Dead Blogging Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ at Lyric Stage

Posted on May 26, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus and I trundled down to the Lyric Stage Company to catch Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures (music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman) and say, it was . . . subarashi.

This startling, entertaining, and thrilling masterpiece puts a cap on Spiro Veloudos’ multi-year Sondheim Initiative. An unlikely friendship is forged between a samurai, Kayama, and an Americanized fisherman, Manjiro, during Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 mission to open trade relations with isolationist Japan. The two friends are caught in the inevitable winds of change and tell the story of Japan’s painful and harrowing Westernization. A highly original, inventive, powerful, and surprisingly humorous theatrical experience.

Sondheim/Weidman collaborations tend to be equal parts weird and engrossing, and Pacific Overtures is no exception. The Lyric’s producing artistic director Spiro Veloudos is something of a Sondheim soulmate, having staged ten of Sondheim’s musicals in the past 20 years. (The Lyric’s production of Sondheim/Weidman’s’s Assassins was surpassing strange and entirely compelling.)

Here’s the Lyric’s trailer for the current production, but to get a true sense of Sondheim’s brilliant lyrics, check out this performance of “Please, Hello” (at 1:29:28) from the original 1976 Broadway production. In it, emissaries from the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Russia, and France crowbar their way into Japan at the end of the 19th century. (You can read the lyrics here.)

 

Not to get technical about it, but the Lyric’s version is way more fun.

The cast is uniformly terrific (special shoutout to Gary Thomas Ng and Karina Wen), and the musicians are exceptionally adroit.

The production runs through June 16th. Well worth a trundle.

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Rest in Peace Anne Adams, Television Producer Extraordinaire

Posted on May 10, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

I loved working with Anne Adams at WGBH’s Greater Boston, where she was supervising producer from 1998 to around 2006.

She was smart, funny, and cynical – everything you could ever ask for in a co-worker.

And now she’s gone.

From Bryan Marquard’s Boston Globe obituary.

Anne Adams, WGBH-TV producer who ‘truly had an impact,’ dies at 55

With uncommon range, Anne B. Adams produced TV news and feature programs about everything from the Oklahoma City bombing to cooking and concerts, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to cancer and caring for elderly parents.

At WGBH for the past two decades, her work was honored with Emmys, James Beard awards, along with a George Foster Peabody Award for “Depression: Out of the Shadows.” After she was diagnosed with cancer 2½ years ago, her constant goal was returning to her job as a senior program producer so she could shepherd more quality shows to completion.

“The one thing driving her was getting back to work,” said her husband, Peter Masalsky. “There’s a notebook on her desk with plans for the shows and the shoots and the guests.”

I remember interviewing Anne for the Greater Boston supervising producer job – which she was supremely overqualified for – on WGBH’s loading dock so I could smoke while we talked. She looked at me like, there is something seriously wrong with you, bub.

So I hired her.

And never regretted it for a single moment.

Anne Adams was talented, accomplished, and sharp in every sense of the word.

It’s just so sad she’s no longer with us.

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Campaign Outsider Presidential Bakeoff 2020™ (Part 2)

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

Itemizing a few deductions now that Joe Biden has concluded his to-be-or-not-to-be-a-candidate interior monologue.

Item: The hardworking staff will be president before Bill de Blasio is

This is just idiotic.

Bad enough that the 2020 Democratic presidential field includes the likes of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Nowhere), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Meshuggeneh), and the Bay State’s own Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Doghouse). Now we get  this (via the unsinkable Maggie Haberman‘s Twitter feed).

The Daily Beast summed it up this way: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Unites the Nation: No One Wants Him to Run for President.

But wait! There’s more!

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Why Not?) has thrown his ski cap into the ring, forcing his brother James, who happens to be the editorial page editor of the New York Times, to recuse himself from all 2020 presidential coverage.

Thanks, bro.

Also jumping in the pool: Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Bollocks), whose best moment just might have occurred in Saturday’s Boston Globe Sports Brief column.

As freak-presidential-hopeful-for-30-seconds Michael Avenatti might say, basta!

Item: Pete Buttigieg is a total media machine

Consider these several facts:

• A few months ago, 37-year-old South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg had about 60,000 follower on Twitter. He now has over a million.

• Pete’s husband Chasten Buttigieg – who not long ago was a homeless community college student/barista – has over 300,000 followers.

• The two of them are the cover story in this week’s Time magazine.

The boys also scored the Page One power position in yesterday’s Boston Sunday Globe.

Man, that is some serious media mojo.

Item: Peggy Noodnik writes again (Edition Umpteen)

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan had one of her We Are the World moments in the latest Weekend Edition of the paper.

Republicans in a Nation Needing Repair

I want to say something big, quickly and broadly.

This week I talked with an intelligent politician who is trying to figure out the future of the Republican Party. He said that in presidential cycles down the road, it will be a relief to get back to the old conservatism of smaller government, tax cuts and reduced spending. I told him what I say to my friends: That old conservatism was deeply pertinent to its era and philosophically right, but it is not fully in line with the crises of our time or its reigning facts. As Lincoln said, the dogmas of the past are inadequate to the present: “As the cause is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”

What the nuts graf:

But beyond that fact is something bigger. America needs help right now and Americans know it. It has been enduring for many years a continuing cultural catastrophe—illegitimacy, the decline of faith, low family formation, child abuse and neglect, drugs, inadequate public education, etc. All this exists alongside an entertainment culture on which the poor and neglected are dependent . . .

Wait, what? America’s poor and neglected are dependent on our entertainment culture?

What in the world does that mean?

Do you have any idea?

‘Cause we sure as hell don’t.

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Campaign Outsider’s Presidential Bakeoff 2020™ (Part 1)

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

Itemizing a few deductions on the state of the Democratic Presidential Primary now that the number of declared candidates has hit the Big Two-Oh.

From the New York Times:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there are the real long shots to run:

Except that the one in the middle – Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado – “has been successfully treated for prostate cancer, clearing the way for a [likely] 2020 presidential campaign” according to the ABC affiliate in Denver.

With that as prologue . . .

Item: Former Rep. John Delaney (D-Who?) is #5 on Q1 fundraising list

The hardworking staff came across this first-quarter fundraising chart at Axios the other day.

Wait, what? Erstwhile Maryland congressman John Delaney, who started running for president in July of 2017, has raised $12 million since the first of the year?

From The Hill:

Delaney . . . loaned his campaign $11.7 million in the first three months of 2019. But he received less than $435,000 in outside contributions, the smallest amount of any candidate in the race.

In other words: Okay, folks – move along, move along. Nothing to see here.

Item: Regardless, Sen. Cory Booker (D-I Got a Boo) decided to whack Delaney

Also from The Hill:

Booker denies ‘swipe’ at John Delaney after his campaign sent fundraising email attacking Delaney

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) denied that his campaign was taking shots at other candidates on Tuesday just days after a fundraising email sent by Booker’s team appeared to criticize a fellow Democrat running for the party’s nomination.

Booker was questioned by reporters on the campaign trail after a fundraising email sent over the weekend referenced former Rep. John Delaney’s (D-Md.) decision to donate $11 million to his own White House bid.

“Friend, this weekend, we found out that one of the other Democrats in this race has given over $11 million of his own money to his campaign. Self-funding is something Cory just can’t and would never do,” the email obtained by CNN read.

Booker’s response? “I’m not even sure what you’re talking about, because again we are not taking swipes at other candidates.”

Booker, as it happens, is polling at 3% in Iowa, roughly in the same zip code as Delaney.

If that’s any indication, this Democratic presidential primary is on track to be like World War I – long battles for small gains.

With, most likely, commensurate results.

Item: Elizabeth Warren’s campaign officially in spaghetti-meets-wall phase 

There’s no question that from the standpoint of substantive policy proposals, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-7%) has far outstripped the Democratic presidential primary field. But her latest agenda item – calling on the House to begin impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump – is just, well, harebrained.

For two basic reasons:

1) It’s an empty exercise, since there’s no chance that 20 of Warren’s GOP counterparts would vote to convict Trump in a Senate trial.

2) It’s counterproductive, since impeachment proceedings would be more likely to return Trump to the Oval Office than remove him from it.

Only the American voter can successfully achieve the latter.

(To be sure graf goes here)

To be sure, we have the worst of both worlds here: Robert Mueller adheres to Department of Justice guidelines and declines to indict Trump for obstruction, and there’s not even a remote chance that Trump can be removed from office despite committing clearly impeachable offenses.

That means, as Charlie Sykes noted in this episode of The Bulwark Podcast, that Donald Trump is effectively above the law, at least while he remains in office. There’s something terribly wrong about that.

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Oh No the New York Times Di’int Print ‘Fucked’ on Page One!

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

Hey, the Nude York Times is one thing.

But the Crude York Times is something else.

From today’s front page:

Of course, that should come as no surprise after the Grey Lady printed Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood grab ’em boast verbatim on Page One in 2016.

Even so . . .

“I’m fucked”?

That’s fucked up, yo.

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The Nude York Times (Lucian Freud ‘Monumental’ Edition)

Posted on April 7, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

From our Grey Lady pearl-clutching desk

As the hardblushing staff has dutifully noted for the past handful of years, the New York Times is increasingly willing to bare all in the name of art – or commerce – in its advertising.

Representative samples include this ulp-skirt ad from Louis Vuitton five years ago . . .

 

 

and this Gagosian Gallery ad three years ago . . .

 

 

and this Christie’s ad the same year . . .

 

 

and this M.S. Ray Antiques ad two years ago . . .

 

 

and this really weird Met Breuer ad last year.

 

 

Now comes the latest Naked City ad in the Times, from Friday’s Weekend Arts II section.

 

 

The Acquavella exhibit Lucian Freud: Monumental (through May 24) looks, well, very Lucian.

 

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Lucian Freud: Monumental, a loan exhibition focusing on the artist’s naked portraits, a subject that has long enjoyed special significance in his oeuvre. Curated by the artist’s longtime studio assistant and friend, David Dawson, Monumental will include thirteen major paintings, including depictions of his most important models from the 1990s and 2000s.

Regardless, that latest Times ad represents one more instance of the Grey Lady opening the kimono.

Wider and wider.

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New York Times Doubles Down On Its Half-True ‘Truth’ Ad

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

As the hardworking staff noted on Saturday, for the past two years the New York Times has been one of the leading voices in the news media’s Pep Squad for Truth – those preaching-to-the-choir ad campaigns aimed at convincing the American public that real news matters.

Representative sample of the Times’ “Truth” campaign:

 

 

Problem is, the latest additions to the campaign are only semi-truthful.

The new ads revolve around Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi, who “traveled to Iraq five times and unearth[ed] more than 15,000 documents to detail the Islamic States’ bureaucratic and brutal rule.”

Here’s the TV spot.

 

 

And here’s a double-truck from yesterday’s A section of the Times.

 

 

The left-hand page quotes Callimachi: “You have to be on the ground if you want to try and understand the story. And for me, I’m trying to understand ISIS.”

The right-hand page features this copy:

Except those ads decidedly do not tell the full story. As we’ve said, there’s no question that Callimachi’s digging produced some spectacular reporting last year, as well as the riveting podcast, Caliphate.

But the full story of Callimachi’s document snatch is a lot more complicated. Last May, a piece by Maryam Saleh in The Intercept detailed the legal and ethical questions raised by the removal of the documents from Iraq. More recently, a group of Middle Eastern scholars criticized George Washington University for cooperating with the Times in creating an online archive of the ISIS files, as Inside Higher Ed’s Elizabeth Redden reported.

[The Middle East Studies Association’s] Committee on Academic Freedom wrote in a Sept. 25 letter to George Washington that its involvement with the archiving project implicates the university in many of the moral, ethical and professional issues it believed to be at stake in the newspaper’s decision to remove and publicize the documents.

(To be sure graf goes here)

To be sure, in this Q&A last May Callimachi and Times editors addressed many of the concerns that critics have raised (and yes, the original documents were delivered to the Iraqi government).

(Two be sure graf goes here)

Also to be sure, no advertiser is obliged to reveal the whole truth in its ads. In this case, though, the irony is just too thick not to, well, document it.

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Latest New York Times ‘Truth’ Commercial Is Only Half-True

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

For the past two years the New York Times has been one of the leading voices in the news media’s Pep Squad for Truth – those preaching-to-the-choir ad campaigns aimed at convincing the American public that real news matters.

The Times launched its campaign with this 2017 TV spot.

 

 

Since then the paper has run a variety of house ads like this one.

 

Now comes the latest in the series, a TV spot that documents “a New York Times reporter [Rukmini Callimachi] travel[ing] to Iraq five times and unearthing more than 15,000 documents to detail the Islamic States’ bureaucratic and brutal rule.”

 

 

Callimachi’s digging produced some spectacular reporting last year, as well as the riveting podcast, Caliphate.

But it also produced some serious controversy, as detailed by Maryam Saleh at The Intercept.

 

About a week after [Callimachi’s] piece was published, [researcher Sara] Farhan emailed Callimachi to ask if she got permission from Iraqi government officials to take the documents, and if she got consent from the people named in the files to publish their names. Farhan didn’t hear back, so she worked with two legal scholars to launch a petition calling on the Times to rethink its use of the documents. The removal of the documents violates international law, the petition authors wrote, calling for them to be returned to Iraq and warning that failure to do so would set a “dangerous precedent for the plundering of material and cultural heritage in conflict zones.”

As Saleh’s piece notes, Callimachi’s cache “is minor when compared to the scores of millions of documents the U.S. government took from Iraq following the 2003 invasion.” Regardless, it was emblematic of “the wound caused by the U.S. government’s expropriation of millions of pages of national documents.”

(To be fair graf goes here)

To be fair, 1) Callimachi says her interest was in preserving the documents, and 2) this case is a bit different since “[questions] about the ownership of the ISIS documents removed by the New York Times are even more complicated since ISIS is not a sovereign state.”

(To be sure graf goes here)

To be sure, no advertiser is obliged to reveal the whole truth in its ads. But you’d think a news organization might be a bit more fastidious than the Times spot is.

Wouldn’t you?

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Dead Blogging the Hot Rods at Larz Anderson Auto Museum

Posted on March 29, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus and I trundled over to Larz Anderson Park the other day to catch Lookin’ East: Art and Imagination of the New England Hot Rod and say, it was . . . sweeeet.

The idea of customizing attainable old cars for straight-line speed caught on in the imaginations of those dreaming of life after [World War II]. Many men received technical, mechanical, or metalworking training while in the service, also adding to their desires. In the late 1940s, men went back home with more mechanical knowledge, a fired-up imagination, a sense of danger, and often a little money in their pockets. There was also a semi-infinite supply of cars and parts with which to get creative. That same competitive spirit boiled over all across the country, as these new hot rodders did not only want to build cars but also wanted to race. Not everybody had a dry lake bed, but in plenty of regions there were unused airstrips that the military no longer needed and were just begging to be raced on, not to mention the strips of pavement between traffic lights. One of these regions was New England, already a center of creativity and innovation.

Among the honeys in the exhibit (via Hot Rod Network).

’32 Full Fendered Deuce

 

’36 Ford Three Window Coupe

 

But this is the one we wanted to take home: A very modified 1951 Ford Shoebox.

 

The exhibit runs through mid-April. So get in gear.

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Dead Blogging ‘Eaglemania’ at McMullen Museum of Art

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Campaign Outsider

Well the Missus and I trundled out to Boston College’s McMullen Museum yesterday to check out Eaglemania: Collecting Japanese Art in Gilded Age America and say, it was swell.

Eaglemania: Collecting Japanese Art in Gilded Age America celebrates and contextualizes Boston College’s monumental bronze eagle, a replica of which now appears atop a column on the University’s Linden Lane. Revealed during its recent conservation to be a Japanese masterpiece from the Meiji period (1868–1912), the original eagle was donated to Boston College in the 1950s by the estate of diplomat and collector Larz Anderson (1866–1937) and his wife, Isabel (1876–1948) . . .

In the exhibition, bronze, silver, and ivory sculptures of birds of prey, folding screens, scroll paintings, netsuke, lacquerware, ceramics, and textiles join to bring the history of the stunning Boston College eagle to life.

The eagle is quite spectacular, so here’s a better view.

 

Many of the other nearly 100 objects in the exhibit – which range from hawks and eagles in the Edo period (1615–1868) to exquisitely crafted folding screens to stunning porcelain works – are equally arresting.

Representative samples:

 

The exhibit runs through June 2. Well worth a trundle.

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