Author Archives: WD

To Storytelling

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I have been fortunate to have surrounded myself with people of good taste throughout my life; as such, I have gained knowledge of many things to which I would not have otherwise been exposed. One rather prosaic example is TV shows either from the past or that I have just not seen.

As a boy and teen, I would summer visiting my grandmother on the Jersey Shore. Gram was a bit past her days of swimming in the ocean, but had a membership to a wonderful beach club where I would pass the time riding the waves, working on my stroke, and yes, visiting the snack bar. In addition to this idyllic play, I’d spend the evenings in the crisp chill of her apartment studying my haftorah, playing with my cousins or watching TV.

As in most markets, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune were both on back to back. Although she claimed to be in for Jeopardy, we always seemed to settle into attention when the wheel began to spin.

Another classic was Hawaii 5-0 which pitted Steve McGarrett against various nefarious characters hanging about our most lovely of states. The arch-villain, the one to whom even the venerable McGarrett was impotent, was always referred to by Gram with reverence and hushed voice… “Wo-Fat!”

It was in among this almost maniacal reverence where I came to see the importance of plot, predicability and character. In this most American of mediums was to be found justice, growth, and perhaps even fortune. And as we read, did crossword puzzles and otherwise multitasked, it felt for a minute that we were wiser and that we had learned.

Bravo

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One of the great benefits of working at Bates is the plethora of arts offerings and the fact that most of them are free 😉 I’ve seen quite a bit of classical music in the past few years (in Marosvasarhely there was a fine orchestra,) but tonight’s performance by Alisa Weilerstein was absolutely phenomenal. Her best piece of the evening happened to be by a Hungarian composer, Zoltan Kodaly. Below you’ll find an excerpt of the piece, but alas, YouTube does not do justice to Weilerstein’s rendering of Kodaly’s Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8. To be so moved by a performance to leap to one’s feet is truly scintillating and rare.

Meow Mix

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Over the past few years I’ve made some dramatic choices in my life. I guess the most dramatic was joining the Peace Corps and venturing half way around the world for 2 1/2 years. Those times were tough but rewarding, and I don’t regret them at all. However, after I was finished with the Peace Corps I could have either gone right to law school or taken some time off. I decided to do the latter, and although I had originally wanted to do a cross-country road trip, I ended up taking a VISTA position in Maine. Thinking about that decision now, with just a few months left, I think I made a mistake.

I had hoped that Maine would be a rustic welcoming place, but instead I found it cold and suspicious. I imagine that part of the difficulty I experienced here was the fact that I was transitioning; we are warned by the Peace Corps that re-adjustment is a difficult process. But I can’t help but feel that I’ve wasted precious time here, and frankly that feeling just sucks. I have come to realize that I need to be in an environment that is more conducive to socialization. I’m not a giant party animal but I like to have things to do and a good group of friends to do them with (who doesn’t?) Unfortunately, as an outsider, I’ve had a really hard time establishing that here.

This lack has led me to question myself and since I tend to be my harshest critic, it’s kinda a depressing cycle. I have had my moments of expanding beyond my comfort zone, but things just haven’t clicked on a satisfactory level. Though there have been some great moments and people, these have been fragmented and too far in between. I yearn to belong somewhere and no longer be transient, but I haven’t found that place yet, and so continue to search, always looking out for what may lie just around the corner.

Disgraceful Media

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I was looking forward to tonight’s debate between Clinton and Obama. For those of you who watched it, as I did, I’m sorry. I’m sorry because you probably feel like you wasted two hours, but I’m also sorry to see that this bullshit passes for debate. The ABC News website has a blog with thousands of comments, most of which express great anger at this travesty. I’ll defer to one such commenter:

Our country is engaged in unlawful war, our military is breaking, our economy faces severe recession, our moral standing in the world has collapsed, our currency has lost nearly half its value, our infrastructure is disintegrating, our citizens cannot afford to stay in their homes though Wall Street moguls make billions of dollars annually, our current adminsitration condones and encourages torture – and lies to us about their actions, our borders cannot be adequatley policed for unlawful entry, our school sytems are so underfunded as to be barely above ‘third-world’ standards, our major auto manufacturers refuse to create vehicles that achieve even half the mpg of European manufactures, our minimum wage is slightly above poverty levels, our health care system operates to benefit the pharmaceutical industry, our veterans are ignored; their physical and emotional suffering trivialized, our energy conglomerates purposely stand in the way of advancing alternative energy, our citizens believe elections have been manipulated and stolen – and that our government has manufactured terror to maintain the facade of protecting us, our constitutional rights and responsibilities have been abridged and decimated, our access to meaningful ‘news’ is stymied by corporate media interests, our government spies on us by unlawful means under the guise of protecting our freedoms, our military commanders present disparate assessments of our ‘success’ in the middle east, our citizenry argues about gay marriage and flag burning while congress postures about life-saving possibilities of stem cell research, our airwaves are filled with hate speech spewing from commentators more interested in shocking us than being truthful….. and you waste our time at this most crucial period in US history asking a man as intelligent and insightful as Senator Obama why he doesn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel? This? This is the best we can do to elect a president?####.Bitter in Seattle

Indeed. Given the multitude of issues that are dogging threatening the very soul of this country, it is shameful that an hour is spent discussing flag pins, tenuous connections to some ex-radical from the 1960’s and other crap. When they “cut to video” to show a concerned midwesterner (who’s hair and home, by the way, looked straight out of the early eighties) ask about flag pins and patriotism, I felt like kicking her head in. I wonder how life is for her… does she have health insurance, a good job, college savings for her children? When she was given the opportunity to address the nation, all she could ask about is a meaningless symbol. I bet she has a magnetic ribbon made in China expressing support for our troops on her Ford Taurus.

But there will always be people like her. The real travesty is the fact that ABC sanctioned this garbage. It should come as no surprise to the older generations, after this debate, that very few people my age (25) watch network news. It has reached the point where the whole packaging of the news is so biased as to render it meaningless. There’s a lot of talk over at Kos about boycotts, etc. and I’m all for that. We need to cut ourself out of this destructive cycle:

http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html

We need big picture talk in these big picture times. Bush will soon leave office, but the damage done to our national institutions, including the media, will take a lot of work to repair. To hear it straight, check out NovaM Radio, home to Mike Malloy, and now, Randi Rhodes. Voices speaking truth to power are out there, but we must actively seek them out. Candidates must do the same and insist upon issues-based debates. If our national networks can not handle this, then let bloggers team up with PBS. No more.