Ramblin' with Roger

The June swoon

The big thing, though, was that the Daughter had not one, but two dance recitals.

This has been the busiest June I can remember. I was in charge of the Friends of the Albany Public Library annual meeting, which involved arranging for the speaker, planning a dinner for 20, and getting a plaque made, the latter two of which had more complications than I need to go into here. But it ultimately went off successfully. The best part is that I discovered an old-fashioned drink called a sidecar; I loved it!

Our church is in covenant with one of the local schools, and one Saturday, that meant putting together a playground, which entailed, among other things, clearing a field of weeds and a tremendous amount of trash. Here’s a brief news story.

I attended a comic book show. Went to at least three parties, with another two this upcoming weekend. I’m not even counting visits to the dentist and eye doctor.

The big thing, though, was that the Daughter had not one, but two dance recitals. The first was at her public school, where she was a new recruit in something called Step. A couple of weeks later, her ballet school was having its annual recital. That school’s founder is one Madeline Cantarella Culpo. One of her grandsons is Michael Culpo, a Division I basketball player, while one of her granddaughters is the new Miss USA, Olivia Culpo; she is understandably proud.
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Why I am getting so much spam on this site, over 300 per day? The filter catches it, but it’s still tedious to remove. And most of it is of the bad spam variety, from companies selling electronic cigarettes, payday loans, or “pantyhose covered female foot fetish,” filled with suspicious links and unreadable text. Whereas GOOD spam is: “Helpful info. Lucky me I discovered your website by chance, and I am shocked why this accident didn’t happen earlier! I bookmarked it.” I know it’s a lie, but at least it’s pleasing to the eye.

Paul McCartney is 70: 12 songs

When I first heard this song about John Lennon, I thought it was too cloying. Moreover, I thought Lennon would think so too.

The thing about Paul McCartney that I appreciate is that, these days, he’s still trying. Oh sure, he’s doing legacy stuff such as reissues of some of his old albums, including recently, Ram. But he’s showing up on the TV show 30 Rock and touring in Latin America, even reimagining old songs. He keeps putting out new music at a reasonable pace, even if that last album had a bunch of old songs; the less familiar I was with a song, the more I liked it. He has played for his queen and will perform at the London Olympics opening ceremonies.

Here’s my Top 12 Macca songs, with links, at least this week. I could have picked a dozen more. I’ve stayed away from live songs, and re-recordings of Beatles songs.

12. Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five – the last song on the extraordinary Band on the Run album.

11. Let Me Roll It – another song from Band on the Run. I especially like the guitar line and the somewhat disconnected vocal.

10. My Valentine – a sweet song for his bride Nancy from the mostly cover album Kisses on the Bottom. Apparently, Natalie Portman and Johnny Depp used incorrect sign language in the promo.

9. Oo You – from that first McCartney solo album. Love the quality of the vocal, and the fact that it’s all Paul.

8. Jenny Wren from the 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. It does remind me of the Beatles song Blackbird a bit, but it is lovely. Here’s a shorter version.

7. Every Night – again, from the first album.

6. Here Today – from Tug of War. When I first heard this song about John Lennon, I thought it was too cloying. Moreover, I thought Lennon would think so too. But after seeing Macca perform it in a live concert (on TV), I changed my mind.

5. Band On The Run. The title cut, of course.

4. What’s That You’re Doing? The OTHER Stevie Wonder collaboration from the Tug of War album. By this point, Stevie was doing MOR stuff such as I Called to Say I Love You, so I was happy that he and Paul got a bit funky. And I’m always a sucker for a Beatles reprise.

3. My Brave Face – from the Flowers in the Dirt album. As I recall reading, Elvis Costello gave Macca permission to play Beatle Paul bass lines.

2. Jet – from Band on the Run. Again.

1. Maybe I’m Amazed – from McCartney. I remember hearing that Paul was going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show, and then being sorely disappointed that his “appearance” was actually this video. The strength of the song, though, won me over.

I have about half of Paul’s solo output, but I ended up gravitating to two or three albums for these cuts.
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Apparently, Macca saved Mark Ronson from drowning, when Ronson was a kid.

A live webcam trained on the crosswalk on Abbey Road in London where a certain Beatles cover photo was shot.

The Unresolved Father Lineage Stuff

What I REALLY want to know is who was my father’s biological father.

The item I wanted to check the most is where my father lived, and just as important, how he is listed. This is the listing for my paternal grandmother’s household in the 1930 Census:

Samuel E Walker, 56, janitor in a public building (my great grandfather, who I remember from my childhood)
Eugene M Walker, 52 [Mary Eugean Patterson Walker, from other sources] – deceased by the time I was born
Agatha H Walker, 27, housekeeper, private family (my grandmother, who died in the mid 1960s)
Earl S Walker, 25, caterer, hotels
Stanley E Walker, 20
Vera C Walker, 17
Melissa C Walker, 15
Jessie G Walker, 13
Morris S Walker, 11
Wesley H Walker, 3 [3 6/12]

Samuel is listed as head of household, Eugene as his wife. Everyone else is listed as his sons or daughters. The oddity is the Wesley Walker record. From the time frame, that is clearly my father, Agatha’s son, but I knew him as Leslie H Green. This begs the obvious questions.

I’m looking to see when the guy I knew as my grandfather, McKinley Green, entered the picture. From the 1938 Binghamton city directory, I can tell my grandmother’s last name was Green, but she appeared to be living at 339 Court Street, whereas McKinley was at 135 Susquehanna Street. The 1940 Census continues to show the Walker clan together, but my grandmother as Agatha Greene (enumerator error) and my father as Leslie Greene. McKinley lived in a boarding house.

What I REALLY want to know is who was my father’s biological father. Rumor had it that my grandmother got pregnant by some minister. Of course, I never asked my father about this. Whatever info I got was from my mother, who got the info secondhand, and from his cousins, all of whom were younger than my father, and thus not present either.

My sisters have mused that, in retrospect, we should have brought this up to my father, but that wasn’t going to happen. NONE of the info I know, or think I know, originated from him, so it would have been mighty difficult to casually slide it into the conversation.

In the picture is my father (center) with his mother, Agatha (right). I have no idea who the others are, though the boy sure looks like a Walker.

W is for Watergate

The key lesson of Watergate seems to have been “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.”

Five burglars involved with the break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972, were arrested; a couple more, involved in the operation, were also detained. The term used by President Richard Nixon’s Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, to describe the event was “a third rate burglary attempt.” The seven were tried and convicted, President Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide, and that was that. Except for the fact that two years later, the President was forced to resign in order to avoid almost certain impeachment.

I could not do justice to the story in such limited space – I recommend this Washington Post retrospective – but I do want to convey how important this story was to me personally, and how it played out provided an optimism about “the process” that I have seldom had since.

The burglars had a relationship with the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which many delighted in calling CREEP. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered information suggesting knowledge of the break-in and attempts to cover it up, with help of secret informant Deep Throat to fill in the blanks, led deep into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House. Various men close to the President were forced to resign.

The US Senate had a select committee operate from May 17 to August 7, 1973, and shown in rotation by the three major networks. Riveting story and I watched it as often as possible, as did most of the country, though some soap opera fans were furious; this was better than the made-up stuff.

It got REALLY interesting when White House assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed that there were listening devices in the Oval Office of the President. Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed the tapes, as did the Senate, but Nixon refused to release them, citing executive privilege and ordered Cox to drop his subpoena, which Cox refused. On October 20, 1973, Nixon demanded the resignations of Attorney General Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus for refusing to fire the special prosecutor, finally getting the reluctant Solicitor General Robert Bork to do so; this was referred to as the “Saturday night massacre.” It was pretty much downhill from there, with each new revelation pointing closer to RMN himself.

I remember SO many of the characters in this drama. Chair of the Senate select committee Sam Ervin of North Carolina had a folksy demeanor, yet stayed on task. During the House committee hearings on impeachment, Republican House member William Cohen of Maine’s looked pained as he recognized his President’s failings. Charles Colson was convicted of obstruction of justice; he became involved in prison ministry, and he died only a couple of months ago (Arthur had a take on him).

It reminded me how checks and balances used to work, with even Republicans communicating to a GOP chief executive that an abuse of power had taken place. And it was also a time when a vigorous press was a true fourth estate, holding government accountable, but in turn, holding itself responsible for what is published in return. I do miss those days. Oh, here’s the trailer to the film All The President’s Men, which addresses the latter aspect.

The key lesson of Watergate seems to have been “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup,” a message politicians seem to have missed over and over. And over and over. One terrible outcome is the attachment of the suffix -gate to almost every subsequent scandal, no matter how trivial. Here’s an undoubtedly incomplete list.
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Legendary reporter Bob Woodward gets defensive about mild accusations that he sexed up his Watergate stories

Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought

Will Robert Redford’s new documentary explain whether Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in?

ABC Wednesday – Round 10

Book review: JOURNALISM by Joe Sacco

Many black Africans travel across the Mediterranean Sea, attempting to get to Europe, but end up in the tiny island nation of Malta.

Cartoonist/war correspondent Joe Sacco’s new book, JOURNALISM (Metropolitan Books; on sale June 22, 2012) is doing an interesting thing, addressing wars and other conflicts in recent human experience in a graphic form, while attempting to operate in the discipline suggested by the book title. Moreover, he generally succeeds in his mission, though it must be said that the writer himself may be his harshest critic.

Most, but not all, of the work had been published before, in a variety of venues. “The War Crimes Trials,” for instance, was commissioned by Details “during the short stint when Art Spiegelman [creator of the historic graphic novel Maus] was the magazine’s comic editor. Sacco’s access was limited by Detail’s reputation for “glossy photos of spoiled young men and saucily clad women,” so that the last page was compromised. I thought it nevertheless worked well.

There were three pieces in The Palestinian Territories chapter, including getting to “look inside” Hebron, seeing both sides of the struggle between the residents and the Israeli neighbors. The Caucasus section is dominated by a 40-page explanation of “Chechen War, Chechen Women,” which explains the history of the conflict and literally illustrates the fate of the victims of war.

In the Iraq section, Sacco complains that his “Complacency Kills” piece could have reflected any war; to me, that was a strength, the universality of conflict. “Down! Up!” may remind you of the gym teachers or coaches you hated most.

The India section addressed Kunsinagar, a section in northern India in the Uttar Pradesh province where the notion of “untouchables” has been abolished legally but not actually, corruption runs rampant, and a certain sense of hopelessness rules.

The best-realized section, though, has to be the Migration tale, “The Unwanted.” Many black Africans travel across the Mediterranean Sea, attempting to get to Europe, but end up in the tiny island nation of Malta. Almost everything you’ve heard in the debate in the United States over illegal immigration shows up here: mutual distrust of the natives and the newcomers and neo-Nazi resistance to the Africans, who also fight among each other. This piece works so well, I suspect because Sacco is Maltese and still knows a bit of the language, though his family had emigrated to Australia a number of years ago.

In some ways, though, the most interesting part of the book is the Preface, “A Manifesto, Anyone?” Critics, Sacco notes, “question the notion that drawings can aspire to objective truth? Isn’t that — objective truth — what journalism is all about? Aren’t drawings by their very nature subjective?” While the answer to “this last question is yes…this does not let the cartoonist who aspires to journalism off the hook. The journalist’s standard obligations—to report accurately, to get quotes right, and to check claims—still pertain. But a comics journalist has obligations that go deeper than that.” Fascinating stuff.

“Another trap promoted in American journalism schools is the slavish adherence to ‘balance.’ But if one side says one thing and the other side says another, does the truth necessarily reside ‘somewhere in the middle’? A journalist who says, ‘Well, I pissed off both sides—I must be doing something right,’ is probably fooling himself and, worse, he may be fooling the reader.” I have frequently heard this very observation from some newspeople and it pains me greatly. It’s like saying that some claim that six million died in the Holocaust, while others deny it happened at all, so we’ll compromise and decide that three million died. This obviously pleases no one.

“Balance should not be a smokescreen for laziness. If there are two or more versions of events, a journalist needs to explore and consider each claim, but ultimately the journalist must get to the bottom of a contested account independently of those making their claims.”

I highly recommend this book. According to the press release, “Sacco received the Eisner Award for Safe Area Gorazde, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and Time Magazine’s best comic book of 2000; his most recent book, Footsteps in Gaza, won the Eisner award in 2010 and was also the first graphic novel to win the Ridenhour Book Prize.”

[I received a review copy of JOURNALISM, but no other compensation.]