Wednesday, May 21, 2003

RT was here

When I told my colleagues at work that both of my seats for Tuesday night’s ballgame at Safeco Field were available (usually, I take one seat and offer the other to friends), they were surprised.  You’re going to be in Seattle but not at the ballpark?? was uttered by more than one.  When I explained that I could go to Safeco any time I wanted, that it isn’t every day that one gets the opportunity to see Richard Thompson, I was met mostly with blank stares.  British guitar god ... was in Fairport Convention didn’t enlighten many of those faces.

How unfortunate for them. 

RT is truly a wonder to behold, one of the most brilliant and most talented musicians it has ever been my privilege to witness.  Last night’s show was mostly electric, mostly with his current band, and entirely great.  Perhaps the best comment came from my brother-in-law, who joined me at the King Cat Theatre in downtown Seattle for the show.  After the concert, Mark admitted that he really hadn’t been familiar with Richard Thompson, that he’d come along to the show based entirely on my enthusiastic recommendation.  Furthermore, he noted that he didn’t recognize any of the songs he heard, that there wasn’t a single “aha, so that’s who plays that one” moment.  That said, he exclaimed that he had been mightily impressed, thoroughly awed!  He said he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been introduced to an artist wholly unknown to him and really, really enjoyed the experience.  I intend to collect the half-dozen or so Richard Thompson CDs I own and lend them to Mark for his further edification.

This concluded a couple of very strong musical weeks here in Seattle.  Well, I suppose I should narrow that down to strength in the “singer-songwriter” or “folkie” genre.  Between May 2 and May 20, I had the great privilege of enjoying the prodigious talents of Greg Brown, Richard Shindell, Lucy Kaplansky, and now Richard Thompson.  Because he showed up in Seattle on Mother’s Day, when I was celebrating with my sister and her family, I missed seeing John Gorka.  I hope his show at the Tractor Tavern was better attended than the embarrassingly low turnout, barely into double-figures, last year (or was it two years ago?) on Father’s Day for Cliff Eberhardt.  Speaking of the Tractor, I thought it was rather strange that on the very same night that Richard was at the King Cat, the Tractor presented John Renbourn, one of the leading lights of Fairport Convention’s late-Sixties Brit-folk rival The Pentangle.  Closing the circle, another member of The Pentangle was Danny Thompson, no relation to Richard but a regular collaborator with RT on recordings and tours.  Danny isn’t on this current US tour, but will join Richard when he goes back to Europe and the UK next month.

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Departees

In every Sunday edition of the Seattle Times, the Passages page displays obituaries and short memorial blurbs about prominent people who died during the preceding week.  Though local personages dominate the lists in the Times, I thought it might be fitting to say a few words about some of this week’s more widely-known decedents.

Before starting, however, a brief digression.  Necrologies have long been an informal interest of mine.  Coincidentally, and for reasons having nothing to do with remembering those no longer among the living, I’ve met (yes, actually met) perhaps the two leading necrologists on the web.  I knew Larry Kestenbaum on a high-traffic email list for several years before he opened his Political Graveyard site in 1996, and was an early devotee of what has turned out to be one of the very best uses of the web by anyone, for any purpose.  Also, back in my Pittsburgh days, I was in a “foodie” group that included Jim and Laurie Mann, proprietor of the well-known Dead People Server.  To finish off this backgrounder, one of my can’t-miss TV programs is the annual necrology segment, always on either the last show of the year or the first of the new year, on CBS Sunday Morning, the show that originally featured Charles Kuralt and now stars Charles Osgood.

And now, without further ado, the week’s dearly departed…

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

FCC rules and the Senate hearings

Unable to sleep due to a miserable head cold, I turned on the TV in the wee hours of last night/this morning.  Clicking past innumerable infomercials and repeats of shows I didn’t want to watch the first (or second, or third, or ...) time they were on the schedule, I eventually landed on the invaluable C-SPAN, which was showing Tuesday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearings on the proposed FCC rules.  That certainly prompted me to pay attention between my sneezes, coughs, and nose-blowing.

The committee heard from four witnesses—Frank Blethen, publisher and CEO of the Seattle Times and five other newspapers; William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, owner of 50 newspapers (including the Denver Post and the Salt Lake Tribune) and several other media sources; Mel Karmazin, president and COO of media conglomerate Viacom; and Jim Goodmon, president and CEO of Capitol Broadcasting, a North Carolina company with five TV stations, WRAL-FM in Raleigh, and other media interests in the state.

Karmazin and Blethen were, predictably, on opposite sides of the issue, with Karmazin urging removal of as much FCC oversight of media giants as possible while Blethen, whose flagship newspaper may be the largest daily in the country to oppose the proposed changes, decried any and all cross-ownership of newspapers and TV while emphasizing the value of local ownership and local roots for media companies.  Goodmon, whose TV stations are affiliated with a variety of networks (two with CBS/Viacom, one with UPN/Viacom, one with Fox, and one with WB/AOL Time Warner), strongly and passionately supported localism, reminding the senators of the value of local ownership and involvement.  Singleton, who appeared, at least to me, to be out of his league in comparison to his fellow witnesses, talked about economy of scale and combined newspaper-TV staffing while supporting FCC chair Powell’s position on the June 2 decision.

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Texas craziness

Amidst the high and low humor of the flight of the Democratic state House members to prevent fulfillment of a quorum call in Austin, we hear that governor Rick Perry or House Speaker Tom Craddick or US House Majority Leader Tom Delay or some other equally-crazed Texas Republican tried to send out the Texas Rangers to track down the wayward Dems and ... ARREST THEM.

Arrest them?  Arrest them??  Arrest them???? What on earth could they possibly be charged with?

Playing hooky?
Truancy?
Absence without a doctor’s note?

Just about the only thing I can imagine, based on the blatantly self-serving coup attempt by the Republicans, is

Leaving the scene of a crime

Early in this comic drama, there was even talk that some Texas official wanted to contact the federal Department of Justice to enlist some G-men to round up those wayward legislators.  Adding interstate flight to those charges would certainly throw a scare into those scaredy-Dems, wouldn’t it?  Happily, not even John Ashcroft’s DOJ could come up with a way to justify a siege at that motel in Ardmore, Oklahoma.  So the Texas House Democrats continue to loll beside the pool with their mai-tais while the rest of the country laughs heartily at their silly Republican colleagues.

Monday, May 12, 2003

MoveOn to Stop the FCC

Lisa English, proprietor of the very excellent Ruminate This, writes to urge her blogospheric colleagues to join in the effort to pressure the Federal Communications Commission to refrain from changing its rules on competition.  Michael Powell, chair of the FCC (and not-coincidentally Colin’s son), has called for an FCC vote on the issue on June 2.  The proposed changes would hasten the wave of media consolidation already extant, allowing, say, Clear Channel Communications or Fox or Viacom to own not only huge stockpiles of radio stations, but also to obtain monopoly or oligopoly control of radio, TV, and print media in the nation’s media markets.

An online petition drive has been organized by those great folks at MoveOn.org.  They make it very easy to send your thoughts and opinions to your representatives in Washington and to the FCC.  I strongly urge you to join Lisa, and me, and thousands of your fellow Americans by making yourself heard before it’s too late:

CLICK HERE to join Moveon.org in asking that “Congress and the FCC stop media deregulation and work to make the media diverse, competitive, balanced, and fair."

But you should do even more than that.  Tell your friends about it!  Tell your neighbors!  Send them this letter to urge them to participate!

We have only a few more weeks to shine the light of publicity on Michael Powell’s anti-democratic, anti-republic, anti-American stealth attack on a competitive media.  It’s been kept under the radar by “bigger” events and by the pervasive silence on the topic we’ve seen in national press circles ... after all, the people running the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, ABC/NBC/CBS, and the like will be the beneficiaries of this consolidation. 

Only a few media outlets have paid it much mind, and fewer still have displayed an understanding of the implications of accelerated loss of diversity of opinion in the threat of media empires.  Thus, few have seen the editorial position of the family-owned Seattle Times, as expressed on April 12, 2002 and March 6, 2003.