We could all use some
“An Intervention” (acrylic and oil on canvas), by Deborah Dancy, in a group show at the Truro (Mass.) Center for the Arts, July 12-July 22.
The center says that Deborah Dancy's multimedia artwork walks between abstract and figurative work. “Her paintings, photos and drawings capture everyday moments through a unique lens.”
She explains in her Web site:
"My work is an investigation of abstraction’s capacity to engage beauty and tension without justification or narrative. In my paintings and works on paper, I do not specify references; meaning is organic since images mingle, shift, and position themselves within a field of agitated or flat color. Within these works, inspiration springs from diverse sources sponsored, in part, from the views of gnarled and jagged trees and bark from the woodlands surrounding my home, discarded shards of construction debris, and constant encounters with the internal and external world. In this odd combination of elements, the initial mark prompts the starting point. Hesitation and agitation of brush strokes within the gesture reveals content. Incompleteness- the unfinished fragment of what - ‘almost was’ and ‘might become’ amplifies meaning. In this orbit, painting explores what I consider as embracing the unpredictable and accidental. Accepting this means I suspend assumptions and allow discoveries to emerge. This edge of conflict and sequence of processes, including scraping and repainting, fresh forms, and constructed imagery, becomes the elemental act of painting.’’
Highland Light, in Truro. The famous lighthouse’s original site is marked by the boulder in the foreground. It was in danger of falling down the cliff that it was perched near the edge of because of erosion, and so the structure was moved 450 feet to the west, in 1996.
It all started in 1797, when a wooden lighthouse was authorized by George Washington to be built to help warn ships about the dangerous coastline between Cape Ann and Nantucket. It was the first lighthouse on Cape Cod. In 1833, the wood structure was replaced by a brick tower. In 1857 the lighthouse was declared dangerous and demolished and the current 66-foot brick tower was constructed.
Will it have to be moved again as seas continue to rise and erosion accelerates on the Outer Cape?
David Warsh: Cambridge will be even more of a capital of economics than usual this month
MIT’s main campus, in Cambridge
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
For the first time in three years the Summer Institute of the National Bureau of Economic Research is meeting in-person in Cambridge, Mass., at least for the most part, with some on-line components as well. (In the days before Zoom, venture capitalists used to describe more expensive face-to-face gatherings as “flesh-meets,” to distinguish them from conference calls.) A parallel, pan-European policy research institution, the Centre for Economic Policy Research, now headquartered in Paris, was founded in 1983.
A substantial fraction of the NBER’s 1,700+ research affiliates, who are drawn from colleges and universities mostly in North America, and a few others scattered around the world, will troop through the Sonesta Hotel in East Cambridge over the next three weeks, along with enough colleagues and students to add up to an attendance of some 2,400 persons in all. It is the forty-fifth annual meeting of what has become, in essence, a highly decentralized Wimbledon-style tournament of applied economists, staged as a science fair, and conducted in a series of high-level seminars.
Wimbledon, in that NBER players are professionally ranked; affiliates are selected by peer-review. Decentralized, in that 49 different projects are on the docket, many of them overlapping. Science fair, in that investigators choose their own problems, and rely on agreed-upon methods to study them, while new methods themselves are the subject of a separate annual lecture. Seminars, in that presenters don’t simply read their papers they have written; they briefly describe them and then respond to discussants and badinage.
An overall program is here. A detailed day-by-day listing of sessions is here. First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Gita Gopinath, of Harvard University, is slated to deliver the Martin Feldstein Lecture July 19 at 5:15p.m. EDT. It’s titled “Managing a Turn in the Global Financial Cycle’’.
Meanwhile, a mile down the Charles River, the Russell Sage Foundation Summer Camp in Behavioral Economies has been underway in the Marriott Hotel, some twenty-five or thirty Ph.D. candidates and post-docs studying with leading researchers, under the direction of David Laibson and Matthew Rabin, both of Harvard University.
The Summer Institute is where economic policy approaches are argued among experts. Nobel Prizes emerge mostly from summer camps. I look forward to a lot of (virtual) running-around.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicsprincipals.com. where this essay first ran.
Bathos at the beach
Artfully depressing photo of Nantasket Beach, in Hull, Mass., about 1950. Long-gone Paragon Park amusement park on the left.
Sometimes fun, if unhealthy
Boston’s “Newspaper Row,’’ in ca. 1906, showing the locations of the Boston Post (left), the Boston Globe (center-left) and the Boston Journal (center-right)
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I’ve been reading Carl Bernstein’s new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, which is mostly about his days as an erratic high school and college student in Maryland and as a devoted copyboy, dictationist and reporter at the old Washington Star in the early and mid ‘60s. It’s a terrific tale of the sometimes inspiring, sometimes exasperating world of journalism back then. It recalled to me some of the similar stuff I saw a few years later as a news assistant at the old Boston Record American, a rather tacky tabloid, and as a reporter at the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP), a somewhat stodgy broadsheet.
Ah, the unpredictable, open-ended hours, the tense, looming deadlines, the smoking, the bad coffee, the immediate post-deadline drinking at nearby watering holes, the interviewees you thought you’d hate but ended up becoming friends with, or enemies, the speeding in cars with fins to story scenes and speeding back to write the stories before deadline and the sudden, exciting assignments to far-away places. Meanwhile, you’d gradually put together a sort of mental Geiger counter to determine with increasing, in fits and starts, acuity if sources were lying to you.
Then there were the printers in the intensely unionized composing rooms who would stage a wildcat strike and/or tip over a page of the lead type spat out from clanking Linotype machines if someone from the newsroom so much as lightly touched the type.
One of Bernstein’s recollections particularly caught my eye: Reporters were sometimes called upon to get a picture of a recently deceased person – killed usually in a car accident or crime -- from his or her survivors to run with a story about the death. We called these assignments “takeouts.’’
I did a few myself, with trepidation. You’d knock on their door, looking mortified, make the request for the picture, which you’d promise to return as soon as it was in the paper, and ask if you could chat with them a bit about their loved one for the article to run with the picture. Rather than being enraged by my bothering them at such a sad, traumatic time, I found that they usually wanted to talk about the victim’s life. Thus I sat at kitchen tables hearing their stories. That I looked younger than my years probably made them more sympathetic about my invasion. Still, it was often tense and of course tearful.
Then there was the editor, who, after a too-long liquid lunch, lit his tie on fire after his cigarette fell from his lips as he nodded off.
Ah, newspaper days: Bad for your health but good for a lifetime supply of anecdotes.
xxx
Bernstein and his Watergate scandal reporting partner at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, agree that Trump has been more dangerous to democracy and more corrupt than Nixon, as bad as he was.
In an earlier time, Trump, a cancer on the body politic, would be facing the gallows, and rightly so.
Then there’s the low life working for him, and the millions of suckers who voted for him. Some would have voted for Hitler, too.
At work in Linotype machines in 1935
Newport, ‘even in November’
President John. F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis watch the 1962 America's Cup races off Newport.
“Some say Newport’s loveliest months are September and October, others are loyal to May and June before the high-summer crowds invade. But even in November when the bay turns gray black and the chill wind hustles off the the Atlantic, Newport keeps its spell — of a kind that has made lively entrepreneurs and tired wanderers alike exclaim on coming to it, ‘This is the place. Let’s stay here.’’’
— Joseph Brennan, in Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons
Washington Square, Newport, in 1818, by an unknown painter
Handing down their boats and their livings
“Wedding Dowry” (watercolor on Arches Paper), by William Talmadge Hall, at David Chatowsky Art Gallery, 47 Dodge St., Block Island, R.I. (401) 835-4623
Hit this link for Mr. Hall’s Web site.
He explains:
“In this picture I show a Block Island Double-Ender fishing boat being brought up on the beach at the end of a day around 1840, with the help of oxen and block and tackle. The boats, a mainstay of the island’s fishing and transportation in the 18th and 19th centuries, were built by islanders to circumvent the problem of not having particularly safe harbors, necessitating that boats be drawn up into the dunes at night to wait for a favorable tide and reasonable weather.
This required the islanders to help each other daily, building a tight communal bond.
Fishing from the family-owned boats was so successful in harvesting the plentiful fish stocks around the island that the Block Island Double-Ender fleet grew large and the boats become famous for seaworthiness.
In this picture, the newlyweds on the boat to the right prepare to forge ahead in their new boat. Two generations of Block Islanders watch this ceremony as they sit on the beach at day’s end in front of a small fire.
Over the years, fathers handed down their boats to sons, and if there were no sons then a boat might be a dowry gift to a daughter and son-in-law.
The new husband brought the potential of a bigger extended fishing family once he had proven himself a worthy fisherman and become the the ascending key figure in the future.
Either way, the prize was the boat and the legacy it represented to a self-sufficient fishing community bolstered by shared beliefs.
xxx
I’m a 74-year-old artist. My family has been a part of Block Island's history for five generations. My father was the first male Hall on the island not to pursue fishing as a career, although he harpooned swordfish until he was drafted into the Army, in World War II.
I’m a watcher, and many of my paintings are about people working — the simple grace of people doing what they do each day to make a living. These folks don’t dwell much on the meaning or the ultimate results of what they do. They go with the flow of a continuum of work.
Llewellyn King: Boris Johnson — the fall of an articulate incompetent
Britain’s soon to be former prime minister, with the famous wild hair
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The best piece of business advice I have ever read was, “Beware the articulate incompetent.” It is important to business decisions but far more so to political ones.
Boris Johnson has always been a poster boy for the articulate incompetent, and yet he rose with wit, bravado and connections to the highest elective office in Britain, prime minister. Now his luck has run out.
Born in New York to British parents, he didn’t renounce his dual citizenship until 2016, when it became a liability politically. He won a scholarship to Eton, the boys-only boarding school where many prime ministers studied, went on to Oxford, and was elected president of the Oxford Union. This is the equivalent of privilege on steroids.
Johnson’s weaknesses, including sloth, disorganization, lack of preparedness, showing off and a disinclination to let the facts stand in the way of a good story, were well known. He was fired from his first journalistic job on The Times of London for fabricating a quote -- from his godfather, of all people. Later Michael Howard, the distinguished Tory leader, fired him from the ranks of the shadow cabinet, also for lying.
After The Times, Johnson worked for the conservative daily, The Telegraph. In Brussels, where he was assigned, he was regarded by his peers as good company but an unreliable reporter. One of them told me that he was often asked to chase up some fabricated concoction of Johnson’s like the banana regulation, allegedly defining the length and curve of bananas allowed into the European Union. The only curve was that of the truth.
Johnson’s editors back in London wanted to hear only bad news about Europe. Johnson obliged: He was playing his part in the movement to take Britain out of Europe, which matured as Brexit.
Johnson went on to become a member of Parliament and editor of The Spectator, an admired British weekly magazine of politics, culture and current affairs, published continuously since 1828. His colleagues at the magazine found him sloppy, often absent and often leaving his work to others. His management was, it is reported, incoherent, a charge repeated about his leadership of Britain.
The Spectator, under Johnson’s editorship, was engulfed in a sex scandal of rare portions. The publisher was cavorting with a British cabinet member, Johnson with the star columnist and an editor with a secretary. It was a literary “Animal House.”
Johnson has been married three times and has six children from those marriages. He acknowledges one love child.
Next step for Johnson was to become mayor of London. His humor papered over the cracks, and he did a good job in defending London’s image -- especially in insisting that the double-decker red buses be retained.
The campaign for the United Kingdom to leave Europe gave Johnson his chance. He went against his old parliamentary friend and Eton and Oxford companion, Prime Minister David Cameron, and campaigned vigorously and with aid of some wild and untrue claims about how Britain would prosper out of Europe. Brexit carried the day.
Cameron was replaced with the dull, dutiful Theresa May. She had the task of trying to make Brexit work without breaking Britain. After three years, she was out, and a shaken party installed Johnson as its leader.
In a landslide, the Conservatives won the first election with Johnson at the helm, and he was expected to be a transformational prime minister. Instead, he has been involved in scandals: He has been caught lying about parties in his official home and office, No. 10 Downing Street, during the Covid-19 lockdown, and recently about the allegations of sexual impropriety of a member of his party, whom he had been warned about but nonetheless promoted. The truth might have saved Johnson; he eschewed it.
Johnson isn’t a fool, but he does foolish, often roguish things. He is a scholar of the ancient world, a biographer, a linguist and a wordsmith. He likes to make comparisons to antiquity: He equated London to Athens and himself to Pericles.
He wrote a biography of Churchill, which I enjoyed but found nothing groundbreaking. It seems to have been written to signal similarities between himself and Churchill.
Johnson will be heard from again as a commentator and author. He excels at the pithy phrase and joking in adversity, as when, as London mayor, he was left hanging on a zipline during a 2012 Olympics event.
His legacy may be that he was the most quotable prime minister of his generation and beyond. Here is a classic: “My friends, I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”
On resigning, Johnson said tamely, “Them’s the breaks.”
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
‘Nail to the mast’
The USS Constitution fires a 17-gun salute in Boston Harbor, on July 4 2014. The Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides,’’ is the world's oldest ship still afloat. She was launched in 1797, one of six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794 and the third constructed.
The ship is most noted for its effectiveness against the British during the War of 1812.
She is now a museum ship, albeit fully commissioned by the Navy. Her crew of 75 officers and sailors participate in ceremonies, educational programs and special events while keeping her open to visitors year round and providing free tours.. She is usually berthed at Pier 1 of the former Charlestown Navy Yard at one end of Boston's Freedom Trail. Go see her.
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
O, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every thread-bare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,—
The lightning and the gale!
— “Old Ironsides,’’ by Boston physician, poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894)
Don Pesci: Chatting with Aristophanes about comedy
Bust of Aristophanes (First Century A.D.)
The Theater of Dionysus, Athens . In the time of comic playwright and poet Aristophanes (446-386, B.C.) the audience probably sat on wooden benches with earth foundations.
VERNON, Conn.
Q: It’s so good to meet you (chuckles) in person, so to speak.
Aristophanes: Funny. Would you mind if I use that in the future?
Q: I wasn’t aware there was a future for the dead.
A: That is what I might call an example of the arrogance of the living. You are forgetting William Faulkner, who said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." He wrote most persuasively about the past by resurrecting the dead in his novels. We all do that, in one way or another. You must remember that the only advantage those who are alive at present have over the dead is that they are alive and the dead are dead. That’s it.
Q: I wonder if you can confirm a story about you, not that it has anything to do with the subject of our discussion, the role of comedy in culture. It is said that you died from a falling roof tile that struck you on the head. One of our commentators said your manner of death was ironically appropriate, for a comic writer.
A: (nonplussed, a vacant look)
Q: He was making a joke.
A: Ah, yes, I get it. And you want to know if the joke is true?
Q: Yes.
A: Well, jokes are always true. But how can I tell you that the incident happened if I had been struck dead by a falling roof tile? Besides, if you have done even minimal research on me – a quick glance at what I call Wickedpedia – you will know that little is known of me? I managed to keep myself well hidden in the plays. Your age is obsessed with facts, but it is important to understand that facts, provided they are all accounted for, are vehicles that may lead to truth. But, in some instances, fiction serves the same purpose, which is why we do not dismiss Shakespeare and Faulkner as unimportant.
Q: It’s Wikipedia, by the way.
A: Not when you are punning.
Q: One of the purposes of this interview is to gather comments from the real Aristophanes about the real world.
A: From what I know of your time and world, I’m not sure (very condescendingly) you people understand either reality or your time in it. And being introduced to your world is a frightening prospect for anyone but a comic writer, provided he is allowed to ventilate his opinions. All comedy is what the moderns call transgressive, and all comedians are at bottom contrarians. Think of “the fool” in Shakespeare’s plays. A real take on your real world would reduce Euripides to tears and make Socrates blush -- and, believe me, Socrates was not given to blushing or Euripides to weeping.
Q: I should ask you, since you and other dramatists were the journalists of your day, do you think, as a general rule, that journalists also should be contrarians?
A: I do. So did Joseph Pulitzer and H.L. Mencken.
Q: I’m guessing the tyrant Creon was cool to your plays in which he was, some say, mercilessly caricatured.
A: In the Athenian republic of my day, it was understood that comics, the Shakespearian “fools” of Greece, should be permitted to dress down world saviors. After Sparta defeated Athens at the close of the Peloponnesian War, comic writers became considerably more cautious – for obvious reasons. As you may have guessed from a close reading of Lysistrata, I was in favor of what Henry Kissinger might have called an Athenian “diplomatic entente,” rather than a 26-year war with Sparta. Actually, Sparta’s peace terms were far less draconian than the terms imposed by World War I’s victors on a humiliated Germany. Sparta won the war, but Athens won the peace, nothing short of a miracle. Old Comedy became a more politically genteel New Comedy after the war, and the New Comedy was less wearing on the nerves of tyrants the world over. Your situation is similar. You have in your country the same fixation with world saviors – naturally, all of them Americans. In a regime of authoritarians -- or, worse, experts -- comedy is rarely tolerated, because comedy is an attempt to readjust proper proportions. When things are out of shape, the comic is the person who whacks them, by means of his comedy, back into shape. It is impossible to imagine in Russia, for instance, a roast of Putin. When I was approached on the street by one of Creon’s lackeys who demanded, “Don’t you take anything seriously?” I responded, as any good comic should, “Of course, I take comedy seriously.” After Athens’s defeat by Sparta at the decisive Battle of Aegospotami, such responses became less advisable and comic wit suffered grievous indignities. Fortunately, I lived to see the revival of Athens after its crushing defeat by the Spartan General Lysander in 405 B.C. Creon wanted a war to the finish with Sparta – and he got one.
Q: Naturally we care more about our present than your past, despite what has been said by Faulkner. But what riches can you bring to our reality?
A: The French, who can be amusing if you catch them in a nonpolitical mood, say – a poor translation – “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” You are now in the process of scourging your comedians. It will not be long before you hoist them on a cross. Here is some advice worth something: comedy is the canary in the cultural mineshaft. And a poisonous culture will repress comedy first, and everyone else later, simply bury them under mounds of humorless, pretentious group-think. Just before the Hungarian revolt, a worker slated by Karl Marx as the future owner of the means of production was asked to comment on his condition under the Marxist-Leninist dispensation. “They pretend to pay us,” he said, “and we pretend to work.” That man understood the proper use of comedy.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
The Tower on Fox Hill in Henry Park, Vernon
Disinfecting corrupt stuff
Sunrise from the top of Cadillac Mountain, in Acadia National Park, Maine. For part of the year it’s the site of America’s earliest sunrise.
“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.’’
“And publicity has already played an important part in the struggle against the Money Trust.’’
— Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), in a Harper’s Magazine article in 1913. A government and civic reformer through much of his life, Brandeis was a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1916-1939. Before then he was a co-founder, in 1879, with Samuel Warren, and long-time partner of the Boston law that today is called Nutter, McClennen & Fish.
Self-defense training
“Lando as a Boy” (oil on board), by Alexander Bostic, at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass.
David Warsh: Three to watch in the mid-term elections
An 1846 painting by George Caleb Bingham showing a polling judge administering an oath to a voter
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
My Fourth of July resolution was to tune out stories about the possible 2024 presidential ambitions of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and pay attention instead, at least until Nov. 8, to the Senate campaign in Ohio. Author-turned-venture capitalist J.D. Vance and Congressman Tim Ryan are running there to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman.
Vance, 37, gained fame as author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016). After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as a public-affairs specialist in an air wing during the Iraq War. He then graduated from from Ohio State University, went on to Yale Law School and then left a corporate-law practice for a venture-capital firm in San Francisco. He returned to Ohio in 2016 to form, with partners, a venture fund of his own. Formerly an evangelical Protestant, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019. He opposes abortion rights.
Ryan. 49, is a 10-term congressman whose present district includes much of northeast Ohio, from Youngstown to Akron. In 2015, he explained to readers of the Akron Beacon Journal “Why I changed my thinking on abortion’’. The next year, he led an ultimately unsuccessful effort to unseat Nancy Pelosi as party leader of the House Democrats.
Might Ryan, if he wins, find a seat on that otherwise still all-but-empty bench of potential 2024 Democratic presidential candidates, at whose opposite end sits Clinton? It is plausible, if not likely. After all, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich had a shot at derailing Trump as Republican nominee in 2016. In any event, lie Vance, Ryan seems likely to remain in public life for years to come.
Jane Coaston, a journalist, is a third star rising in the mid-term elections, and probably well beyond. The New York Times hired her away from Vox last autumn to run a weekly discussion show, The Argument. Coaston grew up in suburban Cincinnati, according to Graham Vyse, of The Washington Post, the daughter of union Democrats who were “giant hippies,” before she learned to distinguish among varieties of conservative thought as editor of The Michigan Review at the University of Michigan. She gained prominence with a National Review article in 2017, “What if there is no such thing as Trumpism?” Her talk-show discussion with two leading Republican theorists after Vance’s Trump-endorsed primary victory in May was especially illuminating.
Control of the Senate will almost certainly become the dominant story of the mid-term elections. The Pennsylvania Senate race is interesting, too. To me, at least, it seems likely, that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will cost Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) his leadership of the Senate. This column is mostly about economics, but the investigation of preferences change is gradually becoming an important part of economics
Immigration, foreign wars, globalization and climate change: All these national issues will take a back seat in November elections, which are about leadership in particular states. They will resurface, along with women’s rights, in 2024. Harvard Historian Jill Lepore wrote a couple years ago that America, like any other nation-state, requires a “national story.” She was right. Voters write it, election by election.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.
The scariest animal, drunk or sober
“Saturn Devouring His Son,’’ from the Black Paintings series, by Francisco de Goya, 1746-1828
“I think a human animal is far more wild and unpredictable and dangerous and destructive than any other animal.’’
—Jeff Corwin (born 1967), biologist, wildlife conservationist and animal-show host. He was raised in Norwell, Mass., and now lives in neighboring Marshfield.
Jacobs Farmhouse, in Norwell, Mass., built in early 19th Century
“Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.’’
— e.e. cummings (1894-1962), American poet, painter, essayist, author and playwright. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., and died in North Conway, Mass.
Through the haze of longing
“Still Life 8” (watercolor, 1990), by celebrated Providence-based painter and art professor Thomas Sgouros (1927-2012), in a show of his work at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, through July 22.
The sad decline of the newsstand
South Station
A newsstand in New York City before the print implosion.
— Photo by Neutrality, Talk
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
To my dismay, there was no newsstand in Boston’s South Station, New England’s biggest train station, when I walked through it the other week. Maybe they’ll bring one back: They’re doing a lot of construction there.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years browsing the now-disappeared stand and many others at home and abroad.
Big newsstands are a joy, with lots of serendipity, but they’re disappearing. Too bad. You see all sorts of magazines you wouldn’t usually have access to. And buying and leafing through a paper publication is more enjoyable than reading on a screen. Further, your retention of what you read is better, say neurologists. Big newsstands make waiting at a train or bus station or airport less onerous.
Porn or semi-porn magazines used to be widely available on newsstands, amongst the more dignified materials, but wrapped in camouflage. Now, with the World Wide Web drenched in porn, the paper version of it is disappearing. Can’t compete! An advance for public order and morality?
The staying power of ‘70s and ‘80s popular music
"Everything new is old again," says Provincetown, Mass., DJ Braintree Jim.
“So much of today's new music longs for nostalgia, this quest to regain or relive some semblance of what is believed to be better times from a bygone era. It's quite remarkable. You can hear it in the tunes, a steadfast reverential pastiche for ‘70s and ‘80s music. I think many of today's younger artists realize the staying power of music from that period. The evidence is all around us.
"If you look at the big streaming services it is the back catalog music that is getting all the attention. So it makes sense, therefore, that a lot of the new music I am listening to has this derivative aesthetic attached to it. I suppose each generation has pinched ideas from previous generations. Still, it's fun hearing new material infused with some of the old effects or instruments or even production techniques that were present back then. It's a hybrid mash-up for sure."
He believes that the recent resurgence and renaissance of English musician Kate Bush, now 63, and popular in the 1980s, is further proof.
Her song, "Running Up That Hill," released in 1985 on the “Hounds of Love’’ album, was recently featured on season 4 of the massively watched Netflix series Stranger Things. Ever since the song was featured it has rocketed back to the charts, both in the U.S. and U.K. It reached the top five in a recent Billboard Hot 100 chart in America, and hit no. 1 in the U.K. The recent chart success has broken all sorts of records. And a three-week period in June saw the song streamed a staggering 137 million times on Spotify.
Braintree Jim's radio show Chill & Dream returns to the airwaves on Wednesday, July 6, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on WOMR (92.1 FM) the community radio station in Provincetown that recently celebrated 40 years on the air. It’s simulcast on sister station WMFR (91.3 FM) in Orleans.
Perhaps tellingly, the new show will showcase music from the 1980s. "It's very much a roots show," he says. "You can't escape the roots. And yes, I will be playing Kate Bush." The show can be streamed live on womr.org.
The building that houses WOMR, at 492-494 Commercial St., has a fascinating history. Hit this link to read about it and see photos from its history.
After awakening from a trance
“Free Association” (Encaustiflex, wax, silver pigment), by Bristol, R.I.- based Leila Stokes Weinstein
She explains:
“My process is a combination of working on an idea that I want to express or just playing with materials, allowing my subconscious to make the decisions.The later is fun because suddenly I ‘awaken’ from a sort of trance or meditation, a place of no thought, to find something pleasing has been created.
''The three-dimensional capability of wax calls to me, whether it is a buildup of layers on a panel or embedded objects in a sculptural piece.
"Like most of the world, I am very concerned about the degradation of our planet and the rapid extinction of wild plants and animals, so my work often reflects on that and the beauty of nature around us.
"My work usually incorporates visual movement. The flow of water, the lapping of waves and the blur between land, water and air call to me.’’
Her bio:
Lelia Stokes Weinstein was raised as a Quaker. She was taught that there was good in everyone. In her art she explores joy, hope and peace. As a small child she loved to do art and was allowed to go to art classes in Cambridge at the age of 9. The experience of commuting for 2 hours by herself from the World’s End section of Hingham, Mass., helped further develop an independent and adventurous spirit.
She went to Friends World College, which required study abroad in at least two countries. Living in India and traveling overland to England through Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey she discovered the vibrancy of these cultures and how they embraced color and texture.
A misty morning in the Hingham, Mass., peninsula called World’s End
The front of the 231st Bristol, R.I., Fourth of July Parade in 2016.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
Llewellyn King: Why I love America but fear its political decay and paralysis
Fourth of July fireworks in America's easternmost town, Lubec, Maine, population 1,300. Canada is across the channel to the right.
— Photo by it'sOnlyMakeBelieve
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Martin Walker, the gifted former Washington correspondent of The Guardian, used to start his speeches by saying that the Fourth of July wasn’t a time for sorrow for him because it was a time when good British yeomen farmers in the American colonies revolted against a German king and his German mercenaries.
Walker — who now lives in France and writes the hugely successful “Bruno” detective books set in the Perigord region — once told me, “It’s exciting living in a country where the president can order up an aircraft carrier to settle a dispute.”
He, an Englishman, and I, a former British colonial (from Zimbabwe) who moved here in 1963, shared our admiration for the United States. For America’s birthday this year, I have counted some things I most like and admire about this country of endless experimentation. Also, alas, I admit that it is getting harder to feel as proud of it as I once did.
America, for me, has always embodied a special freedom: the freedom to try. The wonderful thing about it is that you can try a business, an idea, a way of living, or even a way of thinking. I read in The Waist-High Culture, the 1958 book by Thomas Griffith, that Europe was a “no” culture and the United States was a “yes” culture. So true.
In my first year here, I wrote to a family member in England, marveling at the size and scope of the American market. I wrote to her, “You could make a fortune here making glass beads, so long as they were good glass beads.” I still believe that.
The other great freedom, which I treasure, is that you can move across the country and start all over again. If you feel you have failed in New York, you can take a fresh sheet and try again in Chicago, Austin or San Francisco. You can have failed in marriage, in business, in a career, and in some very public way, but you can go on anew somewhere else.
You can’t do that in what are, in many ways, city-states — for example, in the way England is dominated by London and France by Paris. There is geographic freedom in the United States that has an exhilaration all its own.
I was intoxicated by America from the first. I didn’t dwell on the sins of the past, from the cruelty of the Puritans, the pioneers and the planters to the folly of Prohibition. When I arrived, I embraced all that was in the present; the civil-rights movement was underway and gathering strength, and it was possible to believe that the United States would continue to be the shining example of how you get it right, how you correct big and small errors, and how you let people prosper. John F. Kennedy was president, and it was a new day.
When I covered Congress, I was enchanted with it: the committee power centers, the indifference to party discipline, and a system where you really did need majority approval to get a law passed.
Overall, members of Congress were among the hardest-working (and some were the hardest-drinking) around. They sought to understand issues from atomic energy to cancer. Congress wasn’t perfect, but it aspired to get things right.
For many years, I participated in the Humbert Summer School — a think tank — in the west of Ireland. I used to enjoy talking up the presidential system as superior to the parliamentary one, where a simple majority can wreak havoc.
Now, alas, Congress is experiencing the evils of parliamentary government and none of the virtues, particularly swift legislating. Party discipline — as in the case of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, of California, shunning Rep. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming — has supplanted the old tolerance for differences within the party. It began with the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, abetted by the proliferation of single-point-of-view talk radio.
Like all unchecked decay, it has gotten worse.
America the Beautiful, I wish you a happy birthday. I thank you for your generosity over these decades, and I say sincerely, “Mind how you go.” The world needs your seeking to be fair and just, and full of possibility, not divided and rancorous, and a threat to yourself.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington.
‘Then she remembers’
Tree swallow
…."by the Mad River's (in Compton, N.H.) water-tangled weeds
grapevine and spruce bough, sparrow's lost
four-toed tracks disappear, her song's
a little heartbreak aria in blackberry bushes
then she remembers she can fly’’
— From “Mud Revolver’’, by Rick Agran, a Vermont-New Hampshire poet, teacher, photographer and journalist
Compton, N.H., in 1910, when much of the land was still open for pasturage.
Soothing with silk
“Imitating Symmetry” (silk), by Boston artist Evan Rosenberg, in his show “Mantra,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through July 31.
He tells the gallery:
"My work utilizes silk as a medium to capture, interpret and cope with the chaotic and uncontrollable realities of the world around me. My interest in this material was born out of my research at a biotech startup, which uses silk protein to stabilize vaccines. Intrigued by the possibilities of silk as a material for art, I began exploring its properties and limitations by weaving it into three-dimensional spaces.
“The work I do is grounded in repetition and meditation. As I create, I am driven deeply into self-reflection and meditation. I use the work to disconnect from my thoughts and impulses and guide me into a flow state.’’
Nonotuck Silk Co. advertisement for Corticelli silk showing the stages of silk production.
Nonotuck Silk Company (1832-1930 in various incarnations) produced silk thread at a mill in Haydenville, Mass. It was established as the North Hampton Silk Company and operated for years by members of a utopian society active in abolitionism. The company later acquired the Corticelli Silk Mills, in Leeds, Mass., and became the Corticelli Silk Co.