Cheap shots

I relish the fact that Obama is the president almost daily. After eight years of W, I think I have the right to enjoy the fact that most of the people in power these days have a good command of the language. But every now and then Obama and his crew say stupid things. When mistakes are made, the conservatives blow them so far out of proportion it’s comical. And the hardcore liberals immediately switch into group think and say things like (and this is a direct quote from a friend of mine so drunk on Obama he’s lost all focus), “Could you do better? If not you should shut up.”

I have no idea if I could do better. What I do know is that I haven’t been elected to public office. I haven’t been appointed to a position of power. But, I do have the password to this here blog, so I’ll say whatever the hell I want until someone takes the keys away and revokes my license.

Once upon a time W referred to “the Internets.” The world gasped at how out of touch the president really was. The term caught on and became a wonderful – I think – little bit of code speak. A few weeks ago Obama was giving a speech and he used the term “Twitters.” I have no idea if he was trying to make fun of W or if he honestly thinks the twits are plural or what, and I really don’t care. What I do care about is the White House’s response: it was the speechwriter’s fault. Seriously, the speechwriter? This guy may be our first social media president, but when it comes to covering his ass he has no problem playing the oldest trick in the book. If something goes wrong, blame the writer. Writers are almost never seen. They’re behind the scenes, generally, a ghost behind the voice and the face, and a really, really easy target when something goes wrong. And if his people are going to resort to that sort of crap, you’d think they’d do it over something that matters a bit more than Twitter. It was a cheap shot, I thought.

Speaking of cheap shots, crammed in among all the basketball nonsense last week, Rahm Emanuel, one of Obama’s most dubious appointees, I think, went on The PBS NewsHour for a chat with Jim Lehrer. A while back, the Obama messaging crew decided that saying “the president has been briefed” on something was better than saying “the president has ordered” something when the time came to muddy the waters of accountability – their word, not mine. Jim Lehrer, as we all might imagine, was having none of it. The Russian spies are being sent back to Russia. Now, Jim Lehrer said, did the president order that? He’s been briefed, Rahm smirked snidely. Jim Lehrer kept on, and on, and on. In spite of the fact that, according to him, he’s one of the most savvy people in Washington, he apparently forgot that Jim Lehrer is not in the entertainment business. As I’ve said, he said. Let me try to explain, he said. To which Jim Lehrer replied, whatever you say.

I lost track of the topics, but each one that came up – and there were many – were received by Jim Lehrer in the same spirit: Did the president approve that? Did the president order that? At one point, Rahm said something along the lines of: finally, after five questions, we’re making progress. This reminds me of conversations I have with my kids! That comment reminded me of two points I’d like to make. First, this is one of the most insidious moves employed by the hot-shit crowd. They derail a conversation, or a project, and then turn around and say – in tone, not words, for they convey precious little substance when you get right down to it – your deficiency is the reason this has required five questions. I’ve seen PR careers built on that strategy, so I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to see that it works in Washington. But the second, more important point I’d like to make is that if his pathetic attempt to not answer really simple questions reminded Rahm of conversations with his kids, he must not be a very good parent.

It got worse. Apparently even Rahm realized his non answers were getting him nowhere. So, after warming up with some gibberish about not meaning any disrespect, he told Jim Lehrer that his questions were outdated. A journalist asking for a straight answer to a very simple question is outdated? Jim Lehrer, whose understanding of Washington certainly eclipses that of everyone at the White House combined and then multiplied a few times, outdated? What a punk. Anyhow, I took that one to heart and did something quite outdated myself. I wrote to the White House, which I had never done before, and said I thought they should avoid making “ageist” comments. The population is aging, I wrote, and it would be a shame to exclude the old folks from the era of hope and change with careless comments made in a lame attempt to save a little face. I haven’t heard back.

Cleveland: a cowardly betrayal

A while back I saw something on television that amazed me. The Portland Trail Blazers – our city’s assemblage of semi-literate ‘role models,’ better known as an NBA franchise – were on their way to the playoffs. A chubby, dough-faced white guy (unemployed, due to ‘these hard economic times’) was interviewed while he stood in line to buy tickets. This is worth it, he said, beaming into the camera, this is important. I’m a big fan of succinct, and this guy, I think, deserves a prize. Using less than 10 words, he explained so much.

With the possible exception of Detroit, Cleveland, if you haven’t been, is the most tragic stage in the U.S. But in tragedy, you can usually find a lot of romance, and in Cleveland I think there are all sorts of love stories. That place, like my own Saint Louis, was not constructed: it was built. To borrow a bit of my father’s phrasing, the infrastructure there is breathtaking. Mile after mile after mile of sturdy, solid, utterly romantic, I think, homage to an age when things were actually made in this country. I don’t believe the politics of the industrial age were any more savory than the politics of today, but man, they sure knew a thing or two about cities. Big cities with big plans. Architecture and urban planning guided by what must have been a sense of optimism the likes of which I’ll never experience.

That’s because we traded it all in to save 49 cents on a box of laundry detergent at WalMart. With nary a question, as best I can tell, we bought the messaging provided by the marketing team about the superiority of cars and cul de sacs and houses with attached garages that can be opened and closed from within the car, making it easy to not know people. In the most astounding betrayal of our ancestors – talk about unpatriotic – we came to regard the ‘inner city’ as a place of danger and risks not worth taking. Riding the bus was for losers, as was sending children to the public school. So was shopping at stores where we knew the people who owned them. We got really, really afraid of black people.

Except, of course, for the ones in uniform. As a confirmed hater of professional sports and its devotees, yesterday was something of a bonanza. We’ve been betrayed, cried the people of Cleveland. He’s abandoned us in an undignified way. He’s turned his back on his people, and his city. He's a coward, bellowed the owner of the team. Oh, shut up. A society that sanctions outsourcing jobs anywhere it can while simultaneously cutting off unemployment benefits, a country that cannot seem to provide adequate healthcare to its poorest people, a country that clearly doesn’t prioritize public education, is at the same time a country that can cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to court – pardon the pun – a basketball player and fuel up a degree of media hype that surprised even a person who expects the worst of these people. Even Katie Couric had a bitchy remark about the whole thing, referring to it as “the audacity of hype.” Of course, given that she devoted a full and uninterrupted 12 minutes to the golfer’s press conference not long ago, she should know. My main gripe with the whole thing, though, has nothing to do with the basketball player. My problem is that a great city’s name is now synonymous with something that should be way beneath it on the scale of dignity. And the people of Cleveland, as has been the case so many times before, have nobody to blame but themselves.

News alert: today it will be hot

This week, I’ve asked myself, out loud more than once, in fact, how on earth my parents managed. On the Fourth of July, which was five days ago, my neighbors and I gathered in the intersection and watched the sky explode around us. Then we went to Safeway for cake and ice cream. Then I came home, took a shower, put on my long underwear and a hoodie and climbed into bed with the Winter blanket lineup still in effect.

If we don’t get up to 100 degrees today, we’ll get very close. Yesterday it was 95, and tomorrow it’s supposed to be 94. It’s July, and our glorious reprieve is over: it’s hot. I’m keeping the house closed until the sun starts to go down this evening. I’m eating salads and drinking more water than I usually do. I’m wearing a tee-shirt, flip flops and shorts. The hoodie is sitting at the top of the laundry basket, an artifact missing its museum.

And I’m wondering how I survived my own childhood. I have no idea what it was like to be an adult in, say, 1970, but I’ve searched my memory and I cannot for the life of me recall even a tiny fraction of the hype we have today about the weather. The power grid on the East Coast is being pushed to its limits. People are having heat strokes, or about to. You should drink water, you should stay out of the sun if at all possible. Drink water, but don’t drink too much water, and the time to drink the water, according to medical editors on two of the networks, so far, is before you’re thirsty. People are dying. Oh no, some people on a boat got thrown overboard yesterday. Wear your life vest! Be careful, whatever you do. Don’t leave the babes – or the dogs – in the car when you run into the grocery store. If you do that, they could die. Last night, the most offensive weather guy in town did his hour-by-hour foolishness to make sure we all knew how ‘uncomfortable’ the evening would be. And this morning, on one of the local news shows, this little gem: your child’s ADD meds could cause some problems during extreme heat.

So today, I’m tuned into a radio station where everything is in Spanish, which I do not speak, read or understand. Therefore, I have no idea how dangerous the territory I’m in is. I hope I make it!

Intriguer

I met a meth addict in Sydney in 2006 who told me her life’s problems could all be explained by the lyrics of one seemingly simple song. “The Crowdies have a song about the weather,” she said. Her name was Laverne. “Heard of it?” Australians – especially Australian women – have the most mesmerizing way of speaking. Once in your life, you need to hear an Australian woman say the word ‘weather.’ Even for a fag, it’s like phone sex … in person. I suppose Australians speak a version of British English, but it’s infused with so much atmosphere, as if words originate not in the vocal chords but in the sky, or perhaps the sea, that it exposes people in the U.K. (not to mention the people in the U.S.) as irreparably tongue deficient.

I assured Laverne that I was indeed familiar with Crowded House. In the early 1990s, in Wisconsin, I went to visit my friend Julie one day. She was recovering from back surgery, recuperating in the dining room that her companion Carolyn had transformed, as only she can do, into a sanctuary of sorts, and at the midst of it, in my memory – which is, of course, not the memory of the person recovering from surgery – was a CD, although it may have been a cassette tape, called Woodface. So here we are, two decades and many continents and CDs later, and I’m in Portland and Julie is in Texas, where Carolyn is waging an all-out war with cancer, so it seems weirdly fitting that the Crowdies have just came out with a new one, called Intriguer.

I bought it this weekend. I cannot recall the last time I bought any brand new music, especially brand new music that hasn’t been out for at least a decade. And in the best way possible, I don’t like it.

I don’t fully understand my adoration for Crowded House. Technically, this band should not be part of my Australia fetish portfolio: the Finn brothers and others are from New Zealand, as so many in Sydney are, but they got their start in Australia. In 2005, the original drummer hung himself from a tree in his front yard in Melbourne. I haven’t put the calculator to work on this one, but it seems that far more words have been devoted to the death of the drummer than to the band’s entire body of music, which I find endearing for some reason. Of course, the band’s music is driven, in large part, by percussion, although it’s a whispery sort of percussion, so maybe the attention paid to his death isn’t just sweet but logical as well. Over the years they’ve recorded and toured with plenty of Australians (and even a few people from the U.S., which surprised me a bit). I probably wouldn’t say this if I were in Auckland, but since I’m in Portland I will say that I have to remind myself that the Crowdies are not, strictly speaking, an Australian band.

Pardon the cliché, but for me listening to most of their songs on all the previous CDs is something like looking at a painting over and over, and seeing something new each time. Or like reading a book you’ve read many times, only to discover entire passages you don’t recall. Most of their songs seem to me to have all kinds of detours that are jarring initially, but somehow, after some time passes, seem like the only way to go. All of their songs, I think, are steeped in unsentimental, magically understated and almost unbearable melancholy. It’s a wonder they aren’t black.

But the most notable aspect of Crowded House, for me, is that it’s taken at least a year to warm up to each of the CDs I own. Intriguer is the fifth in my collection, and it’s no different. I played it a few times over the weekend and didn’t really care for it. It’s inconsistent, veering, as they all do, recklessly in and out of all sorts of incongruent musical neighborhoods in a way that’s hard to follow. But if Intriguer is anything like the others, at some point it will morph, with zero warning, into something I love. The CD Together Alone is the best example of that phenomenon to date and, I think, the band’s best CD. I not only didn’t like it the first hundred or so times I listened to it, I actively disliked it. A lot. And then it all changed. The music shifted: the melodies, the musical incarnation, somehow, of clouds and breeze and waves and shadows and winter-grade sunlight in rooms with sand-colored walls, all of it slathered with heartache, all there in the songs, impossible to miss. My affair with that CD must be what it’s like to meet someone who is intolerable in an endless number of ways, and then find yourself, for reasons that you wouldn’t explain even if you could, marrying him.

I do.

But enough about what I think of Crowded House. Here’s what Neil Finn thinks of Crowded House, taken from a musing on the band’s website on his approach to live performances. “The intention is the same as ever to get the people involved, to hit some heights and leave the songs hanging in the air …” I just wrote seven paragraphs trying to say that.

Anyhow, I dislike Intriguer more than I disliked Together Alone, so my guess is that someday I’ll love it more as well. But for now it’s probably a good thing I’m not a music critic.

Noise

Yesterday was unusually noisy. I got on a bus in the morning to go downtown and pick up a book at the library and then go meet a friend for lunch. I left a little early because I didn’t want to rush. As the bus glided across Mt. Tabor, whooshing smoothly along beneath the green canopies that are unusually lush this year, a woman sitting in the back shouted through her list of maladies for her newfound friends, a couple seated not more than a row from her. “It’s OCD I’ve got,” she said. “You know, obsessive-compulsive disorder, that plus some post-traumatic stress issues.” The couple oooed and ahhhed appreciatively. A diagnosis of some sort – any sort, often – is a status symbol in Portland. There were many other items on the agenda: an upcoming wedding, a summer camp for someone’s child, and loud mouth’s new dwellings, which she’s moving into next week. “It’s a great apartment, and they take Section 8,” she bellowed.

I picked up my book, trolled around the stacks a bit, and, having almost an hour before I was to meet my friend, decided to go for coffee. I love doing this on weekday mornings. As long as one’s available, I sit by a window and watch the business of daily life in action. There is a lot of movement downtown, a lot of accomplishing going on. The office workers, the street kids, the tourists and the city workers with their flags and bulldozers, they’re all on a mission, and I love to watch. I got my coffee and sat down in front of a long panel of glass, and witnessed something I didn’t think was possible. I discovered that there is something I hate more than overhearing people’s cell phone conversations, and that’s overhearing people’s cell phone conversations and, thanks to the speaker phone feature, the other person as well. Some slob sat there and took three calls in the 14 minutes I managed to remain seated before I fled. He was looking for files, and checking on the status of a repair job of some sort and waiting for someone to drop something off. Even the hiss of the espresso machine was no match for this asshole. He and the people he was shouting with were louder, so I guess he won.

The loud conversations on the bus are like texture to me, a piece of living around other people. The cell phone set to speaker phone mode, on the other hand, is another sign of our demise, I think. Someone who thinks it’s okay to have conversations so inane that they’re not even necessary with the other person on the speaker in a way that’s impossible to not hear is either completely oblivious or so delusional that they believe they, and their conversations, matter. I’m not sure which is worse. I’m not sure I want to know which is worse.

But it all ended well. I had a great lunch with a good friend and on the way home, shortly after I got off the bus, I was walking toward my house and I heard something odd. It was like a tapping noise, or a clicking of some sort. I stopped and listened for a moment, then kept walking. In a few moments I stopped on the sidewalk, and there, on the front porch of a little green house, sort of hippyish, was the source of the noise: a guy, sitting on the floor, using an old typewriter. I hadn’t heard that noise in so many years that it was exotic, which made me wonder, for a brief moment, if someday I’ll respond that way to hearing someone talk on the cell phone. I can only hope.

We're hiring

Being a homo and all, I hate to rail on things like this, but I saw something Friday that is such a great example of the tone deafness that liberal people often suffer from that I could not pass it up. The finances in Oregon are a disaster, as always. The schools in Portland are about $19 million short, in spite of the tax hike we approved earlier this year. The state agencies have been ordered to cut their budgets by 10 percent, also in spite of the new taxes. One of my friends who works for the health department, where she works on finding real solutions to real problems – childhood obesity, tobacco, things like that – is forced to take furlough days regularly. A woman from one of the schools in my neighborhood came to a meeting recently to grovel for a $2,000 grant to support keeping its library open before and after school hours. The grant is from a local tavern, which donates proceeds from the brew fest it has every August. It’s a nice gesture, I think. Come get drunk and support the schools. It’s how we do shit here in the territory.

Anyhow, even though we’re going broke, Multnomah County is hiring a diversity officer. I’ve never hyperlinked to anything on this blog, but there’s a first time for everything. If you’re interested, check out the job description and apply. If you don’t have time for the actual description, here are a few highlights. Most of it is such bullshit it would make people who do HR at PR agencies – a double disaster, clearly – quite proud. Stakeholders, initiatives, capacity, competencies, system wide, aligning, organizational change, best practices – it’s all there. Here’s the best single line, one of the key responsibilities: Creating a safe environment for difficult conversations around equity and diversity issues. And if you can deliver on that sort of foolishness with a straight face while other more critical offerings are slashed and burned, your minimum annual salary will be $78,000. That’s not quite as much as you’d make for the same level of deceit at a PR agency, but it’s not a bad start.

A quality performance

One of the biggest pitfalls of working in the PR biz, for me, is that I simply assume that most of what’s on the news is seriously distorted, if not fabricated outright. For that reason, I was really impressed with the guy from BP who went before Congress to talk about the oil spill. I’m amazed that the word ‘testify’ is still used: as far as I can tell there’s no testifying whatsoever. Whomever has drawn the unlucky number for the public flogging – bankers, auto people and, last week, the oil industry – shows up and is yelled at and cut off mid-sentence and generally ridiculed. It’s all on camera, of course, and it’s a great opportunity for our elected officials to show us how tough and down with the people they are.

And an even greater opportunity for those elected officials to get some great material – or ‘collateral,’ as the marketing people like to say – for their upcoming elections. I find it as entertaining as anyone, but my problem with it goes like this: if the shouting officials are members of a committee that’s supposed to oversee energy issues, to use last week’s example, did they not pay any attention to what BP and others were doing in the gulf until the rig blew up? Last week the members of Congress took the stage and yelled about BP’s abysmal safety record. And that’s news? Nobody knew? Are these people who sit on the energy committee paying any attention to what mega companies like BP are doing? Or does the committee take its cues from the group that was making sure the nation’s finances were in good working order? If BP was violating regulations meant, allegedly, to ensure the viability of the gulf, who let that slide? Do these people we elect do or say anything sensible when the cameras aren’t running? I accept that we’re suffering from an acute case of memory void, but I’d like to know what these elected people were crowing about when BP set up shop in the gulf and hired some locals. My guess is that it wasn’t rules and regulations.

Anyhow, the guy from BP was having none of it, and for that I’d give him a solid A if I were handing out grades. He refused to speculate on the investigation. He refused to answer questions that fell outside of his area of responsibility and his tenure with the company. He out-snided the character actors firing off “questions.” Good for him. The night of his appearance, I was listening to the BBC news and on came a guy who runs some sort of bullshit strategy consulting firm in the U.S. He said he’s coached hundreds of CEOs and that the guy from BP really did not do well. He needed to show more passion, said the consultant. He needed to really let the people in the gulf knows that he cares about them, that he identifies with them. That’s wrong on all counts, I think. The people in the gulf are suffering because they’re at the bottom of the money ladder. The guy from BP, on the other hand, well, he’s a millionaire. He’s supposed to pretend to identify with people who run shrimp boats and lobster stands? He runs a big company that apparently was allowed to cut corners for the sake of profit. And he should show some passion? I would imagine he saves his passion for yacht racing, which he did over the weekend with his son. Unlike the elected officials, he showed his true colors on camera, for all the world to see, and it was quite a middle finger raised at people I believe deserve it.