By The River

Are you an urban intellectual? Discontented suburbanite? Worried that the rest of the world, especially in Harrisburg, isn't evolving in the way you think it ought to go? Wondering if mayor-elect Linda Thompson even knows who Darwin is? Then come to a concert to celebrate the life of the man who first explained the concept of "evolution."

I'm talking about Charles Darwin, of course, born 200 years ago this year. His magnum opus, The Origin of the Species, was published 150 years ago this year. Nice planning!

This coming Saturday, Nov. 7, from 7-10 p.m., you are invited to attend the Concert for Darwin at the nicely redone Midtown Scholar bookstore at 1302 N. Third Street in Harrisburg near the Broad Street Market. Admission is $15.

Performing will be folk rocker Jefferson Pepper of York County and rapper Baba Brinkman of Vancouver, Canada. Pepper will sing songs from his widely hailed latest CD, "American Evolution, Vol. 2." Brinkman is a comic and rap artist of the more literate variety who will give his own spin on "The Origin of the Species."

Rounding things out will be Kenneth Miller, biology professor, science writer, and two-time Colbert Report guest. Miller was one of the key witnesses in the so-called Intelligent Design trial of the Dover (Pa.) Area School Board in U.S. District Court, Harrisburg. Suffice it to say that evolution came out of that trial a big winner. Pepper's wife, author Lauri Lebo, wrote a book called "The Devil in Dover" about the school board's effort to introduce religion, aka "Intelligent Design," into high school biology classes and how some parents fought back.

So it looks to be a night of intellectual fun and frolic in Harrisburg. Be there.

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I am in Ithaca, New York, until Wednesday, doing some final research for my future book on the typhoid epidemic that ravaged the town and Cornell University in 1903.

Ithaca is a beautiful town, and always was. It sits at the head of Cayuga Lake and climbs three hills, East, where Cornell is, West, and South. Back in 1903, before automobiles were widely available, many students lived in boarding houses on East Hill and walked up to classes at the very top (or took the street car if they were better off). It is a steep, lung-busting climb for someone like me who has not been darkening the doorway of the gym lately.

When I come here for research, at least in the summer, I usually camp at Buttermilk Falls State Park just outside of town. Paying $15 a night to camp, even sleeping on an air mattress, beats paying $95 or more for a motel. Plus you get fringe benefits like being able to swim in the pool carved out of the rock at the base of the falls by Civilian Conservation Corps workers during the Great Depression. The water was surprisingly warm.

Ithaca and the surrounding region have many dramatic waterfalls, and of course there is Cayuga Lake as well. Water, water, everywhere, and in 1903, not a drop to drink. The lake was polluted near Ithaca back then, making it unusable as drinking water. So Ithaca Water Works used Six Mile Creek instead. When the typhoid epidemic began in January 1903, the only safe drinking water came from artesian wells located well outside Ithaca.

There still signs of the epidemic today if you know where to look. Boarding houses that became charnel houses during the crisis. Sage Mansion, today the headquarters of Cornell University Press, which was the Cornell Infirmary. The dam on Six Mile Creek. And of course, graves of young people in the local cemeteries, dead for corporate and institutional recklessness over which they had no control.

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It's been more than six months since I took a buy-out from the Patriot-News and entered into the brave new world of Something Else.

I finished documentary film school at George Washington University, not so happily, and am figuring out what to do now. I finished an updated edition of my book on the Centralia mine fire, formerly called Unseen Danger, now to be called Fire Underground. Globe Pequot Press, my first "real," commercial publisher in the nearly 23 years my book has been in print, will release Fire Underground on Sept. 1. It takes the Centralia story up to this summer, with the state beginning to ease the remaining dozen residents out, and adds a lot of new detail throughout.

Cream cheese frosting on this cake: Fire Underground includes about 50 of my Centralia photographs, many in color. It's the next best thing to the book of my Centralia photography that I've always dreamed of doing.

So it's looking like Labor Day weekend will be big one. My wife is planning a book release party, which will probably dovetail with the opening of "The Town That Was," the documentary film about Centralia in which I appear several times, for a one-week run at the Midtown Cinema in Harrisburg.

In the meantime, I'm waiting to hear from Globe Pequot whether they'll publish my next book, tentatively titled, "The Epidemic," about a typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ithaca, New York, and Cornell University in 1903. It was one of the worst typhoid epidemics in United State history (in percentage terms) and one of the last, and was caused by corporate greed and stupidity. It is a surprisingly modern story. One factoid that fascinates me: Cornell students and their frantic parents (29 students died) kept in touch by long distance telephone call, then a new and quite novel technology. I envision men and women students in Hello, Dolly-era clothing picking up the telephone to tell parents that friends have died and yes, mother, I'll be on the next train home. The suffering and death in Ithaca was immense, criminal, and so, so avoidable.

So there's that. In the meantime, I worry about cash flow (the freelance writer's lament) and paying the bills, and should I get a real job? Not that there's many of those around in the kind of work I do best, sorry to say.

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I just got back from the Silverdocs documentary film festival in Silver Spring, Md. The big event tonight was a tribute to Albert Maysles, who with his late brother David made some of the best examples of the genre, including "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter." The former is about a zany mother and daughter on Long Island who count Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis among their close relations. Maysles commented last night that Big Edie and Little Edie Beale "were just like everyone else, only more so." The latter is about the tragic Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969.

I'm concluding a six-month documentary filmmaking program at George Washington University that has had its ups and downs. This was definitely one of the ups. Mayles was introduced by Barbara Kopple, a two-time Academy Award winner for documentary film who was a student of Maysles and who first came to prominence with the scary and wonderful film, "Harlan County USA."

She was followed to the podium by Christo and Jeanne Claude, the French artists who create huge, dramatic, and temporary public art. I saw them wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris in 1985, and walked through the series of orange gates they erected in Central Park in 2004 (that was my Facebook picture until a couple of days ago). Maysles makes a film of most of their projects. Jeanne Claude, whose hair was dyed the color of the Central Park gates, joked that Maysles shoots chronologically but doesn't edit that way. There is a scene in the Pont Neuf film where she and Christo are seen walking into an office during their 10-year quest for a permit to wrap the bridge. She is heavier than she would like to be when she walks in and thin when she walks out because scenes were shot a year or more apart "and you know how women are heavy one year and not the next."

Maysles, who is 82 but still making films, talked about his reputation for capturing magic moments on film, but talked about the ones that got away. In the old days, it just wasn't practical to carry a 16 mm film camera with you everywhere. He accompanied Fidel Castro to a party at the Chinese Embassy in Havana sans camera in the early 1960s and saw Castro's face when he opened a telegram from the U.S. State Department informing him that diplomatic relations were being broken off. And he recalled as a 10-year-old boy getting a rare strapping from his father and then seeing him a few moments later leaning against his bedroom wall crying.

He said that the documentary filmmaker must find a way through the competing poles of human emotion, namely to keep something secret or dislose it to the world. The latter emotion is stronger, Maysles believes. Or as Little Edie Beale told him after seeing her life laid out on film, "Everyone should do this!"

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Here's a shocker: the Washington Post reports that Heat Surge "Roll 'n Glow" space heaters aren't really made by Amish people, as the Ohio company's newspaper ads imply. Yes, all those bearded, straw hat-wearing men in the ads are really non-Amish placing cheap Chinese space heaters in expensive wooden mountings.

Just about anyone who lives in central Pennsylvania, aka, Amish central, laughs at the idea of "Amish" being a mark of quality. I have nothing against the Amish, but they do run a lot of puppy mills, and their fat-and-calorie rich food leaves much to be desired. I'll buy Amish furniture, maybe, on a cold day in hell. But to the outside world, Amish inexplicably means quality, and sales of the "Roll 'n Glow" heaters are booming. No one ever seems to ask why a religious sect that eschews electricity and powers their tools with windmills, steam engines, and horses would sell electric space heaters.

Newspapers didn't used to take ads like these, but with the precipitous decline of the industry, just about any joker with cash can get his ad in print, and it will go right up next to the sooper-dooper hearing aid and patent medicine ads.

Oh, and the headline on this post refers to a story told me by a Franklin and Marshall College graduate years ago. Seems he was strolling through downtown Lancaster and minding his own business when a big car with New York plates rolls up. The window rolls down and the driver called out, hey, boy, which way de Amish?

Which way, indeed?

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John Updike died today at age 76. He was one of the great American writers, and should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That he did not is probably due to politics as much as anything. The Swedish Academy has not given a Nobel to an American writer since Toni Morrison in 1993. One suspects that disdain for American foreign policy during the George W. Bush years bumped the ever so slightly rightish Updike off the short list. And now it is too late, because the prize is not given posthumously. He joins Mark Twain on that list of American writers who could have and should have won, but didn't. Updike won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, which are nothing to sneeze at.

My one interaction with Updike came in early 1987, when my own book, Unseen Danger, a chronicle of the Centralia mine fire, had just been published. The Shamokin-Coal Township Public Library was having a fund-raising auction, and I came up with the idea of asking Pennsylvania writers to donate a signed first edition of one of their works. I wrote to Updike through Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher, hoping he would respond but not really expecting him to. Then one day I received a phone call from a quite-excited librarian. Updike had sent a signed copy of his latest novel--I honestly can't remember which one it was. As I recall, it went for a good bit of money. I kept the shipping envelope it came in, which had his handwritten return address on it.

Updike, as is well known, grew up in Reading and Shillington, Pa., and I always enjoyed his memory pieces about rural Pennsylvania that he wrote for Th New Yorker. I'll look forward to reading the story the Reading Eagle promises for Wednesday's edition.

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I went to see "Slumdog Millionaire" last night. It is a great film, directed by Danny Boyle of "Trainspotting" fame, about a boy from the Mumbai slums who wins 20 million Indian Rupees (a little over U.S. $415,000) in India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and in so doing captures the heart of the love of his life.

That description is the film the trailer leads you to expect, but it fails to convey the unremitting darkness of "Slumdog Millionaire." The story is played out as flashbacks as the Indian police torture the young man, Jamil, trying to make him wrongly confess that he got as far as he did in the competition through cheating. I won't tell you why he was arrested, because that would give away too much of the story. But what really got to me were the scenes of Dickensian poverty in the film.

Many of us in the U.S. tend to think of India as the place that steals our jobs through their hard work, good education, and willingness to work for less. All of that is true, but it ignores the dire poverty and caste inequality that India has failed to eliminate. What we think of as India is only the thin, top layer of a multi-layered country. Jamil comes from the lowest layer, literally living on a garbage heap, where public education is a tiny, cramped room if he shows up at all. The Fagin in this Indian version of Oliver Twist teaches orphans to sing and then blinds them because blind child singers can make more money on the street. "Slumdog Millionaire" is not for the squeamish. Even Charles Dickens himself would have been shocked by these terrible scenes.

One wonders how long India can maintain this type of a society, where the few live as kings and the masses scrape by in dire poverty. You don't sense that this sort of inequality exists in that other Asian giant, China, where communism, for all its faults, eliminated things like caste discrimination and anti-religious violence (Jamil's mother, a Muslim, is murdered by a Hindu mob in the film). It is not enough for the West to fund Mother Teresa-type missions to help the poor survive and accept their lot. The lot must change.

Like so many films, it has a happy ending with the young lovers dancing in the Mumbai train station in true Bollywood fashion. But as you watch it, remember this was the same train station attacked by Pakistani terrorists in November. Ten people were killed as they fired automatic weapons randomly at the crowds of people you see in the film.

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One of the criticisms of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland was that the exhibits were too dry, that they didn't offer up the visceral rock and roll experienced. In other words, if you somehow didn't know anything about rock you might come out wondering what the fuss was all about.

But now comes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ANNEX in New York's SoHo section, at 76 Mercer Street, and all I can say is hold on to your hats.

This is one amazing multi-media experience. The tour gets under way in a room filled with movie screens and soon to be filled with loud music. The experience is such that you feel like you're in one of the first few rows at a really good concert. When footage of the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium in 1964 came on, including screaming fans, you just want to weep for joy it's so good. Most of the footage appeared to be from New York City appearances by major acts, but the employee I asked couldn't give me a definite answer.

When you leave the screening room, they hand you a headset for the rest of the tour. This enables you to hear appropriate music when you reach different parts of the exhibit. So when you stand in front of a glass case containing one of AC-DC guitarist Angus Young's schoolboy uniforms that he wears during performances, cue "Highway to Hell." When you enter the over-the-top Bruce Springsteen room, cue "Thunder Road." And so on. You have to experience this for yourself to understand exactly how great this all is.

The tour takes about an hour, typically. There isn't as much stuff here as in Cleveland, but I think the presentation is much better. The Annex is located at 76 Mercer Street in the SoHo District of Lower Manhattan. It's about two blocks south of the Apple Store if you know where that is. Tickets cost $26.55 for adults and $17.88 for children, but additional fees add another $3 or more to each ticket. Senior citizens get just $2 off the adult ticket price, perhaps a wry acknowledgment that a lot of patrons of this museum are soon going to be old folks so better keep that revenue coming in.

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I actually saw two plays in New York City yesterday, a good one on Broadway and a great one at the hole-in-the-wall Kraine Theater on E. 4th Street in the East Village.

The Broadway play was Equus, a revival of the Peter Shaffer play first staged in 1977 (which I also saw). The original Broadway production starred Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist, and Peter Firth as Alan Strang, a teenaged boy who blinded six horses in an act of madness. Now the roles are played by Richard Griffiths and Daniel Radcliffe. Griffiths is better known as the odious Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter movies, and Radcliffe, of course, is Harry Potter himself.

This is a bleak, but moving drama of madness and obsession, which may be one reason it might not be appropriate for your Potter-obsessed pre-teen daughters. The other, as is fairly well-known by now, is that Radcliffe gets totally buck naked in the climactic scene in the play, as does the female character Jill Mason. I say fairly well-known because a teenaged girl sitting two seats down from me was shocked to discover this in the moments before the play opened and worried about whether her little sister should see it. The shock wore off, however.

After the curtain call--Radcliffe came out bare-chested--the cast auctioned off an Equus teeshirt to raise money for the Broadway Cares: Equity Fights AIDS campaign. It went for $1,000, mainly because Radcliffe put it on and sweated it up. When he exited the stage door onto West 44th Street, it was like Elvis leaving the building. Police were there to control the throngs of autograph seekers--I just remember someone shoving a guitar toward him. Radcliffe is quite small in person and seemed tiny in contrast to the looming mass of fans.

Actor and playwright Joe Capozzi got a warm reception from the audience, too, but his was for courage in turning his own tragedy into great art.

"For Pete's Sake," directed by Robert Charles Gompers, is Capozzi's story of dealing with being sexually molested by a Catholic priest in northern New Jersey in the 1980s. Saturday's staged reading was the first performance of any kind for the play, but I suspect it will eventually ascend the mountain at least as far as Off Broadway. It was a powerful experience.

I was invited to "For Pete's Sake" by Tony Perry, who worked with me at the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., long ago and who was in an acting class with Capozzi. Most of the actors in the production were from that same class. As a reporter, I had become kind of jaded by priest abuse stories. I wondered what Capozzi could bring to the story to make it come alive.

But I needn't have worried. He uses a sort of "This Is Your Life" approach that includes liberal amounts of both humor and pathos. His abuse at the hands of Father Pete, a trusted family friend, and how he blamed himself initially for what had happened is brought to life largely through the words of people around him. Even better are the inner voices he hears berating and comforting him.

The performance was a benefit for Road to Recovery, an organization that aids victims of clergy abuse. Several other victims were in the audience and rose to be recognized after the play concluded.

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Every journalist has a few heroes. One of mine was Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who managed to combine great literature with great investigative reporting in exposing the brutality of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union.

Solzhenitzsyn, who died Sunday at age 89, first became famous for his novella, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which detailed a single day in the life of a Soviet political prisoner in the camps, a life Solzhenitsyn knew firsthand, having been a prisoner himself. It was allowed to be published in 1963 by Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev, who hoped it would help discredit his murderous predecessor, Joseph Stalin.

But I revered Solzhenitsyn most for his three volume history of the Soviet prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, the first volume of which appeared in 1973. Gulag was investigative reporting as literature, laying out all the crimes of the Soviet Union from its beginning in 1918 through the 1950s. I could only imagine the work that Solzhenitsyn did to collect and verify the terrible tales he relates in his magnum opus. I read every word, and indeed have read two-thirds of all the books he wrote, excepting only the last three historical novels in the Red Wheel series.

Solzhenitsyn led a difficult life. He was thrown into the camps originally for referring to Stalin originally as "the man with the mustache," and barely survived stomach cancer. After Kruschchev was deposed in the mid-1960s, he led an increasingly perilous existence, collecting stories, writing them down, and secreting what he wrote to keep it away from the Soviet secret police. Gulag was published after the police interrogated his typist, who gave up the location of one of the copies and then hanged herself in shame.
Solzhenitsyn's fame around the world kept him alive, but he was thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1974, four years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He spent 18 years living in exile with his family in Vermont, and managed to alienate many of his western supporters with his writings and speeches. I don't hold that against him. Many great artists and great investigative reporters (Sy Hersh comes to mind) have personality issues. They aren't necessarily people you would want to hang out with, but you value their work.

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It is a strange experience to see yourself on the big screen, larger than life, talking about some topic on which you are an expert. In my case, that would be the mine fire that has been burning near or under Centralia, Pa., since 1962. It is one thing to see yourself on TV, on the little screen, but another thing entirely to see yourself in giant size in a darkened theater with hundreds of people hanging on your every word.

I had that experience Saturday night in Pottsville, Pa., during a screening of "The Town That Was," a feature-length documentary about the Centralia mine fire. I wrote a book, Unseen Danger, about the mine fire, and I appear or am heard a dozen times in the documentary. Pottsville is 18 miles southeast of Centralia along Route 61, and this was the first screening of "The Town That Was" within easy driving distance of where the bulk of Centralia residents went to live after the mass relocation of the 1980s. The film played at the Philadelphia Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival last year, but hasn't to date gotten a broadcast deal, which is a shame.

I drove up to Pottsville with my younger daughter, Lydia. The Sovereign Majestic Theater, where the screening would be held, had been a silent film palace until 1930, then spent the next 70 or so years as a farmers market. Earlier in the current decade, the city fathers of Pottsville converted it back to an arts center. It holds about 225 people, and most of the seats were taken. Tickets were $5. I was curious who would come to see it. Many of the people who walked in were older, but there was a fair number of young couples, even a few who appeared to be there on dates. Maybe they thought it would be like "Silent Hill," the horror film loosely, very loosely based on Centralia. Or not.

"The Town That Was" centers on John Lokitis, Jr., the youngest of the dozen or so people who refuse to leave Centralia. Lokitis, now in his late 30s, lives alone in his grandparents' former home and tries to keep what's left of the town alive. He mows some of the lawns, puts up the municipal Christmas decorations, and briefly was Centralia's mayor. He inspires both respect and derision among people who see the film. But the film is more than just about Lokitis--viewers learn the history of the mine fire (Cliff Notes version) and see what Centralia used to look like. Some of my photographs of Centralia in its final years were used in the film, but what's great are the Super 8 home movies the directors were able to dig out of the attics of former Centralia residents.

I was there anonymously, and didn't know if anyone would recognize me as we left. Lydia and I walked out and people were standing in front of the theater, still talking about what they had seen. We walked up to the Greystone Restaurant, but it was packed and so we walked back. I saw people looking at me funny, and we heard them whisper, "That's him, he was in the movie." This is not an experience I ever expected to have. A young guy came up and addressed me by name. He told me he had read my book and was a big fan. An old guy was right behind him, shaking my hand for a long time and explaining that he had grown up in Centralia but left in 1942, no doubt for the war. Eighty years-old now, he was grateful the film had been made. "I never thought I would live to see something like this," he said.

Moments like this help make up for all the crap any writer goes through.

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I'm fascinated and repulsed by liars, especially in the literary world, where it seems doubtful any memoir by anyone who isn't a bona fide celebrity will ever again see the light of day. I say that in reaction to a story tonight in the New York Times about yet another pathological liar who passed off pure fiction as the honest-to-God story of her own life.

This one is almost comical. Almost. Affluent white girl from Sherman Oaks, Calif., writes a "memoir" in which she claims to be a half-white, half-Native American girl who ran with gangs and sold drugs in South Central Los Angeles. It was published by Riverhead Books, a reputable publisher, and received glowing reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere. Here's an interview with the purported memoirist, Margaret B. Jones, on her publisher's website, while it lasts. Her older sister saw a story about her and dimed her out, and last night Margaret Seltzer, the real author, confessed that Margaret B. Jones and "Love and Consequences" were pure fiction. She brings to mind James Frey, author of "A Million Little Pieces," another purported "harrowing" memoir.

And therein lies part of the problem. The literary world wants ever more screwed-up lives in its memoirs. Just having an interesting life, full of lively characters and well-told, is not enough anymore. I was told this myself when, three years ago, I was suddenly besotted with the idea of writing about my early journalism career. I thought my story, of moving from a midwestern town known for its Tulip Festival, to my first journalism job in hard-boiled Shamokin, Pa., at least had some interesting possibilities. Especially when I threw in the Centralia mine fire, the central event of my early life as a journalist. A literary agent I knew practically laughed in my face. She asked me if I had abusive parents, or had some other horrible aspect to my childhood. Told that I didn't, she wouldn't even look at my sample chapters.

What Seltzer did is far from a victimless crime. Her editor, for all her foolishness in not ordering a fact check on the story, seems to have been completely bamboozled. She wasn't in on the scam, but her career will likely be destroyed anyway. Lies are like that. People believe them, and their own lives fall apart. Seltzer says she's sorry. Big deal.

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I'm here in New York with my family, looking down from the 27th floor as the city comes to life on Sunday morning. As a Hope College graduate, the view is ironic: I can see Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, that East Coast citadel of the Reformed Church, and the statue of the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who pastored the church from 1932-84. Both the church and Peale (and his wife, Ruth Stafford Peale) were major supporters of my old alma mater in Holland, Michigan. Peale wrote the best-selling, "The Power of Positive Thinking," an early self-help volume.

Peale was an old-line Republican, not the movement conservative type of Republican that controls the party today. He had veered toward an early version of that in 1960, when he infamously (as spokesman for 150 Protestant clergymen) urged a vote against John F. Kennedy for President because he was a Roman Catholic. "Faced with the election of a Catholic," Peale said, "our culture is at stake." He was widely criticized for that statement, and of course Kennedy narrowly won the Presidency. Peale then withdrew from partisan politics, other than remaining personally close to Richard Nixon and presiding at the wedding of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower in 1968.

Peale was slow to recognize that American culture, political or otherwise, was changing rapidly. The same can be said for many politicians of both parties today who don't understand the appeal of Barack Obama to Americans, especially young Americans, tired of old white guys like Dick Cheney and Co. screwing up their lives. Given the way American politics is trending this year, Obama seems headed for a historic victory over Sen. John McCain, who seems older in every photo we see. Smart, young, urban, hip, and black/white seems destined to triumph this year over old, white, and suburban.

You could see a lot of this this Zeitgeist in a new Broadway musical, In the Heights, which we saw last night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. The play, written by 28-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, is one of the best musicals I've ever seen. The music is as good or even better than that of "Rent," and the dancing is first-rate. It is ostensibly about the lives and loves of the Hispanic community in Washington Heights, a neighborhood near the top of Manhattan where the George Washington Bridge lands on the island. Yet like Obama, In the Heights transcends ethnicity to offer a story that is simply human and real, about people dealing with change. The actors received a thunderous standing ovation at the end of the show, one of the final previews before the official opening night later this week.

I don't know if Obama has been to see In the Heights. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain (New York Times columnist Frank Rich ties them together as evil twins today) ought to, if for no other reason than to understand the cultural changes in America that seem destined to make them seem as irrelevant to the modern day as Norman Vincent Peale.

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It was great to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win the Oscar for Best Song tonight. They were nominated for 'Falling Slowly,' the infectious main song from "Once," a low-budget Irish film written and directed by John Carney. I saw it at the Midtown in Harrisburg, Pa., last year and couldn't stop humming that song. You can listen to it here. "Once" is about a struggling street musician, Hansard, who insists on playing his own songs. He meets Irglova one day and it turns out she is an accomplished pianist. He bets everything he has on producing a great CD of songs, and she is with him all the way. The ending isn't quite what you expect, but it is real.

Hansard, front man for the band, The Frames, and Irglova, who is Czech (neither are trained actors), dedicated their award to struggling artists everywhere. You just know they haven't had an easy time of it. The music business these days is almost as troubled as journalism, and with no fewer trolls who don't care a whit about what is good and right, only what is perceived to sell. "Once" is the antithesis of that kind of thinking, and Hansard and Irglova couldn't have looked happier to be up on stage.

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On this last day of the year, I woke up with a nasty backache thanks to Elvis the cat.

He was howling outside the bedroom door at 3:30 a.m. so I let him in and he, of course, jumped into the bed and curled up by my legs. He has a nasty habit of nipping you if you deign to move your legs, so I ended up (my wife is away) in a weird diagonal position for the next three hours.

And then I recalled what happened yesterday: I accidentally sent my cellphone on a trip through the washing machine. I had been cooking some pie filling on the stove, stirred it a little too hard, and it splashed out onto my jeans. No burns, but a big mess, so I rushed up to change and tossed my jeans and shirt into the laundry basket. Then it was into the washer. I of course felt my pants pockets to make sure they were empty, but the phone had apparently slipped out when I tossed the jeans in the basket. I just grabbed everything up and shoved it in the washer. The phone was a total loss--the slightest bit of dampness kills a cellphone--but at least it's insured.

Am I glad 2007 is almost over? Yup. But I discovered a great New Year's song--Jimmy Buffett's "Changes in Latitutes, Changes in Attitudes." Check out the lyrics at the link and tell me that isn't the perfect song to sing along to at your New Year's party tonight. "Good times and riches and son of a bitches, I've seen more than I can recall..." Gotta love it. Beats "Auld Lang Syne" by a mile.

This is the 334th post on By The River since I began blogging in the spring of 2006. In November, I began subscribing to Google Analytics, a free service that tells you how many people are viewing your blog every day and where they come from. It's been quite interesting, to say the least. I had wondered some days whether anyone was reading it at all beyond the 4-5 regular readers who posted comments. It turns out I range between about 30 and 100 readers per day, with the average about 50.

They're from all 50 states (North Dakota took awhile, but West Fargo finally checked in) and as many foreign countries. Some of them spend a good bit of time on the site reading more than just the current post. Here are the past month's most serious visitors, or rather where they come from:

1. Wausau, Wisconsin. Up in the north woods. Four pages, 37.30 minutes.
2. Dubai, United Arab Emirates. What else can you do in Dubai? Two pages, 18:30 minutes.
3. Perth, Australia. You should be out swimming, but watch out for box jellyfish. Two pages, 18:04 minutes.
4. Thomasville, Ga. No clue what goes on there. Six pages, 17:03 minutes.
5. Yorba Linda, California. Get back in your grave, Richard Nixon! I only mentioned you a few times. Fourteen pages, 15:47 minutes.
6. Brodheadsville, Pa. I get more visitors from Pennsylvania than any other state. Four pages, 14:04 minutes.
7. Shreveport, La. Isn't this where the distinguished Spears family is from? Five pages, 12:02 minutes.
8. Soignier, Belgium. Your guess is as good as minue. Two pages, 10:51 minutes.
9. Safety Harbor, Florida. The marlin are running. Five pages, 9:11 minutes.
10. Harrison, Arkansas. Up in the Ozarks. Probably read my Huckabee stuff. Two pages, 8:53 minutes.

I truly do get readers from all over the world. Some of the other places that checked in more than just briefly were Calgary, Alberta, Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Pontypridd, Wales, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Slough, U.K.--setting for the original BBC version of, "The Office"--Leighton Buzzard, England, Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Berlin, Germany, Anjouleme, France, Monreale, Sicily, Tampere and Kuopio, Finland, Nykobing, Denmark, Stockholm, Sweden, Gdansk, Poland, Prague, Czech Republic, Durban, South Africa, Pune, India, and Ipoh, Malaysia.

And a special thanks to my most regular of readers: Mareike in Los Angeles, Phil in Ithaca, N.Y., Elena in Charlotte, N.C., and Jim, in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J.

I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year. We'll be heading to a party at Jeff and Julia Duthie's house in Shipoke tonight, which is a quick walk around the corner.

Posted by David at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How do you make a film about the life of the enigmatic American singer Bob Dylan, who is prone to "reinvent" the facts about his life at every opportunity?

Martin Scorsese did it one way, in an acclaimed, two-DVD documentary, "No Direction Home," that covered Dylan's career between 1961-1966. And Todd Haynes did it completely differently and just as well in the new film, "I'm Not There," using six actors, including Cate Blanchett, to portray Dylan during the key periods of his amazing and brilliant career.

I saw "I'm Not There" at the Midtown Theatre in Harrisburg, Pa., on Friday night and liked it a lot. It is almost an anti-documentary. If you don't come to the film with a lot of knowledge about Dylan's life and music, it's not going to make a whole lot of sense. But if you do, just sit back and let the film roll over you. I have every non-bootleg Dylan album up through "Slow Train Coming," and have read both Anthony Scaduto's 1973 "Dylan: An Intimate Biography," and Dylan's own autobiography, "Chronicles, Vol. 1." But even I didn't get every reference; you'd need the Dylan equivalent of the Rosetta Stone for that.

Complicating things is that different names are used for just about every person in Dylan's real life except for the poet Allen Ginsberg. Some of the portrayals were obvious, such as Julianne Moore playing a woman who was Joan Baez. French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays Dylan's first wife and major muse, Sara Lownds. But I have no clue, for example, who Michelle Williams is supposed to represent.

I can tell you that the scenes with Richard Gere as Billy the Kid were inspired by the 1973 Sam Peckinpah movie, "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," in which Dylan played a small role and wrote the soundtrack (including, 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door'). The spider crawing across the screen and the poetry represent Dylan's 1971 book of stream-of-consciousness poetry, "Tarantula." (It is a difficult read at best.) The exchange between Dylan and British fans, one of whom calls him "Judas," can be heard on "Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert."

Of the six portrayals of Dylan, Cate Blanchett's was far and away the best. The others were good, but she is the one who could get an Academy Award nomination. Best Supporting Actress or Best Supporting Actor? There's a topic for discussion. She looks the most like Dylan.

Haynes got the rights to use actual Dylan songs sung by Dylan in the film, although the official soundtrack, with one exception, is Dylan songs sung by others. That exception is "I'm Not There," a song from the Bootleg Tapes that has never been released by Dylan until now.

Posted by David at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The last time I saw Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page on stage, in the band's televised 1985 performance at Live Aid, his long hair was jet black. When the band performed in London yesterday in its first concert in 22 years, his hair was still long but had turned snowy white. You can see for yourself in the photo that accompanies the Los Angeles Times review.

Not that age seemed to matter, based on the rapturous reviews of the concert, a 16-song set which was part of a tribute to the late Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun. Here are the reviews from the New York Times, Reuters, London Times, Belfast Telegraph, and Associated Press. And here's a late arrival from the Washington Post.

Jason Bonham, now the drummer for Foreigner, filled in for his late father, John "Bonzo" Bonham, who died one of those classic early rock star deaths back in 1980, after which the band broke up.

I saw Led Zeppelin in concert once, at Earls Court Arena in London in 1975. I was on a three-week May Term course there to finish out my Hope College degree. I needed three more credits to graduate, having withdrawn from a statistics course along the way because my work on the college newspaper, the Anchor, made it impossible to keep up with the daily homework. I will say that London was far better than a statistics course.

We saw the concert advertised and three of us--myself and two other Hope students, the Londono brothers from Colombia, went to the show in high spirits. It was a classic 3-4 hour Led Zep extravaganza, and it was one of the concerts on the "Led Zeppelin" DVD released in 2003.

Apart from everything else, Led Zeppelin's triumphant return to the stage yesterday--an event awaited by legions of fans around the world--shows the triumph of the 1960s culture. It is easy to despair sometimes over the rise of the religious right and movement conservatives in America, who routinely disparage our culture as depraved and decadent. But the truth is, the 1960s, with the youth/rock culture, and the 1990s (when Bill Clinton was President), with the Internet boom, were the premier decades in the American century.

I've always suspected that conservatives really hate the 1960s (defined as the period between the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the Nixon resignation in 1974) because they were listening to "Chicago" and wondering why the cute hippie chicks would have nothing to do with them. But basicly, it's even simpler than that: we won.

Posted by David at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been reading Ted Anthony's enjoyable new book from Simon & Schuster, "Chasing the Rising Sun," which is a travel book of sorts about the author's quest to find the origin of the song 'House of the Rising Sun.' The best-known version of the song was recorded by The Animals in 1964, but dozens if not hundreds of other artists have recorded their own versions. I wondered how an entire book could be written about a single song, but there is enough interesting history here to more than merit the treatment he gives it.

I know Anthony and worked with him at the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News. He started as an intern out of Penn State University in 1990 and worked into a regular reporting job. From here, he went to Associated Press in 1992. His goal was to be a foreign correspondent in China and cover the British handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. He did both and much more, serving as an AP foreign correspondent in China from 2001-2004 and news editor in Beijing for the last two years he was there.

Anthony devoted more than five years to off-and-on research for this book, his first, and manages to incorporate even China (hilariously) into his quest. But most of his research takes place in the United States, and not just in New Orleans, the locale celebrated (or not) in the song. He traces the modern version of the song to one collected by Library of Congress folk song researcher Alan Lomax in 1937. Lomax recorded 16-year-old Georgia Turner singing "our song" in Middlesboro, Ky. While versions of 'House of the Rising Sun' date back as far as the beginning of the 20th century, it is Turner's version that evolved into New York folk singer Dave Van Ronk's version, which became Bob Dylan's version, which, in 1964, classicly and hauntingly, was recorded by Eric Burdon and the Animals, a band from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England.

Anthony wasn't able to interview Van Ronk or Dylan, but did talk to Burdon at length in New Orleans, where he was staying for a time. Burdon and most of the other band members never got any publishing royalties from the song because it was credited to "Trad: Arr. A. Price." Alan Price was the organist for the Animals, and his playing is heard prominently in the song. He profited handsomely, but Burdon and the others never saw a dime. That hasn't stopped Burdon from performing the song at every concert he gives, and then some. Anthony tells a story about how Burdon wandered into a non-descript and nearly empty Seattle karaoke bar one night and, unannounced and unrecognized, went up and did his song.

The bartender commended Burdon for his performance, offering him a free margarita. "Chasing the Rising Sun" is full of good stories like this, enlivened by Anthony's wry humor and obvious devotion to American pop culture. The danger in reading it is that you won't be able to get the song out of your head.

Posted by David at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I watched Nova's very intelligent, two-hour show on the Dover, Pa., intelligent design trial last night. It is worth watching if your local public television station ever broadcasts it again. You will come to realize what a stunning defeat for the religious right this was.

Parents sued the Dover Area School Board after the school board majority attempted to introduce a religious alternative to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, known as Intelligent Design, into high school biology classes. Intelligent Design, as the trial proved, was thinly-disguised creationism, a concept ginned up after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the teaching of Genesis creationism in public schools in 1987. It posits that some living things are so complex that an "Intelligent Designer," i.e., God, must have put them together in his workshop. It was a clear and classic violation of the U.S. Constitution's mandated separation of church and state, but this took place around the high-water mark of the Bush Administration and the fundamentalist Christian right was feeling its oats.

The trial was held in U.S. District Court, Harrisburg, in the fall of 2005. Judge John Jones III, a moderate Republican, handed down a ruling in December of that year ordering the Dover Area School Board not to teach "Intelligent Design" in its schools. Scientific testimony at the trial demolished the critics of evolution, while other testimony revealed the subterfuge behind the school board's scheme. Sick and tired of lies and evasions by the I.D. advocates on the Dover board, Jones slammed the "breathtaking inanity" of their transparent effort to introduce conservative Christian beliefs into the public school curriculum.

My overall reaction to "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," was wonderment about some of the people who get elected to run our schools. Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell, the chief architects of the Intelligent Design fiasco at Dover, are about as qualified to run a public school district as advocates of using bleeding and leaches in medical treatment would be to run the Penn State School of Medicine at Hershey.

There isn't any intelligence test required to be a school director. District Justices in Pennsylvania aren't required to be lawyers but must still complete and pass a course of instruction after they are elected. Not so for school directors. Any idiot who gets more votes than the next guy can serve. The Intelligent Design fiasco cost the taxpayers of Dover a million dollars in legal fees.

My other reaction from watching the show was that the science teachers at Dover Area High School were true heroes. They fought the school board's effort to fundamentalize the biology classes at more than a little risk to their jobs. This wasn't just passive resistance; they put their strong objections into a firmly-worded letter to the school board and made it public. If they have not been given formal honors by their profession for their courage, they ought to be.

Many of the trial participants and observers were interviewed for the Nova production, including Judge Jones, former York Daily Record reporter Lauri Lebo, whose own book on the trial comes out next year, and Buckingham and Bonsell. Michael Behe, the Lehigh University scientist whose writings are a linchpin of the Intelligent Design movement, and who has been disavowed by his Lehigh colleagues, declined to be interviewed.

Posted by David at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've watched all of the episodes so far of "The War," Ken Burns' epic documentary on the American involvement in World War II.

And so far, I'd give Burns and his crew an 'A' for effort and a 'B' for content. I commend him for showing the brutal reality of the war and driving home the point that American soldiers, while overall disciplined and effective, were not always angels. Our side executed prisoners for convenience sake just as the Germans and Japanese did. It was not a "Good War," as Burns points out, but a necessary one.

Last night's episode on the Battle of the Bulge and the rescue of the American civilian internees in the Santo Tomas camp outside Manila was particularly good. In one of many examples of his overall fairness, Burns juxtaposes the little-known Japanese imprisonment of American civilians in the Philippines under increasingly brutal conditions with the American internment of Japanese civilians in the mainland U.S. That's progress; most documentaries on the war show only what we did to Japanese-Americans.

Yet Burns holds back on Santo Tomas. I know a lot about this because I researched it several years ago for a yet-unwritten book on the history of GPU, the company responsible for the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg. GPU, then known as Associated Gas & Electric, owned Manila Electric Co. All the white collar workers at Meralco were Americans, many from Reading, Pa. William Snyder, who later supervised the early stages of construction of TMI-1 for Metropolitan Edison Co., was among the prisoners, although he was later moved to the Los Banos camp. I interviewed several of the GPU Santo Tomas survivors for the book and examined documents of the post-war war crimes trial of the Japanese officers who ran the camp.

Burns gets the increasing starvation right, but he never mentions that it was deliberate Japanese policy in the last months of the war. Many camp inmates believed that the Japanese Army was preparing to murder them outright. The very dramatic rescue of the Santo Tomas inmates didn't come across well in the documentary, but to be fair it was probably a matter of not having time to show everything. Burns does sort of link Gen. MacArthur's grandstanding visit to the camp to the decision of the Japanese to target the camp with their artillery, which killed several American civilians. Most of the former prisoners I talked to had little good to say about MacArthur personally.

My other complaint about the series is the repetitive footage of cannons and machine guns firing. The footage appears to be linked to specific battles on specific days, but the claim of direct link is never made and I wonder if a lot of generic war footage was used. Those army cameramen on both the American and German sides seem to have been everywhere.

And a final note: did anyone else notice how the volume of "The War" is noticeably higher than whatever show you were watching before it? I have to get up and turn it down when each episode starts. I guess Burns knew who his primary audience would be--older Americans who are increasingly hard of hearing. If it wasn't public TV and sponsored entirely by General Motors, I suspect Miracle Ear would have been right in there.

Posted by David at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I watched the 1990 film "Lord of the Flies" on the Chiller Channel tonight with my daughter Elizabeth, who is 14. I had never seen the film (and didn't know there was a Chiller Channel), but of course had read the William Golding novel of the same name back in 9th grade. As I recall--here comes a guilty admisson--I bought the Cliff Notes at Reader's World in downtown Holland, Michigan, to help me with my book report. Elizabeth was assigned the book as summer reading going into 9th grade at Harrisburg Academy. She has been plugging away at the book and didn't buy the Cliff Notes.

I hasten to add that I did read "Lord of the Flies" and it did stick with me. How could it not? Fourteen is the perfect age for a boy or girl to read Golding's 1954 masterwork, which helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The idea of being stranded on an apparently deserted tropical island starts out very attractive. No more parental rules, no more teachers, just fun in the sun. Of course, the boys rapidly shed what turns out to be a thin veneer of civilization and revert to jungle savagery, complete with spears and loincloths and bloody violence.

The movie is a relatively faithful rendition of the book, although the English boys become Americans and the time is the Cold War rather than World War II. They don't find a dead flyer hanging by a parachute from a tree, but they do kill Piggy with a boulder to shut him up. That scene always gave me a chill, symbolic as it is of the triumph of a brutal mob over civilized life.

In 9th grade in 1968 we were confronted with the Vietnam War. Classmates' brother were dying in the Tet Offensive, and we wondered if the war would still be on when we were old enough to be drafted. Fourteen year-olds do wonder about that. What do they think about today when they read "Lord of the Flies?" The bloody hell of Iraq, where the civil war in what, long ago, was the cradle of civilization has become slaughter for slaughter's sake? Where 250 innocent people in a small village die at the hand of faceless bombers?

Yes, do read "Lord of the Flies" whether you are 14 or 41. And think of that thin veneer of civilization and the terrible power of the cruel and brutal mob to strip it away.

Posted by David at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What is it about riding a bicycle as an adult, or a putative adult, that turns one into a self-righteous zealot?

I write in defense of poor Sheila Rothenberger of West Hanover Twp., Pa. Ms. Rothenberger wrote to the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., on June 20 complaining that bicyclists ought to be more careful in how they ride. She suggested they stay off certain roads entirely, such as one where a 19-year-old woman from Lebanon, Pa., was killed tragically in early June while riding her bicycle.

From the reaction, you'd think that Rothenberger, who I've never met in my life, had confessed a desire to take part in the annual baby seal hunt in Canada. First to take up the stick and beat Rothenberger to the ground was Mike McKenney of Mechanicsburg, who suggested that the fault was entirely Rothenberger's for being angry at slow-moving bicycles and that she ought to confine her motoring to interstate highways. Or else, he sniffed with moral superiority, she ought to slow down. Then came a letter from someone who said bicycles have a legal right to be on the same roads as cars, blah, blah, blah.

In my hometown of Holland, Michigan, I distinctly remember my first encounter with bicycle zealots. It was on the busy street that runs past my parents' house. It has two lanes and is divided by double yellow lines, which means, of course, no crossing into the opposite lane to pass. There would be plenty of room to pass a single bicycle, or a procession of them, except that these two bicyclists insisted on riding side by side and blocking the entire lane. I tapped on the horn once, then again when there was no reaction. After the second time, one of the riders turned around with a look of pure hatred on his face. I don't recall if they moved to the side of the road or not.

Of late, bicyclists in my bike-loving hometown have proclaimed a right NOT to ride on bike paths built for them at taxpayer expense. Some Rothenberger out there (probably Van Rothenberger, given the town) had complained about bikes being on a really busy road with lots of fatal accidents. Why couldn't they use the adjoining bike path? Silly woman. She was cudgeled into the ground by the bicycle zealots and informed that the bike path ALSO HAD PEDESTRIANS, which forced dedicated bicycle zealots to slow down, greatly annoying them.

I do most of my daytime driving in the city of Harrisburg, where I observe bicyclists without helmets weaving through traffic, running red lights, running stop signs, going the wrong way on one-way streets, and generally behaving in a dangerous and obnoxious manner.

Rothenberger is right. There are some roads where bicyclists don't belong. No one in their right mind, for example, would commute to work on a bicycle on Second Street in Harrisburg at 7:40 a.m. You can ignore common sense but you can't ignore the laws of physics. Big crushes little in an accident. We may not be South America, where the big vehicle has the right-of-way over the smaller one, but it's time for the bicycle zealots to be a little more considerate if they want the right to ride where they please.

Posted by David at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've written before about how Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has more than its share of really weird, brutal murders. Everyone remembers the slaughter of the Amish school children by Carl Charles Robert IV in West Nickel Mines on Oct. 2, but that was only the latest in a long string of murders in the county.

The latest is the arrest of 16-year-old Alec Devon Kreider of bucolic-sounding Cobblestone Lane, Manheim, for the knife slayings of three people who lived a half-mile from his own home. Supposedly he went there to kill only his friend, Kevin Haines, but doing a Jack-the-Ripper on the parents, Tom and Lisa Haines, as well. A daughter escaped. Kreider supposedly confessed to his father, who then turned him in to the police. Keep in mind that knife slayings--remember Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman?--are often bloody messes, with repeated stab wounds or slashes.

Lancaster County. Call it the land of crazy white people, I suppose. Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" that he got more scared when he encountered a white man on a dark street because statistically, they commit most of the serious crime. I don't think there's another rural/suburban county in Pennsylvania with crimes like this on such a frequent basis.

There really ought to be a psychological investigation of the culture of Lancaster County, where conservative religion dominates life, to figure out what factors lead to these murders. I have an idea about why one 16-year-old boy might be driven to kill another 16-year-old boy, a friend no less, but I'm going to keep it to myself for now and see what comes out as the investigation unfolds.

Posted by David at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This was one of those miscarriages of justice that are so egregious that you think it can't be happening in 21st century America. But today came good news that a nightmare may be ending for a 40-year-old Connecticut school teacher.

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT, faced 40 years in prison for being convicted of intentionally showing pornographic images to students on a classroom computer. Her life was close to being destroyed, and she isn't out of the woods yet because the judge in the case only ordered a new trial. She did not throw out the case, which would have been the proper response. And Amero and her family likely face crushing legal bills that really should be paid by the school district, the police, and the prosecutor's office that brought this case.

Basicly, Amero was a victim of spyware that took over a classroom computer and sent repeated pornographic pop-up images to the screen. She had no training in what to do if that happened. The school had stopped paying for updates of its web filtering software, and it failed to stop the porn onslaught. At her trial, the defense was blocked by the judge from introducing testimony from a computer forensic expert who examined the hard drive of the Windows computer Amero was using. And the prosecution never ran a spyware scan on the computer.

It's tempting to pass this off as another New England sexual hysteria case, like that infamous Fells Acres daycare prosecution in Massachusetts a few years back when children were induced into giving fanciful testimony about implausible sexual horrors. People went to prison in that case and did serious time before reason was restored, largely because of crusading columns by a Wall Street Journal writer. The real villains here are the Norwich police and prosecutors who seemed to lack any common sense and were willing to let an innocent life be destroyed to win a case that wasn't a case at all.

Judge Hillary Strackbein, in granting a new trial (which probably won't happen, meaning Amero will be in the clear) had the lack of grace to criticize the bloggers around the world who targeted this miscarriage of justice and focused critical attention on Connecticut justice. She accused them of trying to "improperly influence" the court. Too bad, lady.

Posted by David at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had the enjoyable experience of seeing myself on the big screen Saturday afternoon when a terrific new documentary about the Centralia mine fire, "The Town That Was," played at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

The photo is from the Q&A session that followed. I'm second from right. The others, from left, are Malinka Thompson-Godoy, producer, Tom Larkin, a former Centralia activist who also appeared in the film, Georgie Roland, co-director, Chris Perkel (with microphone), the other co-director, and at far right, Paul Henning, who composed the film's haunting score. I wrote the book "Unseen Danger: A Tragedy of People, Government, and the Centralia Mine Fire," and covered Centralia as a newspaper reporter. I'm in the film to talk about the history of Centralia and the mine fire.

Centralia, Pa., was a small town with a long history and strong community ties. The mine fire started in 1962 when a clean-up project at the town dump went horribly wrong. Underfunded and occasionally misguided attempts by the state and federal government to stop the fire all ultimately failed. Beginning in the winter of 1979-80, the fire broke through the last barrier and began moving under Centralia, sending dangerous gases into homes and causing the ground to collapse without warning. Relocations of the most endangered residents began in 1981, and the entire town was relocated beginning in 1984.

But not all of them. Some chose to stay. About 12-15 mostly elderly people out of an original population of a little over a thousand remain, but also John Lokitis, Jr., who is in his early 30s. John lives alone in the former home of his grandparents and carries on a quixotic effort to keep a semblance of the town alive. But viewers of the film come to see the futility of the effort, and understand that what had been a real town with real families is gone forever. "The Town That Was" leaves many viewers with a sense of sadness or melancholy at what was lost.

The film drew extended applause from the audience in the Prince Music Theater. There were 200 advance ticket sales and the house was nearly but not entirely filled. Chris Perkel at one point asked how many former Centralia residents or people with ties to Centralia were in the audience, and about 10 hands went up. Among them were Joe Coddington, whose sister, Colleen Dwonczyk appears in the film, and Shannon Buckley, who I had last seen as a six-year-old in 1981. Her family was in that early group of relocatees. She suffered from asthma, which was aggravated by the mine fire gases in her home, and her parents appeared in Tony Mussari's 1983 PBS documentary "Centralia Fire."

Chris, Georgie, and Malinka invited Paul Henning, Tom Larkin and I onstage afterward, and we all answered questions from the audience. I think the Q&A would have gone on for another half hour at least, but we had to clear the house for the next film. All in all, it was a great experience. "The Town That Was" will screen one more time at the film festival, April 16 at 7 p.m. at International House in Philadelphia.

Posted by David at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm about four hours into the live telecast of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony and I'm not going to bed.

This is the first time it has been broadcast live in its entirety (with no commercials!), and you have to wonder why it has taken this long. Well, maybe it isn't that hard to figure out. This is one of the more over the top and unpredictable award shows you'll ever see, with bleeped and un-bleeped obscenities and general craziness. Rolling Stone Keith Richards got things off to a rousing start when he came to induct the Ronettes and, with a twinkle in his eye, thanked advances in medical science for allowing him to be there. That was followed by Ronnie Spector's 17 page acceptance speech in which she seemed to thank everyone in creation. And Paul Schaefer came out at the end to read a message from Phil Spector--he of the murder rap--in tribute to the group he created.

Patti Smith, always a favorite of mine, was next. She was touching and tearful and seemed hesitant in her first two songs, a cover of the Rolling Stones 'Gimme Shelter' that's on her new album, and then 'Because the Night.' But she ended with a kick-ass performance of 'Rock and Roll Nigger,' which she said was her late mother's favorite song of her's.

Van Halen was represented by Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, Eddie Van Halen having gone off to rehab and David Lee Roth not showing. They were inducted by Velvet Revolver, which performed two of Van Halen's songs before Hagar and Anthony and Paul Schaefer came out to do the third in what seemed an impromptu decision.

Gotta run. R.E.M. is coming on. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is doing the induction.

Posted by David at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was waiting for something like this, and now it appears it will happen. The Intelligent Design controversy in Dover, Pa., and the trial in 2005 in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pa., that demolished the concept, is coming to the big screen. No date has been set even to begin filming, but it is for real.

The "untitled Dover project" will have a script by Ron Nyswaner, who has a distinguished scriptwriting pedigree that includes the Oscar-winning "Philadelphia" in 1993. Nyswaner is a native of Clarksville, Pa., a small town midway between Uniontown and Washington, Pa., in the southwestern corner of the state. His most recent script was for "The Painted Veil," which played recently at the Midtown Theatre in Harrisburg. The Dover film will be produced by Lynda Obst, who has an equally long production pedigree ranging from "Adventures in Babysitting" in 1987 to "Sleepless in Seattle." Her most recent film was Kate Hudson's "How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days." No word yet on a director.

U.S. District Judge John Jones III, who ruled that Intelligent Design was not science and could not be taught as science in public schools, said in jest afterward--in the glow of positive attention he received for the decision--that he wanted to be played by actor George Clooney. He bears a passing resemblance to Clooney, but a judge doesn't seem a George Clooney type of role. I suspect the meaty parts will be those of the school board members who forced Intelligent Design on the Dover schools, and the ACLU lawyers who litigated the case.

The Dover film is unlikely to be friendly to the proponents of Intelligent Design, especially the school board members, but I hope it will show restraint and be fair to the Dover residents who were misled by their clergy and other evolution opponents into believing that Intelligent Design was real science. They paid a price in humiliation, in some cases shattered belief, and real cash--the legal fees incurred by the school board will take years to pay off in taxes. The story is loaded with drama, perhaps as much as that other film/play about evolution, "Inherit the Wind," which is being revived on Broadway this spring.

Judge Jones has said his one regret in the case is rejecting a petition from Court TV to televise the trial so people could see the evidence for themselves. If Nyswaner's film is a good one, and there is no reason to think it won't be, perhaps the public will get a second chance.

Posted by David at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Admit it. You were wondering if Prince was going to get electrocuted performing in a driving rainstorm during Sunday's SuperBowl halftime show.

But the Minnesota marvel survived--wireless electric guitars make electrocution far less likely these days, although that mike stand, if it had a ground wire, was definitely dangerous. Prince, who is 48, looked not a day older than during his glorious Purple Reign in the early 1980s.

And what a performance! Despite the rainstorm, he and his band and dancers put on one of the best halftime shows in my memory. Opening with "Let's Go Crazy" and closing with "Purple Rain," he gave not an inch to the weather, unlike the fumblin' Bears and Colts. Picking him to do the show was an inspired choice by the NFL.

And how loud will the demands in Miami be tomorrow to build a domed stadium?

Posted by David at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It has been just over a year since U.S. District Judge John Jones III in Harrisburg, Pa., demolished so-called "intelligent design" in his ruling in a lawsuit brought by parents against the Dover Area School Board. The school board, if you recall, tried to put intelligent design--the idea that a complex world "must have had" an intelligent designer, i.e., God, on an equal footing with Darwinian evolution. Jones ruled that it was not science, and that the religious right-dominated school board had pretty much perpetrated a fraud at taxpayer expense (and oh, the expense). For those of us who want real science taught in schools and real religion taught in churches, it was a moment of triumph.

Four books on this seminal case--the most historically important event in central Pennsylvania since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979--are either out or will soon hit the stores. Matthew Chapman, a great-great-grandson of Darwin who attended part of the trial, has written "40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania." Gordy Slack, a writer with Salon.com, has written "The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA". The third, already out, is "Monkey Girl" by Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Last in line--it was only just signed by a publisher, so it's a minimum 8 months to a year away--is former York Daily Record reporter Lauri Lebo's "The Devil in Dover: Dogma vs. Darwin in Small-Town America." She covered the intelligent design trial for her newspaper, but brings a unique perspective to her book. Lebo comes from an evangelical family, and has an insider's view on the beliefs and emotions that led to the intelligent design showdown. I may not read all these books, but I'll definitely read her's for that special local insight.

Posted by David at 09:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The eyes of the literary world are on the Fairfax County Public Library system in northern Virginia, and those eyes are set in a cold, hard stare. A recent Washington Post article highlighted the library system's practice of removing books that haven't been checked out in two years and either dumping them or putting them up for sale. It doesn't matter whether the book in question is a classic by Hemingway or a potboiler by Ludlum, although the latter is far less likely to hit the scrap heap. This has provoked howls of outrage.

Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of technology. Integrated library system software from SyrsiDynix in Huntsville, Alabama (ever notice how much of the bad in corporate America these days comes from the South? Just an observation) is used to check out books, probably via barcodes, so it is no great shakes to program the software to spit out a literary death list of books gone unread in two years. The outrage stems from the many classics consigned to the scrap heap, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Both authors won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I suspect more libraries than we authors care to imagine engage in this practice. My parents in Holland, Michigan, periodically check out my book, Unseen Danger, from Herrick District Library to keep it from meeting a similar fate (although they tell me last time they went to do this somebody had it out). I would find it quite depressing to have my book tossed to make way for some trash popular novel of the moment.

The issue, expressed brilliantly by writer John J. Miller in the Wall Street Journal of Jan. 3, is whether it is right for public libraries to cater primarily to middlebrow public tastes. Is it right for a library branch to buy five copies of some trash novel to meet public demand, possibly bumping books of more lasting quality. He argues that popular books are incredibly cheap and available these days. For libraries to buy them anyway, he says, subsidizes tightwad middle class patrons who could easily afford to buy the books. He argues that libraries must be cultural repositories where people can go to find knowledge and enlightenment. Librarians, he says, need to use their training to select and retain books the public ought to read, not just the ones they want to read.

Newspapers over the last 10 years have gone through a similar wrenching shift aimed at appeasing the supposed interests of the masses, who are generally defined as middlebrow white suburbanites. We in the business are told we must be "reader driven," not use our training and knowledge to decide what news is best for the public to read. In the new regime, the public orders the hamburger and we deliver it, and don't ask if they want fries, too. The result, predictably, has been dumbed-down newspapers with less and less real news, especially government news. Someday someone will figure out that the newspaper industry's destructive turn against government news was driven as much by conservative politics as any supposed public desire for more chicken dinner reporting and "news you can use." Journalists can't uncover the next Watergate or Jack Abramoff scandal if they can't get the stories in the paper.

For those of you who care about books and libraries, there is something you can do. The next time you're at the library, check out a classic. Even if you don't read it, check it out and then return it in a few days. Spare it from the bonfire so your descendants can still read it.

Posted by David at 02:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We just got back from our annual pre-Christmas weekend in New York City. I'm tired, but happy, and ready to blog again.

The highlight of the weekend was taking our daughters to see the very enjoyable Broadway stage version of "Mary Poppins," the 1964 film that starred Julie Andrews and Dick VanDyke. Ashley Brown did well in the eponymous role, but Gavin Lee excelled in the role of Bert, the chimney sweep. The original songs by Robert and Richard Sherman are supplemented by several new compositions by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The special effects are amazing, notably when Lee tap dances upside down across the proscenium arch of the stage. There wasn't an empty seat in the house, and I see from the ad in today's New York Times that weekends are sold out, or nearly so, through March. Try StubHub.com. That's where I got my tickets.

Now if you thought you'd escape politics in this post, you're wrong. Both the 1964 film and the 2006 Broadway production were/are creatures of their time. The film, no matter how you remember it, was actually quite subversive, suffused with a mid-1960s ethos of rebellion against conformity and rules. Consider Mr. and Mrs. Banks, the couple whose efforts to find and keep a suitable nanny for their unruly children, Jane and Michael, lead to the magical arrival of supernanny Mary Poppins.

In the 1964 film, George Banks is a stuffy banker who proclaims himself the lord and master of his house, wife and children. He sings that, "a British bank, is run with precision. A British home, requires nothing less. Tradition, discipline and rules, must be the tools..." (That song is mostly gone from the new production, save for a few bars near the end.) In addition to trying to tame his unruly children, he is vexed by a wife who is an active suffragette, trying to win women the right to vote. Mary Poppins and Bert introduce the children to a different world, one where rules and conformity are far less important than being a creative free spirit. They visit their father at the bank, where Michael inadvertently triggers a run on the bank by complaining that they won't let him see his money.

In the 2006 Broadway production, George Banks seems more like an over-stressed Yuppie trying to find a nanny with a Green Card than a striver seeking to maintain the rigid social standards and rules of Edwardian England. Mrs. Banks is a former actress, not a suffragette. The conflict with her husband is over his refusal to allow her to continue to work on the stage. When the Banks children visit George at the bank, it seems more like Take Your Children To Work Day than an opportunity for rebellious non-conformity. Michael doesn't cause a ruckus. The bank threatens to fire George for turning down an Enron-like financing deal that another bank snaps up. His career is saved not, as in the film, because George repeats a dumb joke he heard from Jane and Michael that causes the stuffy bank chairman to die laughing, but because the deal implodes for the other bank. The non-conformity is there, but it's not the subversive be-all and end-all it is in the film. It becomes just another lifestyle, like the Apple guy versus the Windows guy.

I suppose one can argue that because the hippies and other rebels of the 1960s essentially won, and non-conformity is the new norm, some other approach had to be taken. Despite its muddled message, "Mary Poppins" on Broadway is well worth your time and money. The wonderful songs, especially "Feed the Birds" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," and the great dance routines make for an evening that will entrance even the most stuffy non-conformist.

Posted by David at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry, couldn't resist. It's true, according to the Washington Post. Now, back to politics and the continuing Democratic sweep.

To make the moment even more bizarre, I just saw a commercial saying how fun it is to raise alpacas. The website is www.ilovealpacas.com. Maybe Kevin Federline can do that after Britney throws him out of the house.

Posted by David at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I had an opportunity to watch a staged reading of an exciting new musical, "A Shelter In Our Car." A staged reading has the actors on stage speaking the dialogue and singing the songs, but with no costumes or sets or much movement. This was performed in the basement of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church at 65th St. and Central Park West in New York City. The book and lyrics were written by Sophie Jaff, and the wonderful music for Jaff's lyrics was written by Robert L. Wilson III. Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, of Indian-Bahamian descent, is the director. Tony Perry, an old friend of mine from The Patriot-News, is one of the seven actors.

The play, which is billed as being for children but which will likewise be enjoyed by adults, is about an immigrant Jamaican woman and her daughter who have sunk into homelessness in New York City after her husband and chief breadwinner died. She is a trained nurse, but cannot work in her profession here without a New York nursing license, which she is working hard to obtain. In the meantime, she and her daughter, Zettie, live in their car. Mom makes a few dollars now and then handing out fliers.

Both homelessness and the current Republican campaign against immigrants are addressed in this musical, but it is a human story at heart. That is often the best way to address issues in art, by showing the impact and not preaching.

The play is based on a children's boook by Monica Gunning of the same name, and is being produced under the auspices of the Making Books Sing program in New York. It will be performed in New York schools beginning in January, but I have to think with songs this good it will have a life beyond that. I would even like to see it expanded a little bit beyond the short attention span of grade schoolers.

Posted by David at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Much has been made of how the Amish in Lancaster County have forgiven Charles Carl Roberts IV for gunning down 10 of their young girls Oct. 2 in a one-room schoolhouse in West Nickel Mines, Pa. Five have died so far, and the others will be scarred for life. Yet the Amish have very publicly forgiven Roberts for his hideous crime and expressed their personal condolences to his widow and children on his death (at his own hand after he shot the girls). This is being hailed in rapturous terms in the mainstream media as the epitome of Christian love and devotion to Jesus, and how it will bring "healing" to the community. Go Thou and do likewise, fellow doormat.

Sorry, I disagree. To forgive Roberts for what he did belittles the horror of what happened to those young innocents. Worst case, it might even encourage some other simpleminded idiot to do something similar. I know forgiveness is an old Christian virtue stressed by Jesus himself, but my reading of that 70x7 passage is that He was talking about the petty annoyances of everyday life, such as bothersome family members, not an evil man who murders your children. I would argue that some crimes are indeed unforgiveable except by God. You don't see Jews, even Jews for Jesus, rushing to forgive Hitler for the Holocaust.

Jewish teaching on the subject of forgiveness is somewhat different than Christian teaching and I like it a lot more. They believe that forgiveness is fine, but don't rush into it. Insist upon sincere efforts by the one who caused you harm to atone for what he or she did. Fix the damage, then seek forgiveness. Mrs. Roberts, though innocent of any involvement in this horror, could help atone for the shame that will inevitably attach to her family name and that of her children by working to help rid America of the sort of weapons her husband used in the slaughter.

Or perhaps by speaking at some events to raise money to pay the medical bills of both the living and dead children, which must be enormous. I understand that charitable donations have been pouring in and will pay some of those expenses, but I find it hard to believe they will cover everything.

Posted by David at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine this. You are a veteran and respected art teacher with nothing but good job evaluations from your superiors. You take fifth graders from a suburban school district on a principal- approved field trip to a major downtown art museum. You have signed permission slips from all parents. During the trip, one of the children observes a nude statue and tells Mommy. Mommy freaks out, complains to the school, and you are fired.

That, in a nutshell, is the fate so far of Sydney McGee, a teacher for 28 years in Frisco, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. The story took on a new, national prominence today when it appeared in the New York Times, but it was first "brought north" earlier this week by Raw Story, a website which aggregates news stories it suspects will appeal to its liberal readership, just as the Drudge Report does for conservatives. The Frisco school board's assertion that her dismissal had nothing to do with the field trip and was related to other, unspecified "performance concerns" is dismissed as so much hogwash by Ms. McGee and her lawyer.

Who was the puritanical parent who stuck the knife in Ms. McGee's back? We don't know, of course. That likely won't come out until the almost-certain lawsuit. If I had to guess, I would say it was fundamentalist Christian parents unhappy about having to send their child to the "Godless" public schools but unable or unwilling to "home school" them or pay private school tuition. No one has yet raised the specter of this being yet another assault on our freedoms by the Christian right, but then, stealth is their watchword these days.

And what about the school board? As we have seen here in central Pennsylvania with the former Dover Area School Board and their reckless attempt to foist "Intelligent Design" on biology classes in the district that was slapped down by the Federal courts, rightwing religious fervor can lead to incredibly stupid and costly decisions. I would not be at all surprised if we find out eventually that some members of the school board had long wanted Ms. McGee axed for her lifestyle, whatever that might be. Controlling female sexuality is a sinister obsession with the fundamentalists. I always like to say there's no intelligence test for getting on a school board. All you need are more votes from your fellow know-nothings than the other guy gets.

An unintentionally revealing look at how far we have fallen during the six years of Texan George W. Bush can be observed in these stories about Sydney McGee from a Dallas TV station. In one of the two stories, the TV station showed footage from the Dallas Museum of Art, but placed black blocks over the breasts and genitals of some of the classical art. They are no doubt concerned, and rightly so, about the increasingly censorious Federal Communications Commission and the prospect of a huge, crippling fine if one viewer happened to take offense at seeing nude art. That's all it takes in Bush's America.

A few people have written to the Dallas Morning News to condemn the school district's surrender to puritanism. But you can be sure there are just as many in that state expressing quiet satisfaction at one more blow against the modern world.

Posted by David at 06:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think chicken pox parties are about as nutty an idea as I've ever run across. Actually, it's more than nutty. It borders on child abuse.

The Patriot-News ran a story Tuesday about this phenomenon. The idea is that instead of having your child vaccinated against chicken pox and NOT getting this highly contagious disease, you deliberately expose them to some kid who has it. That way, instead of a momentary sting while the injection goes in, your kid can suffer and miss school for two weeks and get his or her immunity the "natural" way.

What's more, you'll stuck it to the medical establishment and all those selfish mothers who would rather work to get money for "fancy vacations" (the usual vice of choice) and expensive clothing than stay home with their children. Sure, your child may be one of the 40 or so who die of chicken pox every year, or who get an extremely painful case of shingles as an adult because he or she had chicken pox as a child, but isn't that natural, too?

Full disclosure: I had chicken pox as a child, but did not aquire it at a chicken pox party. I spent two miserable, itchy weeks in bed and then had to catch up on my school work. When I was in my 30s, I came down with shingles, but fortunately it was caught by my doctor and zapped with prednisone before it could morph into climb-the-wall pain. My older daughter was born in 1993, two years before the vaccine was approved for use. When the FDA gave the okay in 1995, we rushed to Jones, Daly & Coldren to have her get the shot. Same with my younger daughter born in 1997.

My father worked for Parke, Davis & Co., a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and I've always taken a very benign view toward the wonders of medical science. People live a whole lot longer now because of pharmaceuticall advances. A lot more men used to die in their 50s from heart disease than do now since the advent of anti-cholesterol and blood pressure pills (and the great drop-off, too, in cigarette smoking).

There are really two things driving chicken pox parties. One is a general, sort of libertarian distrust of the medical establishment and embracing of "natural" cures. The other is antagonism by conservatives, religious or otherwise, toward mothers who work, whether for personal fulfillment or (more likely) because their family needs the second income. The doctor quoted in the Patriot-News article who suggested that chicken pox vaccinations are really for the convenience of working parents (read: mothers) had that written all over him. For families with two working parents of modest means, chicken pox and the need to stay home to nurse a sick child for two weeks can be financially devastating.

I used to wonder, before my daughter got vaccinated, what we would do if she came down with chickenpox late in the year when we either couldn't take vacation (my wife is a speech pathologist for Capital Area Intermediate Unit) and all my vacation days for the year were gone. Fortunately, that never happened, and now that they're vaccinated, it probably won't.

So I say Yay! for chicken pox vaccine. It's worked so far.

Posted by David at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times is reporting that Google has introduced a new search engine that allows a person to search through many different newspaper archives at once. I tried it out this morning and could barely drag myself away to go to breakfast at the hotel where I'm staying.

I searched on my own name and discovered, in addition to my Patriot-News articles, several articles that mentioned me in my hometown newspaper, the Holland (Mich.) Evening Sentinel. Cub Scout awards and promotions, my appearance with the Holland High School team in High School Quiz Bowl, a local TV show, and a number of other highlights of my young life. My parents and uncles and aunts appeared in other articles. Definitely fun.

Most of the articles must be purchased to be read in full, but the prices aren't too bad. My only complaint is that there isn's a single place to pay for access. Some articles are from Newspaper Archive and others from ProQuest or other sources. So depending on what you're looking for, you'll have to buy subscriptions from more than one provider.

Google News Archive will be of particular benefit to historians, opening up some of the vast amount of information that lies in old newspapers in large and small towns. Most of this was effectively inaccessible before. In theory you could search the microfilms day by day for what you were looking for, but I can testify that this is an exhausting and tedious process. Most American newspapers, other than the New York Times, didn't bother with full indexing or any indexing of their back issues. Which was a shame, because it is true that newspapers are the first draft of history.

Posted by David at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed in Hershey Stadium last night and showed that rock's older generation still has a thing or two to teach Gen Y about political commitment, protesting the policies of George W. Bush--and singing in harmony.

This was probably the most political concert I have ever attended. Neil Young, the most artistically active of the four men, was in charge of song selection and the general tone of things, I'm told. If so, he plucked many of their most political songs from the last 40 years to round out "Our House," "Teach Your Children," and their other radio hits. From Graham Nash--no political slouch he--came "Chicago," about the political turmoil there in 1968, including the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial of anti-Vietnam War leaders, and "Immigration Man," as timely as ever.

David Crosby sang "Almost Cut My Hair," about the pressure to conform, which any male from that era can still appreciate, from the band's second album. "Ohio," about the Kent State Massacre in 1970, and "Find the Cost of Freedom" (Ohio's flip side in its 45 rpm release in 1970), backed by photos of American War dead in Iraq, were timely as well.

Neil Young and the band (the other three make a find back-up band for Neil) sang many of the songs on his latest "Living with War" album, capped by 'Let's Impeach the President,' which the band did as a singalong with the audience. I wasn't sure how well this would go over with a central Pennsylvania audience, but many people sang along with vigor. I think a few may have walked out, but maybe they were just going for beer.

All four were in fine voice, especially David Crosby, who seems to have come through his liver transplant and drug bust jailing in Texas a few years back in relatively good shape. I had forgotten what a bluesy voice Stephen Stills has. I last saw him in concert as a solo artist around 1973, so perhaps that's why! When Graham Nash sings 'Our House,' his love song to then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell, you wonder how they ever could have broken up.

Attendance at the concert was not that good, especially compared to the Rolling Stones last October. The Stones filled the Stadium, but CSN&Y filled about a third of it. I blame the high ticket prices for this. Top tickets were nearly $200 with service charge, and low-end ones close to $50. With the price of gas being what it is, people just don't have as much disposable income to drop on a rock concert, however pleasant it may be.

Posted by David at 05:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With a title like that, this blog post could be about (A) global warming, (B) the Iranian A-bomb threat, (C) the Bush Administration approach to just about everything, or (D) a really funny and promising new comedy website.

The correct answer is (D), at least for today. I can't promise what it will be tomorrow.

The Doomed Planet made me laugh, and I think you will, too, even if you're outside the 14-35 target demographic. Here is one of their short films that has gotten a lot of attention, including from Salon.com. It's called "Snakes on a Plane: How Hollywood Really Works.

Click here to go to The Doomed Planet website. You can watch the movies there or download them free to your video iPod through the Apple iTunes Music Store. They actually look quite good on the iPod screen.

Posted by David at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last summer, in a bit of temporary insanity, I bought a white linen suit from the online men's store Hunter & Coggins of North Carolina.

I suppose many writers are attracted to these suits, especially if they like the books of Tom Wolfe or Mark Twain. Both authors seem to wear or have worn white linen suits on most days of their lives, and certainly at public readings. I like both of them. Not everything they wrote, but a lot of it. I even stopped to visit Twain's grave in Elmira, N.Y., one day while I was heading up to the Finger Lakes. The cemetery is right off Route 15. I really felt I needed to wear a white suit to be there, but I didn't own one then. The other thing people associate with white suits, of course, is Southern lawyers. You see white suits in a host of old movies, usually paired with a glass of bourbon (sounds good!) and somebody named Big Daddy or Atticus Finch.

White suits are not really practical. You can only wear them, according to the unwritten rules of men's fashion, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, at least up North. They are comfortable on 100 degree days like yesterday and today, which is why they became popular in the hot, humid South, but their downsides are many. For one thing, they wrinkle easily and are dirt magnets. The trick is to wear one all day and not have to stop at the dry cleaners the next morning. If it's raining and you have to walk anywhere, forget it.

I debuted my suit in June of last year at the big Book Expo America trade show in New York City. I was there for a number of reasons, and decided to look literary. The reactions were definitely interesting. More than one person did a double take after spotting me out of the corner of their eye. Did they think I was Tom Wolfe walking by? I'm way taller than he is. I saw Tom Wolfe the next day signing autographs, of course wearing a white suit. He must have a closetful of them and a really good dry cleaner.

People in Harrisburg almost feel compelled to comment when they see me in my white suit. This morning, the security guard at the Market Street pedestrian crossing in front of the Patriot-News said, "Hey, looks comfortable!" My colleague Dave Wenner said he didn't realize I was "into Tom Wolfe." Reggie Sheffield, another colleague, once commented that I belonged in Louisiana with a suit like that.

I'm one of the few reporters at the Patriot-News who even wears a suit anymore. Dress codes at newspapers have relaxed considerably over the years, but on the Business staff, where I work, or in the Capitol Bureau, it's still pretty much required. My theory is if you need to wear a suit, you might as well look good. In white or not.

Posted by David at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a fascinating story in the Los Angeles Times today about the unusual number of former Pittsburgh Steelers who have gone to that great stadium in the sky in recent years. Eighteen former players have died since 2000. It's one of those cases, like the East Pennsboro High School deaths of several years ago, that will never be solved, but will keep people talking and speculating for years. Looks like Ben Roethlisberger really did dodge a bullet.

Posted by David at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Neil Young is 60, a few months older than George W. Bush, and we can only imagine what the two of them might talk about if they went out to dinner together to celebrate being around for six decades. "You the feller that wrote that Ohier song?" And so forth.

I didn't have the opportunity to see Jonathan Demme's film about Young, "Heart of Gold," on the big screen, and am not certain if it ever played at the Midtown Theater in Harrisburg, where I usually see my movies. But I watched it on DVD on Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday afternoon and plan to buy it for my collection, it's that good. Filmed over two nights in Nashville at the theater that used to host the Grand Ole Opry, it is as good as a concert film gets. The DTS soundtrack is wonderful.

Young is the rare rock musician who continues to turn out great new music as he gets older. Unlike the Beach Boys, who played in Harrisburg on July 4th and can't even come close to reproducing in concert the great studio sound of their early hits, Young is as good as he was in his late 20s. That's when he was in Buffalo Springfield ("I Am a Child"), then Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young ("Ohio"), then a solo artist ("Sugar Mountain," "Heart of Gold," "Like a Hurricane," etc., etc.) He has always taken a schizoid approach to his solo work, sometimes the hard-edged rocker with Crazy Horse, sometimes the plaintive folkie and country guy. His two hearts capture both sides of the mid-to-late 20th century American music scene in one, very creative man. Yes, I know he is Canadian--it comes through in many of his songs. But he recorded them in America and has lived in Marin County, California, for decades.

It is the folk-country persona we see in "Heart of Gold." Recorded over two nights in the same theater in Nashville that originally hosted the Grand Ole Opry, Young sings most of the songs on his "Prairie Wind" album and then finishes off the show with old songs, mainly from his 1972 "Heart of Gold" album and his 1978 "Comes a Time" album. He recorded "Prairie Wind" in a few days of work after he was told he had a brain aneurysm, but before returning to New York for the surgery. The concert was after the surgery, which he came through just fine.

Director Jonathan Demme, who made the "Stop Making Sense" movie about the Talking Heads, knew Young from the song he wrote for Demme's movie "Philadelphia." The camera work and editing and lighting is first-rate, something that can't be taken for granted in indoor concert films. For me, the emotional high point of the concert comes near the end, when nearly everyone in the band picks up a guitar and joins Young in a "wall of guitars" for Ian Tyson's song, "Four Strong Winds." For us aging hippies, it is a magical moment.

You'll have an opportunity to hear Neil Young on tour this summer with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. They'll be at Hershey Statdium on Aug. 25. Catch him while you can. You won't regret it. I imagine George W. Bush has heard a couple of Neil Young's songs on the radio. But I doubt he listened very closely. Not like you.

Posted by David at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes a movie, intentionally or not, perfectly captures the emotional landscape of an era. Robert Altman's new film, "Prairie Home Companion," based on Garrison Keillor's long-running radio show of the same name, can be seen as simply a folksy tale about an old-time radio show doing its farewell performance. But it is also a dead-on parable of the sense of loss and despair many Americans feel after six years of George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and the staining of much that was good and right and joyful about their country.

I have no doubt this is what Keillor and Altman intended. It isn't even all that subtle. Keillor's radio show in the film is doing its final performance because a Texas businessman has purchased the radio station that hosts the show as well as the (F. Scott) Fitzgerald Theatre in St Paul, Minn., where the real show also performs. Known only as "The Axeman," this Texan intends to raze the theater. The Axeman is described verbally before he is seen, and the words form a picture of Bush. He is played by Tommy Lee Jones, an ironic touch given that Jones was Al Gore's roommate at Harvard.

The Axeman is an uncultured and heartless businessman who doesn't even know who F. Scott Fitzgerald was. Informed that many of the members of the troupe have devoted their lives to it, he comments that now, "they'll be free to do something else." One is reminded of Bush's infamous speech in India earlier this year in which he airly waved away the threat of outsourcing to American I.T. jobs, saying that displaced workers could now train for "21st century jobs."

Yet it isn't heavy-handed. The focus of the film is the show itself, full of wonderful folk and country music and humor. Some of it is presented by the real members of Keillor's show, including Keillor himself, but most is by the actresses Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, and the actors Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly. The music offers an America of peaceful and tolerant values, of love and family. It is religious at times, but a very personal, heartfelt, and ultimately friendly religion, not the hard-edged beliefs of the howling American Taliban to which our lamentable President panders. You listen to all this and know that the goodness at its core will soon die, but not by its own hand.

The last six years have been a voyage of despair for many Americans, and not just liberals. There is no place for the massacre of innocents, or the casual torture of captives in the values of people who listen to "Prairie Home Companion." We have seen horrors we never expected to see, or thought were at worst a distant relic of our frontier past. Americans, if they are honest with themselves, have been forced to abandon the quaint notion, born of historical amnesia, that we are a unique, chosen people. In fact, we are just the latest country in the world's long history to gain great wealth, power, and influence and then lose it, or risk losing it, because of foolishness and stupidity. That isn't an easy conclusion to accept, but until we do there is no way back to what was.

Altman, who is 81 and no pie-eyed optimist, tricks the viewer by convincing him for a time that the bad Texan will be taken away by divine intervention, and that good will triumph. I won't give the ending away, but ultimately it is not what the audience expects, or probably wants. Suffice it to say it is a realistic ending.

(You can see "Prairie Home Companion" at the Midtown Theater in Harrisburg)

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So Anheuser-Busch, manufacturer of some of the nation's most execrable beers, is buying Rolling Rock. Worse, they plan to move production of the beer in the little green bottles from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to one of its breweries in New Jersey. They will likely put the Latrobe Brewing Co. up for sale, but if there are no takers, a lot of people in Latrobe will lose their jobs.

I have a love-hate relationship with American beer. I love some of it and hate a lot of it. When I was in college in Michigan, the bar most popular with students served Schlitz and Budweiser. I drank the latter most of the time, both in Skiles Tavern and when we bought beer at Columbia One-Stop, the drinking age having been lowered to 18 in 1972. If we were poor, we drank Old Milwaukee, which was the worst one of all but was really, really cheap. Bud is slightly better than Schlitz, but all three are pallid, watery imitations of what beer ought to taste like. Most of the beer I buy to drink at home is foreign. Canadian, Mexican, German, Irish. Tour the world with beer.

So it is with some trepidation that I view the acquisition of Rolling Rock by the maker of Budweiser. I'm sure Anheuser-Busch would tell you that Rolling Rock will taste the same whether it is brewed in Latrobe or New Jersey. I don't believe that. Beer isn't as tied to the local soil and climate as wine is, but I think the water used in the brewing plays a part. I originally wrote that Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville won't allow anyone else to brew their Lagers, but have since been advised by Sara Bozich that they own a second brewery in Tampa, Florida. I hadn't been aware of that, but I'll bet true afficionados can tell the difference between the Pottsville and Tampa brews. And in any case, you still have the family supervising production.Maybe beer just seems to taste better because you know it was brewed in a specific place by people devoted to turning out a good product.

As for Latrobe, it might look to the example of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, former home of the G. Heileman Brewing Co. Some of my relatives worked there, and one was president of the union in the 1930s and 1940s. A number of years ago, G. Heileman was sold to some Texas company, which kept the brand names and allegedly the recipes but moved brewing elsewhere. After a few years, some of the former managers at the brewery in LaCrosse bought the facilities and brought them back to live as City Brewing Co. Still, the employment numbers aren't nearly what they were in the G. Heileman days.

Pennsylvania's economic development folks ought to do more to keep the state's distinctive products here. Local products, just like local restaurants, make a city or state stand out. Last summer, we visited friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Nice city, but almost nothing but chain restaurants, the same ones you find everywhere. Olive Garden, Red Lobster, the usual list. Life gets blah without local.

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Penn State University yesterday sanctioned women's basketball coach Rene Portland for creating a "hostile, intimidating, and offensive environment" for lesbian players and players perceived by her to be lesbians. She was fined $10,000, but drew no suspension. The university promises to have an Equal Opportunity monitor at exit interviews with players leaving the program. Portland was unapologetic.

This was the latest development to grow out of the lawsuit filed against Portland and Penn State by former Central Dauphin High School basketball star Jen Harris. You've got to suspect that Portland's job is now hanging by a thread. Have conservative alumni already weighed in to help her? I suspect that one more strike and she'll be out, probably to coach at a church-related school less concerned about treating gay and lesbian students with fairness and dignity than Penn State is.

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Well, you heard about the Boston Strangler...

Best-selling author Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm) is running into some flak over his new book, A Death in Belmont, which posits that confessed Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo, alleged killer of 13 women and rapist of many more, was the real killer of one of his childhood neighbors, Bessie Goldberg. A black day laborer, Roy Smith, who was in the Goldberg house that day in 1963, was convicted of the murder. Reviews of Junger's book say he tells a good story, and then of course there's that picture: his mother holding baby Sebastian while DeSalvo, a familiar figure in the neighborhood, standing in the background.

According to Publisher's Weekly, Leah Goldberg, daughter of the victim, issued a statement attacking the book's premise and saying Smith was indeed the murderer. She called the book "inaccurate." Now Junger and his publisher, Norton, have issued a strong statement defending the three years of research the author conducted and that the manuscript was "rigorously fact checked."

I tend to go with Junger on this one, and not because I had dinner in his bar, Half King, in New York City a few weeks ago (it was okay). As a reporter myself, I know how hard it is to challenge conventional wisdom. Even if you have the facts solidly on your side, conventional wisdom is hard to kill. I don't doubt that Leah Goldberg believes the old explanation. Would it be easy to acknowledge that an innocent man spent years in prison by mistake?

DeSalvo, of course, isn't around to comment. He was murdered in prison in 1974. His life sentence was not based on the murders he confessed to, for which he was never tried.

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Another day, another horrific murder in Lancaster County. Or six of them, to be exact, in the village of Leola. The deaths of the Wise family come about six months after David Ludwig murdered the parents of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Kara Beth Borden, and fled west with her. If that was "Badlands," this is "In Cold Blood." And let's not forget the notorious Laurie Show murder in 1991, in which two Lancaster County teen-aged girls, Lisa Michelle Lambert and Tabitha Buck, got life sentences, and friend Laurence Yunkin went off for a few years as well. All over a teenage love triangle. Every county has its share of murders, but Pennsylvania's strongest Bible Belt county seems to have more that truly horrify the public.

Having grown up in the strongly Calvinist community of Holland, Mich., as a member of a minority religion, i.e., Lutheran, I suspect that what we're seeing in Lancaster County may have an inverse relationship to the strongly conservative/fundamentalist brand of Protestantism practiced by many non-Amish in the county. No, I can't explain that. It's more of a gut feeling. That sort of religious petri dish can produce people who feel estranged from their community. Some go on to do good things elsewhere, but others seeth and rot on the fringes of where they were born. Milton Hershey, as his recent biographer writes, didn't much care for the church culture of Lancaster County. He turned his energies to business and in many ways, left his community behind. But not everyone is that lucky.

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I haven't read Dan Brown's, "The DaVinci Code," and so can't offer much of an informed opinion on whether he actually plagiarized the work of other writers in creating his best-selling novel. Nevertheless, I read the news stories about the case with morbid fascination. Several days ago, Brown triumphed in a British court over two writers who sued him for copyright infringement. As a consequence of losing, Baigent and Leigh now face legal bills of nearly $4 million under the "loser pays" British civil justice system. When I first heard that, I predicted that no one would ever take on a best-selling novelist over plagiarism again, no matter how convinced they were that their work had been stolen. But I was wrong.

Now a Russian art historian has filed suit in Russian and American courts again accusing Brown of stealing another writer's work for his novel. No one can say the Russian is piling on and looking for an easy payday after what happened to Baigent and Leigh. The reason he is doing it is that plagiarism and its bastard cousin, intellectual property theft, tend to make the victim writer crazy angry. If he doesn't feel that way when he first reads his stolen words, he will by the time he gets bitch-slapped by the book or magazine publisher who aided and abetted the plagiarizer.

I know, because it happened to me in 2004. A writer named Jeff Tietz, a freelancer for Harper's Magazine, helped himself to passages from my 1986 book about the Centralia mine fire, Unseen Danger, to use in his own article about the famous Pennsylvania environmental disaster. No credit was given, although Harper's admitted in a subsequent letter to my lawyer that it knew Tietz had used my book as a source. One quote was lifted nearly word-for-word. About a dozen others were loosely rewritten to one extent or another. It was the lazy man's approach to journalism--take your research from somebody else and don't give him any credit. If Tietz had done that at a newspaper, he would have been thrown down the stairs and out onto the street. Newspapers take plagiarism seriously, which is why I assumed Harper's would as well. I was wrong.

My lawyer asked for a printed apology and very modest damages, mainly my expenses and a payment of three times whatever Tietz got for the article (probably in the $5,000 range). That seemed fair to me, but the magazine wasn't interested. Rodger D. Hodge, who edited Tietz' article and who has since been promoted to editor of the entire magazine, said in a letter to my lawyer that my claim was "preposterous and defamatory."

"It is unfortunate that your client feels such an unreasonable proprietary interest in this story," Hodge wrote to my lawyer. "His expectations are symptomatic of an unhappy trend in contemporary culture whereby ownership rights are increasingly asserted in circumstances that have no basis in our legal tradition...Were the logic of your demand sound, historical culture would simply grind to a halt and we would be left with nothing but the inane blatherings of the nightly television news."

Of course, all Hodge would have had to do to avoid this unpleasantness was make Tietz attribute the material in the original article (Feb. 2004). That would have been the decent thing to do, in addition to the legal one. The problem is that Hollywood values have infected the magazine and book publishing world. Intellectual property theft is so rampant in the film world that the union representing screenwriters has a detailed procedure for determining who deserves credit on a script. But before a book becomes a script, it's pretty much fair game. Some claims of plagiarism are made-up or frivolous, but others aren't. A big reason it happens so often is that, legally, plagiarism is nearly a no-lose proposition for the writer/publisher/filmmaker/perp. People like me can make a moral case out of it, but that doesn't get you far in court.

Two lawyers declined to take my case. Both agreed that I had been plagiarized, but said U.S. and Pennsylvania copyright and intellectual property law would not allow me to win damages. But what about the word-for-word quote, I protested. I obtained that in an exclusive interview in the 1980s with a man who is now dead. Too bad, they said. Those aren't your words--they're his. Harper's and its lawyers had clearly calculated their potential liability for the plagiarism they must have known had occurred, and determined they could bitch-slap me in the name of "free expression." I was small, a nobody, with no major publisher/muscle backing me up.

But I had the last laugh. Tom Scocca, who writes the well-read media column in The New York Observer, took up my complaint and subjected Harper's and Hodge to the scorn they deserved.

The Authors Guild recently sent out a survey to members seeking comment on a proposal it is discussing with Congress to create what in effect would be a small claims court for copyright infringement cases. It supposedly would make it much easier and cheaper to bring an action against a publisher who let a writer plagiarize. Don't hold your breath, though. The current system has both winners and losers, and the winners have all the money and power.

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Cooking is my hobby, as much as anything so important to a good life can be considered just a hobby. Today I went into the Little Saigon grocery store on Paxton Street in Harrisburg, not far from the Dunkin' Donuts. It adjoins a Vietnamese restaurant of the same name and shares a parking lot with the hugely popular Jumbo (Chinese) Buffet and Grill. I like to go into grocery stores in foreign countries. You can learn a lot about a culture and its cuisine in just a few minutes of walking the aisles. I've done it in Italy, Germany and Canada. Going into Little Saigon was much the same experience. This was no Giant or Weis. Maybe 1-2 percent of the products on the shelves were familiar brands. Of all the Asian cuisines, I've always liked Vietnamese the best, probably because of the French influence. Recently, I read a review on the Los Angeles Times website of a Vietnamese cookbook with the coincidental title of "The Little Saigon Cookbook: Vietnamese Cuisine and Culture in Southern California's Little Saigon." Ann Le is the author. I ordered a copy from Buy.com, and decided to try Ga Chien, or Pan-Fried Spicy Chicken with Mint and Ginger.

I had about half the ingredients, but needed fish sauce, a staple in Vietnamese cooking, fresh coriander and mint, and something called a Thai bird chile (hot pepper). So off I went to Little Saigon, shopping list in hand. Inside, a man was bagging coriander leaves. Good sign. I grabbed a basket and began strolling the aisles, viewing the many unfamiliar products. Little Saigon has a large selection of fish sauces. Phuc Quoc was the brand suggested by the cookbook. It comes from an island in the Mekong Delta, said to be beautiful but unvisitable because of the smell of fermenting fish. I found the sauce, and the helpful lady working the cash register directed me to the mint and hot peppers. Some Vietnamese teens in the store spoke American-accented English, while other men and women spoke their native languages. The lady at the register handled them all with aplomb. Prices were very reasonable, and the store takes credit and ATM cards.

I had never worked with fish sauce before and the odor is a bit overpowering. My cats came running when they smelled it. But it made for a tasty marinade combined with everything else in the recipe. It gave the chicken a nice bite. Everyone liked it.

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It's been a bad six months for the creationists. First, Judge John Jones III in Harrisburg ruled decisively against so-called Intelligent Design in a case brought by parents against the Dover Area School Board in York County. Now comes the Missing Link, a fossil fish with legs that the journal Nature says is a transitional species between fish and land animals. The strange creature, now named the Tiktaalik, was found in the Canadian Arctic. One of the arguments of the anti-evolutionists has always been that no transitional species had been found in the fossil record, ergo, Genesis is literally true. No real scientist ever lost much sleep over that argument--there was plenty of other evidence. Perhaps now public school teachers can get back to teaching evolution without fear of the religious right. But don't hold your breath--I'm waiting for the first wingnut dissection of the personal lives of the scientists who found Tiktaalik to discern whether they're just mora them lyin' librals. Facts don't mean much to that crowd. It is important to remember that the religious right does not speak for all American Christians. I would guess, at most, that they speak for 25-30 percent. That leaves plenty of room for the rest of us to fight back.

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The Boston Globe published a story by Bob Hohler on March 26 that goes into the most detail yet about former Central Dauphin basketball star Jennifer Harris and her bias lawsuit against Penn State basketball coach Rene Portland. This saga is increasingly ugly, and I don't see how Portland can last in her position. What brought about her apparent homophobia? One thing I haven't seen anywhere is comment by Portland's former mates on the Immaculata College team on which she played as an undergraduate beginning in 1972. Would be interesting to know what her attitudes were then.

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I was in New York City the other weekend and saw two films, "V for Vendetta" and "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days." Both are excellent, especially the latter, and both make political points relevant to today's world. "Vendetta," is about an anti-government terrorist in England at some unspecified point in the future. It's a great story, kind of Charles Bronson meets "1984." It forces the viewer to contemplate the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter, and at least think about when violence (mainly against public buildings here) might become a justifiable tactic against a government that lies to the public and keeps people docile through fear of terrorism. The director makes rather obvious parallels to our current political situation that only a complete idiot could miss, which is one reason conservative reviewers tend to hate this movie.

In "Sophie Scholl," we see a brilliant performance by German actress Julia Jentsch in the title role of a young woman, a Munich college student, who sacrifices her life in the anti-Nazi cause in 1943 after the war had turned decisively against Germany in the catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad. It is based closely on a true story about the White Rose movement. The scenes of her interrogation by Gestapo agent Mohr come right from the actual transcripts, which were found in East Germany after reunification. If Lutherans had saints, Sophie would be high on the list. Her religious faith sustains her as she catapaults toward her doom, and she uses her last days to rail against the brutal Nazi regime. The ending is grim, but not bloody (at least on camera). Lets hope the Midtown gets this one soon.

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