Wednesday, January 30, 2002
Grand opera survives, thanks to attention-enhancing devices 0 and babes
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Operagoer applauds the subtitles as experience-enhancing devices
These thoughts came forth while watching Going My Way, the 1944 Christmas
favorite movie. It has a scene where the Metropolitan Opera star Rise Stevens sings
Carmen, and I was struck by the stiffness and woodenness of the sequence. No
wonder the opera is dying. Younger people still think of the art form
as stiff, formal and filled with false emotions, with stout tenors expressing undying
love to broad-beamed sopranos
Opera certainly has come a long way since I spent hours in the standee line at
the old Met on Broadway and 38th Street in Rudolf Bing's 1950s. Think of Denyce
Graves, free-wheeling through the emotions of the gypsy girl Carmen, a dancer and nearly
an acrobat, with an expressive face, body and voice. The experience can be more
alive and charged up than any rock concert - except that the audience of elders
does not jump up and shout. But opera is getting that kind of upgrade, much to the dismay of traditionalists. Let's face it, the art form is not sacred and must sell itself to today's audience, used to movies and TV, not to speak of live stage, where the players have figures, faces and emotions
appropriate to the scene, and mismatches do not succeed. And the scenery - today's lush
and lively Franco Zefirelli designs bring ohs and ahs from the newcomers who
want their $90 worth of presentation, while sparse modern designs do not
attract. A Robert Wilson's stylized Lohengrin of 1999 is, although perhaps a welcome changeover for the afficionados, jars with the sensibilities of a newcomer (although his designs might do for Philip Glass opera..)
A recent issue of Opera News discussed the quest of opera impressarios for
handsome and lithe singers. Purists cannot afford to sneer at it if they want their
beloved art form to survive, it will die if it has no under-retirement-age
audience. And the singers recognize it, the last few years of Met finalists'
contests have brought on younger and thinner figures on the stage, with movements.
This just by way of introduction for another subject, content. Until
recently opera fans, multi-lingual or not, had to rely on brief program notes
for the content of the scenes. Without details, the program booklet descriptions make the opera
insipid and banal. With the arrival of subtitles and supertitles, we have been
given insights into the subtleties of the libretists' and also comporers'
artfulness. Although sometimes distracting, the titles do enhance one's
appreciation. This is a pleasure, heretofore reserved for offline memorizers of
librettos.
Take Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly. Puccini had a lively interest in America and an understanding of the 1900's. When Lt Pinkerton rents the lovely house for a hundred years and marries the beautiful geisha girl,both he and the cynical marriage broker understand that he can break both contracts. He explains it to Sharples, the compassionate American
consul, as the right of a conquering eterpreneur, and that
when the time comes, he will marry a pure US girl. In a sense that's
understandable, such temporary arrangements apparently continue to be
the tradition in the East, not only for Americans but also for other emissaries
of European and now Japanese capital markets. The girl was a geisha, presumed
to have flexible standards. Unfortunately Cio-Cio-San, 16 years old, saw the contract
as one forever. When Pinkerton came back with a new wife, found that he had a
son, and was mostly interested in taking him away from the mother, the faithful San
killed herself. Pinkerton's regrets did come across as perfunctory, and his wife's main interest, in the face of San's deep anguish, came through as selfish. For me, these were new insights in the realistic characterization of the personages. Puccini, the master of melodies and verismo.
On the other hand, the villain in Giuseppe Verdi's Traviata (1853), Giorgio Germont, becomes more
human as the dialogue progresses. Father of the courtesan's lover Alfredo, he
barges into their country hideaway, accusing the demi-mondaine of ruining his
family, although he is instantly inpressed by the Violetta's dignity, more so
when he finds that she is selling her treasures to pay for their retreat.
Nevertheless, he takes off his coat, practically rolls up his sleeves, and
relentlessly barrages the woman with his demands to cease the relationship so
that his daughter can get respectably married.. The noble Violetta not only acquiesces but
plays along, letting Alfredo believe that she has another lover. Mean Giorgio
not only accepts her sacrifice but conceals the true reason of her departure.
But his better feelings are coming forward, little by little, and when Alfredo
demeans Violetta in public, he rebukes his son, still not revealing the reason
for Violetta's behavior. Obviously, a reconciliation still is to be avoided at
all costs. By Act Three, though, he has revealed all to his son, by mail, and
his emotions come true as he admits and confesses. Noble Verdi, creator of catharsis for the audiences.
On a different tack, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (1868), Richard Wagner's comic opera. Comic Wagner? Yes, up to a point. The shticks conceal a level of philosophy of egalitarianism and social order, and, on another level, a discourse of poetic form. Being able to follow the words gives the operagoer an insight that makes the six hours - longest quality opera on record - flow without any onset of boredom. The comic devices seem stretched out and antiquated, until one remembers that this is where some of those vaudeville routines originated. The comedy of "love conquers all" reveals Wagner's genius (he was the first great composer to write his own librettos), until the last 12 minutes, when a jarring and unnecessary, actually clashing section of German nationalism is inserted. Sort of "Oh, yes, I was having so much fun that I forgot to pay my dues." Poor Wagner.
Poor Mozart, too. Idomeneus, an early opera that was going to make some money for the 24-year experienced composer, has a Trojan War plot that leaves singers standing on the stage for minutes on end, making promises, or longing for love and death. The plot revolves around a king's attempt to escape a storm by offering to sacrifice the first persom met - who was his son.The subtitles revealed that the god Neptune had actually exacted the promise, and at the end, overcome by the nobility of the family members, retracted it. Mozart was left with an end scene of a diappointed Greek prioncess, Electra, crying betrayal and thrashing about. If it were not for the music, this loser would have been deep-sixed centuries ago.
Operagoer applauds the subtitles as experience-enhancing devices
These thoughts came forth while watching Going My Way, the 1944 Christmas
favorite movie. It has a scene where the Metropolitan Opera star Rise Stevens sings
Carmen, and I was struck by the stiffness and woodenness of the sequence. No
wonder the opera is dying. Younger people still think of the art form
as stiff, formal and filled with false emotions, with stout tenors expressing undying
love to broad-beamed sopranos
Opera certainly has come a long way since I spent hours in the standee line at
the old Met on Broadway and 38th Street in Rudolf Bing's 1950s. Think of Denyce
Graves, free-wheeling through the emotions of the gypsy girl Carmen, a dancer and nearly
an acrobat, with an expressive face, body and voice. The experience can be more
alive and charged up than any rock concert - except that the audience of elders
does not jump up and shout. But opera is getting that kind of upgrade, much to the dismay of traditionalists. Let's face it, the art form is not sacred and must sell itself to today's audience, used to movies and TV, not to speak of live stage, where the players have figures, faces and emotions
appropriate to the scene, and mismatches do not succeed. And the scenery - today's lush
and lively Franco Zefirelli designs bring ohs and ahs from the newcomers who
want their $90 worth of presentation, while sparse modern designs do not
attract. A Robert Wilson's stylized Lohengrin of 1999 is, although perhaps a welcome changeover for the afficionados, jars with the sensibilities of a newcomer (although his designs might do for Philip Glass opera..)
A recent issue of Opera News discussed the quest of opera impressarios for
handsome and lithe singers. Purists cannot afford to sneer at it if they want their
beloved art form to survive, it will die if it has no under-retirement-age
audience. And the singers recognize it, the last few years of Met finalists'
contests have brought on younger and thinner figures on the stage, with movements.
This just by way of introduction for another subject, content. Until
recently opera fans, multi-lingual or not, had to rely on brief program notes
for the content of the scenes. Without details, the program booklet descriptions make the opera
insipid and banal. With the arrival of subtitles and supertitles, we have been
given insights into the subtleties of the libretists' and also comporers'
artfulness. Although sometimes distracting, the titles do enhance one's
appreciation. This is a pleasure, heretofore reserved for offline memorizers of
librettos.
Take Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly. Puccini had a lively interest in America and an understanding of the 1900's. When Lt Pinkerton rents the lovely house for a hundred years and marries the beautiful geisha girl,both he and the cynical marriage broker understand that he can break both contracts. He explains it to Sharples, the compassionate American
consul, as the right of a conquering eterpreneur, and that
when the time comes, he will marry a pure US girl. In a sense that's
understandable, such temporary arrangements apparently continue to be
the tradition in the East, not only for Americans but also for other emissaries
of European and now Japanese capital markets. The girl was a geisha, presumed
to have flexible standards. Unfortunately Cio-Cio-San, 16 years old, saw the contract
as one forever. When Pinkerton came back with a new wife, found that he had a
son, and was mostly interested in taking him away from the mother, the faithful San
killed herself. Pinkerton's regrets did come across as perfunctory, and his wife's main interest, in the face of San's deep anguish, came through as selfish. For me, these were new insights in the realistic characterization of the personages. Puccini, the master of melodies and verismo.
On the other hand, the villain in Giuseppe Verdi's Traviata (1853), Giorgio Germont, becomes more
human as the dialogue progresses. Father of the courtesan's lover Alfredo, he
barges into their country hideaway, accusing the demi-mondaine of ruining his
family, although he is instantly inpressed by the Violetta's dignity, more so
when he finds that she is selling her treasures to pay for their retreat.
Nevertheless, he takes off his coat, practically rolls up his sleeves, and
relentlessly barrages the woman with his demands to cease the relationship so
that his daughter can get respectably married.. The noble Violetta not only acquiesces but
plays along, letting Alfredo believe that she has another lover. Mean Giorgio
not only accepts her sacrifice but conceals the true reason of her departure.
But his better feelings are coming forward, little by little, and when Alfredo
demeans Violetta in public, he rebukes his son, still not revealing the reason
for Violetta's behavior. Obviously, a reconciliation still is to be avoided at
all costs. By Act Three, though, he has revealed all to his son, by mail, and
his emotions come true as he admits and confesses. Noble Verdi, creator of catharsis for the audiences.
On a different tack, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (1868), Richard Wagner's comic opera. Comic Wagner? Yes, up to a point. The shticks conceal a level of philosophy of egalitarianism and social order, and, on another level, a discourse of poetic form. Being able to follow the words gives the operagoer an insight that makes the six hours - longest quality opera on record - flow without any onset of boredom. The comic devices seem stretched out and antiquated, until one remembers that this is where some of those vaudeville routines originated. The comedy of "love conquers all" reveals Wagner's genius (he was the first great composer to write his own librettos), until the last 12 minutes, when a jarring and unnecessary, actually clashing section of German nationalism is inserted. Sort of "Oh, yes, I was having so much fun that I forgot to pay my dues." Poor Wagner.
Poor Mozart, too. Idomeneus, an early opera that was going to make some money for the 24-year experienced composer, has a Trojan War plot that leaves singers standing on the stage for minutes on end, making promises, or longing for love and death. The plot revolves around a king's attempt to escape a storm by offering to sacrifice the first persom met - who was his son.The subtitles revealed that the god Neptune had actually exacted the promise, and at the end, overcome by the nobility of the family members, retracted it. Mozart was left with an end scene of a diappointed Greek prioncess, Electra, crying betrayal and thrashing about. If it were not for the music, this loser would have been deep-sixed centuries ago.
Monday, January 28, 2002
From Alice Springs to Ayers Rock, a memorable trip
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
In the Red Center of the bleak Australian desert, covered with the sharp-edged grey spinifex grass, rises the red colossus of the Ayers Rock, or Uluru, to address it by the traditional name. It is a dramatic feature in the flat surface, like a big red jellybean resting on a table, half-sunk into a soft tablecloth.
Formed 500 million years ago as a conglomerate of rock shards and particles compressed in a solid mass and pushed to the outside of the Earth's skin during the convulsions that formed the surface of this planet, it was subsequently covered by an ocean. It remained buried in debris, until the forming of the continents brought it once more to the surface, the winds of the millennia eroded away the sands, and the rock rose out of the dust. The Anangu Aborigines, who learned to survive in the arid desert, considered it sacred, and the caverns and caves worn into the base of the rock through the actions of the elements became hiding places and temples for the natives. Discoverers of the 19th century, trying to find the secrets of the desert kept perishing in the vast water less wilderness, and only in 1873 a group of explorers on camels led by William Christie Gosse, traversing from Alice Springs 440 kilometers away, came across it. The land around Uluru was leased to cattle stations, until in 1920 it became part of a reserve set aside for the natives, then in 1958 was designated a national park. In 1976 came the Aboriginal Land Rights declaration, and in 1985 the control of the Uluru and Kata Tjuta, a range of red domes 30 kilometers away (known a Mt Olgas) was turned over to the Anangu Aborigines. The park has a World Heritage status, and has been leased back to the federal government for 99 years.
The tourist arrives from Alice Springs, by bus, car or plane, to stay at the one and only Ayers Rock Resort The entire area is leased to this resort organization, and there are several hotels and camping grounds, of which the outstanding one is Sails in the Desert, a rectangle of two-story motel structures around a giant pool, shielded by canvas, reminiscent of the Sydney Opera. The Town Square, a five minute walk away, conveniently provides restaurants, a small supermarket, post office, book and souvenir stores. You meet many Aboriginals, shopping and banking at the ATM.
Visiting Uluru is an experience. Climbers eager to cross the 1,100 ft high rock (you have to be in shape, people get injured and have died in the process, and the governing agency does not encourage climbing) leave at 5 AM, to catch the sunrise. The Anangus do not approve of it for religious reasons, but tourists provide their livelihood...Less adventurous folk can walk around the Rock, in a 10 km journey of interesting scenery. The various caves are posted as sanctuaries, for native men and women separately, with photographers requested to respect the prohibition (we do). Desecrating the caves can incur a $A 5,000 fine or worse.
The traditional sunset trip to Uluru takes the tourist buses to a different viewing area, some kilometers away. People start arriving at 3 PM, setting up folding chairs and tables laden with snacks and champagne, in view of the huge monolith, which, depending on the light, can be black or bright red or a shade in between, and will continue to change colors as the sunlight fades. I counted 40 buses in the lot, with Aussie, Japanese, Italian and American tours, and some German backpackers sitting on the roof of their Volkswagen jitney. We saw Uluru in a most dramatic light, as a fast-moving thunderstorm with lightning passed over the area, lending credibility to the tales of sacred sanctuary.
Uluru is a big part of in the Anangu Aborigines' daily Tjukurpa, a system of beliefs that governs their daily existence. It harks back to ancestor worship, ascribing the rules that govern and have governed their daily existence (Aborigines have a history of 40,000 years in Australia) to the supernatural giant beings in the form o animals who roamed the earth and created the laws. We visited the Uluru-Kata-Tjuta Cultural Centre, in which native guides lecture visitors in the secrets of bush tucker, the hidden food resources that helped the Aboriginals survive for millennia in the arid desert, an the arts of hunting. There is a range to practice boomerang and spear throwing, the latter enhanced with an arm extender called woomera, and a performing group that sings and dances, accompanied by didgeridoo music. In another location, native women squat on the ground in an area set up to resemble a dwelling in the desert, dipping little sticks in paint pots and dotting canvasboards in a manner that we have learned to recognize and admire as Aboriginal art. These workshop-produced paintings, in sizes of postcards and up can be bought in the adjacent Maruku arts shop for modest prices, $A 15 and up, along with boomerangs and other wooden objects carved by tribal craftsmen.
Didgeridoos, the long wooden music tubes chewed hollow by termites (they have been sanitized, no worries) are very popular souvenirs, and some visitors actually master the art of blowing them, which involves vibrating your lips (not by me, mate) while doing circular breathing, simultaneously inhaling and exhaling (dicey). T&V country people know of it, there is didge musician occasionally performing in the Union Square subway station.
About Kata-Tjuta, the short range of high rock domes some 30 km away from Uluru. Also known as the Olgas, after the Duchess of Wurtemberg who was the patroness of an expedition to the Red Center (the huge clay area in the middle of the Australian desert), it has a mile long gorge that is more diverse to walk than the base of Uluru, because of the changing landscape and the red rock vistas that open as you proceed through the terrain. Majestic Mt. Olga is a third higher than Uluru.
This area is endangered species, because of water shortage. Ayers Rock Resort has drilled down 75 feet, to a aquifer that provides mineral-laden water for daily use, with salt content several times that of the ocean. This water is 80,000 years old and non-renewable, geologists claim. When it is gone, in 20 years, water will have to be brought in by pipe, for huge distances, or the Uluru area will die. Book your reservations before it is too late, tourists.
In the Red Center of the bleak Australian desert, covered with the sharp-edged grey spinifex grass, rises the red colossus of the Ayers Rock, or Uluru, to address it by the traditional name. It is a dramatic feature in the flat surface, like a big red jellybean resting on a table, half-sunk into a soft tablecloth.
Formed 500 million years ago as a conglomerate of rock shards and particles compressed in a solid mass and pushed to the outside of the Earth's skin during the convulsions that formed the surface of this planet, it was subsequently covered by an ocean. It remained buried in debris, until the forming of the continents brought it once more to the surface, the winds of the millennia eroded away the sands, and the rock rose out of the dust. The Anangu Aborigines, who learned to survive in the arid desert, considered it sacred, and the caverns and caves worn into the base of the rock through the actions of the elements became hiding places and temples for the natives. Discoverers of the 19th century, trying to find the secrets of the desert kept perishing in the vast water less wilderness, and only in 1873 a group of explorers on camels led by William Christie Gosse, traversing from Alice Springs 440 kilometers away, came across it. The land around Uluru was leased to cattle stations, until in 1920 it became part of a reserve set aside for the natives, then in 1958 was designated a national park. In 1976 came the Aboriginal Land Rights declaration, and in 1985 the control of the Uluru and Kata Tjuta, a range of red domes 30 kilometers away (known a Mt Olgas) was turned over to the Anangu Aborigines. The park has a World Heritage status, and has been leased back to the federal government for 99 years.
The tourist arrives from Alice Springs, by bus, car or plane, to stay at the one and only Ayers Rock Resort The entire area is leased to this resort organization, and there are several hotels and camping grounds, of which the outstanding one is Sails in the Desert, a rectangle of two-story motel structures around a giant pool, shielded by canvas, reminiscent of the Sydney Opera. The Town Square, a five minute walk away, conveniently provides restaurants, a small supermarket, post office, book and souvenir stores. You meet many Aboriginals, shopping and banking at the ATM.
Visiting Uluru is an experience. Climbers eager to cross the 1,100 ft high rock (you have to be in shape, people get injured and have died in the process, and the governing agency does not encourage climbing) leave at 5 AM, to catch the sunrise. The Anangus do not approve of it for religious reasons, but tourists provide their livelihood...Less adventurous folk can walk around the Rock, in a 10 km journey of interesting scenery. The various caves are posted as sanctuaries, for native men and women separately, with photographers requested to respect the prohibition (we do). Desecrating the caves can incur a $A 5,000 fine or worse.
The traditional sunset trip to Uluru takes the tourist buses to a different viewing area, some kilometers away. People start arriving at 3 PM, setting up folding chairs and tables laden with snacks and champagne, in view of the huge monolith, which, depending on the light, can be black or bright red or a shade in between, and will continue to change colors as the sunlight fades. I counted 40 buses in the lot, with Aussie, Japanese, Italian and American tours, and some German backpackers sitting on the roof of their Volkswagen jitney. We saw Uluru in a most dramatic light, as a fast-moving thunderstorm with lightning passed over the area, lending credibility to the tales of sacred sanctuary.
Uluru is a big part of in the Anangu Aborigines' daily Tjukurpa, a system of beliefs that governs their daily existence. It harks back to ancestor worship, ascribing the rules that govern and have governed their daily existence (Aborigines have a history of 40,000 years in Australia) to the supernatural giant beings in the form o animals who roamed the earth and created the laws. We visited the Uluru-Kata-Tjuta Cultural Centre, in which native guides lecture visitors in the secrets of bush tucker, the hidden food resources that helped the Aboriginals survive for millennia in the arid desert, an the arts of hunting. There is a range to practice boomerang and spear throwing, the latter enhanced with an arm extender called woomera, and a performing group that sings and dances, accompanied by didgeridoo music. In another location, native women squat on the ground in an area set up to resemble a dwelling in the desert, dipping little sticks in paint pots and dotting canvasboards in a manner that we have learned to recognize and admire as Aboriginal art. These workshop-produced paintings, in sizes of postcards and up can be bought in the adjacent Maruku arts shop for modest prices, $A 15 and up, along with boomerangs and other wooden objects carved by tribal craftsmen.
Didgeridoos, the long wooden music tubes chewed hollow by termites (they have been sanitized, no worries) are very popular souvenirs, and some visitors actually master the art of blowing them, which involves vibrating your lips (not by me, mate) while doing circular breathing, simultaneously inhaling and exhaling (dicey). T&V country people know of it, there is didge musician occasionally performing in the Union Square subway station.
About Kata-Tjuta, the short range of high rock domes some 30 km away from Uluru. Also known as the Olgas, after the Duchess of Wurtemberg who was the patroness of an expedition to the Red Center (the huge clay area in the middle of the Australian desert), it has a mile long gorge that is more diverse to walk than the base of Uluru, because of the changing landscape and the red rock vistas that open as you proceed through the terrain. Majestic Mt. Olga is a third higher than Uluru.
This area is endangered species, because of water shortage. Ayers Rock Resort has drilled down 75 feet, to a aquifer that provides mineral-laden water for daily use, with salt content several times that of the ocean. This water is 80,000 years old and non-renewable, geologists claim. When it is gone, in 20 years, water will have to be brought in by pipe, for huge distances, or the Uluru area will die. Book your reservations before it is too late, tourists.
Friday, January 25, 2002
Watch out for frauds on the Internet, they may cost you
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
If you have been an Internet user for some time, you will find that among the spam (unsolicited mail) items coming your way will be some palpably crooked offers.
In the past years I've received messages headed "Become Wealthy With Secret
Flaw in Currency Market," claiming to be backed up by articles in the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Business Weekly and such; also "The
Big Guys Don't Want You to Know.." etc etc. The info is available for a
charge of $25 plus $16 fees, reduced from $195, if you act within 10 days. I
ignored the transparent scam, but the messages persisted,eventually piquing my interest.
An Internet search for International Exchange Alliance, the name of the bunco
organization, was unsuccessful until I reached the Warriors of Internet
Marketing, a site that offers advice. There were 20 messages inquiring and
exchanging information. Stepping through them, I found one that identified
the IEA as an old 1997 scam, World Currency Exchange, under a new name. Another message
offered a site in England, which will come up if one searches for
gcaselton/spam/mmf.html. This turned out to be a rich lode of listings of
shabby Internet offers, categorized by type. Graeme Caselton, a chili pepper merchant
and fossil hunting enthusiast, has tons more of spam material accessible
through his home page. Besides offering explicit instructions on how to thwart the spammers, he collects scam information (IEA is covered under its most recent name, Wealth Exchange Int., with a Santa Monica address).
Caselton lists phoney chain letters, in which, typically, the crook has
you and other first- round chumps send $5 to each of five names which he
controls. Administered pyramid schemes and Multi-Level Markreting (MLM) come
under the headings of home based business and envelope-stuffing opportunities
(the adminitrator has the opportunity to stuff the initial fee in his/her
pocket). Make Money Fast (MMF) schemes offer free vacations, foreign currency secrets, cheap cash, mortgages and home equity loans, foreign currency secrets. "Create a
new credit profile" and "Erase Your Debt" offer palpably dishonest actions
for the borderline person, who is also a good candidate for the instant
college baccalaureate degree "earned by life experience" (masters’ degrees and doctorates a few bucks more).
His IEA and WCE stories explain the secret of how "a $25 investment will get you a hundred of legal currency." You will get back 100 Italian liras, Burundian franks or Guinea-Bissau pesos. Simple, but effective, lots of people have fallen for it, going back to the classified ads era in
mail-order magazines decades ago.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has its own Internet Fraud Alert
webpage (www.sec.gov/consumer/cyberfr.html), in which they warn investors
against online investment newsletters and bulletin boards (chatgroups,
newsgroups, usenet), in which promoters pump up values with bogus inside
information and other come-ons. This alert, last updated in 11/15/2001, was
prompted by SEC's indictment of 44 stock promoters, but the warnings are
still valid. Thus, they urge investors to check registered companies (over
500 investors and $10 million plus in net assets) and listed (on Nasdaq or a
major stock exchange) against the SEC's EDGAR database (no charge).
Clicking back to the SEC home page, im quest for more up-to-date information,
there are links to how-to educational material as well as a valuable link
list of mostly government organizations. Testing something called Investor
Protection Trust ("Dedicated to Non-Commercial Investor Education"), a 1993
consumer group, up comes a lead to the impressive GOTOBUTTON BM_1_ www.fraud.com ( 800-876-7060), website of the National Consumer League, where you get warnings of some strange tricks.
NCL warns you of dangerous downloads, which may cost hundreds of dollars. The
crooks ask you to click to get connected, then download a program. You get
connected to a number in Chad or another small country, and end up with a
phone bill of several dollars per minute. It looks innocuous since no credit
card is involved.
Auction sales, Internet services, computer equipment/software and
work-at-home plans are NCL’s major complaints. They suggest that Internet
retail purchases be made via credit cards, since these are recoverable.
Telephone "cramming" (charging on phone bill for services never received) is a
novel trick that phone companies are fighting. "Slamming" involves getting you to switch
your phone account, and has been engaged in by reputable companies.
NCL also warns against "repairing your credit," cheap advance fee loans,
sweepstakes, "you have won a vacation" and work-at-home plans, the more
conventional tricks to elicit fees from you. The famous 419 Nigerian money
offers (named after a section in Nigeria’s criminal code) are ruses to get your bank account and routing numbers, so that the crook can access your deposits. The offer is aimed at the slightly larcenous, and involves requests for help in clearing out some multi-million dollar bank accounts in Nigeria containing bribes. The originators, with official looking letterheads, need a foreign collaborator, because exporting currency is illegal etc. etc. Anyone who gets caught in this one deserves the loss.
Several sites, such as consumer.gov, warn you against identity theft, with
someone using your name, date of birth and SS number to establish a credit
card, bank account, or cellular phone account, or changing the address on an
existing one. These are expensive frauds, with 300,000 complaints each year. Cancel (not
just cut up) unused credit cards, shred bills and cancelled checks, protect
your mother's maiden name. Order, occasionally, credit reports from the three
credit report agencies: Equifax (800-525-6285), Experian (800-301-7195) and
Trans Union (800-680-7289), to see if your credit is in good shape.
If you have been defrauded, www.ifccfbi.gov, the Internet Fraud Complaint Center,
an FBI/National White Collar Crime Center, will accept your story, evaluate it
and send it to a local, state or federal agency. You have to provide your
phone number for the investigator to call. They are a bit busy this year, with tracking reports of terrorists.
If you have been an Internet user for some time, you will find that among the spam (unsolicited mail) items coming your way will be some palpably crooked offers.
In the past years I've received messages headed "Become Wealthy With Secret
Flaw in Currency Market," claiming to be backed up by articles in the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Business Weekly and such; also "The
Big Guys Don't Want You to Know.." etc etc. The info is available for a
charge of $25 plus $16 fees, reduced from $195, if you act within 10 days. I
ignored the transparent scam, but the messages persisted,eventually piquing my interest.
An Internet search for International Exchange Alliance, the name of the bunco
organization, was unsuccessful until I reached the Warriors of Internet
Marketing, a site that offers advice. There were 20 messages inquiring and
exchanging information. Stepping through them, I found one that identified
the IEA as an old 1997 scam, World Currency Exchange, under a new name. Another message
offered a site in England, which will come up if one searches for
gcaselton/spam/mmf.html. This turned out to be a rich lode of listings of
shabby Internet offers, categorized by type. Graeme Caselton, a chili pepper merchant
and fossil hunting enthusiast, has tons more of spam material accessible
through his home page. Besides offering explicit instructions on how to thwart the spammers, he collects scam information (IEA is covered under its most recent name, Wealth Exchange Int., with a Santa Monica address).
Caselton lists phoney chain letters, in which, typically, the crook has
you and other first- round chumps send $5 to each of five names which he
controls. Administered pyramid schemes and Multi-Level Markreting (MLM) come
under the headings of home based business and envelope-stuffing opportunities
(the adminitrator has the opportunity to stuff the initial fee in his/her
pocket). Make Money Fast (MMF) schemes offer free vacations, foreign currency secrets, cheap cash, mortgages and home equity loans, foreign currency secrets. "Create a
new credit profile" and "Erase Your Debt" offer palpably dishonest actions
for the borderline person, who is also a good candidate for the instant
college baccalaureate degree "earned by life experience" (masters’ degrees and doctorates a few bucks more).
His IEA and WCE stories explain the secret of how "a $25 investment will get you a hundred of legal currency." You will get back 100 Italian liras, Burundian franks or Guinea-Bissau pesos. Simple, but effective, lots of people have fallen for it, going back to the classified ads era in
mail-order magazines decades ago.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has its own Internet Fraud Alert
webpage (www.sec.gov/consumer/cyberfr.html), in which they warn investors
against online investment newsletters and bulletin boards (chatgroups,
newsgroups, usenet), in which promoters pump up values with bogus inside
information and other come-ons. This alert, last updated in 11/15/2001, was
prompted by SEC's indictment of 44 stock promoters, but the warnings are
still valid. Thus, they urge investors to check registered companies (over
500 investors and $10 million plus in net assets) and listed (on Nasdaq or a
major stock exchange) against the SEC's EDGAR database (no charge).
Clicking back to the SEC home page, im quest for more up-to-date information,
there are links to how-to educational material as well as a valuable link
list of mostly government organizations. Testing something called Investor
Protection Trust ("Dedicated to Non-Commercial Investor Education"), a 1993
consumer group, up comes a lead to the impressive GOTOBUTTON BM_1_ www.fraud.com ( 800-876-7060), website of the National Consumer League, where you get warnings of some strange tricks.
NCL warns you of dangerous downloads, which may cost hundreds of dollars. The
crooks ask you to click to get connected, then download a program. You get
connected to a number in Chad or another small country, and end up with a
phone bill of several dollars per minute. It looks innocuous since no credit
card is involved.
Auction sales, Internet services, computer equipment/software and
work-at-home plans are NCL’s major complaints. They suggest that Internet
retail purchases be made via credit cards, since these are recoverable.
Telephone "cramming" (charging on phone bill for services never received) is a
novel trick that phone companies are fighting. "Slamming" involves getting you to switch
your phone account, and has been engaged in by reputable companies.
NCL also warns against "repairing your credit," cheap advance fee loans,
sweepstakes, "you have won a vacation" and work-at-home plans, the more
conventional tricks to elicit fees from you. The famous 419 Nigerian money
offers (named after a section in Nigeria’s criminal code) are ruses to get your bank account and routing numbers, so that the crook can access your deposits. The offer is aimed at the slightly larcenous, and involves requests for help in clearing out some multi-million dollar bank accounts in Nigeria containing bribes. The originators, with official looking letterheads, need a foreign collaborator, because exporting currency is illegal etc. etc. Anyone who gets caught in this one deserves the loss.
Several sites, such as consumer.gov, warn you against identity theft, with
someone using your name, date of birth and SS number to establish a credit
card, bank account, or cellular phone account, or changing the address on an
existing one. These are expensive frauds, with 300,000 complaints each year. Cancel (not
just cut up) unused credit cards, shred bills and cancelled checks, protect
your mother's maiden name. Order, occasionally, credit reports from the three
credit report agencies: Equifax (800-525-6285), Experian (800-301-7195) and
Trans Union (800-680-7289), to see if your credit is in good shape.
If you have been defrauded, www.ifccfbi.gov, the Internet Fraud Complaint Center,
an FBI/National White Collar Crime Center, will accept your story, evaluate it
and send it to a local, state or federal agency. You have to provide your
phone number for the investigator to call. They are a bit busy this year, with tracking reports of terrorists.
Saturday, January 19, 2002
Fielding Dawson (1939-1/5/2002) - obituary
Posted by Wally Dobelis on 1/18/2002, 7:35 am
Fielding Dawson, American writer and painter (1930-1/5/2002)Obituary by Wally DobelisA prominent book editor stopped me on the street to comment, bitterly, that no one in the big press had seen fit to remark on the passing of Fielding Dawson, a local NYC resident and one of the last survivors of the literary era that is associated with Black Mountain, the Beats, and their contemporaries in other forms of art, Pop, Shaped Canvas, as well as early Rock.
I knew Fielding as one of the stalwarts of Max's Kansas City, the legendary artists' hangout from 1965 to 1974, as a short story writer and baseball fan. He was the pitcher for Max's softball team, and he had a pitch for me too, to support The Shortstop, a literary journal he was trying to resuscitate. Fielding knew small press publishing; he had written and drawn illustrations for such literary journals of the era as Jonathan Williams's Jargon, Sparrow, Kulchur, Caterpillar, El Corno Emplumado, Joglars, Rockbottom, Mulch and The Zealot. The names bring back the flavor of the era. We talked a lot, in the company of the Old Curmudgeon, a prominent lawyer friend. OC fondly remembers traveling with Fielding to the Cedar Bar on University, and to Lion's Head on Christopher Street, two prominent watering places for artists and writers.
In 1930, after the birth of a son in New York, the Dawson family moved to the mother's home town, Kirkwood, Mo, near St. Louis, where dad found a job in journalism, and young Fielding acquired a taste for drawing and writing. In 1949 he joined the legendary Black Mountain College in Lake Eden, NC, to study painting under Franz Kline and writing under Charles Olson.
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 as a community of students and teachers, to live and work together, by John Andrew Rice of Florida. It gained strength with the arrival of Joseph and Anni Albers, fleeing Germany after the Bauhaus was closed. Poet Charles Olson mentored a group of students later known as the Black Mountain Writers that included Charles Creeley, Robert Duncan, Joel Oppenheimer, Ed Dorn and Fielding Dawson, several of whom came back to teach. Among the 300 people who taught at BMC before the school closed in 1956 were also John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller.
The school experience shaped Dawson's life. After being drafted in the Army in 1953, as a conscientious objector, and experiencing military service in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was a cook, he came to New York. Here Franz Kline was setting the world of art on fire. The old (before the fire) Cedar Bar on University Avenue was home to Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and, occasionally Jackson Pollock, and Dawson wrote about them all. The recognition gained with his memoir of Kline, published in 1967 (the artist died in 1962), freed him of the drudgery of a service manager's job at Bon Marche on 6th Ave, and he could concentrate on writing and design (he created collages and artwork for a number of magazines), and teaching. And he wrote and continued to publish short stories.
Fielding Dawson taught writing to prisoners at Sing-Sing and Attica, near Buffalo, the site of the bloody 1971 uprising. His first creative writing class in 1984 changed his life and gave him a purpose, a commitment to facilitate self-discovery for convicts. Not an easy thing, violent men came to his classes with an attitude, and he had to learn how to criticize, all over again, in an environment of threat.
Recognizing his commitment, Larry McMurtry, then president of the American PEN, appointed Dawson to chair their languishing Prison Writing effort, with volunteers helping. He also had a radio program on WBAI, 1996-2000, reading prison inmates' writings on the air.
Of Dawson's recent books, "No Man's Land," (Dec. 2000) was a fictionalized account of his teaching, and "Land of Milk and Honey" (Fall 2001) was a collection of short stories. A review in the New York Times, described his style as loose, almost bebop. That was the way his generation wrote. Creeley and other reviewers have described it as fast shifts, doubling back and reversing, a way of telling a story that immediately convinces.
Of the historiographers of Black Mountain College, Fielding Dawson was the only one who actually studied there, and his eponymous 1970 book, revised and reissued in 1990, is in print. .
His 22 books were written over a nearly 50 year period, on a range of subject matter. Most are collections of short stories ( his mother bought him a typewriter at 15, remarking " we could use a new Saroyan.") There are also biographies, criticism, poems and novels. The title of the novel Penny Lane gave birth to Two and Three Penny Lane.
Black Sparrow Press, a recognized publishing house of many important poets of the era, took him on in 1969, with "Krazy Kat," a collection of short stories. This press was organized in 1966 by businessman John Martin to print the poems of Charles Bukowski, and took on a life of its own, as the flagship venue for Diane Wakoski, Clayton Eshleman, also Paul Bowles, Ed Sanders, William Everson and Tom Clarke.
Fielding Dawson had lived in this East Midtown- Gramercy neighborhood for 38 years, in the same house, sharing it for the past 25 with his wife, Susan Maldovan, a free-lance editor, and frequently traveling to prisons and universities to lecture on writing and on the literary period of which he was an integral part.
He was a periodic visitor at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, and lectured at the University of Alabama in Montgomery and Wayne University in Indiana. They were active locally, as members of the Union Square Community Coalition and the Samuel J. Tilden Democratic Club. He died suddenly, on January 5, 20002, after returning home from a stay in the Beth Israel Hospital, where he had been fitted with a pace maker.The survivors also include a sister, Cara Fisher, of Canyon City CO. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, March 3, 3-7 PM, in the Parish Hall of St. Mark's Church In The Bowery.
Distributed with permission from Town & Village weekly newspaper (Hagedorn Communications).
Fielding Dawson, American writer and painter (1930-1/5/2002)Obituary by Wally DobelisA prominent book editor stopped me on the street to comment, bitterly, that no one in the big press had seen fit to remark on the passing of Fielding Dawson, a local NYC resident and one of the last survivors of the literary era that is associated with Black Mountain, the Beats, and their contemporaries in other forms of art, Pop, Shaped Canvas, as well as early Rock.
I knew Fielding as one of the stalwarts of Max's Kansas City, the legendary artists' hangout from 1965 to 1974, as a short story writer and baseball fan. He was the pitcher for Max's softball team, and he had a pitch for me too, to support The Shortstop, a literary journal he was trying to resuscitate. Fielding knew small press publishing; he had written and drawn illustrations for such literary journals of the era as Jonathan Williams's Jargon, Sparrow, Kulchur, Caterpillar, El Corno Emplumado, Joglars, Rockbottom, Mulch and The Zealot. The names bring back the flavor of the era. We talked a lot, in the company of the Old Curmudgeon, a prominent lawyer friend. OC fondly remembers traveling with Fielding to the Cedar Bar on University, and to Lion's Head on Christopher Street, two prominent watering places for artists and writers.
In 1930, after the birth of a son in New York, the Dawson family moved to the mother's home town, Kirkwood, Mo, near St. Louis, where dad found a job in journalism, and young Fielding acquired a taste for drawing and writing. In 1949 he joined the legendary Black Mountain College in Lake Eden, NC, to study painting under Franz Kline and writing under Charles Olson.
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 as a community of students and teachers, to live and work together, by John Andrew Rice of Florida. It gained strength with the arrival of Joseph and Anni Albers, fleeing Germany after the Bauhaus was closed. Poet Charles Olson mentored a group of students later known as the Black Mountain Writers that included Charles Creeley, Robert Duncan, Joel Oppenheimer, Ed Dorn and Fielding Dawson, several of whom came back to teach. Among the 300 people who taught at BMC before the school closed in 1956 were also John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller.
The school experience shaped Dawson's life. After being drafted in the Army in 1953, as a conscientious objector, and experiencing military service in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was a cook, he came to New York. Here Franz Kline was setting the world of art on fire. The old (before the fire) Cedar Bar on University Avenue was home to Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and, occasionally Jackson Pollock, and Dawson wrote about them all. The recognition gained with his memoir of Kline, published in 1967 (the artist died in 1962), freed him of the drudgery of a service manager's job at Bon Marche on 6th Ave, and he could concentrate on writing and design (he created collages and artwork for a number of magazines), and teaching. And he wrote and continued to publish short stories.
Fielding Dawson taught writing to prisoners at Sing-Sing and Attica, near Buffalo, the site of the bloody 1971 uprising. His first creative writing class in 1984 changed his life and gave him a purpose, a commitment to facilitate self-discovery for convicts. Not an easy thing, violent men came to his classes with an attitude, and he had to learn how to criticize, all over again, in an environment of threat.
Recognizing his commitment, Larry McMurtry, then president of the American PEN, appointed Dawson to chair their languishing Prison Writing effort, with volunteers helping. He also had a radio program on WBAI, 1996-2000, reading prison inmates' writings on the air.
Of Dawson's recent books, "No Man's Land," (Dec. 2000) was a fictionalized account of his teaching, and "Land of Milk and Honey" (Fall 2001) was a collection of short stories. A review in the New York Times, described his style as loose, almost bebop. That was the way his generation wrote. Creeley and other reviewers have described it as fast shifts, doubling back and reversing, a way of telling a story that immediately convinces.
Of the historiographers of Black Mountain College, Fielding Dawson was the only one who actually studied there, and his eponymous 1970 book, revised and reissued in 1990, is in print. .
His 22 books were written over a nearly 50 year period, on a range of subject matter. Most are collections of short stories ( his mother bought him a typewriter at 15, remarking " we could use a new Saroyan.") There are also biographies, criticism, poems and novels. The title of the novel Penny Lane gave birth to Two and Three Penny Lane.
Black Sparrow Press, a recognized publishing house of many important poets of the era, took him on in 1969, with "Krazy Kat," a collection of short stories. This press was organized in 1966 by businessman John Martin to print the poems of Charles Bukowski, and took on a life of its own, as the flagship venue for Diane Wakoski, Clayton Eshleman, also Paul Bowles, Ed Sanders, William Everson and Tom Clarke.
Fielding Dawson had lived in this East Midtown- Gramercy neighborhood for 38 years, in the same house, sharing it for the past 25 with his wife, Susan Maldovan, a free-lance editor, and frequently traveling to prisons and universities to lecture on writing and on the literary period of which he was an integral part.
He was a periodic visitor at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, and lectured at the University of Alabama in Montgomery and Wayne University in Indiana. They were active locally, as members of the Union Square Community Coalition and the Samuel J. Tilden Democratic Club. He died suddenly, on January 5, 20002, after returning home from a stay in the Beth Israel Hospital, where he had been fitted with a pace maker.The survivors also include a sister, Cara Fisher, of Canyon City CO. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, March 3, 3-7 PM, in the Parish Hall of St. Mark's Church In The Bowery.
Distributed with permission from Town & Village weekly newspaper (Hagedorn Communications).
Tuesday, January 08, 2002
Friends, neighbors, good strangers, we salute you!
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
A paean of peace
This column offers its New Year respects, salutations and greetings to the neighbors, friends and strangers who come to mind at year-end. Many more greetings to come, God willing.
First and foremost, our respects to the 3,000 neighbors, including the 400 firemen, policemen and officers who were murdered by the kind of wanton villain the world has never seen before, and to President George W. Bush, his Washington command and the members of our Armed Forces who are making sure that we will never experience such villainy again.
To Rudy Giuliani, whom we hated to love, but ended up admiring. Be our worthy hero, continue to make us proud of you.
To the new NYC administration, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Public Advocate Betsy Greenbaum and Comptroller William C. Thompson. I have admired the inventor of the Bloomberg Box ever since I discovered one in my employer's Investment Department and was given the use of it after hours, for audit work. It was then a fantastic stepup from the simple electronic stock ticker, it offered stock and bond prices, histories, analyses and projections, a miracle of its day. Now we can get some of the above free of charge, for personal use, through Yahoo and other Internet services, but then... A man who could walk the idea of his invention out of Solomon Bros, implement it and sell the machines back to Solly will certainly be New York's Mayor for all seasons. Particularly in the season of the $4 billion crisis we are facing.
To Nicholas Scopetta, who at age 69 and after five hard years as the Commissioner of Administration for Children's Services will take on the task of rebuilding the terribly destroyed Fire Department, stay strong.
To Henry Stern, Commissioner of Parks and Recreation for 15 of the past 19 years, seven under Mayor Koch and eight under Mayor Giuliani. Happy landings, Starquest, you will be remembered.
To Dr Allen Chartock, Chairman of the WAMC Northeast Network, who forecasts that Rudy will form his own independent political party and win the 2004 Presidential election over Bush and Gore. He also predicts that Andrew Cuomo will see the inevitable and gracefully accept the designation of Lieutenant Governor candidate, leaving the top spot to Carl McCall. He is also big on put-ons.
Th Martha Stewart, who stacked up quite well in the battle of wits with the Car Talk boys (Tom and Ray Magliozzi) on Public Radio, offering tongue-in-cheek advice to callers, on such topics as ecologically sound decorations for wedding getaway cars (stick with the tin cans, rice on the road may be bad for the birds, might cause roadkill), use of the gas filter as a pastry flour sifter (no way), broiling chicken on a car manifold (it will work at fast speeds, over the distance of Las Vegas to LA, don't forget to split the bird to expedite the process, wrap it in vellum paper before the aluminum, to lessen the chances of Alzheimer's), and use of Mexican tile to decorate your dashboard.
To the workers at Ground Zero, and to Arlene Harrison and her stalwarts from Gramercy Park Block Association and everywhere else (Claudia Mayer, Lisa Anastasia, Jennifer Campbell, Katharine English and Kathleen Scup, to name a few), who have been feeding them, policemen, firemen, Ground Zero volunteers and now the Emergency Squad #1, ever since 9/11. Nearly 50 neighborhood restaurateurs have volunteered food, such as Beppe's, Mumbles, Sal Anthony's, Adriana's, the four Danny Meyer's places (some day I will mention you all, God bless), also the local churches, synagogues, Edwin Gould Foundation, CVS, Gramercy Park Hotel and more - you are all great.
To Rabbi Emeritus Irving J. Block , who pioneered in the fostering of coexistence between Muslims and Jews by having the late Imam Seif Ashmavy speak at the Brotherhood Synagogue during the first Intifada.
To New York Times, who as of 1/1/02 have turned the sports section right side up. I was getting a crick in the neck. Unlike their former Chief Editor Joseph Lelyveld, I cannot speed-read upside down.
To Vanity Fair magazine of the elegant prose, for eschewing the supermarket weeklies' topics, such as the misadventures of wealthy New York kid druggies who max out their indifferent parents' credit cards. Since 9/11 VF has concentrated on adult material. And to the New Yorker, who always had adult text; all they need now is greater cartoons.
To WNYC, New York's Public Radio station, who we hope will collect enough funds to revive its FM music station, which currently has taken over the afternoon air. WNYC's talk show afficionados are getting worn out by esoteric music. I'm sure the FM fans are equally bothered by our beloved politico-lit chatter. Love you anyway. LOL, :)
Finally, to Wystan Hugh. Auden (1907-73), who, 62 years ago, sitting in a dive, uncertain and afraid, cried over the expiry of the clever hopes of a low dishonest decade. He feared the arrival of waves of anger and fear, obsessing our private lives. As the odors of death offended the September air, and important persons spoke windy words, he saw hope only in loving one another. Men and women crave not universal love; they want to be loved alone. Under the ironic points of light through which the Just communicate, our poet wanted to show an affirming flame. Not a bad ambition, for all of us. The paraphrased words are from W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939."
A paean of peace
This column offers its New Year respects, salutations and greetings to the neighbors, friends and strangers who come to mind at year-end. Many more greetings to come, God willing.
First and foremost, our respects to the 3,000 neighbors, including the 400 firemen, policemen and officers who were murdered by the kind of wanton villain the world has never seen before, and to President George W. Bush, his Washington command and the members of our Armed Forces who are making sure that we will never experience such villainy again.
To Rudy Giuliani, whom we hated to love, but ended up admiring. Be our worthy hero, continue to make us proud of you.
To the new NYC administration, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Public Advocate Betsy Greenbaum and Comptroller William C. Thompson. I have admired the inventor of the Bloomberg Box ever since I discovered one in my employer's Investment Department and was given the use of it after hours, for audit work. It was then a fantastic stepup from the simple electronic stock ticker, it offered stock and bond prices, histories, analyses and projections, a miracle of its day. Now we can get some of the above free of charge, for personal use, through Yahoo and other Internet services, but then... A man who could walk the idea of his invention out of Solomon Bros, implement it and sell the machines back to Solly will certainly be New York's Mayor for all seasons. Particularly in the season of the $4 billion crisis we are facing.
To Nicholas Scopetta, who at age 69 and after five hard years as the Commissioner of Administration for Children's Services will take on the task of rebuilding the terribly destroyed Fire Department, stay strong.
To Henry Stern, Commissioner of Parks and Recreation for 15 of the past 19 years, seven under Mayor Koch and eight under Mayor Giuliani. Happy landings, Starquest, you will be remembered.
To Dr Allen Chartock, Chairman of the WAMC Northeast Network, who forecasts that Rudy will form his own independent political party and win the 2004 Presidential election over Bush and Gore. He also predicts that Andrew Cuomo will see the inevitable and gracefully accept the designation of Lieutenant Governor candidate, leaving the top spot to Carl McCall. He is also big on put-ons.
Th Martha Stewart, who stacked up quite well in the battle of wits with the Car Talk boys (Tom and Ray Magliozzi) on Public Radio, offering tongue-in-cheek advice to callers, on such topics as ecologically sound decorations for wedding getaway cars (stick with the tin cans, rice on the road may be bad for the birds, might cause roadkill), use of the gas filter as a pastry flour sifter (no way), broiling chicken on a car manifold (it will work at fast speeds, over the distance of Las Vegas to LA, don't forget to split the bird to expedite the process, wrap it in vellum paper before the aluminum, to lessen the chances of Alzheimer's), and use of Mexican tile to decorate your dashboard.
To the workers at Ground Zero, and to Arlene Harrison and her stalwarts from Gramercy Park Block Association and everywhere else (Claudia Mayer, Lisa Anastasia, Jennifer Campbell, Katharine English and Kathleen Scup, to name a few), who have been feeding them, policemen, firemen, Ground Zero volunteers and now the Emergency Squad #1, ever since 9/11. Nearly 50 neighborhood restaurateurs have volunteered food, such as Beppe's, Mumbles, Sal Anthony's, Adriana's, the four Danny Meyer's places (some day I will mention you all, God bless), also the local churches, synagogues, Edwin Gould Foundation, CVS, Gramercy Park Hotel and more - you are all great.
To Rabbi Emeritus Irving J. Block , who pioneered in the fostering of coexistence between Muslims and Jews by having the late Imam Seif Ashmavy speak at the Brotherhood Synagogue during the first Intifada.
To New York Times, who as of 1/1/02 have turned the sports section right side up. I was getting a crick in the neck. Unlike their former Chief Editor Joseph Lelyveld, I cannot speed-read upside down.
To Vanity Fair magazine of the elegant prose, for eschewing the supermarket weeklies' topics, such as the misadventures of wealthy New York kid druggies who max out their indifferent parents' credit cards. Since 9/11 VF has concentrated on adult material. And to the New Yorker, who always had adult text; all they need now is greater cartoons.
To WNYC, New York's Public Radio station, who we hope will collect enough funds to revive its FM music station, which currently has taken over the afternoon air. WNYC's talk show afficionados are getting worn out by esoteric music. I'm sure the FM fans are equally bothered by our beloved politico-lit chatter. Love you anyway. LOL, :)
Finally, to Wystan Hugh. Auden (1907-73), who, 62 years ago, sitting in a dive, uncertain and afraid, cried over the expiry of the clever hopes of a low dishonest decade. He feared the arrival of waves of anger and fear, obsessing our private lives. As the odors of death offended the September air, and important persons spoke windy words, he saw hope only in loving one another. Men and women crave not universal love; they want to be loved alone. Under the ironic points of light through which the Just communicate, our poet wanted to show an affirming flame. Not a bad ambition, for all of us. The paraphrased words are from W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939."
Wednesday, January 02, 2002
Dr. Paranoia's New Year forecast of American thinking for 2002w
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Dr Paranoia suggests that if you think the latest crisis, the conflict between India and Pakistan, is not al-Qaeda’s work, you have not been close to the news. The conflict over the state of Kashmir (60 percent Muslim, joined India during the implementation of the Indian Independence Act of 1947 by decree of Maharajah Hari Singh, who wanted a strong suzerain, to avoid tribal warfare) was the cause of the wars of 1947-48 and 1965, and the skirmish of 1999. Since 1989 Kashmir’s independence-oriented nationalist revolutionaries been sidelined by the religious fanatic al-Qaeda types, the non-native Afghan war veterans based in Pakistan. Unquestionably, the suicide attack on the Indian Parliament was their effort to provoke India’s warlike reaction towards Pakistan, to cause a shift of the latter’s army toward the eastern 1,800 mile Indian border, thus relieving the military surveilance and pressure at the western Afghanistan border on the al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, both inside and outside Pakistan.
The Indians are punishing the Pakistanis for their failure to shut down the terrorist organizations. Their demands aggravate the internal struggle General Musharraf has with the religious fanatics and their Army supporters in conjunction with the Afghan war.. If he accedes to the Indian demands and attempts to destroy the Muslim terrorist organizations hiding under a patriotic pro-Kashmir shield, he risks a revolt in the Army, and the world risks seeing him deposed, and a revolutionary government of Muslim militants running a country with atomic weapons.
This threat of war on part of the Indians presents not only a nuclear risk to the world but also a commercial threat to the US corporations who have outsourced heir computer work and files to South India, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Madras, over the past years of peace. These dollars present substantial relief for the poverty-beset. country of 1,030 million inhabitants. Some corporate expression of concern over potential wartime destruction of vital files and services might help slow down India’s war enthusiasts. Indians are practical people. If Prime Minister Atal Behari Vaypayee has chosen not to recognize that he is being used by al-Qaeda, some of the 136 members of the Anti-Terrorism Coalition might do the world a service by bringing it to his attention, with all due respect. Al-Qaeda’s tactic is the well-practiced "enemy of peace" ploy that has destroyed coexistence negotiations in Israel, year after year. It has been used not only by Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah but also by such individuals as a Dr. Baruch Goldstein and the killer of Yitzhak Rabin..
On the other hand, the pressure on General Musharraf to move against internal terrorists might produce real results, as did, apparently, Ariel Sharon’s most recent demands that Arafat close the Palestinian terrorist organizations. The threat that made Arafat move was self-interest, the fact that by inaction he was empowering some rivals and fostering his replacement by a more effective and less corrupt new Palestinian coalition. The same applies to Musharraf, he must move against the internal opponents before they move against him. The world can only hope, and apply economic pressure. Warfare, in the form of a Kosovo-type NATO action, is not justified.
But what are the new rules of warfare? How and when does "the world," (however defined, UN, NATO, the Anti-Terrorism Coalition, or US unilaterally) exercise restraints and retaliate against warring nations that might use atomic weapons? What about use of tactical vs. genocidal weapons? Potential of biological warfare? When and how does the world react to defiant terrorist-fostering countries - Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba - that disclaim the accusations? What constitutes adequate evidence for preemptive world action? May the world attack terrorist camps of terrorists in certain countries - Indonesia, the Philippines, Yemen - who have settled there against their hosts’ will?
On the battle field, does the Geneva Convention apply in warfare against terror? How does it work with wounded POWs who surrender with live hand grenades strapped to their bodies and threaten to blow up the hospital where they are treated? Should the al-Qaeda POWs be released after the war is over, if the world knows that their fanatic intent is to go back to destroying peaceful governments that they oppose for religious reasons? Should there be WWII-type detention camps, forever? (Incidentally, if the US expects its informants to dig up information at a Guantanamo al-Qaeda detention camp, where the leaders will exercise controls and do heavy indoctrination, think again. Individual confinement may be more productive for deprogramming.). What about terrorists who hide ammunition in churches, mosques, population centers and hospitals, and use civilians as shields for warlike acts? How about those ho use the white flag to ambush negotiators or take hostages? Are warlike acts against such terrorist warfare that incur "collateral damage" to be subject to international court proceedings? Are small Special Forces units acting behind enemy lines to take POWs (think of Senator Bob Kerry and Vietnam)?
Now the NGOs. How does the world deal with educational and medical care institutions, such as Hezbollah, that also serve as breeding and incubator organizations for suicide bombers? What about the charities that serve the same mixed agenda? And the banks, US, Somali and Mafiya, that transfer the funds for the above?
And religion. How does civilization deal with members of clergy who, under the flag off religious freedom, preach intolerance, advocate murder and recruit terrorists? And civilians who do the same under the excuse of free speech?. Should we countenance the use of the Bill of Rights against itself?
In discussing these subjects on the Internet with informed people, the proposed remedies go much against Dr Paranoia’s Four Freedoms- oriented mind, but the world is changing. Proposed actions range from local customs-oriented field justice for terrorist POWs who do not accept the Geneva Convention, appropriate direct retaliation against terrorist individuals, organizations and countries, upon establishing of adequate proof (that can be eventually used in the World Court). It is proposed that denials and token collaboration with the Alliance do not make friends out of terrorist nations. A preemptive strike against Saddam Hussein is suggested, to avoid a potential nuclear disaster when he has his weapon in place, in the style of Israel’s. strike of 1981. We moderates are urged to remember the visions of burning Americans jumping out of the WTC towers, holding hands.
Seeing these strong opinions in print, Dr Paranoia wishes he had his old world back, but "panta res," everything flows, you can never step back into the same river again, as Heraclites of Ephesus recognized 2,500 years ago. As a personal New Year’s resolution, he intends to try to be more patient with people, and to say a kind thing to at least one stranger every day. Happy 2002 to everybody.
Dr Paranoia suggests that if you think the latest crisis, the conflict between India and Pakistan, is not al-Qaeda’s work, you have not been close to the news. The conflict over the state of Kashmir (60 percent Muslim, joined India during the implementation of the Indian Independence Act of 1947 by decree of Maharajah Hari Singh, who wanted a strong suzerain, to avoid tribal warfare) was the cause of the wars of 1947-48 and 1965, and the skirmish of 1999. Since 1989 Kashmir’s independence-oriented nationalist revolutionaries been sidelined by the religious fanatic al-Qaeda types, the non-native Afghan war veterans based in Pakistan. Unquestionably, the suicide attack on the Indian Parliament was their effort to provoke India’s warlike reaction towards Pakistan, to cause a shift of the latter’s army toward the eastern 1,800 mile Indian border, thus relieving the military surveilance and pressure at the western Afghanistan border on the al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, both inside and outside Pakistan.
The Indians are punishing the Pakistanis for their failure to shut down the terrorist organizations. Their demands aggravate the internal struggle General Musharraf has with the religious fanatics and their Army supporters in conjunction with the Afghan war.. If he accedes to the Indian demands and attempts to destroy the Muslim terrorist organizations hiding under a patriotic pro-Kashmir shield, he risks a revolt in the Army, and the world risks seeing him deposed, and a revolutionary government of Muslim militants running a country with atomic weapons.
This threat of war on part of the Indians presents not only a nuclear risk to the world but also a commercial threat to the US corporations who have outsourced heir computer work and files to South India, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Madras, over the past years of peace. These dollars present substantial relief for the poverty-beset. country of 1,030 million inhabitants. Some corporate expression of concern over potential wartime destruction of vital files and services might help slow down India’s war enthusiasts. Indians are practical people. If Prime Minister Atal Behari Vaypayee has chosen not to recognize that he is being used by al-Qaeda, some of the 136 members of the Anti-Terrorism Coalition might do the world a service by bringing it to his attention, with all due respect. Al-Qaeda’s tactic is the well-practiced "enemy of peace" ploy that has destroyed coexistence negotiations in Israel, year after year. It has been used not only by Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah but also by such individuals as a Dr. Baruch Goldstein and the killer of Yitzhak Rabin..
On the other hand, the pressure on General Musharraf to move against internal terrorists might produce real results, as did, apparently, Ariel Sharon’s most recent demands that Arafat close the Palestinian terrorist organizations. The threat that made Arafat move was self-interest, the fact that by inaction he was empowering some rivals and fostering his replacement by a more effective and less corrupt new Palestinian coalition. The same applies to Musharraf, he must move against the internal opponents before they move against him. The world can only hope, and apply economic pressure. Warfare, in the form of a Kosovo-type NATO action, is not justified.
But what are the new rules of warfare? How and when does "the world," (however defined, UN, NATO, the Anti-Terrorism Coalition, or US unilaterally) exercise restraints and retaliate against warring nations that might use atomic weapons? What about use of tactical vs. genocidal weapons? Potential of biological warfare? When and how does the world react to defiant terrorist-fostering countries - Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba - that disclaim the accusations? What constitutes adequate evidence for preemptive world action? May the world attack terrorist camps of terrorists in certain countries - Indonesia, the Philippines, Yemen - who have settled there against their hosts’ will?
On the battle field, does the Geneva Convention apply in warfare against terror? How does it work with wounded POWs who surrender with live hand grenades strapped to their bodies and threaten to blow up the hospital where they are treated? Should the al-Qaeda POWs be released after the war is over, if the world knows that their fanatic intent is to go back to destroying peaceful governments that they oppose for religious reasons? Should there be WWII-type detention camps, forever? (Incidentally, if the US expects its informants to dig up information at a Guantanamo al-Qaeda detention camp, where the leaders will exercise controls and do heavy indoctrination, think again. Individual confinement may be more productive for deprogramming.). What about terrorists who hide ammunition in churches, mosques, population centers and hospitals, and use civilians as shields for warlike acts? How about those ho use the white flag to ambush negotiators or take hostages? Are warlike acts against such terrorist warfare that incur "collateral damage" to be subject to international court proceedings? Are small Special Forces units acting behind enemy lines to take POWs (think of Senator Bob Kerry and Vietnam)?
Now the NGOs. How does the world deal with educational and medical care institutions, such as Hezbollah, that also serve as breeding and incubator organizations for suicide bombers? What about the charities that serve the same mixed agenda? And the banks, US, Somali and Mafiya, that transfer the funds for the above?
And religion. How does civilization deal with members of clergy who, under the flag off religious freedom, preach intolerance, advocate murder and recruit terrorists? And civilians who do the same under the excuse of free speech?. Should we countenance the use of the Bill of Rights against itself?
In discussing these subjects on the Internet with informed people, the proposed remedies go much against Dr Paranoia’s Four Freedoms- oriented mind, but the world is changing. Proposed actions range from local customs-oriented field justice for terrorist POWs who do not accept the Geneva Convention, appropriate direct retaliation against terrorist individuals, organizations and countries, upon establishing of adequate proof (that can be eventually used in the World Court). It is proposed that denials and token collaboration with the Alliance do not make friends out of terrorist nations. A preemptive strike against Saddam Hussein is suggested, to avoid a potential nuclear disaster when he has his weapon in place, in the style of Israel’s. strike of 1981. We moderates are urged to remember the visions of burning Americans jumping out of the WTC towers, holding hands.
Seeing these strong opinions in print, Dr Paranoia wishes he had his old world back, but "panta res," everything flows, you can never step back into the same river again, as Heraclites of Ephesus recognized 2,500 years ago. As a personal New Year’s resolution, he intends to try to be more patient with people, and to say a kind thing to at least one stranger every day. Happy 2002 to everybody.
