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THE MONEY GAME: GOD'S WORK, OR, MUPPETS BEWARE?

4/29/2012

         The Money Game: God’s Work, or,
                           Muppets Beware?
   Warren Buffet, “Oracle of Omaha,” has a gift for recognizing promising businesses, plus a “buy and hold” policy that made him one of the world’s richest men. He also devised “the Buffet rule,” that the rich should not have a lower tax rate than the poor. At the other end of the scale are vipers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, and off the scale below, swindlers like Bernard Madoff. In the great middle is a host of sharks doing abracadabra with money while skimming as much as possible in fees, commissions, margins, and profits. These play “the money game,” money as a way to keep score, separate from what it can build or buy. Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, hauled before Congress after the U.S.A had gone bust back in 2008, called the money game “God’s work.” Maybe he believes it, like those with guns who believe it is God’s work to murder doctors at Planned Parenthood clinics.
   Mitt Romney boasts about having started with nothing. One can argue that, but there is no doubt he ended with plenty. His Bain Capital plays the money game too, all perfectly legal, like Goldman Sachs, which terms its clients “muppets.”
   In the photo [above], Romney, far right, still in school, is “demonstrating” in support of the draft. It’s before he’d thought up his stump costume of unpressed jeans. Looks like he’d dropped over from a yacht club luncheon for a photo op. The war in Vietnam was taking lives but he got first a two-year draft exemption to be a missionary in France, then three more to study at Harvard, then married as a student and had kids. He looks snappy in that photo holding up a sign favoring a draft that can’t touch him. After graduating, he jumped into the money game.
   As a potential presidential candidate, he says, “I’m a business man so I understand how the economy works,” One wonders what money game players learn about the economy. How to create a real business from scratch, like Bill Gates? What makes a business thrive, like Warren Buffet? Or, like the sharks at Goldman Sachs, that the U.S.A. is the biggest juiciest muppet of them all.

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TALENT: BASHO TO BARISHNIKOV

4/26/2012

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GRANDPA'S LAMP

Talent: Basho to Barishnikov
   Long ago and far away a guy in funny clothes wrote in a language I’ll never speak.
       An ancient pond
       Frog jumps in
       Water sound.
   Three centuries later, Matsuo Basho’s vision blooms in my mind.
   In Biblical days a talent was a weight of gold, and the parable of the talents [Matthew 25], teaches that anything precious must be invested. Now talent includes intelligence, creativity, strength, beauty, talent for words, dance, music, art, healing. It gave us Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mohammad Ali, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, great artisans, gardeners, and makers of ships. My paternal grandfather was an artisan in wrought-iron. One of his lamps is still in my family. [see photo].
   Amadeus, the movie about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is also about the jealousy of Antonio Salieri, resentful of the talent God gave Mozart. It exaggerates Salieri’s jealousy yet is believable. A real-life parallel is the jealousy of ice skater Tonya Harding, who connived to cripple Nancy Kerrigan, her rival. Kerrigan was injured but returned to world class skating. Harding, despite world class talent, sank into degraded notoriety. She lacked “moral” talent, and also the talent to enjoy any talent not her own.
   Most of my creative energy went into making dances. Some have merit but are not in a class with the masterpieces of Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, Jack Cole, or Bob Fosse. It takes a rare talent to make Aureole or Revelations or Sing Sing Sing or The Rich Kid’s Rag, yet the talent to enjoy them is plentiful.
   Vincent Van Gogh’s unhappy life epitomizes the pressures society can place upon talent, although if talent is recognized and allowed to flower, talent and happiness can exist in the same person, Talent loves freedom. China recognizes the power of talent, and rewards those who possess it, yet a continual outflow of talented writers and artists into free societies reveals China as an inhospitable place for talent. The U.S. gives talent plenty of scope, yet has people who fear others who are “too smart.” Newt Gingrich, constantly attacking “elites,” panders shamelessly to those fears. And talent born into a poverty-stricken village in Africa, a Dalit [untouchable] child in India, a nomadic tribe in Siberia, is lost. The world desperately needs the bounty its talented people can supply but will get it only when talent is warmly welcomed and lovingly nurtured wherever it appears..
                                     For a feast of Basho Haiku,click this link BASHO

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JUMP-START OR WAIT FOR A TOW-TRUCK?

4/23/2012

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   Jump-Start or Wait For A Tow-Truck?
   Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, in his NY Times column, writes about a great fallacy—that the worldwide recession can be fixed by cutting back, spending less, and letting it run its course. He believes that the only way to get a stalled economy going is a jump-start, like you jump-start a dead car battery if you leave your parking lights on overnight.
   Swiss banks are now selling bonds with negative interest. You give them, say $10,000, and a year later you have $9,950. They don’t need money so make you pay them to hold yours. U.S. banks are heading that way too, already paying so little it means there is no money shortage here either, and no so-called “job creators” wanting to borrow. With stocks doing fine, profits too, why are these "job-creators" sitting on their money instead of putting it to work? Either they are paying it all to lobbyists to squelch any rise in tax rates for the rich, or doing exactly the wrong thing, clamping down, sitting tight, and letting the Bush Depression run its course.
   After the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to stimulate the economy but was fiercely opposed by sit-tight Republicans, just like the bunch opposing President Obama today. The result was a double-dip Depression that ended only when WW2 supplied a jump-start no one dared oppose.
   Maybe another war is Mitt Romney’s solution as he yammers about an indefinite stay in Afghanistan and has bellicose words for Iran. But even if he manages to start another war (Heaven forbid its WW3), wars fought on credit make things even worse, like Bush’s toy war with Iraq. He lowered taxes on the rich and told Americans to go shopping and buy houses they couldn’t afford. giving us the crash of 2008 followed by the Bush Depression that Obama is still toiling to fix. And never forget that it is still the Bush depression.
   As for Romney, what he says today can flip-flop tomorrow. And anyway, no words can jump-start a stalled-out U.S. economy. Obama can do that only by getting Congress and the Senate to go along. And that is up to the American people.

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A BURNING SPIRIT: LEE BECKER THEODORE

4/21/2012

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LEE THEODORE and GWEN VERDUN

A Burning Spirit: Lee Becker Theodore
   Some assume that every chorus dancer hopes to be a star. I doubt it, although some know: Chita Rivera and Shirley MacClaine, for two.
   Ruth Mitchell, a long stem beauty in the original Annie Get Your Gun said when it closed she’d go home to Atlanta and open a dancing school. John Sharpe [The Most Happy Fella] was working toward his PhD. I did Broadway musicals to support my Modern Dance habit.
   The dancing chorus had a serious limitation; every show closes and soon you’re too old. The chorus is only a bridge, if not to stardom, then roles, or as choreographer, director, stage manager, dresser, any job that doesn’t boot you out at age forty. It’s no accident that the collegial group for older dancers is titled, “Dancers Over 40.”
   In Kismet, Ronald Field, with his instant study steel trap brain was marked for choreography. In The Ambassador, Nicholas Dante was working on the script of A Chorus Line. In Ziegfeld Follies, Lee Becker Theodore was already marked for important things in theater.
   I met Lee, a Performing Arts High School grad, in the chorus of The King and I. Backstage she was kind of mournful, although if you watched her on stage, you realized she was quietly brilliant. We next danced together in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1956 (the only Follies in history to close out of town) choreographed by Jack Cole. She had already choreographed a hit number, Kabuki Mambo, for TV’s Ed Sullivan Show,
   We were sitting at the back of the house watching rehearsal of the traditional A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody number, showgirls stepping gingerly down a grand staircase in ridiculously grand costumes by Raoul Pene Du Bois, I said something about how much I liked Kabuki Mambo. Lee erupted; “I’d rather be any one of those sexpots up there!”
   Baffled, I replied, “And not a one of them up there wouldn’t trade their whole sexpot lives for a tenth of your talent.”
   After notice went up in Philly, producers, director, etc., disappeared like thieves in the night, but Jack Cole came backstage to wish us luck, then sought out Lee in the dressing room. After he left she came out sobbing, “He told me it was an honor to work with me.”
   Lee went on to choreograph, direct, produce, and create The American Dance Machine, whose purpose was to preserve great Broadway dances. It also played 199 Broadway performances at the Century Theater in 1978. Lee’s loss to cancer in 1980 deprived the world of a burning creative spirit.
                                                                                                       * * *
         Anyone with personal memories of Lee, is welcome to post them here.

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PROFILING, RACIAL AND OTHER

4/20/2012

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CERBERUS

Profiling, Racial and Other
   [This post is about Dancers Over 40, a collegial/fraternal
group. It is followed by a link to its web site.]
   As an “old white male,” I fit the profile of the average gay-bashing, radical right, Tea Party bigot. But if anyone were to accuse me of being one, I’d be taken aback, and hurt.
   I started my blog, 101American.com, with an idea from WW2—it’s patriotic to pay taxes. If the percent sign were allowed in site names, it would be titled 101%American. The extra 1% is what I pay to the US Dept of the Treasury over and above my income tax. When my accountant tells me what I paid this year, I’ll send my check for 1% extra, only a rain drop in the ocean, but my raindrop.
   To inform readers, I email friends, friends of friends, students in my choreography class, colleagues in my writing workshops, artists who live at Westbeth, gradually built a list of about 200. I announce each post on Twitter and Facebook, then send an email with a link to my post. No memberships, ads, nothing to sell except ideas. My email can be ignored, deleted, or junked, and anyone can opt out by typing REMOVE in the Subject line. A few did. But even some who don’t like my “liberal” views, stick around. A visual artist with a gallery replied: “Hi Stu, I couldn’t disagree with you more.” A scholar who’d moved to Texas said I’d been brainwashed by NYC. Neither asked to be removed, bless em!
   I spent two days making a separate list from the Dancers Over 40 Directory, and sent a preliminary email. Got a few Removes, also some welcomes. One asked me to post about dance, which I’d been reluctant to do, but have now done.
   I also got a sort of “cease and desist” email from our respected DO40 leader, John Sefakis. I admire John’s energy, organizational skills, and gift for uniting a group of highly individualistic dancers. DO40 would not exist without him. Yet I could not comply.      I realized that as John saw it, he was “protecting” DO40 members from a spammer. The act of emailing to a group—John calls it an eblast—is suspect. It’s what lying, salacious, mendacious, spammers do, ipso facto, I’m a spammer. Surmounting that profile is like getting past Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hades.
   It raised my awareness of how easy it is to cast people into molds, tar them with a ready brush. It also makes me more understanding of cops on the beat, torn between making the streets safer and not hassling people who happen to fit a profile of bad guys. It’s not simple.
   Dancers Over 40 Web: http://www.dancersover40.org/

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SPOOKY AND BIZARRE

4/18/2012

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"The Scream," Edvard Munch

Spooky and Bizarre
   It was spooky and bizarre to watch Norway’s mass murderer, Anders Breivik, enter the courtroom for his trial. Blank-faced and self-satisfied, he raised a fist-clenched arm in a sort of salute—to whom, or what? Shortly thereafter video cameras were banished. I was relieved. Watching that strange man raises disturbing questions about what kind of creatures are we humano sapiens.
   Having freely, even proudly admitted that he killed 77 people, the trial is only to determine whether he’s a criminal or insane. Among his strange statements is that he acted in self-defense, that he is trying to save Norway, that the only true freedom in Norway was when it was occupied by Hitler’s armies.
   Norway, Sweden Denmark, and Finland, the four Scandinavian democracies, are admired by those who fear that rampant crony capitalism is degrading others, while voracious state capitalism is taking over in China. I was impressed with Sweden and Denmark when I danced there in 1954, more so when I taught two summers in Copenhagen, 1982-83. Bicycles had the right of way over automobiles and were left outside unchained overnight. That was thirty ago and maybe they lock bikes these days, but to an outsider, the Danes seemed busy, satisfied, and happy. I do recall some saying that immigrants from the Middle East were not welcomed by all, yet admired the free immersion classes they got in the Danish language.
   Into this peaceful landscape, Anders Breivik exploded. Some deem him a freakish one-off, like a meteor from outer space. Others, that he is a deep madness flowing from within like lava from a volcano. Unfortunately, the second seems more likely. There is evidence that thousands are hate infected and capable of mass murder.
   American rampage killers often end with a bullet into their own brain. That may have been Breivik’s intent. Norway has no death sentence making him an opportunity to study what can turn a seemingly healthy, well-fed, even privileged individual into a deluded mass murderer. If anyone is equipped for this, it is Norway, the country of Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch. No research is more important.

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HOMAGE TO TAP

4/17/2012

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    Been afraid to post about dance, but Carolyn Kalmus said to. So...
Homage to Tap
   Martha Graham wrote that a dancer dies two deaths, the first when she stops dancing. Martha stopped in 1965 after The Witch of Endor. She was 75. Merce Cunningham did not stop. I saw a dance in which he came onstage, hung onto a barre and kind of gestured. Sad, but it was Merce, and no one complained.
   I lack such a deep drive although Heaven knows I loved dancing. Why else do it, when I know I could have made more money at just about anything else? The only thing that compares to dancing is flying. In basic flight training, U.S. Army Air Corps, 1944, I hated Sundays because we didn’t fly.
   When I took my first dance lesson, Martha Graham Studio, September, 1945, I realized that dancing was like flying, only deeper in your bones, so quit college, spurned a job offer to be a TV cameraman (a new field, they figured if you could fly a bomber you could run a camera) and became a dancer. That’s when my mother told me she’d considered sending me to ballet classes, but decided I wouldn’t like it, so gave me violin lessons. I wish she’d thought of tap dancing.
    If I’d been a tapper when I joined the Graham troupe, I know Martha would have found a way to slip tap into one of her dances, like she put Nina Fonarov en pointe as the Fairy Queen in Letter to the World. If I’d been a tapper, modern dance might have more tap in it to this day! Ahh, well.
   After I started dancing I took tap with Paul Draper, Jerry Ames, Jack Stanley, and Carlos, but never became the tapper I wanted to be. Elizabeth [photo above] began in ballet but studied tap with Bob Audy and got pretty good. I was good enough at faking to be her partner in Dancing on Air with Fred Astaire. We took our routines off the screen and toured all over the U.S.A. We danced one number, Don’t Monkey With Broadway, for Dancers Over 40. Afterward, Gemze de Lapp said, “I didn’t know you could tap dance!” Her remark made my decade! Ahh, well.
   Tap is the only stage form you can do well in old age. Performing with Steve Koplowitz in the Lincoln Center courtyard, we followed the Harlem Senior Tappers, ladies in their 50s, 60s and older. The stage was a six-foot high platform.
   “Don’t jes stand there child, help me up the stairs!” cried one. I jumped to, then watched amazed while she shredded the stage. Ahh, well.

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MITT ROMNEY'S "COLD FISH" PROBLEM

4/16/2012

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Mitt Romney’s “Cold Fish” Problem
   When pundit Hilary Rosen said Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life,” Ann shot back that raising five boys was her work freely chosen. Most women understand that Rosen wasn’t denigrating stay-at-home moms (including those that drive two Cadillacs), just noting that their problems are not those of less-than-affluent women who work outside of the home. Yet Obama’s advisors quickly distanced themselves because it broke a sacred rule: “Never criticize your opponent’s wife.”
   Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post, says that Mitt Romney is basically a “problem solver.” Problem solving, the goal of public policy, is a growing college major, particularly evidence-based policy, which is simply “what works.” Richard Nixon began the “war on drugs” in 1971 and now, 41 years larer, the drug problem is even worse. Evidence-based policy says it’s time to try something else, but ideology-based policy keeps the failed policies going.
   Romney, very much an evidence-based problem solver, applies logic unsullied by emotion. To him, the first problem is to line up enough voters to make him U.S. President. This explains his acrobatic flips and flops on secondary problems like the economy, taxes, health care, immigration, abortion, and contraception. He’s too smart to ignore evidence which is why the ideological right doesn’t trust him. To Mitt, the ideological right is just another problem, so he came out tougher on immigration than Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich, tougher on abortion and contraception than Rick Santorum, and to the NRA, posed as a pheasant and elk hunting gun rights advocate. And still the Radical Right doesn’t trust him. They know that Romney considers them the problem not any of their issues.
   He’s also aware that despite wearing unpressed jeans, smiling a lot, and referring to himself as “middle class,” he comes across as a cold fish. But that is one problem to which he has a solution: his wife. Is he right? Is Ann Romney the solution to her husband’s “cold fish” problem? Stay tuned.

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HUNGER GAMES 2

4/14/2012

Hunger Games 2
   The Hunger Games, according to a recent item in the NY Times, is Mitt Romney’s “fun” reading. Not sure I believe it, anymore than I believe he’s comfortable wearing jeans. But the film is breaking box office records. A recent NY Times Arts and Leisure published a discussion by film critics, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, headed: “A Radical Female Hero From Dystopia.” Both agree that no hero like Katniss Everdeen has ever existed in film.
   In literature she harks back to Diana, chaste Roman goddess of the hunt, with the steadfast virtue of Jane Eyre and guileless innocence of Daisy Miller. But she’s unique in her unquestioning acceptance of a gruesome law that demands she kill her peers, including Peeta, deeming his protectiveness and declaration of love mere ruses to lower her guard so that he can kill her. Katniss lives under hellish pressure, and considering the desperate acts of people adrift on oceans, starving in the wilderness, imprisoned in death camps, her response does not unduly strain suspension of disbelief.
   Her country, Panem, is in what is left of continental United States following rising oceans that engulfed both coasts. A luxurious gated community, The Capitol, has enslaved outlying Districts 1 through 12, whose people are on the edge of starvation. A 13th district had been wiped out in punishment for a past insurrection. To remind the rest of its absolute power, The Capital demands each district sacrifice two children a year, boy and girl, to a sadistic ritual battle in which all die but one.
   On the advice of another film critic (The Lone Teenager, Scroll to March 30th) I skipped the movie, but read Catching Fire, second of the trilogy. The inevitable rebellion should have begin, only it turned out to be a rehash of the first, another battle to the death with new hazards like poisonous fog and flesh eating monkeys. It ended with Katniss learning how to destroy the force field that held them, that a rebellion is under way, and that Katniss’s home District 12, has been destroyed. A disappointing rehash of the first, volume two is just a teaser to buy the third, titled Mocking Jay, which I probably will. As fiction. The Hunger Games has much to recommend it, but unless you loved Rocky 2, 3, 4, and 5, skip Catching Fire, and go directly to Mocking Jay. You won’t miss much.

COURTS AND POLITICS, or, SOMETHING ROTTEN IN SANFORD

4/12/2012

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Courtrooms and Politics, or, Something Rotten in Sanford
    George Zimmerman is under arrest. Finally. Whatever happens next should have begun five weeks ago on the day he was brought in after fatally shooting an unarmed teenager, to be released without charge instead, a grotesque corruption of the judicial process that cries for a separate investigation. It brings to mind the routine judicial miscarriages of justice in China. Sudan, Uzbekistan, and other corrupt countries where laws do not apply to those with connections. Whether Zimmerman’s father, a retired judge, whether State Attorney, Norman R. Wolfinger, who is reported to have ordered him released, whether the police chief, Bill Lee, who took a leave of absence, are implicated will, one expects, be considered by special prosecutor, Angela Corey. The nationwide publicity the case is receiving is condemned by those who say it impedes the judicial process. But without the outcry, Zimmerman would still be armed and dangerous and stalking the neighborhood. Whatever happens next, it is clear that there’s something rotten in Sanford, Florida.
   Zimmerman’s words to the police dispatcher, “He’s looks like he’s up to no good, or on drugs, or something,” will certainly be offered as evidence. Even if the darkness and rain allowed him to see that Trayvon Martin was black and wore a hoodie (which is a good rain hat), how could he know that he was “up to no good?’ How could he conclude that he was “on drugs?” Only if he assumed that all tall skinny figures wearing hoodies are up to no good and on drugs, an assumption that reveals a dangerously warped mind. One expects all of this to be brought out in the trial.
   Meanwhile, a poisonous miasma of hate rises as the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and O’Reilly try to distract from the national revulsion the killing generated with some sort of political camouflage. It is impossible to detect a grain of sense in their rantings. Political discourse no longer exists on the Radical Right. One waits, ever hopeful, for the Reasonable Right to speak up. The longer it holds silence, the less hope remains for our two-party system.

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Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

Being 90 years in this world, with great kids, great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
Stuart Hodes

       With my friend, Nero.
             April, 2012.
    Photo by Ray Madrigal