Monday, October 13, 2008
Alaskan Independence Party: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
by In 2004, America's malleable mainstream media allowed itself to be manipulated by artful Republican operatives into devoting weeks of broadcast attention and drums of ink to unfairly desecrating John Kerry's genuine Vietnam heroics while obligingly muzzling serious discussion of George W. Bush's shameful wartime record of evasion and cowardice.
Last week found the American media once again boarding Republican swift boats against this season's Democratic candidate armed with unfair and hypocritical attacks artfully designed by GOP strategists to distract attention from the cataclysmic outcomes of Republican governance. Vice Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin has taken to faulting Senator Barack Obama for his casual acquaintance with a respected Illinois educator Bill Ayers, who forty years ago was a member of the Weathermen, a movement active when Obama was eight and which he has denounced as "detestable." Palin argues that the relationship proves that Obama sees "America as being so imperfect that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."
The Times dedicated a page one article to Obama's relations with Ayers and CNN's Anderson Cooper obliged Palin by rewarding her reckless accusations about Obama's patriotism with a major investigative report. Fox, meanwhile, is still riveting its audience with wall to wall coverage of this pressing irrelevancy.
But if McCarthy-era guilt-by-association is once again a valid political consideration, Palin, it would seem, has more to lose than Obama. Palin, it could be argued, following her own logic, thinks so little of America's perfection that she continues to "pal around" with a man--her husband, actually--who only recently terminated his seven-year membership in the Alaskan Independence Party. Putting plunder above patriotism, the members of this treasonous cabal aim to break our country into pieces and walk away with Alaska's rich federal oil fields and one-fifth of America's land base--an area three-fourths the size of the Civil War Confederacy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/alaskan-independence-part_b_133261.html
Man At Palin Rally Displays Monkey Doll Donning Obama Sticker
(CBS)
(PHILADELPHIA) As the crowd cheered at a Sarah Palin rally this morning in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a man in the audience grinned as he held up a stuffed monkey doll with a Barack Obama bumper sticker wrapped across its forehead.
The incident came at a time when McCain and Palin's events have increasingly been fueled by angry crowds, since Palin began drawing a connection between Barack Obama and 1960s radical William Ayers, claiming that the Democratic nominee has a history of "palling around" with a terrorist.
At a rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, on Friday, McCain was booed after he called on his audience to be respectful of Obama. The Republican nominee took the microphone away from one woman who said she couldn't trust Obama because "he's an Arab."
After Palin finished her remarks this morning, the man holding the stuffed monkey seemed to notice that a video camera was pointed at him, at which point he removed the Obama sticker from the doll's head and crumpling it up in his hand. He then handed the doll to a young boy who was watching the rally from his father's shoulders. The boy's parents later told CBS News that they weren't acquainted with the man who gave their son the stuffed monkey.
Watch the video below:
Feeling panicky? Here are four reasons not to overreact
When the market indexes plunge and your portfolio shrinks, it's natural to think about bailing out of your investments, particularly stocks. But before you head for the exits, consider four reasons why sticking with your investment plan, and resisting the temptation to sell, may be your smartest move.
Reason 1: Market timing is a losing strategy.
You may be thinking you should sell now and get back into stocks later when the market "settles down" and the economy starts to recover. But this approach—called market timing—can lead to disappointing returns. In effect, it puts you at risk of selling low and buying high.
If you do try to time the market, how are you going to know for sure what's the "right" time to get in and out? There is never an announcement that a declining market has started or ended. The direction of stocks can change very quickly; market rallies often occur suddenly and over very short periods. If you happen to be out of the market during those times, you could miss all or most of the gains for that year. This is sometimes called "out-of-market" risk, and it's a risk you should consider when making decisions about your investments.
"Market timing is extremely difficult," said Donald G. Bennyhoff, a senior investment analyst with Vanguard Investment Strategy Group. "To profit from market timing, you have to be able to get out before the low and be able to get back in before the market moves decidedly higher. It's impractical. It may sound good in theory, but market timing mostly fails in practice."
The Next American Revolution: When It Becomes Necessary To Bring King George to Justice
When, in the course of human events, it can't wait any longer
By Nat Hentoff
A revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson, provided the reason for continuing the project started at the Robert H. Jackson Conference on Planning for the Prosecution of High-Level American War Criminals, which I first mentioned last week. The conference brought together 120 legal authorities, activists, law professors, public officials, and scholars in Andover, Massachusetts, on September 13 and 14. Its aims were summed up by Jefferson: "Every government degenerates when trusted solely to the rulers of the people. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree."
Since Obama, McCain, Palin, and Biden have never once mentioned the Constitution during the campaign, let alone any of the specific war crimes by the Bush administration, the people, to prevent further degeneration of their individual liberties, will have to learn how to restart the American revolution through the work of this conference and other such groups as the national Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Amnesty International, and the ACLU.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-08/columns/the-next-american-revolution/
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Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition: Sarah Palin's Extremist Ties
by Plutonium Page
It was only slightly over a month ago that America was swept up in the carefully orchestrated GOP storm known as Sarah Palin. On August 29, 2008, John McCain told Americans that Palin is tenacious, tough, and could handle the job of Vice President just fine. He praised her "grit", "integrity", and "good sense". He said that:
"She is exactly who this country needs to help us fight the same old Washington politics of me first and country second,"
Indeed, "Country First" has become the official McCain campaign slogan. "USA! USA! USA!" is shouted by the frenzied, hate-filled, nationalistic crowds that gather to hear McCain and Palin speak.
What they don't know about Palin is that her political career in Alaska was shaped by the ideology and support of fringe, anti-government, militia-organizing secessionists.
Here at dailyKos, we have but scratched the surface of Palin's connection to the Alaska Independence Party (AIP). The big story that we suspected was there has finally been uncovered by Dave Neiwert and Max Blumenthal, who recently traveled to Wasilla, Alaska.
Neiwert laid the background for their AIP story in a September 22, 2008 article. Of note:
This morning I interviewed John Stein, the former Wasilla mayor who was defeated by Palin in 1996 by using "a quiet campaign by some Palin supporters raising emotional issues like abortion and gun control, which had no apparent tie to municipal politics" -- and as Phil Munger notes, a whisper campaign that Stein was secretly Jewish (Stein is a Lutheran).
The connection revolves mostly around three men known to have far-right leanings in the community: a builder named Steven Stoll, a computer repairman named Mark Chryson, and a third man named Mike Christ. All three subscribed to a bellicose, "Patriot" movement brand of politics -- far-right libertarianism with a John Birch streak.
According to Stein, Steven Stoll -- whose local nickname, according to Phil Munger, is "Black Helicopter Steve" -- was involved in militia organizing in Wasilla the 1990s, and subscribed to most of the movement's paranoid conspiracy theories: "The rumor was that he had wrapped his guns in plastic and buried them in his yard so he could get them after the New World Order took over."
The "black helicopter" concept "became popular in the United States militia movement, and in associated political circles, in the 1990s as an alleged symbol and warning sign of a conspiratorial totalitarian military takeover of part or all of the United States". Timothy McVeigh, among others, was a firm believer.
Neiwert and Blumenthal followed up with a fantastic article published yesterday in Salon. If you weren't already convinced that John McCain's team had no idea what they were doing when they chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, you will be after reading this story.
Meet Sarah Palin's best Alaska pals:
Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin's campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.
Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution's language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as "Black Helicopter Steve," to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. "Every time I showed up her door was open," said Chryson. "And that policy continued when she became governor."
So let's get this straight. John McCain's team chose someone whose political career was tightly interwoven with - and supported by - extremists. Not just average wingnuts. Extremists. Radicals. A secessionist and a paranoid militia organizer.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/12/13228/301/977/627523
What McCain Hasn't Tried
Last week, for example, McCain was angrily promising to "name the names" of those who caused the nation's worst financial crisis in decades. He was blaming Obama and his "cronies," and the "corruption" that Obama had "abetted" in Washington. Meanwhile, almost as if there were no meltdown, his running mate remained stuck on attacking Obama for "palling around with terrorists."
But imagine if McCain had selected for his running mate not a partisan attack dog but someone with deep knowledge of the economy and a record of reaching across the aisle.
Imagine if McCain himself had decided to respond to this crisis as an American first, a candidate second. "Yes," he might have said, "Democrats contributed to our problems with their lobbyist-fueled defense of Fannie and Freddie. But let's not pretend that Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, George W. Bush -- and John McCain -- weren't part of this, too. Warren Buffett saw this coming, but not many of the rest of us did. Let's postpone the recriminations and work together to fix this thing."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/12/AR2008101201632.html
Why ‘Body of Lies’ lost to ‘Chihuahua’
Leonardo DiCaprio in 'Body of Lies'
Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, starring Leonard DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, opened third at the box office over the weekend, said Stuart Heritage in Heckler Spray, while Beverly Hills Chihuahua took No. 1 for the second week in a row. How did a movie about a "funny dog" beat a "taut, relevant thriller" with huge stars? Could it be that "movie audiences are dumb"?
It means that filmmakers "don't seem capable of understanding" one "simple rule," said Ben Child in the Guardian online. "If you want your movie to be a U.S. box office success, don't set it in Iraq." Now more than ever, American audiences are sick of films about terrorism.
Maybe they're just sick of DiCaprio and Crowe, said Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune online. Or it could be that "Hollywood makes so few family-friendly comedies," Beverly Hills Chihuahua "was bound to stand out."
Whatever the reason, said Brooks Barnes in The New York Times, "escapism definitely ruled" again. And that "should ring alarm bells for almost all the Hollywood studios as they prepare to flood the market with somber awards-driven pictures."
http://www.theweek.com/article/index/89742/3/3/Why_Body_of_Lies_lost_to_Chihuahua
Fox’s Cavuto Wins SPLC’s Dobbsy Award for Pinning Blame on Minorities for Mortgage Crisis
Posted in Dobbsy Awards by Mark Potok
The first wave of nominations are in, and one man stands head and shoulders above the rest to claim our inaugural Dobbsy Award – Neil Cavuto of Fox News.
The host of "Your World with Neil Cavuto" used his program to put the blame for the subprime mortgage meltdown squarely where he believes it belongs – on the shoulders of poor minorities who have dared try to own a home. In doing so, Cavuto has exemplified what it means to be a Dobbsy winner – a "mainstream" figure who makes utterly false or misleading statements that denigrate or defame an entire group of people.
Cavuto played Pin-the-Blame-on-the-Minority during a Sept. 18 interview with U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.).
"[W]hen you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to folks who heretofore couldn't get mortgages, when you were pushing homeownership… . Are you totally without culpability here?" he asked. "Are you totally blameless? Are you totally irresponsible of anything that happened?"
And just in case the audience didn't catch his drift, he later spelled it out.
"I'm just saying, I don't remember a clarion call that said, 'Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster,'" he said.
That's right. In Cavuto's world, the real problem isn't Wall Street greed or lax federal regulation of reckless banking behemoths. No, it's all a matter of those irresponsible minorities who were willing to destroy the country's economy for a two-bedroom home in the 'burbs.
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2008/10/06/cavuto-mortgage-dobbsy/?splcnewsletter=newsgen-101308
Saturday Night At The Movies - Choke: Shades of Ashby
By Dennis Hartley
At the risk of sounding like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore, I'm going to go ahead now and sound like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore. There was a time, not too far removed, when the descriptive phrase "character study" was not necessarily the American film industry's code for "box office poison." Okay, I'll stop beating around the bush. I'm talking about the 1970's, when maverick directors like Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and Bob Rafelson made quirky, compelling "character studies" that audiences actually went out of their way to see. The protagonists were usually iconoclastic fringe dwellers or workaday antiheroes who, like the filmmakers themselves, questioned authority, flouted convention and were generally able to convey thoughts and feelings without CG enhancement. The films may not have always sported linear narrative or wrapped up with a "Hollywood ending", but they nearly always left us a bit more enlightened about the human condition.
I'm not saying that the character study ever really went away; it just became increasingly more marginalized as the era of the Hollywood blockbuster juggernaut encroached. Indie films of more recent vintage like Buffalo 66, Jesus' Son and SherryBaby are direct stylistic descendants of episodic 70s fare like Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Altman's California Split, and Ashby's The Last Detail, and prove that the genre is alive and well. The main difference between then and now, of course, is that when you venture out to the multiplex to seek such a film these days, you almost feel like donning dark glasses and a raincoat. When I went to a weekend matinee to catch Clark Gregg's Choke, I counted exactly 4 other patrons in the postage stamp auditorium. It just made me feel so…dirty.
Choke is one of the most original comedy-dramas I have seen this year, undoubtedly due in no small part to the fact that Gregg's screenplay is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, whose previous book-to-screen adaptation was 1999's Fight Club. Choke, similar to Fight Club, serves up a mélange of human foibles (addiction, perversion, madness and deception, to rattle off a few) and tops it all off with a dark comic sensibility. To put it another way, it's a sort of a screwball romantic comedy for nihilists.
At the risk of sounding like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore, I'm going to go ahead now and sound like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore. There was a time, not too far removed, when the descriptive phrase "character study" was not necessarily the American film industry's code for "box office poison." Okay, I'll stop beating around the bush. I'm talking about the 1970's, when maverick directors like Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and Bob Rafelson made quirky, compelling "character studies" that audiences actually went out of their way to see. The protagonists were usually iconoclastic fringe dwellers or workaday antiheroes who, like the filmmakers themselves, questioned authority, flouted convention and were generally able to convey thoughts and feelings without CG enhancement. The films may not have always sported linear narrative or wrapped up with a "Hollywood ending", but they nearly always left us a bit more enlightened about the human condition.I'm not saying that the character study ever really went away; it just became increasingly more marginalized as the era of the Hollywood blockbuster juggernaut encroached. Indie films of more recent vintage like Buffalo 66, Jesus' Son and SherryBaby are direct stylistic descendants of episodic 70s fare like Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Altman's California Split, and Ashby's The Last Detail, and prove that the genre is alive and well. The main difference between then and now, of course, is that when you venture out to the multiplex to seek such a film these days, you almost feel like donning dark glasses and a raincoat. When I went to a weekend matinee to catch Clark Gregg's Choke, I counted exactly 4 other patrons in the postage stamp auditorium. It just made me feel so…dirty.
Choke is one of the most original comedy-dramas I have seen this year, undoubtedly due in no small part to the fact that Gregg's screenplay is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, whose previous book-to-screen adaptation was 1999's Fight Club. Choke, similar to Fight Club, serves up a mélange of human foibles (addiction, perversion, madness and deception, to rattle off a few) and tops it all off with a dark comic sensibility. To put it another way, it's a sort of a screwball romantic comedy for nihilists.
Blue America
By: Howie Klein
I was on the phone with Alan Grayson a few days ago and he told me that he feels the campaign he so painstakingly put together has degenerated into a quest for money to run ads on television, instead of an opportunity to talk with the people of Orlando about how government can help to improve their lives. There are many ways to approach running a campaign, but almost every candidate and staffer I talk to says, no matter how idealistic it starts, it always ends with TV ads. Alan's ground game probably won him the primary-- but his startling TV ads sure didn't hurt.
Today Blue America, with our partners at SaysMe.TV, is launching a new application that can make everyone a political media consultant-- or, better yet, a replacement for a political media consultant.
Click here to see the program.
Start by picking a media market:
Cincinnati- Vic Wulsin
Miami- Annette Taddeo
Washington, DC- Judy Feder
Detroit- Gary Peters
New York- Dennis Shulman
Seattle- Darcy Burner
Philadelphia- Sam Bennett
Charlotte- Larry Kissell (should be up Monday)
Los Angeles- Debbie Cook or Russ Warner (should be up Tuesday)
Then pick which ad you want to run. Right now we have one ad available per candidate but we're hoping to add some more in the next week.
Type your name in at the top, because at the end of the ad it will credit you with paying for it.
Then pick the network and the daypart (time).
An individual ad can cost as little as $10, but the minimum purchase per candidate is $100.
Review the ad purchase, then check off all the boxes that attest that you're a U.S. citizen and that you're not a member of the Bush cabinet, etc.
Better Lenses for Less Money: How To Use Vintage Lenses with Your DSLR
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Back in the day (i.e. 7th grade), we "borrowed" our dad's camera gear. Eventually, when we could afford a camera of our own (i.e. age 27), we finally gave it back.
Now we're thinking of "borrowing" Dad's lenses again, because using vintage lenses on our DSLR is a lot easier than we thought.
All you need is a cheap adapter ring that allows you to attach a particular lens to your camera. And manual-focus vintage lenses are all over eBay, dirt-cheap and ripe for the plucking.
Yes, you have to use manual focus, but you won't miss autofocus as much as you think. Especially when you consider that vintage lenses are better-made, more reliable, and exponentially cheaper than comparable autofocus lenses.
So dust off your dad's gear. Fling wide the closet doors, and hike up to the attic! Shake down your relatives for all the old lenses they have stashed away. It's time to become the gear-geek you always wanted to be.
Politics is the Shadow Cast on Society by Big Business
"The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats."
And as the social philosopher John Dewey put it early in this century:
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business."
And that will remain true as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda," Dewey said.Nader/Gonzalez is churning.
Agitating.
Creating a force for change.
Against the shadow cast by big business.
Against all odds, we are optimistic about the future.
http://www.votenader.org/blog/2008/10/12/politics-is-the-shadow/
The Terror Party
by digby
Michael Froomkin reports from Florida that this is what is arriving in mailboxes in Annette Tadeo's District:
Michael Froomkin reports from Florida that this is what is arriving in mailboxes in Annette Tadeo's District:
Froomkin says:
This is accompanied by a smiling photo of Governor Charlie Crist, along with a message warning that terrorists want to kill us, and that we should vote for Republicans to "help keep America safe." (You can download a .pdf of the entire mailer, if you want.)
Got that? The State GOP, which paid for this thing, and the formerly post-partisan Governor, are saying that Democrats want to surrender to terrorists. Talk about low-class smear jobs…
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/terror-party-by-digby-michael-froomkin.html
I’m a little confused
I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight…..
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.
If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.
Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.
If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with more than 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.
If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude," with at least one DUI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.
OK, much clearer now.
http://azspot.net/post/50111548/im-a-little-confused
Meet Sarah Palin’s radical right-wing pals
Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin's political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. "Her door was open," says Chryson — and still is.
Editor's note: Research support provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. For Salon's complete coverage of Sarah Palin, click here.
By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert
Video: Interview with former Alaskan Independence Party chairman Mark Chryson
Oct. 10, 2008 PALMER, Alaska — | On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the "traditional family" and secede from the United States.
So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. "This here is my attack dog," he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. "Her name is Suzy." Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. "I've got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement," he said, clutching the gun in his palm. "Then again, so do most Alaskans." But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call "the 48." "We want to go our separate ways," he said, "but we are not going to kill you."
Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin's campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
The World Premiere of the Stage Version of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
I Was There and You Weren't #3
The World Premiere of the Stage Version of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
By Michael Dare
The new Seattle production of Even Cowgirls Gets the Blues hits the same cosmic gong of enlightenment the book did, making you laugh and think in equal proportions. It's out of the ballpark, never less than outrageously entertaining while remaining extremely faithful to the anarchic spirit of the original book. This was especially true of the world premiere at the Seattle Center, right there under the Space Needle, next to the 60's amusement park that stands as an everlasting tribute to amusement technology gone by. The attendance of Tom Robbins, inserted into the play - very much as he inserted himself into his novel - brought the whole thing into startling 4D perspective.
The Book-It Repertory Theatre Company accepted an incredibly specific and arduous task when they decided to translate the counterculture lunacy of Robbins' 1976 novel to the stage. He once described his novels as pomegranates, you don't wolf them down like an apple, you savor each morsel, each sentence, the kernels are too strong to take all at once. A Robbins novel deliberately slows you down as he takes unimaginable tangents from whatever you thought the plot was. As soon as the first amoeba dripped down the reader's leg, it either pissed them off or astonished them. Who knew there were so many rules of writing yet to be broken. Robbins took you places no novel had gone before, places impossible for any other medium to follow.
Surely you remember Chapter 100 of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, in which the author simply offers an imaginary toast between you and he, two glasses of champagne, in simple celebration of the fact that together, you've made it all the way to the 100th chapter of this absurd book, in which the fact that it is a novel is merely an excuse to celebrate the written word in all its manifestations, as though Chapter 100 had been waiting in the wings for every novelist to discover but none had the audacity to come right out and allow it to happen, for the novel itself to be self-aware and proud as hell of having made it all the way to triple digits in the chapter department.
Tom Robbins makes you aware of the act of reading while you're reading in order to promote the entire idea of self awareness, to give higher and higher perspectives upon relative absurdities of plot. He never takes anything more seriously than his desire to enlighten, like Penn and Teller, two other magicians who deliberately undermine their own magic tricks just to increase your perspective on reality. If you're reading a Tom Robbins book and someone interrupts asking what the book is about, your answer would be completely different chapter to chapter, page to page, paragraph to paragraph, even sentence to sentence. Cowgirls was completely original and hilarious, always playing tricks on you, never letting you be satisfied by simply sitting back and watching the plot go by, as if the plot itself were an afterthought, something to be gotten back to after tripping out about the nature of the moon.
It took a while for Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to reach the same stylistic conclusions Tom Robbins embraced from the get-go. Vonnegut's early novels were straight-forward sci-fi, and it wasn't until Slaughterhouse Five and the incredible Breakfast of Champions (another cinematic tragedy worthy of the Book-It treatment) that he broke down the fourth wall with the same fervor Germans used to pull down the one in Berlin. Other than Stephen King inserting himself into The Dark Tower, it's a technique few novelists have dared to gamble with, and for good reason. Readers of novels don't really want to be reminded they're reading a book, any more than watchers of movies want to be reminded they're watching a movie. They want to get so involved they forget where they are.
That can't happen with a play. You can't be so involved in a theatrical production you forget you're sitting in a theater watching actors and sets and costumes that are live right in front of you, so this production takes that foregone conclusion and runs with it, constantly talking directly to the audience, letting us know they know we're here, acknowledging right up front that the whole production is for us. The novel does the same thing with words, so Cowgirls turns out to be the perfect book to exploit this theatrical technique to its fullest.
Even so, there are parts of the book that can't possibly be translated into any other medium, amazing literary tricks that can only be appreciated through the written word.
There's a character in the book named the Countess, and you, the reader, presume the Countess to be a woman until suddenly and mysteriously, halfway through the book, the author drops the word "he" in reference to the Countess and the reader goes "huh?" and rereads the entire book again up to that point, realizing a magic trick has just been pulled, that the author cleverly never used the pronouns "he" or "she" in reference to the Countess, that the author was counting on you to assume it was a woman, to force you to face your own sexual prejudices by springing upon you the sad fact that the whole movie you had going on in your head concerning the Countess and their relationship with Sissy Hankshaw was dependent upon the author using the word "their" instead of "his" in endless sentences such as this.
There's really no way to put that in a play or movie. As soon as the character of the Countess is introduced, you're pretty much going to know he's a "he," but in the book that wasn't so.
It's a subject I know way too much about, so as you can guess, I was prepared to hate this version of Cowgirls even more than I detested the film version by Gus Van Sant. Somewhere in the effort to translate Cowgirls to the silver screen, someone decided this heterosexual paean to female sexuality needed a gay director, mysteriously deciding upon the brilliant but utterly humorless Gus Van Sant. You can take all the laughs in every Van Sant Film, fit them in a flea's navel, and still have room for a hard cover copy of Infinite Jest. Van Sant systematically stripped the book of everything whimsical in a misguided attempt to give the whole thing an impossible sense of realism, forgetting there isn't one realistic moment in any of Robbins' magical books.
But this production pulls the rabbit out of the hat, finding just the right quirks of theatricality to match the quirks of the book. If you don't like this production of Cowgirls, chances are it's because you don't like the book in the first place, it's that faithful a reproduction.
As far as I'm concerned, as soon as Cowgirls is an over the top comedy, a flat out farce, everything fits in place. This production, superbly adapted by Jennifer Sue Johnson and directed by Russ Banham, combines a variety of theatrical techniques, including vaudeville, commedia dell'arte, and most importantly, Paul Sill's Story Theater, which allows them to simply read the book to the audience while acting it out.
It's so simple, it's become commonplace, you've seen it a million times, the theatrical device whereby each character narrates their own story and the stories of others on stage, while simultaneously becoming the people they're talking about, going in and out of character at the drop of a hat, much like a Greek Chorus in which each chorus member gets to play the lead once in a while. No one had done it before Paul Sill's Story Theater, which told tales from the Brothers Grimm. It was simply the most economical means of storytelling the stage had ever seen, appearing first at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1971, moving from there to Broadway, where it was just as big a theatrical revelation as Tom's books were literary revelations years later. Ovid's Metamorphosis followed, proving the technique would work with just about anything, even in 1980 in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby where they did the whole book, every character, every chapter, every sub-plot, every nuance, over six hours, seen on two different nights, in Story Theater fashion, just reading the book to you while acting it out.
Following in this classic tradition, this production of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues sets the record straight, letting the story go its goofy and ridiculous way with a style in between commedia dell'arte and cosmic circus, letting us know the universe is a funny place where serious things happen, or a serious place where funny things happen, a quirky point of view with every nuance perfected. Story theater lets them incorporate everything from standard Greek chorus to vaudeville, whatever the story calls for, a comedy with plenty of time to get seriously philosophical in between the yocks. This is just the right way to do Tom Robbins for the stage, and everyone involved should be proud as hell.
What's it about? The nutshell? When you try to boil it all down, you're left with FBI agents, whooping cranes, big thumbs, and the first amoeba, not to mention the nature of time and space and everything in between, but mainly Sissy Hankshaw. She's the spokes-model for a feminine hygiene deodorant spray with phallic thumbs who gets involved with a bunch of cowgirls fighting for the rights of whooping cranes, who teach her that the scent of a woman is nothing to be embarrassed about, indeed, it's one of their finest points, which they have no problem sharing with the world, leading to an incredibly funny nude scene in which all the cowgirls chase off the Countess in horror at the sight of their unscented bushiness.
Two narrators play guitar and violin, the perfect accompaniment, Barbara Lamb and Jo Miller, like Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye in Cat Ballou, telling the story through song, underscoring all the ridiculous events that ensue.
Kate Czajkowski plays Sissy goofy and innocent, not an obvious choice, but the right one, keeping the laughs coming as her big thumbs set her life on the road. The set is an old truckstop, the type hitchhikers get stuck at, with hubcaps and license plates covering the walls, and an ice machine that doubles as a cave for The Chink, played to lunatic perfection by Wesley Rice as a variation on Dr. Pangloss from Candide, a looney philosopher horndog who can't keep his hands off the cowgirls, and who can blame him.
Ellen Barkin would make quite a cowgirl, and so does Hilary Pickles as Bonanza Jellybean, a wacked-out R. Crumb caricature of a character, the cutest button of a cowgirl at the Rubber Rose ranch who plants a smack on Sissy's mouth that changes her life.
The rest of the cast is just right, Brian Thompson a hilarious Countess, and every cowgirl a potential Lucille Ball, and that might seem a strange way to go with it but no, comediennes is precisely what this story needed. They're not really "lesbians," a word that doesn't show up till halfway through, and not in a nice way. Sissy ain't no lesbian, she just can't turn down sex from both the Chink and Bonanza Jellybean, regardless of their stereotypes, they both get her off.
The premiere provided the actual presence of Tom Robbins, who hadn't read the book himself in 33 years, which made it all the more entertaining for him, constantly reminding him of lines he'd forgotten he'd written. Tom appears as a character in the book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, so seeing him sitting down the row from you when one of the characters says "Hey, who wrote this book?", a moment in which he appeared in the play as himself, very much as he appeared in the book as himself, was a genius moment just for that audience, right then, gone forever, unrepeatable, and I wish you could have been there, but don't let that stop you from seeing it without that moment. If you can see it, see it. If you can't see it, read it.
This production doesn't make the big mistake of the film, turning Robbins' hilarious fantasy lesbians on the range into serious politically correct spokesdykes for the righteous homosexual cause. These cowgirls are all perfectly ludicrous, individual characters that add up to a comic book whole, and a Zapp Comic at that. The play has a lusty and zestful fixation on the female crotch, which could be one reason the book is such a classic, the clearly visceral response the author has towards the commercial exploitation of feminine hygiene, which was just getting started at the end of the '70s, when the airwaves were mysteriously full of ads for different spray products for women, as ubiquitous and strange as the current spate of ads for boner pills for men. Cowgirls is as far away from the guilt ridden gay cowboy angst of Brokeback Mountain as humanly possible, putting the gay back in the word gay, leaving out none of the feminist rhetoric, but coming from these ridiculous characters, right out of a Coen brothers or Tim Burton film, in which TONE is everything.
The Book-It Repertory Theatre is a non-profit organization dedicated to "transforming great literature into great theatre through simple and sensitive production and inspiring its audiences to read." It's been going on for a miraculous 19 years I'm sorry I missed. If they were all as good as this, they're one of the most important theatrical companies in the country, translating hundreds of pieces of untranslatable material through the sieve of the perfect theatrical device for translating just about anything. They've got it down, completely perfected, I can't imagine a book I wouldn't want to see their production of.
Of course I could be wrong. This is the only production I've ever seen from the Book-It Repertory Company. Maybe they do EVERYTHING like this, appropriate or not, and I just happened to catch the one where it fit, in which case their upcoming Moby Dick is going to be very interesting.
"A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised."
- Tom Robbins: Jitterbug Perfume -
Tom Robbins' EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES
Playing September 16-October 12, 2008 at the Center House Theatre
Book-It Repertory Theatre
206-216-0877, ext. 100
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