be proud.”
Priscilla, both authors agree, was the love of his life (Ann- Margret ran a close second). She had lots going for her: She was 14 when they met (he was 24) and appeared to make a serious go at pleasing her husband after their 1967 Vegas marriage, including co-starring in videotaped performances of simulated sex with a woman hairdresser. Despite such efforts he would not be converted to monogamy. Their divorce became final in 1973.
Presley had other passions, including drugs, not all of which were acquired by prescription. He’d smoke pot on occasion, Klein and Nash write, and even dropped acid. But he could be very strange without the help of psychedelics.
Raised in the Pentecostal tradition and later developing an interest in Eastern religions, Elvis had his own “road to Damascus” experience, according to Nash, though it happened during a drive through Arizona, where he looked up in the sky and suddenly proclaimed: “What the hell is Joseph Stalin doing in that cloud?” 407. Elvis, in a highly excited state, surrendered his “ego” to God, at which point Stalin turned into Jesus. An arresting topic for a hymn, though none was forthcoming.
Nash provides a gruesome telling of his terrible decline, which included an increasingly ravaging drug habit and disorder of the bowels. He also took to wearing hideous jumpsuits and capes that could make him look like a cream-puff done up as a superhero. On his final night, she writes, he apparently fell off the toilet and nearly bit his tongue off before expiring, age 42.
Yet his charms are still very much with us. Nash reports that in 2009, Elvis raked in $55 million, putting him in fourth place on Forbes magazine's "Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list" -- an amount that is "more than many of the music industry's most popular living acts command." The King may be dead, but his mojo is still working overtime.

The Bag Lady Papers
The Priceless Experience of Losing It All
A True Story

By Alexandra Penney
Voice, 216 pages, $23.99

Alexandra Penney got burned by Bernie Maddoff, losing her life’s savings to the Pope of Ponzi, which triggered fears she might become a bag lady – a fear that has also struck Gloria Steinem Lily Tomlin, Shirley MacLaine “and many other accomplished, well-off women.” Ms. Penney, best known as the former editor of Self magazine and author of “How To Make Love To A Man” didn’t bottom out in the traditional sense, though she does write that she Googled the Hemlock Society seeking a “painless way to die” after learning her nest egg had gone belly-up. The better angels of her world were quick to the rescue. Tina Brown immediately asked her to write a blog (with assistance) for The Daily Beast, she knocked off a piece for the Sunday Times of London and there was also a book offer. Friends bearing $200-a-bottle champagne also softened the fall, which included trying to unload properties in Florida and the Hamptons. The unfolding economic meltdown was even worse for others: One couple she knew faced the prospect of leaving New York to move back to Pittsburg – the equal, it appears, of relocating under a bridge. While many readers might pray to fall into such circumstances, Ms. Penney’s pain seems real enough, especially as she recalls her upbringing as a privileged child with distant parents. She writes with an plainspoken if dramatic voice about gaining a deeper sense of life and that while having money was great, losing it taught her “it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” She can even live without Botox these days and has learned the joys of bartering, serving pizza to dinner guests, and if nothing else can claim to be party to a major display of irony. In 1999 her beloved former psychiatrist, whom she calls “my mother and my father,” mentioned the Madoff fund – closed at the time, “but I think I know a way that I can get you in.” :Membership’s privileges aren’t all they’re cracked up to be either, though one assumes Ms. Penney’s phone will soon ring (if it hasn’t already) with an offer that will set the manna flowing once again.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – There’s a major player missing from Tracey Ullman’s season opener of “State of the Union”: Barack Obama.
Ullman, who wore out a pair of books kicking former President George W. Bush, takes a pass on the new prez in her third season debut, which airs on Showtime Jan. 25 at 10:30 p.m. New York time.
You’d think getting a Nobel Peace Prize while escalating a war should be good for at least a laugh or two.
Bernie Madoff, however, gets pasted, as does his wife, Ruth, (played by Ullman) who has been downsized to a small apartment on the outskirts of Harlem, complete with a bare radiator and lots of street noise.
That’s paradise compared to Bernie’s new digs. Cut to a correctional facility in North Carolina, where the pope of ponzi shares a narrow bunk with a burly black inmate who clearly has not taken a vow of chastity.
It gets worse. Madoff is also blamed for 911, swine flu, and his likeness is included in a Holocaust museum.
Sorta makes you wonder if Bernie might have stolen some of Tracey’s dough here in the real world.
The half-hour show is a bit uneven. Some gags are top-drawer, others fall flat. Ullman is at her best in a terrific send-up of the political chattering class.
The skit unfolds in Rachel Maddow’s make-up room, where Ullman plays Maddow, Arianna Huffington – “I haven’t stopped talking since ‘Morning Joe’” – Meghan McCain, and Rep. Barney Frank. Her Huffington imitation is especially tight: She looks like Huff, yaps like Huff, and reminds some of us why we always reach for the clicker when Huffington appears on screen.
There’s also a whack at city slickers who pay big bucks for brushed denim jeans that make it appear they’ve been out digging ditches, putting up houses for Habitat for Humanity, or pack industrial-strength marriage tackle – a new wrinkle on the old codpiece gag. Ullman also brings back her hybrid car, which gets 900 miles a gallon and is so small you could probably drive it with a three wood.
For my money, the funniest segment features a woman who suffers from severe internet addiction. She’s monitoring a cyst with an ultrasound app and may post a pic on her Facebook page -- so weird and gross it’s easy to believe it’s really happened.
After an intervention by friends and family the patient goes off to a detox facility in Arizona and falls back in love with the pre-digital world. “I want to read books with pages again,” she said. “I don’t want to scroll through life any more.”
There’s a message here: America is hooked on addiction and intervention programs. For every American, the show concludes, there’s a staff of four professionals ready to help us regain our footing.
All told, the debut is an enjoyable enough half-hour. The second installment in the weekly series is more of a challenge. A story line in which author and famed widow Candy Spelling hires an assistant to wipe up during trips to the toilet is cringe material, though there’s some redemption in a skit about a couple matched up by a Jewish dating service. Things go okay until the dude admits he’s not Jewish at all but instead a lapsed Presbyterian.
“How did you infiltrate the data base?” Ullman screeches. “Call the Mossad!”
One assumes the Mossad is down in North Carolina, slipping razor blades into Bernie’s grits.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Maybe Igor Stravinsky should be named patron saint of hip-hop.
His dictum -- “A good composer does not imitate, he steals” -- has found much resonance among hip-hoppers and their artistic descendents, according to “Copyright Criminals,” a fascinating special airing on PBS Jan. 19 at 10 p.m. New York time.
An expanding “remix culture,” many members of which probably haven’t heard of Igor, is creating a massive body of work by snatching bits and pieces of earlier compositions and creating sonic pastiches. They speak of “borrowing,” “re-interpretation” and performing feats of musical “archaeology.”
Copyright holders have a less exalted view: they call this practice a form of theft, which is making some lawyers feel very groovy.
Things are definitely hopping on this front of the intellectual property war.
The documentary, produced by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, takes us back to the early days of hip-hop. Even viewers (myself included) who consider hip-hop a form of aural dentistry may develop an appreciation for the process of building these compositions.
There’s more to this stuff than meets the ear, especially the frantic and sometimes acrobatic use of the turntable, which is considered a musical instrument.
The show features a who’s who including Public Enemy’s Chuck D, producer Hank Shocklee, DJ Qbert (the world’s greatest DJ, according to aficionados), and Long Island hip-hoppers De La Soul. Also appearing are historian Jeff Chang, producer El-P, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky the Subliminal Kid) and members of Eclectic Method, London-based creators of music/film “mash ups” that may remind some viewers of those warnings about the brown acid.
There’s copious scorn for the samplers. Steve Albini, a recording engineer who has worked with Nirvana, Jimmy Page and Roger Plant, says samplers “should be embarrassed for behaving this way.” Their process, he explains, is to take “someone else’s life’s work and put your name on it.”
Indeed, you have to assume they’d make some righteous noise if you slipped by and “shared” their car without permission.
Yet there is praise from the pharaoh of funk, George Clinton, who himself looks like a result of sampling, with orange hair, blazing wardrobe, and a wearily beatific look. Samplers, he says, make “the noise sound good” and they also revived his career, according to the film.
The most compelling figure is Clyde Stubblefield, once a member of James Brown’s band and thought to be the most sampled drummer in the world. His signature beats in Brown’s “Cold Sweat” have shown up in countless compositions.
Stubblefield, who taps on his steering wheel with drumsticks while driving, seems flattered, though flattery doesn’t pay the bills. “I haven’t got a penny for it yet.”
Worse, he says he’s never gotten any credit on the samplers’ CDs.
Others have fared better. Lawsuits have benefited lawyers and created a new industry: sampling clearance. But scrutiny also spawned a new game: manipulating samples so much it’s impossible to prosecute. Stubblefield says sometimes he can’t tell if a beat that sounds suspiciously like his work really is.
It’s easy to tell who’s having the fun here, including a band called Little Roger and the Goosebumps, whose send-up of “Stairway to Heaven” – “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” – drew an immediate lawsuit from Led Zeppelin’s lawyers.
It also seems likely that no amount of legal action is going to silence the practice. Samplers assert a grand tradition, including blues music, which has always used “borrowed” melodies, and Andy Warhol’s photos of soup cans. Plus, they have Igor on their side.
So far as they’re concerned, case closed.



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By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Louisa May Alcott was a cougar?
Well, maybe sorta, once.
So we learn in “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women,’” which airs on PBS Dec. 28 at 9 p.m. New York time. The widely-unknown life of the legendarily upright American author includes a few other surprises, at least for readers who assume Alcott went through life without a racy thought or perhaps even a belch.
Billed as the “first film biography” of the author of “Little Women” (1868) and other tales of moral rectitude, the show stars Elizabeth Marvel as LMA and Jane Alexander in a smaller role as her first biographer, Ednah Dow Cheney, who glorified Alcott as “the children’s friend.”
Yet the film, utilizing latter scholarly revelations, says Alcott wrote a prodigious amount of pulp fiction under the pen name A.M. Barnard that featured drug addicts, cross dressers and killers. It also turns out she was not always a big fan of the juvenile fiction for which she is so well known.
Marvel plays a wry, attractive and engaging Alcott who often addresses the camera with pithy sayings taken from her own writings or firsthand accounts of conversations.
She was no desperate housewife -- “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she quips -- though she enjoyed a short-term relationship with younger Polish lad, according to the film. “We had a fine time for a fortnight,” Alcott observes, though whether or not they ascended to the hayloft is not known.
More interesting, to me at least, is her relationship with her father, Bronson Alcott, a transcendentalist pal of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He is portrayed with massive sideburns and propensities for dramatic melancholy and letting the womenfolk do most of the heavy lifting.
After a harrowing stint at the utopian Fruitlands community the family moved dozens of times, including into one of the worst slums in Boston. Dad could talk up a storm but put few beans in the pot, which forced Louisa May to work as a seamstress, laundress, teacher, and wood-splitter: a “true Cinderella” as she puts it.
She developed suicidal thoughts though would eventually find her way as a writer. She delivers a line that should have put a permanent wince on her father’s face: “Though an Alcott I can support myself,” especially when “Little Women” and its sequels, including “Good Wives” (1869) and “Little Men”(1871) set the cash registers ringing.
Yet her better-known works did not thrill her, at least artistically. “I don’t enjoy writing moral pap for the young,” she notes, but “do it because it pays well.”
The world’s hack writers may have found a new heroine.
Director Nancy Porter and writer Harriet Reisen also show Alcott as sharing her father’s commitment to progressive causes (other than full female employment), for which she made greater sacrifice.
“I was an abolitionist at age of three,” she says and during the Civil War worked at a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. There she contracted typhoid fever, which was treated with a drug called calomel, which contains mercury. She believed mercury permanently undermined her health, though the film speculates that she may have suffered from bi-polar disorder and lupus.
She comes across as very modern, and like many writers knew the art of self-medication, favoring opium and hashish, though she also took in a niece and cared for her father, who was eventually struck down, according to the film, while working on a sonnet about immortality.
He died March 4, 1888 and she died two days later, possibly after suffering a stroke.
One assumes her estate picked up both sets of funeral expenses, and that this film will resurrect interest in a writer who is yet another person we thought we knew, but really didn’t.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – Santa better watch his back in Juarez, and Phoenix, too.
That’s the news from “Explorer: Narco State,” a blood-soaked National Geographic special airing Dec. 13 at 8 p.m. New York time.
If you’re already tired of holiday cheer this show may be the cure. It’s brimming with corpses and other indications we’re a long way from winning the drug war.
Host Lisa Ling opens the show in Phoenix, which has the second highest kidnapping/home invasion rate in the world (behind Mexico City) with roughly one person swiped every day. Much of the crime is related to the drug industry.
A young man has gone missing and a suspect is in hand, though officials from the local Home Invasion and Kidnapping Enforcement Task Force (HIKE team) have no idea where the victim may have been stashed.
One answer seems to present itself as the alleged perp, a massive, shirtless man with a billowing belly, is walked to the police car: Maybe he ate his victim.
The perpetually lithe Ling follows the investigation throughout the hour-long show while also breaking away to Juarez, where over 1800 people were killed last year, earning it the moniker “Baghdad on the border.”
“Iraq and Afghanistan certainly generate more news coverage,” says Ling, “but make no mistake about it … we are fighting a war right here at home, on our own border” that, she says in her ever-cool monotone, has “no end in sight.”
This war, she adds, isn’t about “beliefs” such as virgins in heaven and converting the infidels. It’s about drugs, guns and money. The drugs flow north into the insatiable U.S. drug market and the money and guns flow south.
You could definitely mistake Juarez for a war zone. The Mexican army roams the streets in armored personnel carriers though it is sometimes out-gunned by the narco-troops, who deploy military-grade weapons including M-60 machine guns and aren’t above using hand-grenades against enemies of their enterprise.
The killing has spun off a few growth industries, including a booming business for folk songs celebrating the killings, which are broadcast while the blood is still flowing. Business is also brisk for local photojournalist Jose Luis Gonzales, who might shoot as many as ten corpses a day.
We see plenty of examples of his work, which often features people blasted in cars, with gaping mouths and significant holes in their heads. Those who lie on sidewalks and in gutters remind us that humans carry lots of blood that can ooze long distances.
In perhaps the most captivating segment Ling interviews some of the whack talent – a “sicario” (hit man) named “Manuel” who comes off as something of a sensitive soul. He tells of starting out small in Los Angeles and eventually receiving quasi-military training, then recalls his first hit, a throat-slicing operation.
“I felt like it wasn’t me doing it,” he says, as if slightly traumatized. He also admits losing count of the number of people he has killed while insisting he doesn’t “mean to sound cruel.”
Maybe he should find himself a support group.
The only semi-chirpy news comes from Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican ambassador to the U.S., who says that despite all the bodies the military truly is stabilizing the border and helping rebuild a civilian police force that had experienced “penetration” by the druggies.
What’s beyond dispute is that bodies will continue to stack up. Journalist Charles Bowden, the embodiment of a world-weary scribe, says that in response to Juárez’s 1800 murders last year “maybe there were 20 or 30 arrests. Not convictions, arrests. You kill and walk. Nothing happens. You can kill with absolute impunity.”
There are some survivors. At show’s end the alleged kidnap victim is reported to have surfaced, alive, on a Mexican farm, which is far preferable to surfacing in Juarez.

By Dave Shiflett
Just in time for the holiday spending binge, PBS shines a bright light on the credit card monster.
“The Card Game,” which airs Nov. 24 at 9 p.m. New York time, may make you want to strangle a banker or two -- an easier target than the ultimate problem: our national enthusiasm to buy now, pay later.
Americans use cards for about 100,000 transactions a minute, the show says, and while individuals bear responsibility for profligate spending, credit card companies have made it easy to go deep in the hole.
Host Lowell Bergman gets the ball rolling by interviewing former Providian Financial CEO Shailesh Mehta, a pioneer of “stealth pricing” and other creative strategies that earned his company around $1 billion a year.
Mehta is a suave guy who lives in a slightly miniaturized copy of the White House. He illustrates how easy it is to put yourself in debtors prison.
Mehta opens a card offer from Bank of America boasting a zero percent introductory APR. He notes an asterisk and when reading the small print discovers “my APR is 11.9, 15.9 or 19.9” Bottom line: “I have no idea which one I am going to get when they approve me.”
Many card holders, the show says, are also unaware of various fees that can turn that little piece of plastic into a truly toxic asset.
Credit card debt played a role in the economic meltdown, says consumer advocate Martin Eakes.
“We are focused on the current economic crisis as primarily a foreclosure and mortgage crisis,” he says, “when the sub-prime lending was really taking off, it was largely a mortgage product to refinance credit card debt.” Robert McKinley, CEO of CardWeb.com, adds that consumers refinanced their homes to pay off their credit cards, then “they would go out and charge them back up again.”
What, we worry?
In another dose of bad news, McKinley notes that debit cards “can be under certain circumstances even more expensive that credit cards.”
The chief trap is overdraft protection, which isn’t always free. A consumer named Josette Wermuth explains that a stalled deposit meant she couldn’t cover a $7 pizza purchase. The bank covered it for her, but charged a $33 fee, which the show says is the equivalent of an annual interest rate of over 24,000 percent.
Some lenders also process larger charges first, even if they occurred later in the month, which can empty an account and create numerous overdraft charges (or opportunities, if you’re doing the lending.)
So who’s going to save us from all this?
While Congress passed reforms in May limiting the practice of arbitrarily changing interest rates, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren says the reforms are “a modest step” and that the industry “instantly set to work on how they could run around them.”
Warren and the Obama administration are putting their chips behind a new Consumer Finance Protection agency, which would have regulatory powers across the lending world, including payday lenders, whose storefronts outnumber Starbucks two-to-one, according to the show.
Yet several big dogs have lined up against the plan, including Sen. Richard Shelby, who calls it a “radical departure from the way we have regulated.” A truly radical step – limiting the amount of interest than can charged -- is a dead letter, the show indicates.
No matter what reforms are devised, Mehta agrees that the industry will find a way around them. Bankers, he says, have a mindset of “tell me the rules, and then I'll outsmart you all.” He also adds that the ultimate problem lies elsewhere:
“Lending money to people is never a difficult exercise. Okay?”
All of which leaves us with the cold fact that the most effective reform is a pair of scissors.

Smash-Up Reveals Corporate Evil, Murder

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— Sometimes it pays to take the bus.
That’s one interpretation of “Collision,” a deeply captivating drama airing on PBS Sunday night at 9 p.m. New York time.
The story, written by Anthony Horowitz and Michael A. Walker, unfolds from a pile-up on England’s A12, in which two people are killed and several others injured. On the inanimate side, a Mercedes, BMW and Volvo go toes-up, along with a couple of junkers.
The larger story, however, is that you never know who you might bump into on the highway. In this case, the dead and wounded include a piano teacher with a mysterious fetish, a desperate smuggler, a guy who might have bumped off his mother-in-law, a middle-aged rich guy with a roving eye, a nervous whistle-blower, and a couple of stoners being chased for speeding.
A representative cross-section of humanity, no doubt.
Detective Inspector John Tolin (Douglas Henshall), himself a haunted obsessive, is brought in to find out why the wreck occurred. He’s teamed with Senior Investigating Officer Ann Stallwood (Kate Ashfield), with whom he had an affair that ended badly. When these two are together there’s no need to run the air conditioner. They radiate permafrost.
Yet Tolin has a warm nose for rot, which serves him well. The deeper he looks into the mayhem, the murkier it gets – and the deeper we’re drawn in.
There’s a decidedly realistic air about the production. Tolin works out of narrow office with cheap wood paneling and one wall painted a sickly yellow. Like many real-life inspectors he’s none too flashy; indeed, it looks like he might comb his hair with a pork chop.
Stallwood, meantime, is a bowling-alley blonde who’s not going to make you forget the babes who conduct most cinematic investigations. But she’s a solid type and one can’t help but wonder if she’s going to eventually warm toward Tolin, who lost his wife in an accident that also crippled his daughter.
Fear not: there is one true babe -- Alice Jackson (Lenora Crichlow), who unfortunately is one of the deceased, though she looks good even post-mortem. Her father alleges she and boyfriend Gareth Clay (Anwar Lynch) were singled out for chase because they were black. It turns out they were roaring along at 83 miles per hour and engaged in another illegal activity as well.
Yet they are, by comparison, the innocent ones. The body count rises as the investigation proceeds, and Tolin begins unearthing signs of international corporate evil and perhaps murder. Several questions are left to be resolved in film’s conclusion, which airs Nov. 22.
Among them: Why didn’t Danny Rampton (Dean Lennox Kelly), a smuggler who abandoned his vehicle after the crash, at least tip police as to the nature of his cargo?
Why did Karen Donnelly (Claire Rushbrook), who made copies of her boss’s computer files to give to a journalist, check herself out of the hospital after the wreck, and who were those people following her in the black Mercedes?
Why did Brian Edwards (Phil Davis), who was taking a drive with his mother-in-law (Sylvia Syms), say she didn’t have on a seatbelt when she really did – and were her head wounds really the result of the wreck?
Why is Richard Reeves (Paul McGann), a wealthy middle-aged developer, chasing a twenty-something waitress? Okay, we know the answer to that one, though we’ll have to wait and see if his lust is in vain. And what exactly is piano teacher Sidney Norris’s (David Bamber) fetish?
Viewers weary of blood and guts will find little here to offend them. These cars crash without exploding in flames and the few corpses don’t look nearly as bad as some people you might bump into while walking the streets.
The first night ends with another body rolling out of the wreckage, though we’re not positive he’s without pulse, or how he ties into the larger picture. Another reason to catch the second act.
Meantime, keep your eyes on the road.

(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) Does hemp get horny?
It appears so, and some marijuana plants may pine away for humans, according to “The Botany of Desire,” a fascinating film airing on PBS Oct 28 at 8 p.m. New York time.
The film takes a “plant’s eye” view of the relationship between humans and marijuana, tulips, apples, and potatoes. While we might think we’re in the command position, author/host Michael Pollan makes a good case these allegedly passive partners have seduced us into doing their bidding by appealing to our desires for intoxication, beauty, sweetness and control.
“They’ve been using us,” he says and by show’s end you’re likely to agree.
Apples originated in Central Asia, and in the beginning there were thousands of types, though most were very bitter. Sweetness, says Pollan, was their ticket out of the forest.
Bears ate the sweetest and excreted their seeds in ever-expanding horizons. Humans eventually took a bite and were hooked, exporting apples down the Silk Road to Europe and later America, where they found an evangelist in the person of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.
The Appleseed saga underscores the love-hate nature of these relationships, Pollan explains. It wasn’t long before Americans started using apples to make hard cider, the go-to drink for children and presidents alike. John Adams started his day with a couple of belts and by the 1830s chronic cider intoxication had become a national menace.
Suddenly, apples were seen as evil, but it was too late. They had used humans to get out in the world and left them with a hangover.
Pretty smart for an allegedly dumb piece of fruit.
Tulips, which also originated in Central Asia, seduced humans by gratifying our desire for beauty. Like Helen of Troy they drove some people entirely nuts.
During the “tulip mania” of the 1630s Dutch investors paid the equivalent of a contemporary Manhattan townhouse -- which Pollan values at $10-$15 million -- for a single bulb.
Like all investment bubbles this one finally burst, unleashing a wave of tulip hatred symbolized by a mad professor who roamed the streets with a stick, beating the scapegoats to shreds. Yet the love of tulips, and other flowers, is very much with us today, symbolized by the Aalsmeer Flower Market, housed in a building bigger than 200 football fields.
The section on marijuana reminds us that plants with intoxicating qualities will always find suitors, even though the relationship can land them in prison.
It wasn’t always that way. In the 19th century Americans legally used cannabis to combat labor pain, asthma, and rheumatism. Eventually the war on drugs drove growers indoors, where they created a strain of pot with a mind of its own. One planter, whose identity is withheld, says that when his partner is gone for a few days, “the plants know it” and they “don’t do as well.” Even weeds get the blues, it seems.
Like humans, they can experience a romantic rising of the sap. When male plants are removed from the growing area ”sexually frustrated” female plants excrete large amounts of resin, apparently in the hope of attracting male spores.
The final segment features potatoes, first cultivated in the Andes 8000 years ago. They seduce men by giving them control over hunger, though this can be illusory.
The Irish developed a dependency on one type of potato – the Lumper – which was wiped out by an air-borne blight in 1845. One in eight citizens died as a result.
We are creating a similar “monoculture,” the film warns, because of our French fry infatuation. Americans consume 7.5 billion pounds a year, many of which are produced from the Russet Burbank. The film stresses the importance of diversifying the crop and the health benefits of organic farming.
Pollan is a thoughtful and engaging host, often reminding us that plants really don’t have minds or agendas. It just seems that way.
There’s little doubt who’ll have the last laugh. One reasonably assumes tulips will be dancing in the sun long after the human race has converted itself to fertilizer.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – New York’s Garment District is being buried in a cheap Chinese suit.
That’s the word from “Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags,” which airs on HBO Oct. 19 at 9 p.m. New York time.
The garment industry was New York’s biggest employer in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the documentary. Today, most of those jobs have gone overseas, many of them to China.
The schmatta (Yiddish for “rag”) trade is very ragged indeed.
Yet the 90-minute film is fairly lively, considering it’s basically a long obit for the industry, whose fate is told in this statistic: In 1965, 95% of American clothing was made in the United States. Now, only 5% is made here.
The show begins with a look back at District’s origins. It was basically an Italian/Jewish endeavor, says Joe Raico, a fabric cutter and union official with 43 years in the trade. He’s taking a buyout because things have gotten so bad, though in the beginning they were even worse.
Lisa Nussbaum tells the story of distant cousin Sadie Nussbaum, who shared a Lower East Side apartment with 11 people. Conditions were “horrendous,” she says: no heat or running water plus long tedious days at very low wages.
Director Marc Levin illustrates the era with a still photo of children playing beside a horse lying dead in the street. This isn’t the only corpse we see.
Sadie Nussbaum was among 146 women killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A photo of victims’ bodies lined up for identification is heart-rending and finds a modern counterpart near the end of the film.
The Triangle fire outraged New Yorkers. Some 100,000 marched in the funeral procession while 400,000 lined the streets. The fire helped spark the modern American labor movement, whose early leaders, including Sidney Hillman, would eventually wield great power in New York and Washington.
In its heyday the district was vibrant and raucous, its sidewalks full of fast moving dress racks and its offices full of cigar-smokers and hot-tempered bosses. “I was a screamer,” admits Irving Rousso, who owned sportswear giant Russ Togs.
Other featured insiders include Fern Mallis, creator of Fashion Week; designers Isaac Mizrahi and Anna Sui; Julius Stern, first president of Donna Karan Inc., and Sigrid Olsen, whose company was bought in 1999 by Liz Claiborne Inc., who shut it down in 2008 and laid off all its workers, including Olsen.
The industry’s decline is blamed on automation, deregulation and “free-trade agreements” championed by Republicans and Democrats. We see Bill Clinton hailing NAFTA as a boon though one U.S. worker has a different take: “How do I compete with someone who makes five dollars a week?”
If workers were getting the shaft, designers such as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Halston became gods, according to Stan Herman, famous as the “People’s Designer” and a five-decade fixture in the industry. Nancy Reagan is hailed as a worshipper in chief.
Levin gives the beautiful people plenty of face time but never turns his back on the people who actually make the clothes. He revisits the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, in which Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee accused her of using sweatshop labor to produce her clothing line.
“How dare you,” she sputters during a televised rant, though she changed her tune after sweatshop conditions were publicized. This segment features footage of exhausted children asleep at their sewing machines and a chicken that’s even skinnier than a Ralph Lauren model.
The film ends with a look back at a 2000 fire at a Bangladesh garment factory that killed over 50 workers, an eerie replay of the Triangle fire. Kernaghan predicts other casualties as outsourcing expands: “Wait till the thirty to forty million white collar jobs start going offshore.”

By DAVE SHIFLETT
Ralph Stanley, the hillbilly (his term) musician best known for his 2002 Grammy-winning rendition of "O Death" in the Coen brothers movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?," may be 82 years old and play songs nearly as ancient as the southwest Virginia hills where he was born (and still lives). But after all these years his tongue is still sharp, as he shows in "Man of Constant Sorrow," a memoir that may send some cowboy hats spinning along Nashville's Music Row. Dr. Stanley, as he likes to be known—the doctorate is honorary, from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn.—dispenses a few lashes along with his rollicking account of 60 years as a banjo-picking bluegrass performer, though none will do lasting harm.

Born in Dickenson County, Va., on Feb. 25, 1927, Dr. Stanley came up hard. He describes a Christmas when all he got was an orange and a handful of rock candy. In 1939, his father bolted for a younger woman and "never even said goodbye."

Career options were as stark as his home life, basically limited to working in the coal and timber industries. "If you didn't go digging you'd be out logging," he writes. "They'd get you one way or the other." Death lurked in the mines. "I had asthma and figured I'd smother down there." Music seemed a safer option, though as it turned out the trade also had a pretty high body count.

He and his older brother, Carter, took up music together, with Ralph playing a used banjo and Carter learning how to play a $3.45 guitar from Montgomery Ward. Thus began a partnership that would last for 20 years. The Stanley Brothers performed in local lumber camps and wherever else they could land work. They took off for a few years while both young men served in the military—Ralph enlisted two weeks after graduating from high school in 1945, World War II already over. When the brothers reunited onstage, they got a break when a Norton, Va., radio station gave them a daily show, sponsored by Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

The life of a traveling musician is hardly glamorous in Dr. Stanley's telling. He writes (with help from Eddie Dean) of occupational hazards such as knifings, shootings, surly club employees and low-paying gigs. Another hazard, encountered in the 1950s: a fellow named Presley.

"Elvis just about starved us out," Dr. Stanley says, recalling how country-music records and performance opportunities plummeted with the advent of Presley and rock music. "We got used to eating a lot of Vienna sausages."

Yet the biggest scourge was liquor. Alcoholism killed Carter Stanley at age 41. He died in 1966, hemorrhaging so badly on the way to the hospital "that when they opened the back door of the ambulance, there was blood running out onto the ground." While not making excuses, he mourns that his brother died "a poor man" who "never did give up on the dream that finally done him in."

More ravages of alcohol among Dr. Stanley's bandmates: Singer Roy Lee Centers was pistol-whipped and shot to death after a booze-fueled argument, and another singer, Keith Whitley, died of alcohol poisoning at age 34. Makes the Grateful Dead sound like a junior-varsity outfit.

For all that, the author has mixed views about distilled spirits. "Now some might say the gospel and liquor don't go together," he writes, "but they can work fine if you know the proper amounts." He insists that while he was behind the wheel on long nighttime drives, singing hymns while slowly sipping Jack Daniels helped keep him awake "and probably saved us from many a car wreck." Sage advice perhaps, though likely to get him on the MADD watch list.

He takes a few jabs at Nashville, reminding us that Music City has turned its back on legends such as George Jones. The "younger crowd would rather us old-timers go under the wheels of our tour buses and be done with it." The good doctor could have cut a lot deeper without fear of being charged with malpractice.

On the sunny side, the success of the "O Brother" movie soundtrack, which producer T-Bone Burnett heavily stocked with mountain music, strikes Dr. Stanley "as proof people are craving our type of country music, and when they get a chance to hear it, they can't hardly get enough of it."

Dr. Stanley has other passions. He ran for clerk of court and commissioner of revenue in Dickenson County a few years ago, but says his efforts were undone by party shenanigans. He's proud of his membership in the Masons, whose ranks, he notes, have included Harry Truman and Colonel Sanders. And, after a lifetime of singing hymns, he got himself baptized at age 73.

But first and foremost, Dr. Stanley is a traveling musician, still logging 100,000 miles a year with his band, the Clinch Mountain Boys. If he burns a few bridges with this book, there's little doubt that he knows a back road or two that will take him safely home.

—Mr. Shiflett is a writer and musician in Virginia who posts his original music at Daveshiflett.com

By Dave Shiflett

Steinway pianos, very much at home among black ties and tails, happen to hail from a decidedly blue-collar neighborhood.
“Note by Note,” which aired on PBS Sept. 14 and is available from filmmaker Ben Niles, follows the creation of Steinway concert grand L1037 from its humble origins in a Queens factory to the Steinway & Sons showroom at 109 West 57th Street, staging area for the world’s great concert halls.
The fascinating film starts on a snowy December day as craftsmen force begin assembling the piano’s wooden frame. While L1037’s destiny will likely include Mozart and perhaps dancing waifs, its birth features huffing, puffing and grunting from guys who tend to be beefy, tattooed and sport pictures of Jerry Garcia and Harley Davidsons on their workshop walls.
They bang away with hammers and chisels, sometimes pulling pegs out of an old Maxwell House can, other times knocking the piano into shape with the help of substantial power tools. The efforts of 450 craftsmen go into a Steinway, along with 12,000 parts. Tiring work, to be sure, punctuated by breaks during which the workers play guitars, cards, or go outside in the rain for a smoke.
Director/producer Ben Niles includes testimonials to Steinway’s greatness from pianists Lang Lang, Hélène Grimaud, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Harry Connick Jr., Hank Jones, Marcus Roberts, Kenny Barron and Bill Charlap.
“A good piano,” says Lang, “is like a good actor” with “several personalities.” Jazz great Jones explains that some “resonate more than others” though that is only “apparent to some people.” Tin ears, we assume, can make due with a Yamaha.
The film follows Aimard’s search for a “monster” to play at an upcoming Carnegie Hall performance. If Steinways had feelings most of them probably wouldn’t like picky Pierre, who has a hard time finding the beast of his dreams.
The show doesn’t go into prices, though we glimpse one price tag a bit north of $103,000. One worker, outfitted in a football jersey, admits that “nobody I know could afford one.”
We also get a look at sale day at the Steinway showroom. A saleswoman plays a magnificent passage for a woman and child, inspiring the little tickler to take a shot at “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” One senses there’s a Porshe awaiting her on her 16th birthday.
There are a few amusing asides. Connick tells of his “heavy handed” technique while Lang provides an animated explanation of what drew him to the piano: hearing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies on Tom and Jerry cartoons.
A child-rearing tip, perhaps.
Aimard finally finds his piano, which has just come off a truck and is ice cold. He sits down to test her out, reminding us that when some people tickle a Steinway they get much more than a giggle.
“Ahhh!” he exclaims after detonating an aural explosion. His monster has been located.
It takes around a year to complete a concert grand, and the final product is a source of great pride to employees, one of whom compares the process to the creation of a swan.
At show’s end we see L1037 getting its finishing touches from a worker whose job is to “even out the tone.” When it’s “easy to play and easy on the ears, then you know you’ve got a piano,” he explains.
The swan – painted jet black -- is moved to the Steinway store, where Helene Grimaud beams it “spoke to me immediately.” We assume L1037 will be speaking to audiences long after we, the humble viewers, have departed for the great concert hall in the sky, which we assume will be home to a truly sublime Steinway.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)— It takes some nerve to name a new television series “Bored To Death” – just as it would be to name a new CD “Very Lame Stuff.”
The title might quickly become the project’s epitaph.
HBO’s new Sunday night series isn’t boring a bit. Nor, to be sure is it profound, riveting or likely to change your life. It’s an amusing half-hour that may be around a while.
Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman) is a struggling 30-something Brooklyn writer whose girlfriend Suzanne (Olivia Thirlby) flies the coop for standard reasons: he’s been spending too much time with his vino and weed.
One senses Jonathan might have also yacked her to distraction: he talks so much you’d suspect he enhances his pot with a dusting of amphetamine.
He’s thin as a pipe cleaner with a tongue that rarely rests. He also seems to say whatever pops into his head. Early on he tells a pair of furniture haulers that he’s surprised to see “Jewish movers” undertaking “such muscle-oriented work.”
After a suitable glare, one of the movers asks Jonathan if he’s “just another self-hating New York Jew” to which he responds: “Yes I am.”
Yet that seems an overly harsh self-appraisal. Jonathan may be a bit of a schlub at times yet he’s also likable, sympathetic, and in his own way, inspirational. Writers in the viewing audience may especially identify with the poor hack.
While Jonathan can talk up a storm he’s at a total loss for words when it comes to finishing his second novel. Like many with this affliction he seeks solace in writer fluid – a cup of wine – and also dips into Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely.”
Suddenly, inspiration strikes. Jonathan places an ad on Craigslist offering his services as an “unlicensed” private detective. He soon snags his first client, a woman whose sister has disappeared. Being a PI, it appears, is an excellent way to meet the ladies, at least in television land.
The show plays on several detective novel mainstays. Jonathan, playing the tough guy at a bar, takes a big slug of whiskey, which goes down like a shot of lye. He plies sources with cash and wears a trench coat, yet he is not half as salty as many PIs, even reprimanding a hotel clerk for dropping F-bombs.
Viewers who prefer their love on the rocks will find the show deeply pleasing. There’s not an intact relationship anywhere in New York, it seems. Jonathan’s friend Ray Hueston, (Zach Galifianakis), a comic book illustrator, is spending far too much time in the ranks of the celibate for his own comfort. He’s down to the point of getting weepy.
Then there’s George Christopher (Ted Danson), Jonathan’s silver-haired magazine editor boss who’s got his own pot and vino regimen, plus a Viagra prescription. Despite those enhancements he’s bored with life and complains of “death by a thousand dull conversations.” You could almost feel sorry for him if he weren’t so oily and vain.
Jonathan eventually gets his girl, who to no surprise has romance troubles of her own: her meth-head boyfriend is trying out a romantic twist on the Stockholm syndrome. No telling here if the ploy works, though the show ends with Jonathan taking a call from another damsel in distress.
All he needs to do now is figure out how to charge his clients by the word.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) “Man Men” enters its third session billed as the “sexiest” show on television.
The season premier, which airs August 16 at 10 p.m. New York time, may inspire viewers to break a few erotic sweats, while others may be reminded that sex isn’t all moonlight and roses.
Near the start, for instance, a rustic lass warns her incipient bed mate that if she gets “in trouble” she’s going to slice off his pride “and boil it in hog fat.”
Shivver me timbers. Talk about performance anxiety.
For the most part, however, all remains swell, or at least swollen, among the staff of the Manhattan-based Sterling Cooper advertising agency. Without revealing too much of the story line, at one point creative director and gigolo-in-chief Donald Draper (Jon Hamm), dapper as ever, works his mojo with a foxy blonde airline stewardess (the show is set in the 1960s) while colleague Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt) jumps the bones of a hotel guy sent up to fix the air conditioner.
Something for everyone, it seems, and thankfully no further mention of hog fat.
Yet in our world of Internet sex-on-demand, where you can watch blondes take on an entire planeloads of creative directors, or hogs for that matter, this stuff seems fairly tame.
Thankfully, the “Mad Men” has other strengths, especially its portrayal of human weasels. That and good writing explain the show’s Emmys and Golden Globe awards, and the opener suggests there may be more in the offing.
Prime weasel remains Peter Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser, who simultaneously triggers the gag and slap responses.
The premier finds him in a full snit. Sterling Cooper, now owned by a British firm, is trying out a few new management schemes, including putting Campbell and fellow weasel Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) into a competitive arrangement that, with any luck, will result in a double homicide.
Meanwhile, life at the 1960s-era agency goes on as usual. These were the days before anyone took the Surgeon General seriously and every living thing except the potted plants smokes cigarettes. The endless booze flow indicates the company motto is “It must be 10 a.m. somewhere.” This crowd clearly agrees the liver is evil and must be punished.
The secretarial pool, led by office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) operates behind a phalanx of pointed bras while members of the mostly male creative team leave few hairs ungreased as they go about devising jingles for the company’s client list, which includes Chevron, Dunkin Donuts, Warner Brothers, Bethlehem Steel, Lucky Strike and Platex.
Draper, who considers himself something of a genius, puts his formidable talents to creating a new ad campaign for London Fog. To no surprise, it includes a female flasher. Back then that was pushing the envelope. These days, it might earn a promotion to the mail room.
The pace goes a bit flat here and there, though creator/producer/director Matthew Weiner continues to squeeze good lines out of his writing staff. My favorite comes at the end, when Draper, reconciling with wife Betty (January Jones) while perhaps thinking about the steamy stew, confesses “I don’t sleep well when I’m not here.”
It is hard not to notice that despite all the sex, booze and professional glory the mad men seem to be sad men. Smiles are rare with this crew. A nice atmospheric touch suggests at least part of the answer.
In one office, against there wall, we see a glass-sided ant farm. As metaphors go, a pretty good one.

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – In the pantheon of political survivors, Marion Barry is king of kings.
Neither a stint in federal prison, drug and alcohol addiction, world-class womanizing, IRS troubles nor even a gunshot wound can keep him out of office.
The four-time Washington, D.C. mayor’s storied career is the subject of an engrossing HBO documentary, “The Nine Lives of Marion Barry,” which airs August 10 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Even his detractors, who are legion, may soften their views by film’s end. Barry, 73, is a whisper of his former self, and if nothing else he played the political scoundrel to the hilt and did some good, especially early in his career.
Born to a Mississippi sharecropper and his teenage wife, Barry would become an Eagle Scout and a standout student, eventually pursuing a doctorate in chemistry. Yet civil rights became his passion. He joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and came to D.C. in the mid-1960s when it was run by white southern congressmen and surly cops.
They met their match in Barry who was, Jesse Jackson says in an interview, a “militant” and “a rabble rouser.” Yet he also co-founded Pride Inc., which found jobs for thousands of desperate city residents, including many hustlers, ex-cons and drug addicts.
After home rule came in 1974, allowing residents to elect local officials, Barry won a seat on the city council. The job had its ups and downs, including a March 1977 takeover of District buildings by Muslim militants who shot Barry as he exited an elevator. That dramatic event, the film indicates, added a heroic glow and may have helped him win his first term as mayor in 1978.
His first two terms were the glory days. A building boom was accompanied by increasing opportunities for blacks; journalist Harry Jaffe says Barry “had the potential to become Martin Luther King’s successor” though his flaws would eventually take center stage.
The film includes interviews with Barry, political colleagues, journalists, and constituents, though none are as compelling as his late wife Effi Barry, who endured tribulations nearly beyond belief.
“Power is a very seductive mistress,” she notes, and power was not his only one.
Barry’s personal life became an international sensation, including an investigation for cocaine use, sexual shenanigans in a strip bar, and finally his arrest in Jan. 1990 after being filmed smoking crack in a Washington hotel room with a former girlfriend.
It was there that Barry uttered his most famous words – “bitch set me up” – and the surveillance tape, a lengthy segment of which is shown, lends credence to his assertion.
The trial was too much for the long-suffering Mrs. Barry, who left him shortly thereafter (she died in 2007). Barry spent six months behind bars, though that was a mere speed bump. He won a seat on the city council in 1992 and was re-elected mayor in 1994.
His secret to winning, the film indicates, is in playing to his strong suit: Barry bills himself a “role model for those who fell down.” As he told one audience: “We are living in an imperfect world where people expect us to be perfect.”
His constituents clearly sympathize. “Everybody has a Marion Barry in their family,” one supporter insists, though that may be a bit of an overstatement.
His talents and troubles have followed him into his senior years, as have his true believers. He won a seat on city council in 2004; in 2005 he pleaded guilty to tax charges. A mandatory drug test found traces of cocaine, but no matter. He was re-elected to city council in 2008 in a landslide.
By film’s end, it’s clear that if Washington is ever hit by a meteor, when the dust clears there will be at least two life forms still standing: the cockroaches and Marion Barry.

Yes Men Say No To Milton Friedman, Dow, Big Oil

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg)—If you like Milton Friedman, you’re gonna hate Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, aka The Yes Men.
Their crusade against the “free market cult” championed by the late Nobel Laureate is chronicled in “The Yes Men Fix The World,” which airs on HBO July 27 at 9 p.m. New York time.
Often posing as spokesmen for “corporations we don’t like,” the world-infamous pranksters target Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, and Halliburton in high-profile spoofs that sometimes have a serious effect on the bottom line.
All in the name of truth, justice, and renewable energy.
The first segment, to my mind the most compelling, illustrates their modus operandi. The Yes Men create a fake website for Dow in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, which occurred Dec. 3, 1984. Since Dow had bought Union Carbide, which operated the Bhopal facility, they assume at least one media outlet would come looking for a company representative.
They were right. The BBC invited them in for an interview at their Paris office and got lots more news than expected.
Bichlbaum, posing as Dow spokesman Jude Finisterra, announced the company was not only going to finally clean up the disaster site but also distribute billions of dollars among survivors.
Suddenly the BREAKING NEWS banner appears, though the hoax was discovered soon after airing and apologies were quickly issued, with the BBC saying the “interview was inaccurate and part of an elaborate deception.”
Au contraire, the Yes Men argue. The interview was actually “an honest representation of what Dow should be doing.” The marketplace had a different view. The company lost over $2 billion in 23 minutes, the film says.
Viewers who share the view that the “free market cult puts everyone else at risk” and that if “we let the free market cult keep running the world, there wouldn’t be a world left to fix” will love this film.
If your teeth are set to grinding by declarations such as “big oil” is “destroying the planet” and don’t agree that Milton Freidman is a “guru of greed” who unleashed a plague of evil free-market marauders, you’ll likely think these guys have rocks in their heads.
Yet it’s hard not to agree that both possess a considerable set of stones, and that they sure know how to liven up a conference.
They sabotage several, including an energy conference where they present Exxon Mobil’s revolutionary new renewable energy resource – Vivoleum – to be made from the victims of global warming. They pass around samples in candle form; when lit they smell like burning flesh. The stink was short-lived as conference officials sent them packing, with malice.
They did a bit better passing themselves off as Halliburton reps introducing the SurvivaBall, a very expensive inflatable suit that protects executives and other well-heeled consumers from most forms of natural and man-made disasters. While some of the audience is simply amused others seem to take an interest in the garb.
The show has many amusing moments but drags in parts. Like many evangelicals the duo seems a bit smug at times, and contradictory. Sure, big oil is making lots of money selling fuel, especially to guys like the Yes Men, whose jetting about between Paris, India, the U.K. and North America leaves a carbon footprint any oil baron would envy.
That said, you’ve got to admire a couple of guys who produced 100,000 bogus copies of the New York Times that was distributed in Manhattan on Nov. 12, 2008, announcing that the war in Iraq was over, the Patriot Act repealed, a free university system established, the oil industry nationalized, a “maximum wage” law passed, and the devil issued a summons: “Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge.” If you’re gonna dream, dream big.
Yet both seem to sense that despite their efforts, Friedman and Company continue to hold a strong hand. After one conference prank, they say of the audience: “Instead of freaking out they just took our business cards.”


Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions
expressed are his own.)

By Dave Shiflett

Now that the world’s most notorious moonwalker is dead and buried (without his drug-ridden brain, London’s Mirror reported), attention shifts back to the original moonwalkers, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (with Michael Collins circling overhead), just in time for the 40th anniversary of their historic stroll on the Sea of Tranquility.
Not since the walk up Calvary (which followed a reported stroll on the Sea of Galilee) has an ambulation attracted such attention, though the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 lunar walk benefited from a much larger support staff, budget, and audience – at least 600 million people watched Armstrong take his “giant leap for Mankind.”
Four decades on, the sheer magnitude of the mission is still stunning, inspiring a handful of books that also remind us how much the world has changed since the Eagle lunar module touched down at 3:20 p.m. CST that summer Sunday..
Craig Nelson’s “Rocket Men” (Viking, 404 pages, $27.95) is a broad and often entertaining account. Based on 23,000 pages of NASA oral histories, interviews and other documentation, it is also a fact-junkie’s dream, starting with its opening description of getting the Apollo-tipped Saturn V rocket from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch site.
The 129 million cubic foot building had doors 45 stories high and a 10,000-ton air conditioner without which, Mr. Nelson writes, clouds would form inside the building and create rain. The “crawler” that lugged the 363-foot rocket five miles to the pad (at 1 mile per hour) was the world’s largest land vehicle, weighing in at 6 million pounds, while Apollo-Saturn V weighed just under 6.5 million pounds, had 6 million parts, and represented the combined effort of 400,000 people and 12,000 corporations.
This ship had some serious mojo: At takeoff, its engines consumed 10,000 pounds of fuel per second and to break free of Earth’s gravity it hit 24,182 miles per hour, “over ten times faster than the bullet of a Winchester .270.” In the carbon footprint competition, Apollo was a true Sasquatch.
Mr. Nelson, who has written books on the Doolittle raid and Thomas Paine, provides plenty of historical perspective, noting that while President John F. Kennedy, who announced the mission to put a man on the moon May 25, 1961, may not have been a full-blown “space cadet” he worried deeply about falling behind the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson, sounding a bit like an anchor on the Weather Channel, lit a fire under those fears. “Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson thundered. “From space the masters of infinity would have the power to control the Earth’s weather, to cause droughts and floods, to change the tides and raise the level of the sea, divert the Gulf stream and change the temperature climates to frigid.”
The project had other fathers, including Wernher von Braun, whose former boss, Adolf Hitler, employed him to use his technical savvy to incinerate Britons, as noted by Kennedy speechwriter Mort Sahl. During World War II, Sahl cracked, von Braun “aimed at the stars, but often hit London,” though he apparently changed his ways after coming to the U.S., joining the Church of the Nazarene after a religious conversion and even reciting the Lord’s Prayer at Apollo 11’s liftoff – before turning to a colleague and saying, “You give me ten billion dollars and ten years, and I’ll have a man on Mars.”
Mr. Nelson pens an often-gripping narrative of the roughly 240,000-mile (each way) flight, along the way answering several questions likely to pop up in landlubber minds. Claustrophobia? He quotes astronaut Frank Borman: “Here on Earth usually, when you’re trapped in something, what’s good is on the outside. In a spacecraft, what’s good is on the inside and what’s outside is death.”
Regarding the “facilities” issue, we’re reminded that incredible feats of science are often undertaken by men wearing diapers, at least part of the time, though in space even the most mundane matters take on a magical air. After explaining that discarded liquids freeze in a “a shower of glistening ice crystals” Mr. Nelson quotes an unnamed astronaut who said the most beautiful thing he saw during his space travels was a “urine dump at sunset.”
We also learn that no matter how far you travel from Earth you can’t escape the nags. Aldrin celebrated a brief Communion after touching down on the Moon, though he had to keep it secret so as not to further enflame Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who filed a lawsuit after astronauts on Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis. Then there’s the news media, which sometimes seemed dead-set on proving that journalism isn’t exactly rocket science.
While Armstrong wowed the world with his “one small step” comments, Walter Cronkite marked the event with, “Phew! Wow, boy! Man on the Moon!” and also asked an official why it took Armstrong so long to back down the ladder. Because, he was told, Armstrong “doesn’t have eyes in his rear end.”
Then there were countless questions about how the astronauts “felt,” -- which, as Michael Collins explained, was a case of barking up the wrong tree: “It’s not within our ken to share emotions or utter extraneous information.” Armstrong made the same point after being asked what it felt like to walk on the moon: “Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.”
Some astronauts do stretch a bit further, as noted in “Voices from the Moon” (Viking Studio, 200 pages, $29,05), though even the most extraneous keep their feet close to the ground, even while on the moon. Apollo 12’s Alan Bean recalls how he was astounded to look up from the lunar surface and see the Earth -- “I’m really here,” he thought – before quickly scolding himself: “I’ve got to quit doing this…because when I’m doing this I’m not looking for rocks.”
What goes up must come down, and after their return Armstrong, and especially Aldrin, hit some very low points (Collins enjoyed relative tranquility, joining the State Department and later becoming first director of the National Air and Space Museum). While gazing at the moon may inspire romance, walking on it seems to have the opposite effect.
Armstrong moved to a dairy farm in Ohio, where he was a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. His wife left him, Mr. Collins writes, and he later had a heart attack.
Aldrin had double the marriage trouble, plus some, which he chronicles in “Magnificent Desolation” (Harmony Books, 326 pages, $27), a breezy read indicating that Aldrin has adapted quite well to our age’s penchant for self-revelation. .
“What does a man do for an encore after walking on the moon?” he asks early on, and for him the answer was: Crash. They didn’t call him Buzz for nothing back then: He had an ongoing wrestling match with alcohol and depression, sometimes rising from bed primarily to down a bottle of Scotch or Jack Daniel’s. He even went to work for a Cadillac dealership.
Yet Aldrin eventually broke free from booze’s orbit, giving it up in Oct. 1978 and later marrying the love of his life, a platinum blonde named Lois Driggs, on Valentine’s Day 1988. These days his passion is putting civilians into space, and the nation’s musicians will be heartened to learn that Aldrin prefers songwriters to journalists because, he believes, they have larger audiences.
In an introduction to another 40th anniversary commemorative book, “One Small Step (Murray Books, 162 pages, NO PRICE ON BOOK ), Aldrin leaves us with another insight into how much life has changed since Eagle landed.
After writing that a combined effort of the U.S. and EU countries may send the next astronauts to the Moon, Aldrin adds “there is no motivation for Russia because they would be 40 years late and they seem more interested in selling tickets to the Moon for $100m” -- recalling the time, not so long ago, when the Bear was officially a non-profit entity.

NY Singer’s Comeback An Inspirational Hit

By Dave Shiflett
(Bloomberg) – If you’re looking for a mega-dose of inspiration, Jason Crigler may be your man.
Crigler, a New York guitarist and singer, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during an August 4, 2004 performance in Manhattan. His unbelievable recovery is chronicled in “Life. Support. Music,” which airs on PBS July 7 a 10 p.m. New York time.
When it comes to comebacks, Crigler gives Lazarus a run for his money.
Calamity struck early in the gig. Bandmates recall that Crigler, then 34, suddenly looked confused and rushed from the stage to wife Monica, who was two months pregnant.
“I need help, I need help,” he said.
They went outside, where he gently lay down on the sidewalk. Being whisked away in an ambulance, he recalls, “is the last thing I remember for a year and a half.”
Jason had little brain function when he got to the hospital, and doctors offered little hope of him regaining even basic abilities. Over the next several months muscles deteriorated and the fingers that once danced along his guitar neck curled into a tight knot.
Filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar, a friend of Crigler’s, interviewed family, musical colleagues and doctors during the recovery, and also includes video shot during therapy sessions at Boston’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, where Crigler transferred after six months in acute care.
The videos are shocking and heartrending:
Crigler’s mouth is wide open and his eyes bulge, as if he had just been speared in the back. I found myself thinking: If I’m ever that far gone, let me go. His doctors offered little hope.
"Scientifically, he wasn't there," says Dr. Christopher Carter, who treated Crigler.
To his family, however, Crigler was anything but a Nowhere Man. Instead of placing him in a nursing home they moved him to a Boston residence and provided round-the-clock care and stimulation.
Slowly the old Jason began to re-emerge.
Wife Monica, who is remarkably unsentimental, says the smallest advances “were miraculous.” She adds that she came to “see the beauty in sadness and hardship,” though she states she is “not trying to romanticize” the situation.
Perhaps the biggest miracle was when Crigler started playing the guitar, initially picking out a small progression of notes, which he repeated incessantly. An old saying came to mind: There’s no curing a guitar player.
While Jason Crigler is not a household name, he has shared the stage with John Cale, Linda Thompson, Marshall Crenshaw, Rufus Wainwright and Norah Jones, who in an interview says his loss created “a big hole in the community.”
Crigler’s comeback came in increments – a cameo song at a friend’s gig, then a set, and finally, on his 36th birthday, a full show at a favorite Manhattan venue, The Living Room.
“I think I’m okay,” Crigler says as he tunes up. The audience couldn’t have been happier if John, George, Paul and Ringo had materialized on stage.
“Something exceptional and quite indescribable occurred,” Metzgar says, and it’s impossible not to be astounded watching Crigler play and sing, considering the dismal wreck of a man we recall from the therapy videos.
His family believes he’s 90 percent recovered, though his sense of humor couldn’t get much better. In a bit of stage bantering, Crigler calls the stroke “quite an experience” during which he met doctors who told him he would never walk or play the guitar.
“Luckily, I proved them all wrong.”