Monday, December 19, 2005

Being called "retarded" by Tucker Carlson is like being called a "punk-ass rich boy shitheel nitwit" by. . .Tucker Carlson. Here's a face that's just begging for a bitch-slap   Canada described as 'retarded cousin' by U.S. "pundit", in spate of attacks BETH GORHAM1 hour, 54 minutes ago WASHINGTON (CP) - Canada has been described lately by a conservative U.S. television host as "a stalker" and a "retarded cousin." Another pundit recently asked if Canadians weren't getting "a little too big for their britches." There's been a spate of Canada-bashing by right-wing media commentators in the United States ever since Prime Minister Paul Martin's complaints about lumber penalties and U.S. policy on climate change. His remarks prompted an unusual rebuke last week from the American ambassador. The attacks on Canada have had web bloggers typing overtime and a non-profit group that's monitoring the trend, Media Matters for America, says it's disturbing. Yet Paul Waldman, a senior fellow for the group, said Monday the criticism is confined to the usual faction that erupts whenever there's criticism of President George W. Bush's administration and it probably won't last past Canada's Jan. 23 election. "There are always going to be occasions when it pops up. But Canada is never going to occupy an extraordinary amount of American thought," said Waldman. "It's more like: 'Who can we beat on today?' It's never going to reach the heights of animosity toward France in the run-up to the Iraq war." Last week, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, a well-known conservative pundit, let loose with a string of anti-Canada rants. "Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York," he said. "Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he's nice but you don't take him seriously. That's Canada." Carlson also said it's pointless to tell Canada to stop criticizing the United States. "It only eggs them on. Canada is essentially a stalker, stalking the United States, right? Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right?" "It's unrequited love between Canada and the United States. We, meanwhile, don't even know Canada's name. We pay no attention at all," he said. The day before, Fox News host Neil Cavuto highlighted Martin's remark at a news conference that the United States is a "reticent nation" lacking a "global conscience" on climate change. "So have the Canadians gotten a little too big for their britches?" Cavuto asked. "Could our neighbours to the north soon be our enemies?" Douglas MacKinnon, a press secretary to former Republican senator Bob Dole, also recently accused Canada of harbouring terrorists. "Can Canada really be considered our friend anymore?" he asked in a recent commentary in the right-wing Washington Times newspaper. "What other question can be asked when the Canadian government not only willingly allows Islamic terrorists into their country but does nothing to stop them from entering our nation?" U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins warned Martin last week to tone down anti-American jabs or risk hurting bilateral relations. But Martin was unrepentant, saying he would "not be dictated to" by the United States and his hard line appears to be resonating with some voters. While the offensive from American pundits isn't widespread, it still has the potential to affect cross-border ties, said Waldman. "On Capitol Hill, the TVs are turned to Fox News. This kind of media environment is what the White House pays attention to," he said. "That hostility is probably shared by a lot of people in the administration." Copyright © 2005 Canadian Press 5:46:29 PM     comment []

The Last Line of Defense The Republicans long ago proved themselves to be, among their many evils, the Party of Mr. Suburban Shithead and his Hummer, the Live for Today, Fuck the Future Party, the Oil Companies Über Alles Party. The Democrats may not be much, but they're all we've got, and they're the last line of defense against total ruination, degregation and genuine indecency. Support them, even if, like me, you sometimes have to hold your nose, and please support this filibuster.                 Republican Vision                                                                                                                  Democratic Vision   Democrats to fight Arctic oil drilling By Tom Doggett1 hour, 27 minutes ago Senate Democrats on Monday threatened a filibuster to stop Republicans from adding language to a must-pass defense spending bill that would allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The refuge, an area the size of South Carolina that sprawls along Alaska's northern coast, has been at the center of a bitter congressional debate for decades. The refuge is home to caribou, polar bears, migratory birds and other wildlife. Tapping ANWR's estimated 1 million barrel per day crude oil output is a top priority of the Bush administration to increase oil supplies and slow imports. Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans say tougher fuel standards for sport utility vehicles and minivans could save the same amount of oil. Senate debate on the measure began on Monday morning, a few hours after the U.S. House of Representatives approved a $453.3 billion defense budget bill in a pre-dawn vote with the controversial ANWR drilling provision attached to it. Furious Democrats said including ANWR in funding for U.S. soldiers and Pentagon weapons programs violated Senate rules that require a spending bill to include only germane items. "These tactics reflect poorly on this body and this leadership," said Sen. Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record), a Wisconsin Democrat, "Funding for our brave men and women in uniform should not be jeopardized by opening ANWR to drilling." Democrats first planned a parliamentary procedure to challenge the ANWR language in the bill, saying it was added by negotiators and did not appear in the original versions of the House and Senate defense spending bills. If Republicans override the chamber's parliamentary ruling with a simple majority of 51 votes, Democrats said they would launch a filibuster to talk the bill to death. "I don't have any hesitation to be a part of a filibuster," said Democrat Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. "This is a fight worth waging." Republicans must have 60 votes to end a filibuster, cutting off debate and allowing a bill to have a vote. "This is a Christmas package designed for delivery to the oil industry, and we have got to fight as hard as we can to stop that delivery," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (news, bio, voting record) of New Jersey. The fiery debate over ANWR drilling could keep the Senate in session until Wednesday, according to aides. Republican Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record) of Alaska pushed to get the drilling plan included in the annual defense budget because it was the only major bill moving through the Congress that ANWR could hitch a ride on. "Oil is related to national security. This is an amendment to pursue domestic production of oil," Stevens said. "The largest consumer of oil in the United States is the Department of Defense." His state would get half the estimated $10 billion that energy companies would pay for ANWR drilling rights if oil prices were at $50 a barrel, according to government estimates. The federal government would receive the other half. "This is nothing more than a sweetheart deal for Alaska and the oil companies," said Sen. Maria Cantwell (news, bio, voting record), a Democrat from Washington state. About 1.5 million acres of the refuge's coastal plain would be opened to drilling under the current congressional plan. If Congress opened ANWR to drilling, the refuge's oil would not flow into market for 10 years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Once the refuge reached peak production in 2025, its oil would shave about 2 percentage points off the share oil imports would have in meeting domestic demand, the EIA said. That would moderate U.S. oil imports to a forecast 58 percent of total demand in 2025, equal to current import levels. Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. 5:05:03 PM     comment []

Deconstructing the president's defense As we noted earlier today, the White House is making a two-pronged argument in order to defend a secret spying program that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. First, George W. Bush and his attorney general say, the president has inherent authority as commander-in-chief to do what he thinks is necessary to protect Americans from an enemy attack. Second, they say, Congress somehow implicitly repealed FISA when it adopted a use-of-force authorization in the days after the attacks of 9/11. For the White House, the first of these arguments ought to be at least a little embarrassing. The president has said he would have "moved mountains" to prevent the attacks of 9/11. But doesn't the administration's argument about the secret spying program suggest that Bush did less than he could have done before the planes struck? Let's walk through this one step at a time. In an interview to be aired on "Nightline" tonight, Dick Cheney says pretty unequivocally that the Bush administration might have been able to prevent 9/11 if it had had the capability that Bush's executive order on spying gave it in 2002. "It's the kind of capability [that], if we'd had before 9/11, might have led us to be able to prevent 9/11," Cheney says. "We had two 9/11 terrorists in San Diego prior to the attack in contact with al-Qaida sources outside the U.S. We didn't know it. The 9/11 Commission talks about it. If we'd had this capability, then we might well have been able to stop it." At the same time, however, Cheney and Alberto Gonzales and Condoleezza Rice and Bush himself are all insisting that Bush has the power, as part of his inherent authority as commander in chief, to sign the executive order that he signed. If they're right about that, doesn't it follow that Bush could have signed his executive order sometime before 9/11 -- say, on the day that he was warned that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States? And if he didn't, isn't it the case that Bush really didn't do everything he could have done to prevent September 11th from becoming anything other than another date on the calendar? Maybe that's why administration officials are careful to make a two-part argument on the spying order. Bush had inherent authority to sign his executive order, they say, but he also obtained additional authority from Congress when it approved a measure authorizing the use of force against al-Qaida. This second argument is ridiculous on its face. Congress knows how to repeal a law when it wants to do so, and it didn't give any clue that it was repealing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when it authorized the president to use force against al-Qaida. While the congressional resolution authorized Bush to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons" who participated in the attacks of 9/11 or helped or harbored those who did, it didn't authorize Bush to violate FISA any more than it authorized him to violate laws against murder, insider trading or jaywalking. But arguments that seem ridiculous sometimes carry the day in court anyway, and this one has before. When lawyers for Yaser Hamdi argued that the president lacked the authority to order the indefinite detention of American citizens he deemed "enemy combatants," the Justice Department countered with the same arguments the White House is floating now: Bush has inherent authority to detain combatants in time of war, and Congress gave him additional authority with its use-of-force authorization. Only Clarence Thomas bought the first argument, but five justices -- Thomas, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Kennedy and Breyer -- accepted the idea that the power to detain "enemy combatants" should be read into the use-of-force authorization. Indeed, O'Connor, writing for a four-judge plurality in the Hamdi case, insisted that the use-of-force authorization was "explicit" authorization for Bush to hold detainees even though the authorization itself was silent on the subject. Was the Hamdi case different? In this way, it was: It went to court. By taking it upon himself to rewrite FISA through executive order, Bush has avoided that inconvenience. The Constitution's checks and balances just aren't necessary, he insisted during his press conference today: The president and his lawyers have sworn to uphold the law, and the American people can trust that they're doing so. "I disagree with your assertion of 'unchecked power,'" the president shot back when a reporter raised the question today. "To say 'unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject." But it isn't the reporter who was ascribing "some kind of dictatorial position" to the president. It's Bush who has taken it for himself. In a sign of just how far this administration has come from the first principles of conservatism, even Antonin Scalia seems troubled by the powers that Bush and his lawyers have assumed for themselves. Disseting in the Hamdi case last year, Scalia quoted Alexander Hamilton on the dangers of trading away liberty for safety, then wrote words that seem entirely applicable today: "Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis -- that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it." Those are big words, and they remind of some other ones that occurred to us today: Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about blow jobs. -- By Tim Grieve, salon.com 2:18:32 PM     comment []

The Evolution of John Patrick Shanley From 'Danny' to 'Doubt,' the Bronx to Brooklyn Heights, the playwright contemplates a fate he never envisioned by Robert Coe  John Patrick Shanley's Bronx characters don't sidle up and ask—they demand to be seen and heard. Saying exactly what they feel, almost without appearing to think about it, they're posturing and naked at once, far-fetched, mercurial and profane, and they effortlessly own the stage. This fall theatre season in New York is offering a major revival of Shanley's electrifying first drama, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, a 1984 two-hander "dedicated to everyone in the Bronx who punched me or kissed me, and to everyone whom I punched or kissed"—by a man inducted this past summer into the Bronx Walk of Fame. The play opened at Second Stage on Oct. 21. Five days later, New York audiences began catching up to Shanley's present work at the Public Theatre's Shiva Theatre, where the LAByrinth Theater Company is presenting the world-premiere production of one of the playwright's most radical stylistic experiments to date: Sailor's Song, a love story with dancing (to waltzes by Johann Strauss), set in an imagined seaside town, about a cynical man and a true believer battling over two beautiful women and the nature of love. A second new play will open on Nov. 22 at Manhattan Theatre Club's New York City Center Stage I, and will play this spring at California's Pasadena Playhouse: Doubt, a drama set in the 1960s at a Bronx Catholic School—the story of a stern principal, Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones), who grows suspicious of a priest who seems to be taking too much interest in a young male student. Night and day from the animal vitality of Danny, Doubt unfolds in a spirit of poetic restraint and deep seriousness, and it reads as Shanley's most powerful play in years. This would seem an ideal moment to reconsider the career of an off-center playwright frequently viewed as an eccentric, vulgar provisioner for scenery-chewing actors, but who is in fact a deeply ambitious artist working through primal themes, in a language that people actually use and a voice as recognizable as David Mamet's (although less easily caricatured). An overview of his work reveals a more substantial, shapelier body than this reader had previously imagined, as well as an integrity and steadily deepening gravitas suited to a writer now nearing 54 and living comfortably in Brooklyn Heights, with a leafy school ground for a backyard, since 2000. Formerly married, now divorced and co-parenting 12-year-olds Nick and Frank, and after two decades toiling with mixed success and failure in the killing fields of Hollywood, Shanley has settled into a solid maturity that, as he once told a journalist, leaves behind the "electric leaps" of youth in favor of "a more considered attempt to converse and discover connection." It was slightly over 20 years ago that Danny burst onto the American theatre scene with two vivid characters, described by the author as "violent and battered, inarticulate and yearning to speak, dangerous and vulnerable," locked in mortal combat, longing and, eventually, a kind of love. From the beginning Shanley exhibited a seemingly effortless mastery of the rhythms of hostility and longing, along with a natural gift for instilling tremendous spiritual ambition in his characters—a willingness to leap, to let go, far more often than to hesitate and cling. Whether in doubt or rapture, Shanley's characters are unafraid of speaking in banalities or in wild poetic flight—or, when they are afraid of something, then the playwright confronts those fears head-on. (Courage and determination are subjects that Shanley has revisited throughout his career.) Each of the Bronx plays that followed Danny would be about people wanting either IN or OUT—another way of saying that these plays are about dramatic change and a challenge to imposed definitions and boundaries, especially the ones between the Bronx/Manhattan and victimhood/liberation. Shanley's characters seek transcendence, connection and new identities, via more than words alone: They touch, sweat, spit and spray every available bodily fluid in that alternately claustrophobic and explosive atmosphere that has characterized most of the canonical mainstream of 20th-century American drama. Shanley worked outside this atmosphere as well. Welcome to the Moon…and Other Plays, which ran in the fall of 1982 at New York's Ensemble Studio Theatre, introduced a strain of surrealistic experimentation that established Shanley's parallel career as a radical stage formalist, not unlike that of another hard-living, essentially naturalistic Irish-American writer, Eugene O'Neill. Shanley remained in his imagined Bronx and delivered further on his promise with Savage in Limbo (1985), "dedicated to all those good assassins who contributed to the death of my former self." Working with multiple characters this time, Shanley stood closest to his eponymous heroine, the pained and caustic Denise Savage: "We're on the cliff. We were born here. Well, do you wanna die on the cliff?" Savage was in part about the animals lurking inside human beings, just as Danny was, but with a caveat offered by Denise's friend in boyfriend trouble, Linda Rotunda: "It ain't the new clothes that make the man. It's what he does with his dirty things." The project of self-discovery becomes one of finding determination within the grope and flailing of tongues. As the aptly named bartender Murk opines: "The problem with people is they think they're alone. They think what they say don't do nothing. So they say every stupid thing that goes through their gourd, and they do shit they don't even know why. Which leads to what? The world looks like homemade refried shit." Shanley could not keep working forever in this tortured Italian-American ghetto. Women of Manhattan (1986)—this time the inevitable and telling dedication was "to women, women, women…[written 23 more times] and a guy named Larry Sigman [a dying friend, now deceased]"—headed down to a lower borough, away from working-class, ethnic concerns, to address the issue and substance of self-esteem, a screaming lack in all Shanley's earlier characters. Women of Manhattan moved through the animal appetites to search for grown-up identities. I have probably undervalued the verbal intelligence and wit on display in these early writings, but this play, while beautifully written and complete, feels a little weightless. Shanley wasn't through with the Bronx: His 1985 fantasia, the dreamer examines his pillow, dedicated, simply enough, "to my family," introduced family members for the first time—a daughter, Donna, who is unable to live with her lover, Tommy, or without him (especially after she discovers he's sleeping with her 16-year-old sister). Like Women of Manhattan, the dreamer pursues questions of identity, as opposed to merely coping or desperately surviving: "You are somebody, " Donna tells Tommy. "Tell me who….You know what it is down there inside the last Chinese box?" Dealing with their pie-in-the-sky romantic dreams, she realizes they will always find themselves "back down in this shithole room or some other shithole room, and I can't feature that no more." The dreamer is a dark attempt to chart the intellectual/emotional terrain of Shanley's imagination, leading to an ambiguous recognition that in sex we can discover identity, and escape it. Shanley's best work simultaneously imagines and exposes the failure of "the key that lets me outta my life," as Donna puts it. Self-knowledge is far more difficult to obtain than simply escaping the past or some shithole room. In the end, the dreamer reaches for a deeper question: Why live at all? A didactic element entered Shanley's work for the first time: "You gotta make the big mistakes," says Donna's dad. "Remember that. It makes it easier to bear. But remember, too, that Sex does resurrect. Flyin in the face of the truly great mistakes, there is that consolation." Shanley's constant implicit theme—the marriage of two people—became comically overt in his popular Italian American Reconciliation (1988), the first of his plays the author directed, with a cast including John Turturro (the original Danny), John Pankow, Laura San Giacomo and Shanley's then wife, Jayne Haynes, at Manhattan Theatre Club. Reconciliation had a simple, outrageous plot involving an inappropriate seduction (the commedia aspect of which was inescapable), a hilarious momentum, and an almost maudlin denouement reached when Aldo (Turturro) announces: "And this is the lesson I have to teach: The greatest, the only success, is to be able to love." Nineteen-eighty-two to 1988 were years of extraordinary creativity for the former juvenile delinquent and NYU grad. By the time of The Big Funk (1990), he was arguing for the interconnectedness of everything. But an undercurrent had entered his work that was not so empathic. Shanley prefaced the published version: "And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, un-new, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams? It's a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me, making me feel lumpy and sick." The Big Funk was formally adventurous, employing nudity and direct address of the audience, while also reminding us of the Greeks by essentially being about a dinner party—a Symposium. But it also removed all recognizable contexts of time and place—as if the playwright wanted to address the interconnectedness of everything at the expense of its specificity. From this turning point, Shanley wheeled back to a theatrical beginning he never actually had and wrote a nakedly autobiographical family play: Beggars in the House of Plenty (1991), about how some siblings make it and others don't. Beggars is arguably his most successful work employing surrealistic elements, while also breaking from his usual intense dramatic focus to explore a more studied irony. Out of the cauldron into what fire? (The old Shanley did periodically surface, as his stand-in "Johnny" intoned: "I look like the Bronx inside. I could vomit up a burning car.") Inevitably, Shanley stepped back from his investigation of an increasingly distant past: Four Dogs and a Bone (1993) was his first play not driven by insatiable personal demons. Instead, it used bitter, excoriating comedy to limn a social world in which two actresses battle to have their parts beefed up during an indie film production. By the end of the play it's the screenwriter who grows some balls, or is corrupted (it's hard to tell which, but he does take over the show). Shanley knew something about Hollywood wish-fulfillment: Back in the early '80s, watching funds from a large NEA grant dwindling, he had decided that instead of returning to painting apartments, moving furniture or tending bar, he would write a screenplay. Five Corners (1987) ended up being produced by Beatle George Harrison, and was followed shortly by Shanley's signature achievement, Moonstruck, the Norman Jewison film and Cher vehicle that won Shanley a well-deserved Oscar for best screenplay. Moonstruck brought together all his insights into Italian-American culture with a brilliantly funny, wise and balanced screenplay that holds up, to this day, as a masterful comedic melodrama. This was followed by The January Man (1989), a botched thriller; Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), which Shanley also directed, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in an odd turn that died at the box office; Alive (1993), about a plane crash and cannibalism in the Andes; and Congo (1995) a jungle-based techno-thriller about mutant apes—none of which came close to matching his early success. Shanley returned to the stage with new aspirations: Psychopathia Sexualis (1996) was a clever, entertaining boulevard comedy about sexual fetishism and a loony shrink. Cellini (1998), his first-ever stage adaptation, drew on the notorious Renaissance autobiography; Missing/Kissing (1996) proved a not-particularly-engaging romantic study; Where's My Money? (2001), his first experience with the LAByrinth Theater Company, was a wholly satisfying dark comedic drama about a kinky affair, a cynical marriage and the loss of romantic sentiment—for my money, Shanley's best play since the '80s, although more West Side comedy of manners than raw exposé. Then came 9/11, which inspired Shanley's topical Dirty Story (2003), featuring characters intended to represent the U.S., Israel and Palestine—a comedic parable so cartoonish that some critics had a hard time taking it seriously, even while the New York Times called it "appallingly entertaining." [Denver Center Theatre Company's production runs through Nov. 13.] Shanley was staying on a Mideast beat: Live from Baghdad, a 2002 film written for HBO, about CNN at the start of the Gulf War, earned an Emmy nomination for him and other co-screenwriters. (My favorite line: "If we can keep talking, then maybe we won't kill each other.") Shanley also recently completed a new script for Moonstruck director Norman Jewison, The Waltz of the Tulips. Apparently the moonstruck writer is thinking in three-four time these days. Which brings us up to Doubt and Sailor's Song—two new plays, each a major return to form, both resounding evidence of a new confidence, maturity and economy from an artist who has always maintained that "writing is acting is directing is living your life." We meet at his request at the SoHo Grand Hotel for tea and cookies. Shanley is grayer than the last time I saw him, back in the early '90s, strolling in a black leather jacket down Lafayette Street in Manhattan with the actress Julia Roberts. His explosive, raucous laugh and the classic Irish twinkle in his eye haven't changed; he seems eminently sane, focused, amiable and self-examined. He tells me that today is his son Frankie's birthday, and that after our interview he will be picking him up to celebrate. Both sons were adopted at birth, four-and-a-half months apart, so for the next seven-and-one-half months, Shanley laughs, "both my sons are 12." Speaking with the rhythms of his native Bronx, he is still asking ambitious questions and giving big answers, but with a new subtlety, new tools and a steady, jovial demeanor. ROBERT COE: When was the last time you actually saw Danny and the Deep Blue Sea? JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY: It's been a few years. Some of my plays I've never seen done by anybody since the original productions. Danny I've seen done maybe three times in amateur productions that somebody got me to go to. Actually, the last time I saw it was in Paris, in French. Did you think you were watching No Exit? [Laughs] No! Because Danny has a catharsis. Catharses build up a lot of energy, and when the energy is metabolized, it is released, and the audience is released. That can be really important! You have to legitimately achieve it. It's one of the big reasons that I would go to the theatre—in the hopes of experiencing that. Who will be playing Danny and Roberta this year? I don't know. Second Stage suggested Leigh Silverman for director—she had done well at the Public [with Lisa Kron's acclaimed solo 2.5 Minute Ride], and I met with her and thought she was smart and driven and completely unlike me. I can't explain that any more than to say she's made of different stuff. So I said, "All right, let's see what you'll do. You're free. I want the Leigh Silverman production." You really don't want to haunt the rehearsal hall? Nah. I'm not much for going back. You can either have a career or chase it, and I don't particularly want to chase my own shadow back through time. With the number of workshops of my plays in New York alone, it could have been my career, just going to my own shows—and how sad would that have been! "Is Shanley here again?" [Raucous laughter] That's right. "Poor guy." So let's jump forward 20-plus years to your new play Sailor's Song. The publicity makes it sound as if you were inspired by the two Genes: Kelly and O'Neill. Sailor's Song is about—just to pull a figure out of the air—35 percent dance. But it's not performed by dancers, it's very much a play. A very, very romantic play—almost a tragic-romance. I'll be very involved in this one. Sailor's Song and Doubt are only four days apart in rehearsal schedule, so I couldn't direct either one of them. Doug Hughes is directing Doubt, and he's great; the other show's got a much greener director, Chris McGarry, who's been an actor mostly, and who I did Dirty Story with. He's very intelligent and I wanted to give him a shot. The music is extant—it's waltzes, used in a very unusual way. It's almost all three-four time—"Tales of Vienna Woods," "Blue Danube," all that stuff. Johann Strauss mostly, right down the line! And it works! I did a workshop of it last fall to make sure, and it's really fun to listen to that music. All the music that's ever been written is still around, but it's amazing how pop music has pushed out everything else, for the most part, except for in formal dance. And it doesn't have to be so. You've written so much about the nature of love and romance. I sense in Sailor's Song a new wisdom and maturity—almost a mellowness that does not suggest complacency, just a longer overview and a deeper perspective. Yes. I'm savoring life now, whereas I used to just wolf it down. This play is all about savoring the moonlit moment of romantic choice—that place on the dance floor of the heart when two people could kiss but they haven't yet. You are a dancer and the music is playing like a blue river around you. Everything is on the move and yet, paradoxically, time has ceased its forward motion. And this liquid pulsing photograph of possibilities is placed side by side in this play with mortality, with the certainty of death, with the brevity of youth, and with the importance of now. So Sailor's Song is about the almost unbearable beauty of choosing to love in the face of death. Love is the most essential act of courage, isn't it? Will you choose to love before you are swept away by oblivion? I hope so. Now tell me about Doubt. I went to a Catholic Church school in the Bronx and was educated by the Sisters of Charity in the '60s. That's a world that's gone now, but it was a very defined place that I was in for eight years. I realized later on when the Church scandals were breaking that the way a lot of these priests were getting busted had to be by nuns. Because nuns were the ones who were noticing the children with aberrant behavior, distressed children, falling grades, and in some cases they had to be the ones who discovered what was happening. But the chain of command in the Catholic Church was such that they had to report it not to the police but to their superior within the Church, who then covered up for the guy. This had to create very powerful frustrations and moral dilemmas for these women. It was very shortly after that that they started to leave the Church in droves. I was not aware of that. Has this been noted elsewhere? As far as I can make out, never. So showing this experience was one of the motivations behind Doubt. Another was that I saw a dark side to the Second Vatican Council's message of "go out into the community." When I was a kid, priests were not going to take boys out of church [to outside activities]. They were priests, they were in the rectory. And so I think this explosive combination of celibacy and "go out and make believe you're just one of the other folks" had a lot to do with the problems that followed. But over and above that, the more interesting thing to me doesn't have anything to do with the scandals, and that is the cathartic, philosophical power of embracing doubt—of embracing not knowing, embracing that you may never know the truth or falsity of a story, of a scenario, and that you cannot morally stand in judgment from any place that is utterly firm in relation to another person's life. And yet actions must be taken if you feel the imperative, if you feel that you have the clarity of thought and know what should be done. And that powerful, explosive dilemma for an individual is really fraught for me. Here are these women who stumble on what may be something—and the choice is to go through the normal chain of command, which will lead to the complete exoneration and literally the safety of an abusive priest. You know a member of my own family was molested by [Father John] Geoghan, the guy who was strangled in prison. And my family members went to Cardinal O'Connor, after they'd gone to everybody locally and gotten no satisfaction, and Cardinal O'Connor took them by the hands and said, "I am so sorry this happened. I will take care of it." And then he promoted him. Unbelievable. So they left the Church, but after 10 years they went back, and that Sunday the Monsignor got up and gave a sermon saying that these children who were abused, it was the parents' fault. That's when they left the Church again. So this material is very close to home. It is, but I think when you see the play you'll see that my relationship to it is very complicated. There's an even weirder level: Is what some of these guys do totally bad? That I also have doubts about. When I was growing up, at certain points I was championed by homosexual teachers who were the only people watching out for me. And why were they doing it? They were really into boys. They were really into my problems. Did they do anything to me? No. Did they want to? I don't know. Did they make a pass? No. Was that in the air? Somewhere yes, it was in the air. Did I take advantage of the good things they were offering me? Yes, because I needed to, because I was isolated and there was no one else. Did that make them bad people? Not to me. Not to me at all. It's only acting out that compromises a child. That is correct. And, even then, if it's like some guy putting his hand on my leg and me saying, "Get your hand off my leg," and that's it—frankly I wouldn't have been traumatized. But, of course, what happens is that a lot of kids who are more confused than that about their sexuality, which is perfectly natural at that age—and also out of tremendous need—can become very confused. So there are a lot of levels to it. I'm not interested in issue plays per se, although I'm more interested in them now than I used to be. What I'm not interested in is writing polemics on one side of an issue or another. Doubt does not have to dismantle passion. It can be a passionate exercise. When you look back, do you see any arc or evolution in your career? One of the ongoing concerns that I have is how to be intimate with another human being. Another is how to invite everybody to the party. We have to be able to find a way to communicate so that we can talk about anything. That's the one thing we should be able to do—to talk about anything. We don't necessarily have to be able to do everything. That is correct. Right now, the Democrats and the Republicans, for instance, are never able to cede anything to the other side. Everything has to be crossfire! Which can be a fun part of a play, but that's a play that never goes to catharsis. It ends up forever stuck in some kind of French existential hell! And that's not what's interesting to me. I want to find the dynamic door that leads out of the dilemma and on into the future. I grew up in a violent place where people did not communicate well, but where there were big feelings and big longings, and I remember that some of the most interesting people were also the most doomed, because they had no tools to save themselves. In some weird way, the Palestinian character in Dirty Story is a descendent of those people: "If you won't solve my problem, if no one will listen to me, then I'm going to blow you and me up." I certainly knew that guy, I certainly grew up with that guy—and I've got a little bit of that guy in me. I always said that if things went well I would spend the first half of my life writing about my problems, and the second half I would write about other people's problems, and that's sort of what happened—I'm able now to start turning out. Maybe that's why I was able to write Doubt, and why I was able to write Dirty Story. Of course they're personal plays, but they are about larger social concerns. Your own ethnic background provides a great example of communicating across boundaries and bridging differences. Yes. I'm very Irish, from an Irish-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. I grew up in a household where talk was important, music was important, clothing was not important, food was not important. Then I went over to my Italian friends' houses, where the guys were combing their hair with "Hidden Magic" which they'd stolen from their mothers and spending an hour getting dressed, and talking openly about sexuality, which was bad in my household! It was just a much more sensual, ebullient world, I went to their houses to soak up the sheer pleasure of it, the stimulation—and I was like, "I want what they got, plus what I got!" My father came from Ireland when he was 24, had a brogue and was raised on a farm, basically in the 19th century. And my mother was first-generation—her parents were from Ireland as well. And when I went back to the farm where my father was born—he died two years ago at 96—the people on that farm spoke in poetry, and we really got along. And I thought, "This is much closer to my true family than the particular culture I grew up in!" Most of your plays are language-driven, and yet we know movies generally aren't—the engine of a film is imagery. How do you think writing screenplays has affected your playwriting? Actually, the influence is very much the other way around. Playwriting has continued to make my screenwriting possible. Without that constant feedback from the audience, writing can become ungrounded. Audiences show up too late in cinema; you don't get a chance to fix it after they get there. So you better have a very strong sense of what you've got, of what the music is between you and the audience. The theatre gives so much back in that way. I feel genetically born to be a playwright. When I started writing in the dialogue form, I had a complete moment of recognition, like, "Oh! This is what I do!" I'd written in many other forms before that—I started writing when I was 11 and I was a poet, exclusively, for several years. But it wasn't until I was 23, 24, that I tried the dialogue form, and it was instantaneous. I wrote a full-length play the first time I ever wrote in dialogue, and it was produced a few weeks later. When you reflect back on your personal journey, are you ever amazed that here you are, this troublemaker from the Bronx, who ended up a playwright with something to say that lots of people want to hear? Yes. My life is both inevitable and surprising to me. But I've never had the slightest sense of future. I did not envision a fate. So I don't know why I should have any feeling of surprise. Robert Coe is a screenwriter, playwright and journalist living in New York City. This is his ninth article for American Theatre since 1986. 1:33:05 PM     comment []

The Big Easy: Rising   Willie Strums on Guthrie's Katrina Tour By STACEY PLAISANCE Associated Press Writer December 18,2005 | NEW ORLEANS -- Folk singer Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson gave a sold-out crowd something they've needed since Hurricane Katrina -- good music, a good time and a reminder of what they love most about this city. Guthrie welcomed the crowd late Saturday at legendary Tipitina's, his last performance in a two-week railroad tour to raise money for musicians left homeless and without a place to work by Katrina. "I'm so happy to be here," Guthrie said, drawing hollers and applause. Crystal Gross was among the roughly 800 people at the benefit concert. She said her apartment in the city survived, but she wanted to do her part to help people who were less fortunate. "Besides, when else do you get to see Willie Nelson at Tip's?" said Gross, who had just moved back to New Orleans in July, about a month before Katrina struck. Gross said the city has been glum since Katrina, but Guthrie and Nelson have changed that, at least for the moment. "It's so good to see people out again. It's good to see people with smiles on their faces," she said. Inspired by television coverage of the hurricane's aftermath and by learning that Amtrak had resumed its "City of New Orleans" service to the city, Guthrie hopped a train in Illinois two weeks ago and scheduled performances along the route with other musicians. His 1972 hit, "The City of New Orleans," recounts life on the train, with the chorus "Good morning America, how are you? Don't you know me, I'm your native son, I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans." Guthrie arrived in New Orleans on Thursday and performed at Tipitina's on Friday with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and others. He added that show after finding out that Saturday night's grand finale performance with Nelson was sold out. "We are thrilled that we have been able to make some small dent in all that is wrong down here," Guthrie said. In an interview before the show, Nelson said he hoped his visit would encourage musicians to return and get the New Orleans music scene back on its feet. "We want to see them come back," he said, "but I want them to have a place to come back to, a place to live." Nelson took the stage after 11 p.m. and, following his set he joined Guthrie with a stirring rendition of the Steve Goodman song "City of New Orleans" that Guthrie made popular in 1972. The song was based on a train operated by Illinois Central before the creation of Amtrak. The City of New Orleans name was discontinued in 1971, but Amtrak christened an overnight train that runs much of the same route in 1981. Money and equipment from the Arlo Guthrie & Friends benefit tour will be donated to performers and to churches and schools that have music programs. Tour spokesman Cash Edwards did not have definitive figures on how much the tour has raised. The tour is one of several efforts to help New Orleans' musicians. Singer Harry Connick Jr. and saxophone player Branford Marsalis are working with Habitat for Humanity to create a "village" for musicians who lost their homes to the storm. © 2005 The Associated Press.   New Orleans' Historic Streetcars Return By STACEY PLAISANCE Associated Press Writer December 18,2005 | NEW ORLEANS -- The clackety-clack is officially back. New Orleans on Sunday resumed its streetcar service, which had been out of commission since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the utility poles and metal tracks used to propel the city's trademark mode of transportation. Car number 930, adorned with holiday garland and red ribbon, was the first to roll out from the French Market post at 7 a.m. "It has taken so much to get here," said Regional Transit Authority spokeswoman Rosalind Blanco Cook. "Evaluating the cars, trying to get the cars on different routes and getting the operators back -- it took a lot of work." Six of the 35 historic New Orleans streetcars that before Hurricane Katrina ran along St. Charles Avenue -- the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world -- operated Sunday along the Mississippi Riverfront line and part of the Canal Street line. There were two backup cars on the tracks as well. The RTA is providing free bus service on the St. Charles route, whose infrastructure is not yet ready for streetcar service, Cook said. She said it's unclear when the service, which runs through the city's Garden District, past mansions and Audubon Park, will resume. The riverfront line was added in 1988 and the Canal Street line, which was abandoned 40 years ago, was restored in 2004. Clarence Glover, who has driven streetcars for 22 years, was instructing conductor Jerry Duplessis on Sunday's first run. Before Katrina, Duplessis drove the newer cars, which had more automatic features. He had to be briefed on the older cars' manual components, such as a foot pump that drops sand on the tracks for traction as the car comes to a stop. The newer cars drop sand automatically, Glover said. Getting conductors back into the city was part of the battle to resume streetcar service. Many RTA workers, including Cook, are living on a cruise ship docked at the riverfront after their homes were destroyed by Katrina's winds Aug. 29 and subsequent flooding. Glover, whose home in eastern New Orleans was flooded, left his wife and daughter with family in Houston to return to his job. He's currently living in a hotel until he finds something more permanent. Duplessis, whose home was deluged as well, said he is living with family in Avondale. As the streetcar rolled Sunday, several bystanders waved and took pictures. A handful hopped on board. Kurt Hampton, a self-proclaimed "streetcar buff" who lives in suburban Metairie, said he woke up early to come into the city and see the first car roll. He was glad he remembered to bring his camera when barely five minutes into the first run, car 930 came to a halt -- a car parked near Jax Brewery in the French Quarter was too close to the tracks for the streetcar to pass. So, in typical New Orleans fashion, a policeman, some RTA workers and even a couple of passengers helped bounce it away from the tracks. The vehicle was later towed. "This is the kind of job where you have to have a sense of humor," Glover said, chuckling as the streetcar continued its route. Passengers talked of friends and family, the chilly weather and about how good it felt to have a little piece of New Orleans back. Alan Drake, whose lower Garden District home fared well, said he "couldn't resist being here." He said he was among the first passengers to ride the Canal Street line when it launched last year. "I love the great positives about this city, and this is one of its great positives," he said. Hampton, who works for Cox Media, said he's been commuting to Baton Rouge since his New Orleans office was relocated there after the storm. When his office returns in January, he said he plans to take advantage of the free streetcar service being offered until March. © 2005 The Associated Press. 12:34:26 PM     comment []

Room 101?   Torture at secret jail alleged Items compiled from Tribune news services Published December 19, 2005 KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Eight men at the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have given their lawyers "consistent accounts" of being tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004, Human Rights Watch said Sunday. The men, five of whom were identified, told their lawyers that they had been arrested in various countries, mostly in Asia and the Middle East, the New York-based rights group said. Some recounted being flown to Afghanistan and then driven a few minutes from the landing strip to the prison, the organization said. The detainees said they were guarded by Afghans and Americans in civilian clothes, leading the rights group to suggest that "the prison may have been operated by personnel from the Central Intelligence Agency." U.S. military officials in Afghanistan declined to comment.   Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune   12:25:37 PM     comment []

American Dystopia: The Newspeak of Bush/Cheney/Gonzales   Welcome to Oceania. Doubleplus Good!!!   Bush: Trust me on spying In a press conference from the White House this morning -- his third live televised event in three days -- George W. Bush tried to defend his decision to engage in warrant-less spying on Americans citizens, all the while condemning those government officials who exposed the controversial program to public view in the first place. Bush said it was a "shameful act" for anyone to reveal that he had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on telephone calls without warrants, and he said he assumed that the Justice Department was taking the steps necessary to begin an investigation into leaks of classified information. At the same time, he suggested that he would oppose any congressional investigation into the spying program itsself. "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy," Bush said. The president didn't explain -- the president can't explain -- why. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the executive branch to monitor telephone calls and other electronic communications so long as it obtains a warrant for doing so. If al-Qaida is paying as much attention as Bush suggests, it already knew that much, and it has "adjusted" -- Bush's term -- to that knowledge accordingly. What Bush's program for spying did was remove the warrant requirement FISA imposes. How does that change anything for al-Qaida? How would terrorists communicate differently if they knew that the National Security Agency might be monitoring them without a warrant instead of with one? There's no good answer to that question, and Bush didn't give one. Bush also failed to explain, at least in any way that made sense, why he needed to evade FISA's requirements. Bush said repeatedly that the war on terror is a new kind of war that requires fast action by United States. "This is a different era, a different war, it's a war where people are changing phone numbers and phone calls, and they're moving quick," he said. "We've got to be able to prevent and detect. It requires quick action." But the FISA process was designed for quick action. And indeed, FISA allows the executive branch to begin monitoring communications immediately and then seek a warrant after the fact. How isn't that "fast" or "quick" or "agile" enough? Bush couldn't say. Instead, he suggest again and again that the FISA process is for "long-term monitoring" and that, after the attacks of 9/11, he saw the need to "detect." He never explained what he meant by that or how the FISA process couldn't be used both to "monitor" and to "detect." It wasn't at all clear that he knew. And if he knew, he certainly wasn't saying. Bush said he wouldn't get into details about the secret spying program because doing so would help al-Qaida. Americans would simply have to trust him, he said, that he's doing everything he can to protect them from attack while respecting their civil liberties. -- Tim Grieve, Salon.com   Gonzales: Bush had "inherent" authority to violate spying law Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has just launched the administration's legal defense of the president's decision to order warrantless spying on American citizens. It's breathtaking, even if it's not unexpected. While acknowledging that the president's program would be illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Gonzales says that the president has inherent authority as commander in chief to do what he thinks needs to be done in the war on terror. Moreover, Gonzales says, Congress essentially overturned FISA when it authorized the president to use force against Afghanistan in 2001. The first of Gonzales' arguments -- familiar to anyone who has heard the administration defend its views on detainees and torture -- is alarming in that it knows no limits. If the president's "inherent" authority as commander in chief allows him to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act during times of war, what other laws is he free to ignore, rewrite or violate at his pleasure? As for Gonzales' second argument? It probably goes without saying -- but the Washington Post says it anyway -- that the 2001 use-of-force authorization didn't say anything about electronic surveillance or FISA or spying on Americans without getting warrants. That legislation authorized Bush to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." How is listening in on telephone calls without a warrant the use of "necessary and appropriate force"? Gonzales didn't say, exactly. And the answer is, it isn't. As Sen. Russ Feingold explained during a television appearance this morning, "Nobody, nobody, thought when we passed a resolution to invade Afghanistan and to fight the war on terror, including myself who voted for it, thought that this was an authorization to allow a wiretapping against the law of the United States." -- Tim Grieve, Salon.com   Cheney on spying: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 In an interview that will air on ABC's "Nightline" tonight, Dick Cheney defends the Bush administration's program of spying on Americans by wrapping it up in 9/11. It's not the least bit unexpected: Even as it becomes clearer and clearer and clearer that there never was any operational link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, Cheney continues to justify the war in Iraq by recalling the attacks of Sept. 11. In his speech at the Al-Asad Air Base Sunday, Cheney turned to 9/11 repeatedly, invoking it both as a reason for invading Iraq in 2002 and as a reason for staying there now. So it's no surprise that Cheney will use 9/11 -- and the specter of another 9/11 -- to justify the administration's decision to spy on American citizens. It's just dishonest. In his interview with ABC's Terry Moran, Cheney says the president's secret spying program represents "the kind of capability" that "might have led us to be able to prevent 9/11" if the administration had had that sort of capability before 9/11. But the thing is, it did. As we have already noted, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the executive branch to monitor electronic communications in exactly the way it has been doing for the past three years -- so long as it gets a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court along the way. It doesn't even have to get the warrant first: As we explained earlier, the National Security Agency can begin eavesdropping the second it wants to do so, as long as it goes to the intelligence court within 72 hours to get approval after the fact. Cheney laments that the administration "didn't know" before 9/11 that there were "two 9/11 terrorists in San Diego prior to the attack in contact with al-Qaida sources outside the United States." Maybe that's right. But what Cheney doesn't explain -- what he can't explain -- is how FISA's none-too-onerous warrant requirement stood in the way of the administration's obtaining such knowledge. To defend what appears to be a violation of both federal law and the U.S. Constitution -- and even this wouldn't be so much of a defense as a justification -- the administration needs to say, "We needed to be able to engage in spying without a warrant because ..." If Cheney has a way to finish that sentence, we sure haven't heard it yet. -- Tim Grieve, salon.com 12:18:19 PM     comment []

© Copyright 2006 Michael D. Zungolo. Last update: 1/3/2006; 10:00:52 AM.