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Clinton’s dominance stretches to the West: Hillary blocks Bernie’s chance for comeback with Arizona win

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Published on March 22, 2016 21:20

“Be careful or I will spill the beans on your wife”: Trump’s Twitter fingers threaten Ted Cruz’s family

Donald Trump is lashing out on Twitter, again, and this time he's set his target on Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi. Not exactly a new low. "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!" Trump tweeted twice Tuesday night, as the Republican frontrunner waited for elections result from Arizona and Utah. Trump was apparently upset by an image of his wife, Melania, in an anti-Trump attack. The suggestive picture of Trump's former model wife, from a shoot for British GQ in 2000, was used by an anti-Trump group hoping to gin up Mormon voters with appeals to their morality in an effort to ramp up the anti-Trump vote:

"Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad," Trump tweeted late Monday, incorrectly accusing his Republican presidential opponent of being the source of the attack: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... But as Buzzfeed reported, the Make America Awesome Political Action Committee, run by GOP operative Liz Mair, is behind the ad, not Cruz. Cruz said as much, responding to Trump's threat. "Donald, if you try to attack Heidi, you're more of a coward than I thought," Cruz tweeted: https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/71... Mair, the actual source of the ad, responded to Trump's misplaced aggression with a bit of humor: https://twitter.com/LizMair/status/71...

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Published on March 22, 2016 19:44

Brussels and American narcissism: Europe faces a huge test — it’s one we already failed

I went to an afternoon screening of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” on Tuesday, and walked out into a world that resembled Zack Snyder’s overwrought DC Comics universe much too strongly. Anderson Cooper was on TV talking soberly about terrorism, just as he does in the film; the Times Square subway station was ringed by cops in body armor, carrying automatic weapons; an outdoor press conference was being prepared outside a police station, looking exactly like the ones hosted by beefy actors with deliberately bad haircuts in every superhero movie. I’ll review “Batman v Superman” on Wednesday; what I can tell you now is that it features a suicide bombing in a prominent American location, images of devastation in Belgium and a panicky, hysterical and narcissistic reaction to the threat of terrorism. I’m not suggesting that Snyder or the film’s writers have uncanny abilities and foresaw Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels. Those fears and realities are now permanent features of the cultural landscape. (Well, except for the Belgian part, which in the film is a reference to World War I.) There are any number of reasons why the American fear of terrorism, and our exaggerated reactions to it, are worse than the actual mayhem inflicted by murderous zealots in Brussels and Paris and Mali and San Bernardino and elsewhere. Among other things, it serves notice of how well such attacks are working: The central point of terrorism, after all, is to spread terror. Bloodshed in Western cities is no doubt desirable, from the ISIS point of view, but it’s more or less a byproduct. Another big reason, one we witnessed yet again in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s bombing attacks at the Brussels airport and a central rail station, is that these events expose our profound ignorance of history and our near-total inability to understand context. People around the world tend to describe America as a childish or juvenile nation not out of snobbery or bigotry (although those currents exist) but because it fits. We are the exceptional nation or the “indispensable nation,” to use the formulation currently favored by the Washington policy elite; we are the center of the world and the pole star of liberty, and everything that happens is about us. Someone on Fox News apparently suggested on Wednesday morning that since Brussels is considered the capital city of the European Union, by analogy this could be considered a proxy attack on Washington. It’s no surprise that Fox commentators would make wild, jingoistic claims unsupported by evidence; my point is that the same narcissistic self-absorption, and the same free-associative disregard for facts or ordinary logic or well-understood history, are widespread in our country. When I was covering the New Hampshire campaign and heard Donald Trump tell audiences that ISIS was the most brutal and barbaric phenomenon since the Middle Ages, I had the same sitcom double-take reaction as every other reasonably informed person: How does he get away with saying this shit? At the risk of tumbling into the cliché about Trump’s “poorly educated” followers, the Trumpian demographic neither knows nor cares whether the outrageous claims he makes are true, and could not successfully identify any century in the Middle Ages with 20 guesses. He has channeled their unfocused rage and resentment with a series of belligerent fantasies — the Mexican border wall, paid for by Mexico; the ban on all Muslims — that bear roughly the same relationship to actual politics or history as the superhero throwdown in Snyder’s film. (Indeed, “Batman v Superman” probably offers a more sober, adult perspective on the nature of power than the Trump campaign, which is aimed more at an infantile consciousness than a juvenile one.) Desperate to outflank Trump in his last-ditch campaign to become the standard-bearer for a Republican establishment that hates his guts, Ted Cruz has suggested that we must “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Given that law enforcement agencies are specifically empowered to interrupt criminal conspiracies, and have many tools available to accomplish that goal, it’s not quite clear what the junior senator from Texas thinks he means. To paraphrase something the late Molly Ivins said in a different context, I suspect his remarks made more sense when they involved the word “Kristallnacht.” But my fellow Americans, here’s the thing: Yes, we are once again failing the civil-liberties test, on grounds of paranoia and stupidity. But the Brussels attack, like the two Paris attacks last year, was not about us, or was about us only incidentally and indirectly. Yes, we were the nation who responded to the 9/11 attacks by deciding to bankrupt ourselves financially and morally with an unending worldwide war against a shadowy enemy who can never be defeated, and in that sense everything that has happened since has been driven by our disastrous policies and our inability to learn anything from their failures. No matter how badly we want Brussels to be an attack on our freedoms and our greatness and our glorious and noble campaign against Eastasia (or is it Eurasia?), it just wasn’t. It was the latest in a coordinated series of attacks on European social democracy at its weakest points, its points of maximum contradiction. Between the Syrian refugee crisis, a stagnant economy, the recent wave of terrorist attacks and resulting political discord, many Americans no doubt believe that Europe is in total chaos. That represents an immense failure of the American media, which is just as narcissistic as the public. Such a picture is largely untrue: In most of Western Europe, social democratic institutions have continued to function, despite abundant flaws. European citizens enjoy better healthcare than Americans and an enormously more equitable and affordable educational system. They eat better, work less and spend much more time with their friends and families, but are nearly as productive and have a similar standard of living. Europeans live longer, and have far fewer stress-related illnesses like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Even when you factor in terrorism and historically low crime rates in America, violent crime in most of Europe is 50 to 80 percent lower. None of that is to deny the significant fractures and stress points in European society, which are exactly what ISIS wants to attack. As European elites have moved ever closer to the Anglo-American model of finance capital and neoliberal economics, Europe has become increasingly fragmented and the continent’s prosperity has become more uneven than ever before. Although economic inequality remains mild by American standards, Europe’s large communities of Middle Eastern and African immigrants have become trapped in impoverished urban enclaves like Molenbeek, the now-infamous Brussels district where last fall’s Paris attacks were planned and where accused Paris ringleader Salah Abdeslam was recently arrested, an event that may have sparked Tuesday’s attacks. Europe now faces an enormous test, and an enormous choice. Can the continent’s political leaders, and its people, respond to the threat posed by domestic Islamic terrorism without surrendering the vision of multicultural, multinational, secular social democracy that the European Union at least theoretically represents? (Or used to.) Some version of combat and conflict with the so-called Islamic State is unavoidable, but the ideological and political conflict within Europe is likely to decide the future of the planet more than whatever military misadventures an anti-ISIS alliance embarks upon in the Middle East. Can Europe resist the allure of tyranny, and begin to undo the toxic policies of economic injustice, corporate criminality and social division that have done so much to create this problem and worsen it? Of course those questions are important to Americans too, and Americans will ultimately play a role in forging the answers. But pending unimaginable large changes to American society, our domestic answers are known. ISIS doesn’t need to bother fomenting panic, hysteria and tyranny on our shores; that task is done. We took the big test already, and we failed.I went to an afternoon screening of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” on Tuesday, and walked out into a world that resembled Zack Snyder’s overwrought DC Comics universe much too strongly. Anderson Cooper was on TV talking soberly about terrorism, just as he does in the film; the Times Square subway station was ringed by cops in body armor, carrying automatic weapons; an outdoor press conference was being prepared outside a police station, looking exactly like the ones hosted by beefy actors with deliberately bad haircuts in every superhero movie. I’ll review “Batman v Superman” on Wednesday; what I can tell you now is that it features a suicide bombing in a prominent American location, images of devastation in Belgium and a panicky, hysterical and narcissistic reaction to the threat of terrorism. I’m not suggesting that Snyder or the film’s writers have uncanny abilities and foresaw Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels. Those fears and realities are now permanent features of the cultural landscape. (Well, except for the Belgian part, which in the film is a reference to World War I.) There are any number of reasons why the American fear of terrorism, and our exaggerated reactions to it, are worse than the actual mayhem inflicted by murderous zealots in Brussels and Paris and Mali and San Bernardino and elsewhere. Among other things, it serves notice of how well such attacks are working: The central point of terrorism, after all, is to spread terror. Bloodshed in Western cities is no doubt desirable, from the ISIS point of view, but it’s more or less a byproduct. Another big reason, one we witnessed yet again in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s bombing attacks at the Brussels airport and a central rail station, is that these events expose our profound ignorance of history and our near-total inability to understand context. People around the world tend to describe America as a childish or juvenile nation not out of snobbery or bigotry (although those currents exist) but because it fits. We are the exceptional nation or the “indispensable nation,” to use the formulation currently favored by the Washington policy elite; we are the center of the world and the pole star of liberty, and everything that happens is about us. Someone on Fox News apparently suggested on Wednesday morning that since Brussels is considered the capital city of the European Union, by analogy this could be considered a proxy attack on Washington. It’s no surprise that Fox commentators would make wild, jingoistic claims unsupported by evidence; my point is that the same narcissistic self-absorption, and the same free-associative disregard for facts or ordinary logic or well-understood history, are widespread in our country. When I was covering the New Hampshire campaign and heard Donald Trump tell audiences that ISIS was the most brutal and barbaric phenomenon since the Middle Ages, I had the same sitcom double-take reaction as every other reasonably informed person: How does he get away with saying this shit? At the risk of tumbling into the cliché about Trump’s “poorly educated” followers, the Trumpian demographic neither knows nor cares whether the outrageous claims he makes are true, and could not successfully identify any century in the Middle Ages with 20 guesses. He has channeled their unfocused rage and resentment with a series of belligerent fantasies — the Mexican border wall, paid for by Mexico; the ban on all Muslims — that bear roughly the same relationship to actual politics or history as the superhero throwdown in Snyder’s film. (Indeed, “Batman v Superman” probably offers a more sober, adult perspective on the nature of power than the Trump campaign, which is aimed more at an infantile consciousness than a juvenile one.) Desperate to outflank Trump in his last-ditch campaign to become the standard-bearer for a Republican establishment that hates his guts, Ted Cruz has suggested that we must “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Given that law enforcement agencies are specifically empowered to interrupt criminal conspiracies, and have many tools available to accomplish that goal, it’s not quite clear what the junior senator from Texas thinks he means. To paraphrase something the late Molly Ivins said in a different context, I suspect his remarks made more sense when they involved the word “Kristallnacht.” But my fellow Americans, here’s the thing: Yes, we are once again failing the civil-liberties test, on grounds of paranoia and stupidity. But the Brussels attack, like the two Paris attacks last year, was not about us, or was about us only incidentally and indirectly. Yes, we were the nation who responded to the 9/11 attacks by deciding to bankrupt ourselves financially and morally with an unending worldwide war against a shadowy enemy who can never be defeated, and in that sense everything that has happened since has been driven by our disastrous policies and our inability to learn anything from their failures. No matter how badly we want Brussels to be an attack on our freedoms and our greatness and our glorious and noble campaign against Eastasia (or is it Eurasia?), it just wasn’t. It was the latest in a coordinated series of attacks on European social democracy at its weakest points, its points of maximum contradiction. Between the Syrian refugee crisis, a stagnant economy, the recent wave of terrorist attacks and resulting political discord, many Americans no doubt believe that Europe is in total chaos. That represents an immense failure of the American media, which is just as narcissistic as the public. Such a picture is largely untrue: In most of Western Europe, social democratic institutions have continued to function, despite abundant flaws. European citizens enjoy better healthcare than Americans and an enormously more equitable and affordable educational system. They eat better, work less and spend much more time with their friends and families, but are nearly as productive and have a similar standard of living. Europeans live longer, and have far fewer stress-related illnesses like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Even when you factor in terrorism and historically low crime rates in America, violent crime in most of Europe is 50 to 80 percent lower. None of that is to deny the significant fractures and stress points in European society, which are exactly what ISIS wants to attack. As European elites have moved ever closer to the Anglo-American model of finance capital and neoliberal economics, Europe has become increasingly fragmented and the continent’s prosperity has become more uneven than ever before. Although economic inequality remains mild by American standards, Europe’s large communities of Middle Eastern and African immigrants have become trapped in impoverished urban enclaves like Molenbeek, the now-infamous Brussels district where last fall’s Paris attacks were planned and where accused Paris ringleader Salah Abdeslam was recently arrested, an event that may have sparked Tuesday’s attacks. Europe now faces an enormous test, and an enormous choice. Can the continent’s political leaders, and its people, respond to the threat posed by domestic Islamic terrorism without surrendering the vision of multicultural, multinational, secular social democracy that the European Union at least theoretically represents? (Or used to.) Some version of combat and conflict with the so-called Islamic State is unavoidable, but the ideological and political conflict within Europe is likely to decide the future of the planet more than whatever military misadventures an anti-ISIS alliance embarks upon in the Middle East. Can Europe resist the allure of tyranny, and begin to undo the toxic policies of economic injustice, corporate criminality and social division that have done so much to create this problem and worsen it? Of course those questions are important to Americans too, and Americans will ultimately play a role in forging the answers. But pending unimaginable large changes to American society, our domestic answers are known. ISIS doesn’t need to bother fomenting panic, hysteria and tyranny on our shores; that task is done. We took the big test already, and we failed.

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Published on March 22, 2016 16:00

CNN’s “Race for the White House”: The campy history of cutthroat campaigns that 2016 deserves

At least in part, the pleasures of CNN’s “Race for the White House,” a six-part series tracking some of the most acrimonious presidential match-ups in history, come from just how hilariously low-budget it is. It might not actually be low-budget, but it certainly feels that way. The miniseries’ heart and soul is in its sit-down interviews with academics, biographers, political advisers and, in some cases, the real-life candidates themselves. Political history buffs aren’t going to learn anything new from this miniseries. But for anyone wanting a beginner’s crash course of the unsightly ways elections have been won in American history, the CNN docuseries offers a good overview. But in an understandable effort to keep things interesting, “Race for the White House” is punctuated with historical reenactment, from actors portraying Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the 1860 presidential race to a stand-in for a younger George H.W. Bush in the 1988 election. In this era of very high-quality historical reenactment on television, it’s easy to spot how limited those scenes are, from the at-times jarring physical dissimilarities between actor and candidate to the slightly too on-the-nose reconstruction of theorized events. And yet the reenactments are all so earnest, in their aims at education, that it is hard to not feel a kind of affection for them, too. In the first episode, “Nixon vs. JFK,” a morose Vice President Richard Nixon (Ralph Edward Macleod) roams the halls of the West Wing, peeking in a door to find a secretary watching John F. Kennedy on the television, apparently rapt. In the third, “Bush vs. Dukakis,” there's legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater (Rob Cardno), watching the first Willie Horton attack ad with something like a revelation crossing his face. And in the second, Abraham Lincoln (Mark Etlinger) takes stage after stage to make his case against slavery, embodying none of the rhetorical passion that the man must have had, but certainly making the case for trying anyway. Just to seal the slightly campy deal, however, “Race for the White House” is narrated by executive producer Kevin Spacey, in his very best “House of Cards” voice; a sardonic Southern twang sneaks into his voice, from time to time, as he does his best to infuse the twists and turns of each campaign with the drama. It’s more necessary for some junctures than others. The events of the 1860 Republican National Convention, for example, hardly need any embellishment whatsoever, as a handful of talking heads—including CNN anchor Jake Tapper and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich—relate the multiple rounds of conniving that ended with Lincoln’s nomination. But the following months, as Lincoln civilly discussed himself into the Oval Office, need all of Spacey’s insinuating vowels to make it seem slimy. Spacey’s Frank Underwood-ing—and the promos for the miniseries—are invested in the idea that all politics is dirty, and though this is a cynical argument, it’s also a bit more complex than Spacey’s narration makes it out to be. With “Nixon vs. JFK,” the documentary advances the idea that Nixon was so devastated by Kennedy’s superior politicking and charisma that when he did become president, his scruples had seriously eroded; pundit Paul Begala and President Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe make the point, in “Lincoln vs. Douglas,” that all the chicanery in the world was worth electing the president who would free the slaves. Former Gov. Michael Dukakis, who is a commentator on his own episode, is depicted as losing the 1988 election precisely because he couldn’t bring himself to play the game of politics. That gave Atwater, and the rest of Bush’s campaign team, leeway to utterly crush him. Dukakis’ former campaign manager, Susan Estrich, comes across as a woman transformed by impotent fury, torn between knowing how to win the game and wanting to believe in a candidate who tried to be something better. Estrich is also the only woman to get her own reenacting actor (Kari Schlamann), because she’s the only female political player of consequence in the three episodes that have already aired. (The fourth, “Truman vs. Dewey,” airs Sunday night.) Which is another dimension the docuseries offers, albeit indirectly: a portrait of how we got to here, one of the most perplexing and alienating presidential campaigns in history. Much of “Race for the White House” is taken up with white men meeting each other in private rooms; two of the episodes follow elections that take place before women had the right to vote. In “Nixon vs. JFK,” the assembled panelists discuss how important the African-American vote became to Kennedy’s campaign, despite the fact that up until then, the Republican Party had been the party for black voters. The series is not airing its presidential elections in order, meaning that some historical trends get buried in decade-jumping. But if identity politics is a buried theme, the other, even more indirectly examined narrative of “Race for the White House” is media. Lincoln and Douglas were holding their debates during the first election cycle that could use railroads and telegraphs to publish them in big-city papers just 24 hours later; Nixon and Kennedy were the first televised candidates. And with the accelerating pace of news coverage, narratives were more quickly built and more easily deployed, as is portrayed, painfully, in the clever and layered attack ads directed at Dukakis in 1988. What’s sad about all of these showcased tactics—particularly the more recent ones, in a national climate that looks more like ours—is that they worked. The American electorate proves to be particularly sensitive to certain demonstrations of power or ability, and in the annals of jockeying for public favor, very few winning candidates have held the moral high ground for long. But watching the stories of these campaigns unfold, largely by stepping through the scandals, brokered deals and gaffes of the time, it’s difficult not to wonder what story they’ll tell of our own presidential election. Our affinity for convenient narratives and obvious discomfort with certain kinds of people as commander in chief does not seem to have gone anywhere. There is, to be sure, something comforting and illuminating in seeing that political machinery and campaign tactics have been more or less the same throughout history—from Stephen Douglas shamelessly playing the race card against Lincoln in 1860 to the Kennedy campaign’s probably fraudulent victory in Chicago over Nixon. But it’s less comforting when we’re living through another one of these eras of obfuscation and rapacity; it would be nice to feel as if things were changing for the better.At least in part, the pleasures of CNN’s “Race for the White House,” a six-part series tracking some of the most acrimonious presidential match-ups in history, come from just how hilariously low-budget it is. It might not actually be low-budget, but it certainly feels that way. The miniseries’ heart and soul is in its sit-down interviews with academics, biographers, political advisers and, in some cases, the real-life candidates themselves. Political history buffs aren’t going to learn anything new from this miniseries. But for anyone wanting a beginner’s crash course of the unsightly ways elections have been won in American history, the CNN docuseries offers a good overview. But in an understandable effort to keep things interesting, “Race for the White House” is punctuated with historical reenactment, from actors portraying Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the 1860 presidential race to a stand-in for a younger George H.W. Bush in the 1988 election. In this era of very high-quality historical reenactment on television, it’s easy to spot how limited those scenes are, from the at-times jarring physical dissimilarities between actor and candidate to the slightly too on-the-nose reconstruction of theorized events. And yet the reenactments are all so earnest, in their aims at education, that it is hard to not feel a kind of affection for them, too. In the first episode, “Nixon vs. JFK,” a morose Vice President Richard Nixon (Ralph Edward Macleod) roams the halls of the West Wing, peeking in a door to find a secretary watching John F. Kennedy on the television, apparently rapt. In the third, “Bush vs. Dukakis,” there's legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater (Rob Cardno), watching the first Willie Horton attack ad with something like a revelation crossing his face. And in the second, Abraham Lincoln (Mark Etlinger) takes stage after stage to make his case against slavery, embodying none of the rhetorical passion that the man must have had, but certainly making the case for trying anyway. Just to seal the slightly campy deal, however, “Race for the White House” is narrated by executive producer Kevin Spacey, in his very best “House of Cards” voice; a sardonic Southern twang sneaks into his voice, from time to time, as he does his best to infuse the twists and turns of each campaign with the drama. It’s more necessary for some junctures than others. The events of the 1860 Republican National Convention, for example, hardly need any embellishment whatsoever, as a handful of talking heads—including CNN anchor Jake Tapper and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich—relate the multiple rounds of conniving that ended with Lincoln’s nomination. But the following months, as Lincoln civilly discussed himself into the Oval Office, need all of Spacey’s insinuating vowels to make it seem slimy. Spacey’s Frank Underwood-ing—and the promos for the miniseries—are invested in the idea that all politics is dirty, and though this is a cynical argument, it’s also a bit more complex than Spacey’s narration makes it out to be. With “Nixon vs. JFK,” the documentary advances the idea that Nixon was so devastated by Kennedy’s superior politicking and charisma that when he did become president, his scruples had seriously eroded; pundit Paul Begala and President Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe make the point, in “Lincoln vs. Douglas,” that all the chicanery in the world was worth electing the president who would free the slaves. Former Gov. Michael Dukakis, who is a commentator on his own episode, is depicted as losing the 1988 election precisely because he couldn’t bring himself to play the game of politics. That gave Atwater, and the rest of Bush’s campaign team, leeway to utterly crush him. Dukakis’ former campaign manager, Susan Estrich, comes across as a woman transformed by impotent fury, torn between knowing how to win the game and wanting to believe in a candidate who tried to be something better. Estrich is also the only woman to get her own reenacting actor (Kari Schlamann), because she’s the only female political player of consequence in the three episodes that have already aired. (The fourth, “Truman vs. Dewey,” airs Sunday night.) Which is another dimension the docuseries offers, albeit indirectly: a portrait of how we got to here, one of the most perplexing and alienating presidential campaigns in history. Much of “Race for the White House” is taken up with white men meeting each other in private rooms; two of the episodes follow elections that take place before women had the right to vote. In “Nixon vs. JFK,” the assembled panelists discuss how important the African-American vote became to Kennedy’s campaign, despite the fact that up until then, the Republican Party had been the party for black voters. The series is not airing its presidential elections in order, meaning that some historical trends get buried in decade-jumping. But if identity politics is a buried theme, the other, even more indirectly examined narrative of “Race for the White House” is media. Lincoln and Douglas were holding their debates during the first election cycle that could use railroads and telegraphs to publish them in big-city papers just 24 hours later; Nixon and Kennedy were the first televised candidates. And with the accelerating pace of news coverage, narratives were more quickly built and more easily deployed, as is portrayed, painfully, in the clever and layered attack ads directed at Dukakis in 1988. What’s sad about all of these showcased tactics—particularly the more recent ones, in a national climate that looks more like ours—is that they worked. The American electorate proves to be particularly sensitive to certain demonstrations of power or ability, and in the annals of jockeying for public favor, very few winning candidates have held the moral high ground for long. But watching the stories of these campaigns unfold, largely by stepping through the scandals, brokered deals and gaffes of the time, it’s difficult not to wonder what story they’ll tell of our own presidential election. Our affinity for convenient narratives and obvious discomfort with certain kinds of people as commander in chief does not seem to have gone anywhere. There is, to be sure, something comforting and illuminating in seeing that political machinery and campaign tactics have been more or less the same throughout history—from Stephen Douglas shamelessly playing the race card against Lincoln in 1860 to the Kennedy campaign’s probably fraudulent victory in Chicago over Nixon. But it’s less comforting when we’re living through another one of these eras of obfuscation and rapacity; it would be nice to feel as if things were changing for the better.

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Published on March 22, 2016 15:59

New Order’s next album is coming: Bernard Sumner talks “Complete Music,” Peter Hook and why it’s important to “glow for a very long time”

There’s been a dark cloud over New Order ever since Peter Hook left in 2007, and a lawsuit looms in the distance, but on the phone from a tour stop in Los Angeles, frontman Bernard Sumner is serene. For one thing, he’s got something out of his system: his memoir, “Chapter and Verse,” published last November in the U.S., offers what he has called his “final word” on his spectacular falling out with Hook, after the two of them traded barbs in the press for years. For another, the band’s new album, “Music Complete,” hit No. 2 in their native U.K. in September and has won over critics as well. As Sumner reveals, there’s a companion piece on its way, called—what else—“Complete Music.” This new release, he says, will “radically” rework “Music Complete,” whose songs continue to inspire New Order. “It’s very unusual for bands to stay successful—and then this deep into your career, make an album that doesn’t sound tired.” While Hooky’s melodic, chorus-laden bass lines are irreplaceable, the hooks themselves, the heady counterpoint, and the euphoric wistfulness remain, and New Order enlist both fans (Brandon Flowers, La Roux) and a longtime hero (Iggy Pop) to help fill out their most synth-heavy sound in decades. As for Sumner, once something of an enigma, he comes across in “Chapter and Verse” as determined, defiant – his former band, Joy Division, was an escape from being “parked in one of life’s culs-de-sac, thwarted by society” – and able to laugh at himself, spinning out cautionary tales of the hedonistic ‘80s. Now, at the end of a whistlestop U.S. tour, he’s charming and somewhat sheepish (“We had the night off last night and drank a little too much”), telling Salon about his creative process, his distrust of fame, his fears about the world, “Complete Music” … and yes, his erstwhile bandmate. The last time you toured North America, you were exclusively playing older material. How different is it to be out on the road with Music Complete? It feels really fresh, and “Music Complete” does really lend itself to be played live. It’s very easy to sit down and write slow, introspective songs; it’s more difficult to write something that’s got a lot of energy, so the house rule was that we write all the up-tempo, upbeat stuff first. We never did write the slower ones [laughs]. So we could play virtually any track off the album. It’s your danciest album since “Republic” [from 1993]. Did you have in mind the popularity of electronic music now, and the way this record would fit in with it? No, just a coincidence. We never pay much attention to what’s going on in the musical world. The music you make is a combination of the music you’ve listened to throughout your life. I write from within, not from without. You just catch snippets of little things that you like and retain them in some sort of memory bank, and then they become influences, on a subconscious level. There was one nice little instrumental piece that I wrote that didn’t make it on the album; the inspiration came from a German TV series I saw as a child when I was about 9 years old. The references go that far back. The opener, “Restless,” seems topical, with lyrics about the “fiscal climate” and the lines “Get out of town / the streets are running rivers full of blood,” which I’m guessing is a reference to Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration “Rivers of Blood” speech? Especially as you’ve been travelling through America, with the rise of Donald Trump and his similar rhetoric about immigration, is that particular track resonating right now? That track is a little diary of a day, and what’s going on in the world around me. Part of it is about how materialistic we’ve become. I’m as guilty as anyone. Can buying the new iPhone make you any happier by the end of the day? It’s just a diversion, and the question is, what is it a diversion from? Why do we want to be diverted? … The streets with “rivers full of blood” is a comment on violence throughout the world. It’s the clash of cultures and ideologies, and what are we going to do about it? It is worrying, and Donald Trump’s worrying. The other night, in Chicago, we drove past the Trump Tower and made a few derogatory comments about Trump in the cab. When I was paying the driver, he said, “Actually I like Trump, because he will ignite Islam,” which sent a cold shiver down my spine. This guy, who was obviously radical, an Islamist, was into Trump because he would create a rift between the West and Islam. I said, “Surely we want peace?” And he shrugged and drove off. It’s a bit scary. … Also we played in Paris the week before the attacks—not at the Bataclan, but we played there the previous time we played Paris. Events like that bring it close to home. It worries me, what sort of world my kids are going to end up with. It’s like there’s some unseen, dark hand at work somewhere. In your book, you write about the violence that crept into the acid house scene in Manchester, and into The Haçienda [the legendary, now-shuttered club that New Order co-owned in the ‘80s and ‘90s], with gangs holding meetings there. Often your music has an uplifting feel but your lyrics are ambivalent or sardonic, and I wonder if that comes from your having encountered that side of life … [From the book] I presume it sounds a bit like I grew up in a violent hellhole [in working-class Lower Broughton, outside of Manchester]; there were occasional events of extreme violence, but for the most part, it was a pretty safe, fun place to live. I told the story about a guy coming in the club with a machine gun, trying to shoot a bouncer—well, it didn’t happen every day. There would just be these eruptions. So you’re right about the music being quite uplifting and my vocals being sometimes a bit melancholic. I do that because it forms a contrast: I like to temper or twist the mood of the music with perhaps a more plaintive vocal, so it takes you on a winding journey. It doesn’t deliver it all on a happy plane. I think I did write one uplifting song once. “World in Motion”? [Laughs] I guess part of it is the way I write, which is to sit there on my own, late at night—I start at about 6 p.m. and work until about 2:00 in the morning, and I always work in the winter. I sit in the dark and dream with a bottle of wine … Quite simply I don’t want it all to get too sugary sweet, because I don’t like music like that. It’s like chocolate—it’s great because it tastes bitter and sweet at the same time. If you get chocolate that just tastes of sugar, what’s the point? At the end of the book, you write, “Shit does happen in life, but you can get over it. Don’t let it defeat you.” Do you want to be an inspiration for people just as the Sex Pistols were for you when you saw them in Manchester? Erm, yeah, I would like to be, but I never thought about it until you just mentioned it now. I like reading biographies and historical books because you learn the way other people have lived, what they’ve achieved. I didn’t learn a lot in school, but I’m finding that my thirst for education has got greater as I’ve got older, and I learn off other people and the way different people behave. I’m not perfect, by any means—I’m no angel. If I was, I wouldn’t have a hangover today. The other potential moral of “Chapter and Verse” might be, “Don’t go into business with your bandmates” (beyond music). It needs mentioning, there’s one in particular I wouldn’t go into business with again. Diversification is not my bag. That’s a lesson I learned. I don’t want to be worrying about whether we’re going to put some cheeseburgers in The Haçienda when I’m trying to write a song, or whether we should get a metal detector at the door or bulletproof vests for the bouncers. All of that was an enormous distraction, and it weakens you. Our [hedonistic] behavior was a distraction. We’ve not got any of that now, and I think that’s why things are working really well. I think that shows itself with the success we’ve had with this album. This past December, the News section of your website mentioned, “‘Music Complete’ album sales more than doubled (+107.9%) in the week ending 4th December following the court hearing [that gave Hook the right to sue for allegedly unpaid royalties] and Mr Hook's statement. Seems like there's no bad publicity for record promotion or is it the glowing end of year accolades driving sales?” Do you think all the press about the fallout actually helped bring attention to the band? It is true, sales went up, and I don’t really know why. It could have been that we were touring at that time... The court hearing was just an initial hearing, with a certain spin put on it, but it’s not the end of the story. I can’t talk about it much, but I don’t think it’s beneficial to anyone. None of this shit comes from us. It all comes from the opposite direction. You left the band; get on with your life—that’s my advice. You’re doing what you want to do, and we’re doing what we want to do. What’s the problem? And I have to say one thing: We pay Peter Hook a license fee for all our activities; we pay him a percentage of everything we do. It’s just not enough for him. He wants more money. But he doesn’t pay us anything when he goes out and tours the albums, like “Unknown Pleasures” and “Power, Corruption and Lies.” He thinks that’s OK, but he thinks that we should pay a lot more than what we pay him. Let’s be kind and say it’s a bit unfair. But I can’t talk too much about it, because it’s ongoing. Parts of your book are very funny, for instance being driven around by Bez from the Happy Mondays in Spain — That is not a memory I look back on with great fondness. At the time, I’m thinking, get me out of here! I was being driven around by a drug-crazed maniac—funny in retrospect, but not at the time! And when we got back to the studio, in Ibiza, where we recorded part of “Technique,” I told Bez that the waiter, Herman the German—only a young guy—had some drugs, and Bez dragged him over the counter and started chasing him around the studio. Me and my girlfriend locked ourselves in the bedroom while Bez was trying to get his drugs! [laughs] Don’t get me wrong; I love Bez. He’s a great guy, and a good friend, but just in those days, it was on the edge, shall we say, of craziness. And now he’s a politician. There’s a lot more stories like that, but I find it vaguely embarrassing. I don’t behave like that anymore. The most I get up to is too many glasses of wine, like last night. Despite all of your success, you still seem somewhat like a cult band – the kind of band that people can discover for themselves. We were on Factory to begin with, and we -- not just Factory -- were incompetent as well, so we weren’t clever enough to ram [our music] down people’s throats. In a weird way, this backfired in our favour. I think the secret of our longevity is that we make good music. The attitude is, “If you feel like discovering us, take a look,” rather than world domination. You either burn really bright for a short time, or you glow for a very long time, and I think we glow for a very long time. I don’t love being famous; I love music. [Being] a super worldwide famous guy—not like me—just means you can’t do anything. You can’t go out of your hotel room; you can’t go shopping; you can’t go on a plane without someone making a fuss out of you, so probably the only upside is you can get a really good table at a restaurant. I like the way we’ve done things, in a very natural way. You wrote that in ’93, when you’d been playing to bigger venues than ever, you decided to pull back from the band. Yeah, I think all of the stress would have made me super-unhappy… After I finish this conversation, I’m going to go up to the swimming pool and lay down by the pool, have a recuperative cocktail, lounge about in the sun, and that’s going to make me happy. You’ve got to learn to observe little things like feeling the wind on your skin or getting out of the city and going for a walk on a beautiful lakeside path, or watching a really good movie or reading a really good book. Of course, other human beings make you happy, but things made out of plastic and glass don’t. Apart from CDs, sometimes. [Laughs] That’s just the delivery method. Can I just mention, too, that there will be an album coming out called “Complete Music”; it’s extended and reworked versions of the [“Music Complete”] tracks, and is coming out very soon—not quite sure when. We’ve given [the music] to different mixers, and they’ve chopped it up and rearranged it and stripped it back, so it’s like another take on the original album. Can you tell me some of the people who were involved? Erm, I don’t know if I can release that yet. I’ve got to speak to Daniel Miller [head of New Order’s label, Mute] —it’s only a couple people. That’s what’s nice about it as well. We’d send it off to the mixer, and then he’d send it back and make suggestions; we’d send it back, and we played Internet tennis with the songs. Some of them are radically different, but rather than like a remixer who would write a new set of music, they used the music that we’d already incorporated in the songs, but warped it in a way that was very interesting.There’s been a dark cloud over New Order ever since Peter Hook left in 2007, and a lawsuit looms in the distance, but on the phone from a tour stop in Los Angeles, frontman Bernard Sumner is serene. For one thing, he’s got something out of his system: his memoir, “Chapter and Verse,” published last November in the U.S., offers what he has called his “final word” on his spectacular falling out with Hook, after the two of them traded barbs in the press for years. For another, the band’s new album, “Music Complete,” hit No. 2 in their native U.K. in September and has won over critics as well. As Sumner reveals, there’s a companion piece on its way, called—what else—“Complete Music.” This new release, he says, will “radically” rework “Music Complete,” whose songs continue to inspire New Order. “It’s very unusual for bands to stay successful—and then this deep into your career, make an album that doesn’t sound tired.” While Hooky’s melodic, chorus-laden bass lines are irreplaceable, the hooks themselves, the heady counterpoint, and the euphoric wistfulness remain, and New Order enlist both fans (Brandon Flowers, La Roux) and a longtime hero (Iggy Pop) to help fill out their most synth-heavy sound in decades. As for Sumner, once something of an enigma, he comes across in “Chapter and Verse” as determined, defiant – his former band, Joy Division, was an escape from being “parked in one of life’s culs-de-sac, thwarted by society” – and able to laugh at himself, spinning out cautionary tales of the hedonistic ‘80s. Now, at the end of a whistlestop U.S. tour, he’s charming and somewhat sheepish (“We had the night off last night and drank a little too much”), telling Salon about his creative process, his distrust of fame, his fears about the world, “Complete Music” … and yes, his erstwhile bandmate. The last time you toured North America, you were exclusively playing older material. How different is it to be out on the road with Music Complete? It feels really fresh, and “Music Complete” does really lend itself to be played live. It’s very easy to sit down and write slow, introspective songs; it’s more difficult to write something that’s got a lot of energy, so the house rule was that we write all the up-tempo, upbeat stuff first. We never did write the slower ones [laughs]. So we could play virtually any track off the album. It’s your danciest album since “Republic” [from 1993]. Did you have in mind the popularity of electronic music now, and the way this record would fit in with it? No, just a coincidence. We never pay much attention to what’s going on in the musical world. The music you make is a combination of the music you’ve listened to throughout your life. I write from within, not from without. You just catch snippets of little things that you like and retain them in some sort of memory bank, and then they become influences, on a subconscious level. There was one nice little instrumental piece that I wrote that didn’t make it on the album; the inspiration came from a German TV series I saw as a child when I was about 9 years old. The references go that far back. The opener, “Restless,” seems topical, with lyrics about the “fiscal climate” and the lines “Get out of town / the streets are running rivers full of blood,” which I’m guessing is a reference to Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration “Rivers of Blood” speech? Especially as you’ve been travelling through America, with the rise of Donald Trump and his similar rhetoric about immigration, is that particular track resonating right now? That track is a little diary of a day, and what’s going on in the world around me. Part of it is about how materialistic we’ve become. I’m as guilty as anyone. Can buying the new iPhone make you any happier by the end of the day? It’s just a diversion, and the question is, what is it a diversion from? Why do we want to be diverted? … The streets with “rivers full of blood” is a comment on violence throughout the world. It’s the clash of cultures and ideologies, and what are we going to do about it? It is worrying, and Donald Trump’s worrying. The other night, in Chicago, we drove past the Trump Tower and made a few derogatory comments about Trump in the cab. When I was paying the driver, he said, “Actually I like Trump, because he will ignite Islam,” which sent a cold shiver down my spine. This guy, who was obviously radical, an Islamist, was into Trump because he would create a rift between the West and Islam. I said, “Surely we want peace?” And he shrugged and drove off. It’s a bit scary. … Also we played in Paris the week before the attacks—not at the Bataclan, but we played there the previous time we played Paris. Events like that bring it close to home. It worries me, what sort of world my kids are going to end up with. It’s like there’s some unseen, dark hand at work somewhere. In your book, you write about the violence that crept into the acid house scene in Manchester, and into The Haçienda [the legendary, now-shuttered club that New Order co-owned in the ‘80s and ‘90s], with gangs holding meetings there. Often your music has an uplifting feel but your lyrics are ambivalent or sardonic, and I wonder if that comes from your having encountered that side of life … [From the book] I presume it sounds a bit like I grew up in a violent hellhole [in working-class Lower Broughton, outside of Manchester]; there were occasional events of extreme violence, but for the most part, it was a pretty safe, fun place to live. I told the story about a guy coming in the club with a machine gun, trying to shoot a bouncer—well, it didn’t happen every day. There would just be these eruptions. So you’re right about the music being quite uplifting and my vocals being sometimes a bit melancholic. I do that because it forms a contrast: I like to temper or twist the mood of the music with perhaps a more plaintive vocal, so it takes you on a winding journey. It doesn’t deliver it all on a happy plane. I think I did write one uplifting song once. “World in Motion”? [Laughs] I guess part of it is the way I write, which is to sit there on my own, late at night—I start at about 6 p.m. and work until about 2:00 in the morning, and I always work in the winter. I sit in the dark and dream with a bottle of wine … Quite simply I don’t want it all to get too sugary sweet, because I don’t like music like that. It’s like chocolate—it’s great because it tastes bitter and sweet at the same time. If you get chocolate that just tastes of sugar, what’s the point? At the end of the book, you write, “Shit does happen in life, but you can get over it. Don’t let it defeat you.” Do you want to be an inspiration for people just as the Sex Pistols were for you when you saw them in Manchester? Erm, yeah, I would like to be, but I never thought about it until you just mentioned it now. I like reading biographies and historical books because you learn the way other people have lived, what they’ve achieved. I didn’t learn a lot in school, but I’m finding that my thirst for education has got greater as I’ve got older, and I learn off other people and the way different people behave. I’m not perfect, by any means—I’m no angel. If I was, I wouldn’t have a hangover today. The other potential moral of “Chapter and Verse” might be, “Don’t go into business with your bandmates” (beyond music). It needs mentioning, there’s one in particular I wouldn’t go into business with again. Diversification is not my bag. That’s a lesson I learned. I don’t want to be worrying about whether we’re going to put some cheeseburgers in The Haçienda when I’m trying to write a song, or whether we should get a metal detector at the door or bulletproof vests for the bouncers. All of that was an enormous distraction, and it weakens you. Our [hedonistic] behavior was a distraction. We’ve not got any of that now, and I think that’s why things are working really well. I think that shows itself with the success we’ve had with this album. This past December, the News section of your website mentioned, “‘Music Complete’ album sales more than doubled (+107.9%) in the week ending 4th December following the court hearing [that gave Hook the right to sue for allegedly unpaid royalties] and Mr Hook's statement. Seems like there's no bad publicity for record promotion or is it the glowing end of year accolades driving sales?” Do you think all the press about the fallout actually helped bring attention to the band? It is true, sales went up, and I don’t really know why. It could have been that we were touring at that time... The court hearing was just an initial hearing, with a certain spin put on it, but it’s not the end of the story. I can’t talk about it much, but I don’t think it’s beneficial to anyone. None of this shit comes from us. It all comes from the opposite direction. You left the band; get on with your life—that’s my advice. You’re doing what you want to do, and we’re doing what we want to do. What’s the problem? And I have to say one thing: We pay Peter Hook a license fee for all our activities; we pay him a percentage of everything we do. It’s just not enough for him. He wants more money. But he doesn’t pay us anything when he goes out and tours the albums, like “Unknown Pleasures” and “Power, Corruption and Lies.” He thinks that’s OK, but he thinks that we should pay a lot more than what we pay him. Let’s be kind and say it’s a bit unfair. But I can’t talk too much about it, because it’s ongoing. Parts of your book are very funny, for instance being driven around by Bez from the Happy Mondays in Spain — That is not a memory I look back on with great fondness. At the time, I’m thinking, get me out of here! I was being driven around by a drug-crazed maniac—funny in retrospect, but not at the time! And when we got back to the studio, in Ibiza, where we recorded part of “Technique,” I told Bez that the waiter, Herman the German—only a young guy—had some drugs, and Bez dragged him over the counter and started chasing him around the studio. Me and my girlfriend locked ourselves in the bedroom while Bez was trying to get his drugs! [laughs] Don’t get me wrong; I love Bez. He’s a great guy, and a good friend, but just in those days, it was on the edge, shall we say, of craziness. And now he’s a politician. There’s a lot more stories like that, but I find it vaguely embarrassing. I don’t behave like that anymore. The most I get up to is too many glasses of wine, like last night. Despite all of your success, you still seem somewhat like a cult band – the kind of band that people can discover for themselves. We were on Factory to begin with, and we -- not just Factory -- were incompetent as well, so we weren’t clever enough to ram [our music] down people’s throats. In a weird way, this backfired in our favour. I think the secret of our longevity is that we make good music. The attitude is, “If you feel like discovering us, take a look,” rather than world domination. You either burn really bright for a short time, or you glow for a very long time, and I think we glow for a very long time. I don’t love being famous; I love music. [Being] a super worldwide famous guy—not like me—just means you can’t do anything. You can’t go out of your hotel room; you can’t go shopping; you can’t go on a plane without someone making a fuss out of you, so probably the only upside is you can get a really good table at a restaurant. I like the way we’ve done things, in a very natural way. You wrote that in ’93, when you’d been playing to bigger venues than ever, you decided to pull back from the band. Yeah, I think all of the stress would have made me super-unhappy… After I finish this conversation, I’m going to go up to the swimming pool and lay down by the pool, have a recuperative cocktail, lounge about in the sun, and that’s going to make me happy. You’ve got to learn to observe little things like feeling the wind on your skin or getting out of the city and going for a walk on a beautiful lakeside path, or watching a really good movie or reading a really good book. Of course, other human beings make you happy, but things made out of plastic and glass don’t. Apart from CDs, sometimes. [Laughs] That’s just the delivery method. Can I just mention, too, that there will be an album coming out called “Complete Music”; it’s extended and reworked versions of the [“Music Complete”] tracks, and is coming out very soon—not quite sure when. We’ve given [the music] to different mixers, and they’ve chopped it up and rearranged it and stripped it back, so it’s like another take on the original album. Can you tell me some of the people who were involved? Erm, I don’t know if I can release that yet. I’ve got to speak to Daniel Miller [head of New Order’s label, Mute] —it’s only a couple people. That’s what’s nice about it as well. We’d send it off to the mixer, and then he’d send it back and make suggestions; we’d send it back, and we played Internet tennis with the songs. Some of them are radically different, but rather than like a remixer who would write a new set of music, they used the music that we’d already incorporated in the songs, but warped it in a way that was very interesting.

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Published on March 22, 2016 15:58

Life after “Making a Murderer”: Defense attorneys — and unlikely TV stars — push conversation on criminal justice

The two defense lawyers who represented Steven Avery, and gained overnight stardom from the Netflix docu-series “Making a Murderer,” kicked off a North American road show last week that will take them to 33 cities by the end of summer. That’s a long way from the dusty county courthouse in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Appearing Friday before a hometown crowd in Milwaukee, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang were greeted with whoops and hollers as they took the stage for a 90-minute “unfiltered discussion” about the criminal justice system and the case that made them folk heroes to some, scoundrels to others, and unlikely sex symbols to still others. The Netflix crowd, if there is such a demographic -- bearded men and bespectacled women in normcore, equal parts law students, armchair detectives and aging professionals -- were fans all the way. Sitting beneath the gilded ceiling of the historic Riverside Theater, they could have been at a Sufjan Stevens or Jackson Browne concert, singing along with every song. They knew the film’s back story, its players, its every twist and turn. Yet they wanted more: a second encore, a third. Of course, that’s been the appeal of the series from the start. Despite the guilty verdicts, the convictions and life sentences of Steven Avery and his nephew-accomplice Brendan Dassey, the story has no ending. Avery and Dassey both are appealing their convictions. Filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi reportedly are considering a sequel. And the show goes on. With the release of all 10 episodes on Dec. 18, “Making a Murderer” leaped into the public consciousness. Dripping with drama, supercharged with controversy, and populated by true-life characters -- many of them unlikable yet oddly charismatic -- it went beyond water-cooler fodder. It became a national obsession. Reaction to the series has become a virtual true-crime parlor game, with viewers taking sides and duking it out on social media: Avery, one side claims, was rightfully convicted for murdering 25-year old Teresa Halbach, then burning her body outside his mobile home near Manitowoc. Not so, counter the skeptics. He was framed by police whose calculated disregard for justice had put him behind bars before, for a crime he did not commit. Meanwhile, cast through the filmmakers’ subjective lens as noble pursuers of truth and justice, Avery’s defense lawyers became accidental celebrities, their on-screen personae deconstructed by infatuated magazine writers and fawning fans: Buting as the combative one, a forensic wizard, attack dog when necessary, and full-on Twitter freak; Strang, the compassionate one, a former federal public defender, unpracticed in social media yet an online heartthrob, whose Tumblr image of him lounging barefoot on a couch inexplicably gave certain followers fits. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and websites worldwide, every angle imaginable was explored, every conspiracy theory dissected. Rotten Tomatoes gave the doc a 97-percent rating, while celebs like Ricky Gervais and Mandy Moore and Alec Baldwin weighed in on social media. And in no time at all, up sprang a cottage industry hawking anything tangentially related to the docuseries. “Free Steven Avery” bumper stickers flooded online markets and souvenir shops, while T-shirts extolled the sex appeal of the defense team: “Jerry Buting in the streets, Dean Strang in the sheets” and “Dean Strang is BAE.” Podcasts popped up on Radiolab, Reddit and iHeart Radio. A software company in Palo Alto offered the StevenAvery.org Web domain for a cool $1,000. Downloads of trial transcripts – some 13,300 pages -- were free for the taking, financed through a crowdsourcing campaign. Faster than you can say “I object,” at least a dozen books showed up on Amazon, most of them e-books and nearly all of them panned. One promises multiple sequels: “Fool’s Paradise: The State vs. Steven Avery (The Halbach Murder Mystery Series Book 1).” In the Creepy Yet Creative genre, “The Steven Avery ‘Making a Murderer’ Coloring Book” invites adults and kids alike to colorize the line drawings of courtroom caricatures and crime scenes, and then post the artwork on Instagram. And then there’s “Kill the Rich,” a paperback mystery listing Steven Avery as the author and displaying his photo on the cover. The 315-page novel cries out “hoax” and “scam.” “I wrote this book from my prison cell,” reads the dubious bio of the author. “It was the only way I could think of raising the money for my next appeals challenge. Please be kind in your Amazon reviews. I had to write this book without access to Google or the Internet. Just me, an old manual typewriter, and some yellow note pads. Plus, it's hard to write a book while murderers and rapists are shouting and fighting all the time.”

***

I came to the “Making a Murderer” phenomenon late. As a reporter, I had worked on a magazine article in late 2005, chasing the back roads of Manitowoc County, visiting the Avery auto salvage company, interviewing friends and family members of the victim and of the accused – looking for an explanation for the disappearance of Teresa Halbach. After Avery’s arrest, I interviewed him by phone when he was in jail. Exonerated for a violent rape, he was behind bars again. The déjà vu twist was nearly beyond belief. When “Making a Murderer” debuted 10 years later, it took me weeks before I finally gave in and binged. I had seen too much of the drama close-up. It was buried deep in my subconscious, and I didn’t hurry to dislodge it. I had lived it for months, dreamed it, walked on the land near the crime scene – a massive, hilly vehicle-strewn property that had come to represent a place of savage violence and suffering, a Wisconsin gethsemane. It’s hard to reconcile the quick-buck hustles, the overkill of media coverage, and the wild popularity of two above-average criminal defense lawyers who were simply doing their jobs. This, after all, is the story of a young woman who was murdered, a man and teenage boy who were found guilty of the brutal act, and the aftermath of so many others who were touched by the tragedy. Coloring books and T-shirts have become the tawdry and unfortunate byproducts of a personal tragedy gone viral. It would be easy to accuse Buting and Strang of cashing in. Their cross-continental tour will take them to the Beacon Theater in New York, the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, the Theater at Ace Hotel in L.A., the Sony Center in Toronto, the Chicago Theater, San Francisco’s Warfield, and on and on. Nice work if you can get it. Tickets for their opening night in Milwaukee were on the pricey side, from $45 to $65, and I half expected to see a merch table in the theater lobby, stocked with “Making a Murderer” baseball caps and Buting and Strang for president posters, maybe action figures of the lawyers in gray suits, posed to mightily launch a cross-examination. But there was no self-promotion at all, except for a cursory mention of each of their law firms. A portion of their fees in fact will be donated to local and national equal justice initiatives. Rather than a chest-beating performance, Buting and Strang delivered what they had promised in the billing: a conversation on justice. With a local journalist as moderator, the duo provided the requisite war stories, a director’s cut of the making of “Making a Murderer.” They maintained they never rehearsed for their on-camera moments, and admitted that their expectations of the film were low. Said Strang: “I thought, you know, 105 minutes long, shown in art houses in L.A. and New York, and seen by 17 people.” Strang and Buting appeared genuinely uncomfortable with their roles as marquee names. “We have had other high-profile cases, but nothing like this,” said Buting. “The recognition we get just walking down the street is not typical. On the other hand, I do embrace the role model of good, honest defense attorney with integrity. To that extent, I’m willing to accept the inconvenience factor of having selfies taken on every block.” Slamming the prosecution for releasing lurid details that allegedly described Halbach’s final moments, they castigated Special Prosecutor Ken Kratz for tainting the jury pool. And while they gave high marks to the filmmakers for raising valid questions about the prosecution of Avery, they said they would have liked more footage of their attack on the prosecution’s evidence. Where was the victim’s blood? And why was the prosecutor allowed to enter as evidence DNA from Avery’s sweat, supposedly found on the hood latch of Halbach’s car? “There’s no such thing as sweat DNA,” Buting insisted, and the crowd cheered. But the conversation inevitably circled back to the shortfalls of the criminal justice system -- the prevalence of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans, of life-without-parole sentences, of criminal prosecutions of juveniles in adult court, as seen in sharp detail in the documentary’s scene of 16-year-old Dassey being interrogated by police without the presence of a lawyer or a parent. An opportunistic sideshow? I don’t think so. Their tour is a smart move to steer the “Making a Murderer” conversation to a higher ground. Although they lost the Avery case, Buting and Strang came away as creditable critics of the justice system. In an election year that’s richly topical and divisible, they’re in a unique position to speak out. “The film does raise important questions about what we’re doing in our courts, about police operations in our communities, the role of class and poverty, the experience of juveniles,” said Strang, the contemplative one. “The questions are of overriding importance, as long as viewers keep in mind that this is not entertainment. It certainly is something to watch in your leisure time. I understand that. But in the richest sense of the word, this is not and should not be entertainment. But it can be useful in leading to a better informed public and a better informed dialogue about how we administer justice.” It was the encore performance that the fans had been waiting to see.The two defense lawyers who represented Steven Avery, and gained overnight stardom from the Netflix docu-series “Making a Murderer,” kicked off a North American road show last week that will take them to 33 cities by the end of summer. That’s a long way from the dusty county courthouse in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Appearing Friday before a hometown crowd in Milwaukee, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang were greeted with whoops and hollers as they took the stage for a 90-minute “unfiltered discussion” about the criminal justice system and the case that made them folk heroes to some, scoundrels to others, and unlikely sex symbols to still others. The Netflix crowd, if there is such a demographic -- bearded men and bespectacled women in normcore, equal parts law students, armchair detectives and aging professionals -- were fans all the way. Sitting beneath the gilded ceiling of the historic Riverside Theater, they could have been at a Sufjan Stevens or Jackson Browne concert, singing along with every song. They knew the film’s back story, its players, its every twist and turn. Yet they wanted more: a second encore, a third. Of course, that’s been the appeal of the series from the start. Despite the guilty verdicts, the convictions and life sentences of Steven Avery and his nephew-accomplice Brendan Dassey, the story has no ending. Avery and Dassey both are appealing their convictions. Filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi reportedly are considering a sequel. And the show goes on. With the release of all 10 episodes on Dec. 18, “Making a Murderer” leaped into the public consciousness. Dripping with drama, supercharged with controversy, and populated by true-life characters -- many of them unlikable yet oddly charismatic -- it went beyond water-cooler fodder. It became a national obsession. Reaction to the series has become a virtual true-crime parlor game, with viewers taking sides and duking it out on social media: Avery, one side claims, was rightfully convicted for murdering 25-year old Teresa Halbach, then burning her body outside his mobile home near Manitowoc. Not so, counter the skeptics. He was framed by police whose calculated disregard for justice had put him behind bars before, for a crime he did not commit. Meanwhile, cast through the filmmakers’ subjective lens as noble pursuers of truth and justice, Avery’s defense lawyers became accidental celebrities, their on-screen personae deconstructed by infatuated magazine writers and fawning fans: Buting as the combative one, a forensic wizard, attack dog when necessary, and full-on Twitter freak; Strang, the compassionate one, a former federal public defender, unpracticed in social media yet an online heartthrob, whose Tumblr image of him lounging barefoot on a couch inexplicably gave certain followers fits. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and websites worldwide, every angle imaginable was explored, every conspiracy theory dissected. Rotten Tomatoes gave the doc a 97-percent rating, while celebs like Ricky Gervais and Mandy Moore and Alec Baldwin weighed in on social media. And in no time at all, up sprang a cottage industry hawking anything tangentially related to the docuseries. “Free Steven Avery” bumper stickers flooded online markets and souvenir shops, while T-shirts extolled the sex appeal of the defense team: “Jerry Buting in the streets, Dean Strang in the sheets” and “Dean Strang is BAE.” Podcasts popped up on Radiolab, Reddit and iHeart Radio. A software company in Palo Alto offered the StevenAvery.org Web domain for a cool $1,000. Downloads of trial transcripts – some 13,300 pages -- were free for the taking, financed through a crowdsourcing campaign. Faster than you can say “I object,” at least a dozen books showed up on Amazon, most of them e-books and nearly all of them panned. One promises multiple sequels: “Fool’s Paradise: The State vs. Steven Avery (The Halbach Murder Mystery Series Book 1).” In the Creepy Yet Creative genre, “The Steven Avery ‘Making a Murderer’ Coloring Book” invites adults and kids alike to colorize the line drawings of courtroom caricatures and crime scenes, and then post the artwork on Instagram. And then there’s “Kill the Rich,” a paperback mystery listing Steven Avery as the author and displaying his photo on the cover. The 315-page novel cries out “hoax” and “scam.” “I wrote this book from my prison cell,” reads the dubious bio of the author. “It was the only way I could think of raising the money for my next appeals challenge. Please be kind in your Amazon reviews. I had to write this book without access to Google or the Internet. Just me, an old manual typewriter, and some yellow note pads. Plus, it's hard to write a book while murderers and rapists are shouting and fighting all the time.”

***

I came to the “Making a Murderer” phenomenon late. As a reporter, I had worked on a magazine article in late 2005, chasing the back roads of Manitowoc County, visiting the Avery auto salvage company, interviewing friends and family members of the victim and of the accused – looking for an explanation for the disappearance of Teresa Halbach. After Avery’s arrest, I interviewed him by phone when he was in jail. Exonerated for a violent rape, he was behind bars again. The déjà vu twist was nearly beyond belief. When “Making a Murderer” debuted 10 years later, it took me weeks before I finally gave in and binged. I had seen too much of the drama close-up. It was buried deep in my subconscious, and I didn’t hurry to dislodge it. I had lived it for months, dreamed it, walked on the land near the crime scene – a massive, hilly vehicle-strewn property that had come to represent a place of savage violence and suffering, a Wisconsin gethsemane. It’s hard to reconcile the quick-buck hustles, the overkill of media coverage, and the wild popularity of two above-average criminal defense lawyers who were simply doing their jobs. This, after all, is the story of a young woman who was murdered, a man and teenage boy who were found guilty of the brutal act, and the aftermath of so many others who were touched by the tragedy. Coloring books and T-shirts have become the tawdry and unfortunate byproducts of a personal tragedy gone viral. It would be easy to accuse Buting and Strang of cashing in. Their cross-continental tour will take them to the Beacon Theater in New York, the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, the Theater at Ace Hotel in L.A., the Sony Center in Toronto, the Chicago Theater, San Francisco’s Warfield, and on and on. Nice work if you can get it. Tickets for their opening night in Milwaukee were on the pricey side, from $45 to $65, and I half expected to see a merch table in the theater lobby, stocked with “Making a Murderer” baseball caps and Buting and Strang for president posters, maybe action figures of the lawyers in gray suits, posed to mightily launch a cross-examination. But there was no self-promotion at all, except for a cursory mention of each of their law firms. A portion of their fees in fact will be donated to local and national equal justice initiatives. Rather than a chest-beating performance, Buting and Strang delivered what they had promised in the billing: a conversation on justice. With a local journalist as moderator, the duo provided the requisite war stories, a director’s cut of the making of “Making a Murderer.” They maintained they never rehearsed for their on-camera moments, and admitted that their expectations of the film were low. Said Strang: “I thought, you know, 105 minutes long, shown in art houses in L.A. and New York, and seen by 17 people.” Strang and Buting appeared genuinely uncomfortable with their roles as marquee names. “We have had other high-profile cases, but nothing like this,” said Buting. “The recognition we get just walking down the street is not typical. On the other hand, I do embrace the role model of good, honest defense attorney with integrity. To that extent, I’m willing to accept the inconvenience factor of having selfies taken on every block.” Slamming the prosecution for releasing lurid details that allegedly described Halbach’s final moments, they castigated Special Prosecutor Ken Kratz for tainting the jury pool. And while they gave high marks to the filmmakers for raising valid questions about the prosecution of Avery, they said they would have liked more footage of their attack on the prosecution’s evidence. Where was the victim’s blood? And why was the prosecutor allowed to enter as evidence DNA from Avery’s sweat, supposedly found on the hood latch of Halbach’s car? “There’s no such thing as sweat DNA,” Buting insisted, and the crowd cheered. But the conversation inevitably circled back to the shortfalls of the criminal justice system -- the prevalence of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans, of life-without-parole sentences, of criminal prosecutions of juveniles in adult court, as seen in sharp detail in the documentary’s scene of 16-year-old Dassey being interrogated by police without the presence of a lawyer or a parent. An opportunistic sideshow? I don’t think so. Their tour is a smart move to steer the “Making a Murderer” conversation to a higher ground. Although they lost the Avery case, Buting and Strang came away as creditable critics of the justice system. In an election year that’s richly topical and divisible, they’re in a unique position to speak out. “The film does raise important questions about what we’re doing in our courts, about police operations in our communities, the role of class and poverty, the experience of juveniles,” said Strang, the contemplative one. “The questions are of overriding importance, as long as viewers keep in mind that this is not entertainment. It certainly is something to watch in your leisure time. I understand that. But in the richest sense of the word, this is not and should not be entertainment. But it can be useful in leading to a better informed public and a better informed dialogue about how we administer justice.” It was the encore performance that the fans had been waiting to see.The two defense lawyers who represented Steven Avery, and gained overnight stardom from the Netflix docu-series “Making a Murderer,” kicked off a North American road show last week that will take them to 33 cities by the end of summer. That’s a long way from the dusty county courthouse in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Appearing Friday before a hometown crowd in Milwaukee, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang were greeted with whoops and hollers as they took the stage for a 90-minute “unfiltered discussion” about the criminal justice system and the case that made them folk heroes to some, scoundrels to others, and unlikely sex symbols to still others. The Netflix crowd, if there is such a demographic -- bearded men and bespectacled women in normcore, equal parts law students, armchair detectives and aging professionals -- were fans all the way. Sitting beneath the gilded ceiling of the historic Riverside Theater, they could have been at a Sufjan Stevens or Jackson Browne concert, singing along with every song. They knew the film’s back story, its players, its every twist and turn. Yet they wanted more: a second encore, a third. Of course, that’s been the appeal of the series from the start. Despite the guilty verdicts, the convictions and life sentences of Steven Avery and his nephew-accomplice Brendan Dassey, the story has no ending. Avery and Dassey both are appealing their convictions. Filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi reportedly are considering a sequel. And the show goes on. With the release of all 10 episodes on Dec. 18, “Making a Murderer” leaped into the public consciousness. Dripping with drama, supercharged with controversy, and populated by true-life characters -- many of them unlikable yet oddly charismatic -- it went beyond water-cooler fodder. It became a national obsession. Reaction to the series has become a virtual true-crime parlor game, with viewers taking sides and duking it out on social media: Avery, one side claims, was rightfully convicted for murdering 25-year old Teresa Halbach, then burning her body outside his mobile home near Manitowoc. Not so, counter the skeptics. He was framed by police whose calculated disregard for justice had put him behind bars before, for a crime he did not commit. Meanwhile, cast through the filmmakers’ subjective lens as noble pursuers of truth and justice, Avery’s defense lawyers became accidental celebrities, their on-screen personae deconstructed by infatuated magazine writers and fawning fans: Buting as the combative one, a forensic wizard, attack dog when necessary, and full-on Twitter freak; Strang, the compassionate one, a former federal public defender, unpracticed in social media yet an online heartthrob, whose Tumblr image of him lounging barefoot on a couch inexplicably gave certain followers fits. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and websites worldwide, every angle imaginable was explored, every conspiracy theory dissected. Rotten Tomatoes gave the doc a 97-percent rating, while celebs like Ricky Gervais and Mandy Moore and Alec Baldwin weighed in on social media. And in no time at all, up sprang a cottage industry hawking anything tangentially related to the docuseries. “Free Steven Avery” bumper stickers flooded online markets and souvenir shops, while T-shirts extolled the sex appeal of the defense team: “Jerry Buting in the streets, Dean Strang in the sheets” and “Dean Strang is BAE.” Podcasts popped up on Radiolab, Reddit and iHeart Radio. A software company in Palo Alto offered the StevenAvery.org Web domain for a cool $1,000. Downloads of trial transcripts – some 13,300 pages -- were free for the taking, financed through a crowdsourcing campaign. Faster than you can say “I object,” at least a dozen books showed up on Amazon, most of them e-books and nearly all of them panned. One promises multiple sequels: “Fool’s Paradise: The State vs. Steven Avery (The Halbach Murder Mystery Series Book 1).” In the Creepy Yet Creative genre, “The Steven Avery ‘Making a Murderer’ Coloring Book” invites adults and kids alike to colorize the line drawings of courtroom caricatures and crime scenes, and then post the artwork on Instagram. And then there’s “Kill the Rich,” a paperback mystery listing Steven Avery as the author and displaying his photo on the cover. The 315-page novel cries out “hoax” and “scam.” “I wrote this book from my prison cell,” reads the dubious bio of the author. “It was the only way I could think of raising the money for my next appeals challenge. Please be kind in your Amazon reviews. I had to write this book without access to Google or the Internet. Just me, an old manual typewriter, and some yellow note pads. Plus, it's hard to write a book while murderers and rapists are shouting and fighting all the time.”

***

I came to the “Making a Murderer” phenomenon late. As a reporter, I had worked on a magazine article in late 2005, chasing the back roads of Manitowoc County, visiting the Avery auto salvage company, interviewing friends and family members of the victim and of the accused – looking for an explanation for the disappearance of Teresa Halbach. After Avery’s arrest, I interviewed him by phone when he was in jail. Exonerated for a violent rape, he was behind bars again. The déjà vu twist was nearly beyond belief. When “Making a Murderer” debuted 10 years later, it took me weeks before I finally gave in and binged. I had seen too much of the drama close-up. It was buried deep in my subconscious, and I didn’t hurry to dislodge it. I had lived it for months, dreamed it, walked on the land near the crime scene – a massive, hilly vehicle-strewn property that had come to represent a place of savage violence and suffering, a Wisconsin gethsemane. It’s hard to reconcile the quick-buck hustles, the overkill of media coverage, and the wild popularity of two above-average criminal defense lawyers who were simply doing their jobs. This, after all, is the story of a young woman who was murdered, a man and teenage boy who were found guilty of the brutal act, and the aftermath of so many others who were touched by the tragedy. Coloring books and T-shirts have become the tawdry and unfortunate byproducts of a personal tragedy gone viral. It would be easy to accuse Buting and Strang of cashing in. Their cross-continental tour will take them to the Beacon Theater in New York, the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, the Theater at Ace Hotel in L.A., the Sony Center in Toronto, the Chicago Theater, San Francisco’s Warfield, and on and on. Nice work if you can get it. Tickets for their opening night in Milwaukee were on the pricey side, from $45 to $65, and I half expected to see a merch table in the theater lobby, stocked with “Making a Murderer” baseball caps and Buting and Strang for president posters, maybe action figures of the lawyers in gray suits, posed to mightily launch a cross-examination. But there was no self-promotion at all, except for a cursory mention of each of their law firms. A portion of their fees in fact will be donated to local and national equal justice initiatives. Rather than a chest-beating performance, Buting and Strang delivered what they had promised in the billing: a conversation on justice. With a local journalist as moderator, the duo provided the requisite war stories, a director’s cut of the making of “Making a Murderer.” They maintained they never rehearsed for their on-camera moments, and admitted that their expectations of the film were low. Said Strang: “I thought, you know, 105 minutes long, shown in art houses in L.A. and New York, and seen by 17 people.” Strang and Buting appeared genuinely uncomfortable with their roles as marquee names. “We have had other high-profile cases, but nothing like this,” said Buting. “The recognition we get just walking down the street is not typical. On the other hand, I do embrace the role model of good, honest defense attorney with integrity. To that extent, I’m willing to accept the inconvenience factor of having selfies taken on every block.” Slamming the prosecution for releasing lurid details that allegedly described Halbach’s final moments, they castigated Special Prosecutor Ken Kratz for tainting the jury pool. And while they gave high marks to the filmmakers for raising valid questions about the prosecution of Avery, they said they would have liked more footage of their attack on the prosecution’s evidence. Where was the victim’s blood? And why was the prosecutor allowed to enter as evidence DNA from Avery’s sweat, supposedly found on the hood latch of Halbach’s car? “There’s no such thing as sweat DNA,” Buting insisted, and the crowd cheered. But the conversation inevitably circled back to the shortfalls of the criminal justice system -- the prevalence of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans, of life-without-parole sentences, of criminal prosecutions of juveniles in adult court, as seen in sharp detail in the documentary’s scene of 16-year-old Dassey being interrogated by police without the presence of a lawyer or a parent. An opportunistic sideshow? I don’t think so. Their tour is a smart move to steer the “Making a Murderer” conversation to a higher ground. Although they lost the Avery case, Buting and Strang came away as creditable critics of the justice system. In an election year that’s richly topical and divisible, they’re in a unique position to speak out. “The film does raise important questions about what we’re doing in our courts, about police operations in our communities, the role of class and poverty, the experience of juveniles,” said Strang, the contemplative one. “The questions are of overriding importance, as long as viewers keep in mind that this is not entertainment. It certainly is something to watch in your leisure time. I understand that. But in the richest sense of the word, this is not and should not be entertainment. But it can be useful in leading to a better informed public and a better informed dialogue about how we administer justice.” It was the encore performance that the fans had been waiting to see.The two defense lawyers who represented Steven Avery, and gained overnight stardom from the Netflix docu-series “Making a Murderer,” kicked off a North American road show last week that will take them to 33 cities by the end of summer. That’s a long way from the dusty county courthouse in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Appearing Friday before a hometown crowd in Milwaukee, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang were greeted with whoops and hollers as they took the stage for a 90-minute “unfiltered discussion” about the criminal justice system and the case that made them folk heroes to some, scoundrels to others, and unlikely sex symbols to still others. The Netflix crowd, if there is such a demographic -- bearded men and bespectacled women in normcore, equal parts law students, armchair detectives and aging professionals -- were fans all the way. Sitting beneath the gilded ceiling of the historic Riverside Theater, they could have been at a Sufjan Stevens or Jackson Browne concert, singing along with every song. They knew the film’s back story, its players, its every twist and turn. Yet they wanted more: a second encore, a third. Of course, that’s been the appeal of the series from the start. Despite the guilty verdicts, the convictions and life sentences of Steven Avery and his nephew-accomplice Brendan Dassey, the story has no ending. Avery and Dassey both are appealing their convictions. Filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi reportedly are considering a sequel. And the show goes on. With the release of all 10 episodes on Dec. 18, “Making a Murderer” leaped into the public consciousness. Dripping with drama, supercharged with controversy, and populated by true-life characters -- many of them unlikable yet oddly charismatic -- it went beyond water-cooler fodder. It became a national obsession. Reaction to the series has become a virtual true-crime parlor game, with viewers taking sides and duking it out on social media: Avery, one side claims, was rightfully convicted for murdering 25-year old Teresa Halbach, then burning her body outside his mobile home near Manitowoc. Not so, counter the skeptics. He was framed by police whose calculated disregard for justice had put him behind bars before, for a crime he did not commit. Meanwhile, cast through the filmmakers’ subjective lens as noble pursuers of truth and justice, Avery’s defense lawyers became accidental celebrities, their on-screen personae deconstructed by infatuated magazine writers and fawning fans: Buting as the combative one, a forensic wizard, attack dog when necessary, and full-on Twitter freak; Strang, the compassionate one, a former federal public defender, unpracticed in social media yet an online heartthrob, whose Tumblr image of him lounging barefoot on a couch inexplicably gave certain followers fits. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and websites worldwide, every angle imaginable was explored, every conspiracy theory dissected. Rotten Tomatoes gave the doc a 97-percent rating, while celebs like Ricky Gervais and Mandy Moore and Alec Baldwin weighed in on social media. And in no time at all, up sprang a cottage industry hawking anything tangentially related to the docuseries. “Free Steven Avery” bumper stickers flooded online markets and souvenir shops, while T-shirts extolled the sex appeal of the defense team: “Jerry Buting in the streets, Dean Strang in the sheets” and “Dean Strang is BAE.” Podcasts popped up on Radiolab, Reddit and iHeart Radio. A software company in Palo Alto offered the StevenAvery.org Web domain for a cool $1,000. Downloads of trial transcripts – some 13,300 pages -- were free for the taking, financed through a crowdsourcing campaign. Faster than you can say “I object,” at least a dozen books showed up on Amazon, most of them e-books and nearly all of them panned. One promises multiple sequels: “Fool’s Paradise: The State vs. Steven Avery (The Halbach Murder Mystery Series Book 1).” In the Creepy Yet Creative genre, “The Steven Avery ‘Making a Murderer’ Coloring Book” invites adults and kids alike to colorize the line drawings of courtroom caricatures and crime scenes, and then post the artwork on Instagram. And then there’s “Kill the Rich,” a paperback mystery listing Steven Avery as the author and displaying his photo on the cover. The 315-page novel cries out “hoax” and “scam.” “I wrote this book from my prison cell,” reads the dubious bio of the author. “It was the only way I could think of raising the money for my next appeals challenge. Please be kind in your Amazon reviews. I had to write this book without access to Google or the Internet. Just me, an old manual typewriter, and some yellow note pads. Plus, it's hard to write a book while murderers and rapists are shouting and fighting all the time.”

***

I came to the “Making a Murderer” phenomenon late. As a reporter, I had worked on a magazine article in late 2005, chasing the back roads of Manitowoc County, visiting the Avery auto salvage company, interviewing friends and family members of the victim and of the accused – looking for an explanation for the disappearance of Teresa Halbach. After Avery’s arrest, I interviewed him by phone when he was in jail. Exonerated for a violent rape, he was behind bars again. The déjà vu twist was nearly beyond belief. When “Making a Murderer” debuted 10 years later, it took me weeks before I finally gave in and binged. I had seen too much of the drama close-up. It was buried deep in my subconscious, and I didn’t hurry to dislodge it. I had lived it for months, dreamed it, walked on the land near the crime scene – a massive, hilly vehicle-strewn property that had come to represent a place of savage violence and suffering, a Wisconsin gethsemane. It’s hard to reconcile the quick-buck hustles, the overkill of media coverage, and the wild popularity of two above-average criminal defense lawyers who were simply doing their jobs. This, after all, is the story of a young woman who was murdered, a man and teenage boy who were found guilty of the brutal act, and the aftermath of so many others who were touched by the tragedy. Coloring books and T-shirts have become the tawdry and unfortunate byproducts of a personal tragedy gone viral. It would be easy to accuse Buting and Strang of cashing in. Their cross-continental tour will take them to the Beacon Theater in New York, the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, the Theater at Ace Hotel in L.A., the Sony Center in Toronto, the Chicago Theater, San Francisco’s Warfield, and on and on. Nice work if you can get it. Tickets for their opening night in Milwaukee were on the pricey side, from $45 to $65, and I half expected to see a merch table in the theater lobby, stocked with “Making a Murderer” baseball caps and Buting and Strang for president posters, maybe action figures of the lawyers in gray suits, posed to mightily launch a cross-examination. But there was no self-promotion at all, except for a cursory mention of each of their law firms. A portion of their fees in fact will be donated to local and national equal justice initiatives. Rather than a chest-beating performance, Buting and Strang delivered what they had promised in the billing: a conversation on justice. With a local journalist as moderator, the duo provided the requisite war stories, a director’s cut of the making of “Making a Murderer.” They maintained they never rehearsed for their on-camera moments, and admitted that their expectations of the film were low. Said Strang: “I thought, you know, 105 minutes long, shown in art houses in L.A. and New York, and seen by 17 people.” Strang and Buting appeared genuinely uncomfortable with their roles as marquee names. “We have had other high-profile cases, but nothing like this,” said Buting. “The recognition we get just walking down the street is not typical. On the other hand, I do embrace the role model of good, honest defense attorney with integrity. To that extent, I’m willing to accept the inconvenience factor of having selfies taken on every block.” Slamming the prosecution for releasing lurid details that allegedly described Halbach’s final moments, they castigated Special Prosecutor Ken Kratz for tainting the jury pool. And while they gave high marks to the filmmakers for raising valid questions about the prosecution of Avery, they said they would have liked more footage of their attack on the prosecution’s evidence. Where was the victim’s blood? And why was the prosecutor allowed to enter as evidence DNA from Avery’s sweat, supposedly found on the hood latch of Halbach’s car? “There’s no such thing as sweat DNA,” Buting insisted, and the crowd cheered. But the conversation inevitably circled back to the shortfalls of the criminal justice system -- the prevalence of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans, of life-without-parole sentences, of criminal prosecutions of juveniles in adult court, as seen in sharp detail in the documentary’s scene of 16-year-old Dassey being interrogated by police without the presence of a lawyer or a parent. An opportunistic sideshow? I don’t think so. Their tour is a smart move to steer the “Making a Murderer” conversation to a higher ground. Although they lost the Avery case, Buting and Strang came away as creditable critics of the justice system. In an election year that’s richly topical and divisible, they’re in a unique position to speak out. “The film does raise important questions about what we’re doing in our courts, about police operations in our communities, the role of class and poverty, the experience of juveniles,” said Strang, the contemplative one. “The questions are of overriding importance, as long as viewers keep in mind that this is not entertainment. It certainly is something to watch in your leisure time. I understand that. But in the richest sense of the word, this is not and should not be entertainment. But it can be useful in leading to a better informed public and a better informed dialogue about how we administer justice.” It was the encore performance that the fans had been waiting to see.

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Published on March 22, 2016 15:57

Weed is winning: 4 signs the marijuana business is booming

Marijuana is going mainstream fast, and so is the marijuana industry. In a time of sluggish growth, the pot business is bursting with energy. It's a weird mix of righteous exhilaration at the victory of the weed over the dark forces of repression (at least in some places) and people walking around with dollar signs in their eyes. But like it or not, pot is hot. Here are some signs of the times: 1. Weed Outsold Booze in Aspen for a Couple of Months Last Year. There's nothing better than a nice cognac while relaxing before the blazing fire at the ski lodge after a hard day of running the trails (or so I hear). Or is there? Well, as the Aspen Times reported, marijuana sales exceeded alcohol sales in the months of March and April 2015. March, which just happens to include spring break, also saw the year's highest marijuana sales total, at $998,000. Pot sales plummeted nearly by half the next month, as the snow melted and the resort went into its in-between season doldrums, but they still exceeded booze sales in April, too. In all, the city's seven pot shops sold $8.3 million worth of medical and just-plain marijuana in 2015, with the city collecting a nifty $200,000 in taxes and fees. 2. The Industry Is Attracting a New Kind of Celebrity. Popular figures such as Snoop Dogg, Tommy Chong, and Willie Nelson have been eagerly embraced by the marijuana industry as weed-friendly celebrities, but now the industry is seeking out celebrities of a different sort—people who have made a name for themselves not in part as famous stoners but for being accomplished in their fields. The Marijuana Business Daily profiled one, Mindy Segal, owner of Mindy's Hot Chocolate in Chicago. She's a big name in the pastry world. She's the author of the award-winning cookbook "Cookie Love" and won the James Beard Foundation award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2012. And now, she's hooking up with Cresco Labs, which has three Illinois medical marijuana cultivation licenses, to create a line of marijuana-infused sweets, including chocolate brittle bars, granola bites, hot chocolate, and ready-made cake and cookie mixes. Cresco will provide the extracted THC and other ingredients, while Segal will put her baking skills to work creating the final product, which will carry her brand. “I feel like this is an industry that is going to grow at rapid rates. I feel like I’m getting in at a time where the future is now,” Segal said. “I think I’m the first sort of well-known chef who has somewhat of a credible reputation to come forward and say, you know what, I’m entering this market.” According to the Daily, the collaborative effort between Segal and Cresco is also "part of a larger trend in which cannabis companies are hooking up with celebrities and mainstream professionals who bring a new air of legitimacy to the business." Sweet. 3. Domestic Pot Production Is Hurting Mexican Cartels. Marijuana seizures along the Mexican border are down dramatically, according to new data from the US Border Patrol. Agents snagged nearly 4 million pounds of Mexican weed in 2009, but that figure dropped to only 1.5 million pounds in 2014, providing more evidence that competition from north of the border is putting the hurt on the Mexican pot industry. We've already seen many stories about the tough times in the pot fields of the Sierra Madre, with hardscrabble farmers bemoaning declining farm gate prices. "Two or three years ago, a kilogram [2.2 pounds] of marijuana was worth $60 to $90," a Mexican marijuana grower told NPR news in December 2014. "But now they're paying us $30 to $40 a kilo. It's a big difference. If the US continues to legalize pot, they'll run us into the ground." While one can sympathize with the plight of the small producer, his products were flowing into the profit streams of those crazy violent Mexican drug cartels, and anything that reduces their operating capital is probably a good thing. That's not to say that legalizing weed in the US will destroy the cartels—they do have other profitable product lines, such as cocaine, heroin, and meth, and they have been diversifying into things like kidnapping and extortion—but give the US pot industry credit for whittling away at cartel bottom lines. 4. The Legal Weed Industry Could Have a $44 Billion Economic Impact by 2020. That's according to the 2016 Marijuana Business Factbook, published by the industry watchdog Marijuana Business Daily.The figure is based on estimated retail sales of $11 billion by 2020, up from somewhere around $4 billion this year, but also attempts to capture the industry's overall contribution to the economy. The Factbook estimates an additional three dollars in economic impact for every dollar spent on retail pot, from revenues generated for governments, marijuana-related businesses, job creation, and increased tourism. “We’re witnessing the emergence of a business that is about to become a massive economic force,” said Chris Walsh, managing editor of Marijuana Business Daily. “These figures, which we deem conservative, show not only how important the industry already is to the U.S economy at large, but also how much more important it is about to become.” Of course, that depends on a few things, such as how many states legalize it between now and then and who gets elected president this fall. Despite all the buzz around the business, it's still federally illegal—and only a Justice Department memo away from being blown up. Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.

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Published on March 22, 2016 15:56

Most writers get screwed: We did the math, and it’s true — literary prizes exclude writers outside the campus gates

It is widely held and discussed in our literary community that we are not inclusive and remain biased in favor of the white male. The ongoing conversation about lack of access, lack of diversity of voice, and underrepresented writers led us to look critically at the system in place to discern what was working and what was not. What does it mean to be successful in the literary world? Who gets the prizes? Who has access to mentors and networks? Who is attending residencies that foster community, collaboration, and offer more time to write? In answering these questions, we kept getting pulled back to the same place: Academia. If literature has a gatekeeper, that gatekeeper is academia. We, the founding board of a new organization, The Lulu Fund, are a group of writers and activists who identify along the many varied identities that comprise diversity of voice. We have formed to collaborate with a broad base of supporters and partner organizations, including academic institutions, to enact programing that supports an inclusive community of writers and aims to create support networks for under-served writers and eliminate the practices of exclusionary gatekeeping. We deeply respect and stand in solidarity with the long-standing work of organizations like Cave Canem, Kundiman, Native American Literature Symposium, Canto Mundo, VONA/Voices, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, ,and many others. Our primary goal is to support sustainable writing careers for an inclusive group of people. We begin this month with the presentation of our first annual literary awards, a cash prize called The Lulu, and a release of data we have compiled. VIDA – which annually counts gender of those publishing in a small number of periodicals -- has said, “We encourage anyone with a calculator and a library card to pursue their own version of the VIDA Count. By no means have we set up a monopoly on provocative pie charts.” The Lulu Fund collected data to offer more insight into who is winning literary prizes. Almost exclusively, we looked at prizes given to non-genre writers in fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. This count, the flip side of our offering our own modest awards, shows that 75 percent of the top 23 prizes in literature go to those in academia. We offer this as evidence of academic predominance in literature. The Lulu Fund cares deeply about academia and honors the work of the academy. If we didn’t care so much, we would not be dedicating our time and energy to encouraging it to become more inclusive and therefore, by definition, better. 75 percent of our founding board have MFAs or teach. We are not suggesting we do away with the academy. We are not suggesting academics are the problem; we don’t think they are. We are not suggesting that it is wrong for writers to teach. We understand that remuneration for writers is a staggering problem. In fact we are glad that so many of our writing colleagues are able to find sustainability for their writing through academic jobs. We are not suggesting that academics should not get prizes. We are not even suggesting that more prizes go to non-academics. What we are saying is: let us honestly talk about the inclusiveness issues in academia; let us look at the data on prizes and the intersection of prizes and academia; let us discuss, all of us, what we need to do to rectify the problems, take ownership, and effect change. Let us commit to upholding inclusiveness as a shared value and then keep one another accountable. Academia – full and part time faculty and students in American higher education — remains deeply exclusionary regarding race/ethnicity, class, dis/ability, and other traditionally underrepresented groups. These exclusions are well documented, even by academia itself. Full-time and part-time faculty are, respectively, 59/50 percent male, 81/77 percent white and have a household income of $114/ $92K. Of students, 60 percent are white, 15 percent are black, 15 percent are Hispanic, 6 percent are Asian/Pacific Islander, and 1 percent are American Indian/Alaska Native. While women largely have parity with men in student admissions and faculty, this gender parity breaks down when we look more closely at who is publishing, what they are publishing and where. As the VIDA count tells us every year, women -- especially women of color -- are not being published comparably to men within the most prestigious publications, including academic publications. This shapes the eventual pipeline of literary prize award winners. Further, women of all races and ethnicities are disproportionately affected by the class inequities within academia, such as struggling to pay for childcare on an adjunct’s salary. SEIU, a labor union that represents faculty, tells us it that on average an adjunct would have to teach 3 courses just to pay for full-time child care. We are cognizant of the long-standing structural influences that contribute to the inequities in higher education and believe those need to be aggressively redressed. We understand that exclusion exists far beyond the academy and have no desire to use the academic realm as a stand-in for the exclusions that happen throughout our society. However, academia serves as a gatekeeper for literature, and a responsible gatekeeper must meter opportunities in such a way that reflects the population and allows necessary stories to be told. Instead, exclusivity allows academia and, in turn, publishing to largely remain a white, able-bodied, economically privileged system that favors men. Academia influences who moves on to work at publishing houses, most of which require a college degree for employment. (This is compounded when factoring in the ability to complete an unpaid internship, which many publishers continue to utilize.) Academia also influences who teaches the canon to the next generation. The only way to promote a diversity of voices is to have a diverse demographic. Tenure track positions have decreased over 45 percent over the past 40 years according to SEIU data. This creates an underclass of workers with unreliable employment from multiple employers, a lack of healthcare, and a funneling of the ever-rising tuition to a new and unnecessary class of academic administrators. All of this retains the status quo of a predominately white and wealthy faculty and student body. As Junot Diaz penned in his unflinching New Yorker essay, “MFA vs. POC,” “I can’t tell you how often students of color seek me out during my visits or approach me after readings in order to share with me the racist nonsense they’re facing in their programs, from both their peers and their professors. In the last 17 years I must have had at least three hundred of these conversations, minimum.” At The Lulu Fund, our foundation is built upon inclusivity—our mission states that Lulu:

“works within the literary community to shift established systems that benefit the few, and to promote the understanding within intersectional feminism that racial, gender, and class justice must be sought as a whole. We support individual writers and organizations who demonstrate their commitment to these ideas by telling critical stories and lifting marginalized voices. Lulu offers financial support, takes and encourages direct action, and works to foster collaborations. We support writers of all ages and at all stages of their careers. We emphasize support for members of the LGBTQQIA community, people of color, the dis/abled, and those from diverse educational and economic backgrounds. Lulu believes that these divisive, identifying markers do not exist independently of one another.”

In the past few years we have seen a proliferation of think pieces and critical essays written on the realities of the university system and its impact on the literary world; we think this framing is a crucial precursor to direct action. We believe that the issues illuminated in part by much of the data collected are systemic. Simply pointing them out has brought about little change to the numbers from year to year — and in many cases no change at all. We believe direct action is needed to build a literary community where everyone has a seat at the table. Poet and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady wrote in his poem “Gratitude,” which considers being an African-American in the white academy, “I am a brick in the house that is being built around your house.” Those words have long informed the activist ethos for some of us, and are the guiding principle of The Lulu Fund. Lulu believes we should, as a community, engage in an open and unflinchingly honest conversation about the current literary climate. This will mean looking critically at a number of issues, including the influence academia has over literature as it pertains to systemic issues with inclusion. Does rewarding literature that overwhelming comes from a system that is economically privileged and white and able-bodied fuel lack of access? Does it marginalize the work of political and activist writers housed outside of the halls of the academy? Might these excluded writers be more engaged with exploring these very themes of exclusion and oppression than their academic counterparts? Might these writers also be more likely to shine bright lights on structural inequities in the institutions we tend to venerate? Writers of color have been fighting for decades to shift the literary landscape so that they too may influence current and historical narratives and have sought balanced representation in the future of the canon. Transgender writers are bringing their stories to the forefront of American thought. Dis/abled writers are making clear that their stories are not represented. And writers without means are waving red flags at us from every corner of the country. We must be candid and honest about how we are influenced by the university system. Semantics are used to convince one labor force that they are better than/less than another labor force. Listing any academic affiliation in one’s bios offers legitimacy in the eyes of editors. Faculty positions are coveted — as they should be — as a way to stay immersed in literature, work with the next generation, and have an income that makes writing possible and provides time to write. Let’s honestly acknowledge what’s good and fix the rest. A myth prevails that most writers work in academia. In fact, writers working within academia are a minority of writers. (We support the idea that a writer is someone who writes, and that it is not publication that defines someone as a writer. However, for the subjects we are focusing on in this essay, a writer here is defined as poets and non-genre creative writers of both fiction and nonfiction publishing books and/or in magazines or journals. This group might be thought of as literary writers.) How many writers are there? An analysis by The Millions estimates that there are at least 210,000 writers producing books of traditionally published fiction. Using the same methodology on the same data, there are at least 30,000 each of poets and creative non-fiction writers producing traditionally published books. That’s conservatively 270,000 writers. (To generously offset those included in that number who might be publishing in more than one category, we are not counting the thousands of people publishing in magazines and journals who have not, at least yet, published books.) By comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are, including graduate assistants, about 83,000 post-secondary teachers who teach literature or writing classes. Let us, to offset for writers working in other academic areas, say every one is a writer according to our definition. That means that just 31 percent of writers are also academics. Clearly there is much room for conversation and education if anyone is having difficulty generating a list of worthwhile writers outside of the academy. Likewise, a conversation is needed so we can talk about systemic solutions to the lack of inclusivity in higher education. We believe all successful writers must use their privilege to fight for systemic change so that the next generation of broadly published and lauded writers have among their ranks a diversity of voice so far-reaching that no reader may ever say again: there are no characters that look like me, sound like me, and have lived what I live. While there is a staggering amount of work to be done, we are heartened by changes we have seen in the landscape. We are about to award seven writers and organizations who uphold that ethos; whose writing and actions in the world do the good work of elevating marginalized voices, promote inclusivity, and tell the stories that have long waiting to be told. We are happy to support the Writers of Color Database and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. We are also proud to support WAM: Women Action & the Media and Third Wave Fund for using storytelling as a powerful tool for change in their organizations. We are delighted to see Lisa Lucas as the first African–American woman to head the National Book Foundation. We love what Cathy Hoang Park is doing with a multitude of voices at The New Republic and how Sophie Gilbert is invigorating conversations about culture at The Atlantic. We Need Diverse Books is a leader in inclusion. We are proud to honor Saeed Jones for his own important writing as well as for the paid fellowship program for emerging writers he has started at Buzzfeed. We’re happy to be honoring Wendy Ortiz and Garth Greenwell and the honest, un-flinching portrayals of queer sex and sexuality they each write. In this spirit of change and progress, The Lulu Fund seeks to build scaffolding alongside of academia. During the repairs we trust academia will make, Lulu will create systems of support to immediately start the work of inclusivity. In addition to our annual data release of prizes and giving our own awards, we will work to create new networks. To tip the scales toward equity, Lulu will offer paid fellowships to students as we work to end unpaid internships. As Lulu joins the fight to end adjunct exploitation, we will create a mentorship program that pairs established writers with emerging writers across all spectrums of identity—similar to the access created within the confines of academia. And finally, Lulu will interrogate the current residency structure in order to build one that works for everyone—where care providers are taken into consideration and folks without means are offered the same opportunities for community and time to write. The Lulu Fund is thrilled to have this opportunity to work toward building the inclusive literary world that future generations need us to build now. We are heartened by the generous responses we’ve received and the donations and support and offers of assistance. We need your help. We need you to share your ideas with us, and tell us how you can volunteer your time to help if you can. We need you write about these issues. Support us. Talk to us. Work with us. Let's come together to talk about how each one of us can be part of creating change in academia, to discover what each one of us can do to create new systems to support writers. Join us in the work, join us in the fight. Together, we can make writing a sustainable choice for a broader group of people and make the literary world an inclusive world.

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Published on March 22, 2016 15:21

Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 827

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Most writers get screwed: We did the math, and it’s true — literary prizes exclude writers outside the campus gates

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