Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 958
November 9, 2015
“That is old-fashioned racism!” Bernie Sanders tears down Donald Trump over never-ending campaign insanity
At a campaign rally Sunday in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders criticized Donald Trump’s mischaracterization of undocumented immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
“That is old-fashioned racism,” Sanders told the crowd. “It is not an American value to talk about rounding up millions of people and simply say that we are going to throw them out of the country. That is xenophobia.”
Sanders went on to promise “the beginning of the dismantling of an excessively wasteful $18 billion deportation regime.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, Sanders was played on by “a dozen mariachi musicians” before speaking to the crowd of more than 2,800 at the Cheyenne Sports Complex in North Las Vegas, where more than a third of the population is Hispanic.
Watch the Ruptly video below:
(h/t Raw Story)At a campaign rally Sunday in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders criticized Donald Trump’s mischaracterization of undocumented immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
“That is old-fashioned racism,” Sanders told the crowd. “It is not an American value to talk about rounding up millions of people and simply say that we are going to throw them out of the country. That is xenophobia.”
Sanders went on to promise “the beginning of the dismantling of an excessively wasteful $18 billion deportation regime.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, Sanders was played on by “a dozen mariachi musicians” before speaking to the crowd of more than 2,800 at the Cheyenne Sports Complex in North Las Vegas, where more than a third of the population is Hispanic.
Watch the Ruptly video below:
(h/t Raw Story)At a campaign rally Sunday in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders criticized Donald Trump’s mischaracterization of undocumented immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.
“That is old-fashioned racism,” Sanders told the crowd. “It is not an American value to talk about rounding up millions of people and simply say that we are going to throw them out of the country. That is xenophobia.”
Sanders went on to promise “the beginning of the dismantling of an excessively wasteful $18 billion deportation regime.”
According to the Las Vegas Sun, Sanders was played on by “a dozen mariachi musicians” before speaking to the crowd of more than 2,800 at the Cheyenne Sports Complex in North Las Vegas, where more than a third of the population is Hispanic.
Watch the Ruptly video below:
(h/t Raw Story)
November 7, 2015
The Hero’s Journey: The idea you never knew had shaped “Star Wars”
The opening of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, would have been the most ambitious single shot in cinema. It was to begin outside a spiral galaxy and then continuously track in, into the blazing light of billions of stars, past planets and wrecked spacecraft. The music was to be written and performed by Pink Floyd. The scene would have continued past convoys of mining trucks designed by the crème of European science fiction and surrealist artists, including Chris Foss, Moebius and H.R. Giger. We would see bands of space pirates attacking these craft and fighting to the death over their cargo, a life-giving drug known as Spice. Still the camera would continue forwards, past inhabited asteroids and the deep-space industrial complexes which refine the drug, until it found a small spacecraft carrying away the end result of this galactic economy: the dead bodies of those involved in the spice trade. The shot would have been a couple of minutes long and would have established an entire universe. It was a wildly ambitious undertaking, especially in the pre-computer graphics days of cinema. But that wasn’t going to deter Jodorowsky. This scale of Jodorowsky’s vision was a reflection of his philosophy of filmmaking. “What is the goal of life? It is to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art more than an industry. The search for the human soul as painting, as literature, as poetry: movies are that for me,” he said. From that perspective, there was no point in settling for anything small. “My ambition for Dune was for the film to be a Prophet, to change the young minds of all the world. For me Dune would be the coming of a God, an artistic and cinematic God. "For me the aim was not to make a picture, it was something deeper. I wanted to make something sacred.” The English maverick theatre director Ken Campbell, who formed the Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool in 1976, also recognised that this level of ambition could arise from science fiction, even if he viewed it from a more grounded perspective. “When you think about it,” he explained, “the entire history of literature is nothing more than people coming in and out of doors. Science fiction is about everything else.” Jodorowsky began putting a team together, one capable of realising his dream. He chose collaborators he believed to be “spiritual warriors.” The entire project seemed blessed by good fortune and synchronicity. When he decided that he needed superstars like Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí or Mick Jagger to play certain parts, he would somehow meet these people by happenstance and persuade them to agree. But when pre-production was complete, he went to pitch the film to the Hollywood studios. Jodorowsky pitched Dune in the years before the success of Star Wars, when science fiction was still seen as strange and embarrassing. As impressive and groundbreaking as his pitch was, it was still a science fiction film. They all said “no.” By the time this genre was first named, in the 1920s, it was already marginalised. It was fine for the kids, needless to say, but critics looked down upon it. In many ways this was a blessing. Away from the cultural centre, science fiction authors were free to explore and experiment. In this less pressured environment science fiction became, in the opinion of the English novelist J.G. Ballard, the last genre capable of adequately representing present-day reality. Science fiction was able to get under the skin of the times in a different way to more respected literature. A century of uncertainty, relative perspectives and endless technological revolutions was frequently invisible to mainstream culture, but was not ignored by science fiction.
* * *
The script for George Lucas’s 1977 movie Star Wars was influenced by The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a 1949 book by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell believed that at the heart of all the wild and varied myths and stories which mankind has dreamt lies one single archetypal story of profound psychological importance. He called this the monomyth. As Campbell saw it, the myths and legends of the world were all imperfect variations on this one, pure story structure. As Campbell summarised the monomyth, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell found echoes of this story wherever he looked; myths as diverse as those of Ulysses, Osiris or Prometheus, the lives of religious figures such as Moses, Christ or Buddha, and in plays and stories ranging from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and Dickens. This story is now known as “The Hero’s Journey.” It is a story that begins with an ordinary man (it is almost always a man) in a recognisable world. That man typically receives a call to adventure, encounters an older patriarchal mentor, undergoes many trials in his journey to confront and destroy a great evil, and returns to his previous life rewarded and transformed. George Lucas was always open about the fact that he consciously shaped the original Star Wars film into a modern expression of Campbell’s monomyth, and has done much to raise the profile of Campbell and his work. Star Wars was so successful that the American film industry has never really recovered. Together with the films of Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg, it changed Hollywood into an industry of blockbusters, tent-pole releases and high-concept pitches. American film was always a democratic affair which gave the audience what it wanted, and the audience demonstrated what they wanted by the purchase of tickets. The shock with which Hollywood reacted to Star Wars was as much about recognising how out of step with the audience’s interests it had become as it was about how much money was up for grabs. Had it realised this a few years earlier, it might have green-lit Jodorowsky’s Dune. The fact that Lucas had used Campbell’s monomyth as his tool for bottling magic did not go unnoticed. As far as Hollywood was concerned, The Hero’s Journey was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Studio script-readers used it to analyse submitted scripts and determine whether or not they should be rejected. Screenwriting theorists and professionals internalised it, until they were unable to produce stories that differed from its basic structure. Readers and writers alike all knew at exactly which point in the script the hero needed their inciting incident, their reversal into their darkest hour and their third-act resolution. In an industry dominated by the bottom line and massive job insecurity, Campbell’s monomyth gained a stranglehold over the structure of cinema. Campbell’s monomyth has been criticised for being Eurocentric and patriarchal. But it has a more significant problem, in that Campbell was wrong. There is not one pure archetypal story at the heart of human storytelling. The monomyth was not a treasure he discovered at the heart of myth, but an invention of his own that he projected onto the stories of the ages. It’s unarguably a good story, but it is most definitely not the only one we have. As the American media critic Philip Sandifer notes, Campbell “identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other ‘fundamental stories’ that you could also find in world mythology.” Campbell’s story revolves around one single individual, a lowly born person with whom the audience identifies. This hero is the single most important person in the world of the story, a fact understood not just by the hero, but by everyone else in that world. A triumph is only a triumph if the hero is responsible, and a tragedy is only a tragedy if it affects the hero personally. Supporting characters cheer or weep for the hero in ways they do not for other people. The death of a character the hero did not know is presented in a manner emotionally far removed from the death of someone the hero loved. Clearly, this was a story structure ideally suited to the prevailing culture. Out of all the potential monomyths that he could have run with, Campbell, a twentieth-century American, chose perhaps the most individualistic one possible. The success of this monomyth in the later decades of the twentieth century is an indication of how firmly entrenched the individualism became. Yet in the early twenty-first century, there are signs that this magic formula may be waning. The truly absorbing and successful narratives of our age are moving beyond the limited, individual perspective of The Hero’s Journey. Critically applauded series like The Wire and mainstream commercial hit series such as Game of Thrones are loved for the complexity of their politics and group relationships. These are stories told not from the point of view of one person, but from many interrelated perspectives, and the relationships between a complex network of different characters can engage us more than the story of a single man being brave. In the twenty-first century audiences are drawn to complicated, lengthy engagements with characters, from their own long-term avatar in World of Warcraft and other online gameworlds to characters like Doctor Who who have a fifty-years-plus history. The superhero films in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” are all connected, because Marvel understands that the sum is greater than the parts. A simple Hero’s Journey story such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit becomes, when adapted for a twenty-first-century cinema audience, a lengthy trilogy of films far more complex than the original book. We now seem to look for stories of greater complexity than can be offered by a single perspective. If science fiction is our cultural early-warning system, its move away from individualism tells us something about the direction we are headed. This should grab our attention, especially when, in the years after the Second World War, it became apparent just how dark the cult of the self could get. Excerpted from "Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century" by John Higgs. Copyright © 2015 by John Higgs. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint. The opening of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, would have been the most ambitious single shot in cinema. It was to begin outside a spiral galaxy and then continuously track in, into the blazing light of billions of stars, past planets and wrecked spacecraft. The music was to be written and performed by Pink Floyd. The scene would have continued past convoys of mining trucks designed by the crème of European science fiction and surrealist artists, including Chris Foss, Moebius and H.R. Giger. We would see bands of space pirates attacking these craft and fighting to the death over their cargo, a life-giving drug known as Spice. Still the camera would continue forwards, past inhabited asteroids and the deep-space industrial complexes which refine the drug, until it found a small spacecraft carrying away the end result of this galactic economy: the dead bodies of those involved in the spice trade. The shot would have been a couple of minutes long and would have established an entire universe. It was a wildly ambitious undertaking, especially in the pre-computer graphics days of cinema. But that wasn’t going to deter Jodorowsky. This scale of Jodorowsky’s vision was a reflection of his philosophy of filmmaking. “What is the goal of life? It is to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art more than an industry. The search for the human soul as painting, as literature, as poetry: movies are that for me,” he said. From that perspective, there was no point in settling for anything small. “My ambition for Dune was for the film to be a Prophet, to change the young minds of all the world. For me Dune would be the coming of a God, an artistic and cinematic God. "For me the aim was not to make a picture, it was something deeper. I wanted to make something sacred.” The English maverick theatre director Ken Campbell, who formed the Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool in 1976, also recognised that this level of ambition could arise from science fiction, even if he viewed it from a more grounded perspective. “When you think about it,” he explained, “the entire history of literature is nothing more than people coming in and out of doors. Science fiction is about everything else.” Jodorowsky began putting a team together, one capable of realising his dream. He chose collaborators he believed to be “spiritual warriors.” The entire project seemed blessed by good fortune and synchronicity. When he decided that he needed superstars like Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí or Mick Jagger to play certain parts, he would somehow meet these people by happenstance and persuade them to agree. But when pre-production was complete, he went to pitch the film to the Hollywood studios. Jodorowsky pitched Dune in the years before the success of Star Wars, when science fiction was still seen as strange and embarrassing. As impressive and groundbreaking as his pitch was, it was still a science fiction film. They all said “no.” By the time this genre was first named, in the 1920s, it was already marginalised. It was fine for the kids, needless to say, but critics looked down upon it. In many ways this was a blessing. Away from the cultural centre, science fiction authors were free to explore and experiment. In this less pressured environment science fiction became, in the opinion of the English novelist J.G. Ballard, the last genre capable of adequately representing present-day reality. Science fiction was able to get under the skin of the times in a different way to more respected literature. A century of uncertainty, relative perspectives and endless technological revolutions was frequently invisible to mainstream culture, but was not ignored by science fiction.* * *
The script for George Lucas’s 1977 movie Star Wars was influenced by The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a 1949 book by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell believed that at the heart of all the wild and varied myths and stories which mankind has dreamt lies one single archetypal story of profound psychological importance. He called this the monomyth. As Campbell saw it, the myths and legends of the world were all imperfect variations on this one, pure story structure. As Campbell summarised the monomyth, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell found echoes of this story wherever he looked; myths as diverse as those of Ulysses, Osiris or Prometheus, the lives of religious figures such as Moses, Christ or Buddha, and in plays and stories ranging from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare and Dickens. This story is now known as “The Hero’s Journey.” It is a story that begins with an ordinary man (it is almost always a man) in a recognisable world. That man typically receives a call to adventure, encounters an older patriarchal mentor, undergoes many trials in his journey to confront and destroy a great evil, and returns to his previous life rewarded and transformed. George Lucas was always open about the fact that he consciously shaped the original Star Wars film into a modern expression of Campbell’s monomyth, and has done much to raise the profile of Campbell and his work. Star Wars was so successful that the American film industry has never really recovered. Together with the films of Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg, it changed Hollywood into an industry of blockbusters, tent-pole releases and high-concept pitches. American film was always a democratic affair which gave the audience what it wanted, and the audience demonstrated what they wanted by the purchase of tickets. The shock with which Hollywood reacted to Star Wars was as much about recognising how out of step with the audience’s interests it had become as it was about how much money was up for grabs. Had it realised this a few years earlier, it might have green-lit Jodorowsky’s Dune. The fact that Lucas had used Campbell’s monomyth as his tool for bottling magic did not go unnoticed. As far as Hollywood was concerned, The Hero’s Journey was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Studio script-readers used it to analyse submitted scripts and determine whether or not they should be rejected. Screenwriting theorists and professionals internalised it, until they were unable to produce stories that differed from its basic structure. Readers and writers alike all knew at exactly which point in the script the hero needed their inciting incident, their reversal into their darkest hour and their third-act resolution. In an industry dominated by the bottom line and massive job insecurity, Campbell’s monomyth gained a stranglehold over the structure of cinema. Campbell’s monomyth has been criticised for being Eurocentric and patriarchal. But it has a more significant problem, in that Campbell was wrong. There is not one pure archetypal story at the heart of human storytelling. The monomyth was not a treasure he discovered at the heart of myth, but an invention of his own that he projected onto the stories of the ages. It’s unarguably a good story, but it is most definitely not the only one we have. As the American media critic Philip Sandifer notes, Campbell “identified one story he liked about death and resurrection and proceeded to find every instance of it he could in world mythology. Having discovered a vast expanse of nails for his newfound hammer he declared that it was a fundamental aspect of human existence, ignoring the fact that there were a thousand other ‘fundamental stories’ that you could also find in world mythology.” Campbell’s story revolves around one single individual, a lowly born person with whom the audience identifies. This hero is the single most important person in the world of the story, a fact understood not just by the hero, but by everyone else in that world. A triumph is only a triumph if the hero is responsible, and a tragedy is only a tragedy if it affects the hero personally. Supporting characters cheer or weep for the hero in ways they do not for other people. The death of a character the hero did not know is presented in a manner emotionally far removed from the death of someone the hero loved. Clearly, this was a story structure ideally suited to the prevailing culture. Out of all the potential monomyths that he could have run with, Campbell, a twentieth-century American, chose perhaps the most individualistic one possible. The success of this monomyth in the later decades of the twentieth century is an indication of how firmly entrenched the individualism became. Yet in the early twenty-first century, there are signs that this magic formula may be waning. The truly absorbing and successful narratives of our age are moving beyond the limited, individual perspective of The Hero’s Journey. Critically applauded series like The Wire and mainstream commercial hit series such as Game of Thrones are loved for the complexity of their politics and group relationships. These are stories told not from the point of view of one person, but from many interrelated perspectives, and the relationships between a complex network of different characters can engage us more than the story of a single man being brave. In the twenty-first century audiences are drawn to complicated, lengthy engagements with characters, from their own long-term avatar in World of Warcraft and other online gameworlds to characters like Doctor Who who have a fifty-years-plus history. The superhero films in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” are all connected, because Marvel understands that the sum is greater than the parts. A simple Hero’s Journey story such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit becomes, when adapted for a twenty-first-century cinema audience, a lengthy trilogy of films far more complex than the original book. We now seem to look for stories of greater complexity than can be offered by a single perspective. If science fiction is our cultural early-warning system, its move away from individualism tells us something about the direction we are headed. This should grab our attention, especially when, in the years after the Second World War, it became apparent just how dark the cult of the self could get. Excerpted from "Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century" by John Higgs. Copyright © 2015 by John Higgs. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.
There is sex after childbirth: What to expect in the bedroom when you’re done expecting
Even though I’m still in the trying-to-get-pregnant stage of my sex life, I’ve found myself wondering every time I contemplate parenting: Will becoming a mom disrupt my sex life? And if so, will the damage be permanent? To get a sense of what might be in store for me, I asked friends and experts whether moms really can continue to get it on. As far as I can tell, there seem to be two stages of sex after a woman becomes a mother: the immediate changes a new child brings, and the more long-term effects. As for the former, in her book
Mama Tried,
cartoonist and author Emily Flake writes of postpartum sex, “I wanted to have sex again very soon after I had the baby. But not in a sexy way, not in a way that felt anything like sexual desire. What I felt was a physical jonesing for my husband’s body that felt like starving … I did not want anything done to my lady parts…But I desperately, viscerally needed to be close to John.” While much has been written about the need for skin-to-skin contact between mothers and babies, the intimate kind of touch Flake is talking about, between adults, which may or may not be sexual per se, is also important. More from DAME: "Do We Have to Get Married?" In a similar way, writer Jordan Rosenfeld credits having a child with improving her sex life—yes, you read that right. In an essay on the topic, she reports that while she and her husband miss “the sleepy ease of morning sex,” there are other ways their passion for each other has been rekindled. Cue the so-called “cuddle hormone” oxytocin. Rosenfeld writes, “We quickly realized that for all the ways that children pull at the threads of a marriage, sex could weave those threads back into place.” In bed. For some moms, that’s an uphill battle. Blogger Crista Anne told me that after becoming a mom, intense postpartum depression “completely killed my libido.” When her libido returned, she was hit with another complication: “I felt extreme guilt that having a high sex drive somehow made me the dreaded ‘bad mommy,’” Anne said. What helped her navigate those extremes? Self-love. “Masturbation helped me immensely as I figured out the various changes I'd gone through. Learning how to allow myself to experience pleasure without another person around was vital. From there I was more confident to make changes within my interpersonal sex life. You may never be the same sexual being you were before, but I've found that prioritizing my pleasure has taken me to a point where I am having by far the best sex of my life.” So for moms who may not have lost that lovin’ feeling, but don’t quite know how to act on it, what steps can they take? Rosenfeld’s advice is simple: “If you feel even slightly in the mood, go for it. My mantra about sex is, you may not feel like it at the moment, but you always have a good time once you're there.” HIV-testing counselor and single mom Alicia Beth says the best thing you can do is give yourself a break. Don’t feel pressured, whether by your partner, society, or your own expectations, to be horny on demand. “It's humanly impossible to be fabulous, sexy, a new mom and do all the other things our lives call for,” said Beth. “Give you and your partner room to adjust to your new roles as parents. Slowly start to take time to rekindle what you had before baby.” Beth also noted that after her marriage ended and she was back in the dating game, what wound up working in her favor is good old-fashioned confidence. “When I accepted that I had a ‘mom body,’ for lack of a better phrase, my confidence attracted plenty of men who could've cared less about the changes my body had taken on. The more comfortable I felt with myself, the better my sex became.” More from DAME: "I Wasn't Supposed to Get Breast Cancer" Balancing time with your child and time with your partner (or partners) becomes extremely tricky. Meaghan O’Connell of The Cut hilariously dissects her overnight date with her husband at a pricey hotel, in which they were very conscious of spending money specifically in order to have sex. As she put it, “It’s a little absurd in concept: Did I just spent two years physically building a life with my own body, only to turn around and spend hundreds of dollars to escape it for less than 24 hours?” Mom of two Kristina Wright, who had her first child at 42, found what’s worked as a solution so parenthood didn’t completely take over her life—or her marriage. “I think I was very conscious of being focused on our relationship and making time for each other because we'd been together for 19 years; I didn't want this wonderful intimacy we'd always had to go away,” recalled Wright. “We had almost weekly date nights from the time our first was six months old, and that really helped us stay connected.” Hillary Frank, host of parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time, has some tips based on two episodes on the theme Parents’ Guide to Doing It (you can listen to those here and here). First, remember that you get to define what sex looks like for you—and it’s okay if it looks different than it did in your pre-mom days. “If full-on penetrative sex feels too scary or painful or involved, make it easy on yourself: don't do it. There are lots of other ways to be sexual with your partner that are just as intimate. Be creative,” suggested Frank. She also endorses sex columnist Dan Savage’s suggestion from the podcast that new parents, whether or not they’ve given birth, should get a pass from having sex for a year. Even though those who’ve given birth might be given the medical all clear for nookie after six weeks, Frank admits, “Most women I've talked to don't feel anywhere ready by then.” So don’t feel like just because you can after six weeks (or any other time period), you should, if it’s not feeling right for you. As it turns out, I’ve got good timing in thinking about how to keep things hot with my partner before I’m in the thick of parenting. According to Shar Rednour, co-author of
The Sex & Pleasure Book,
who adopted three kids with her partner, the time to start building up your sex life is before kids enter your life. “We had lots of sex while waiting to become parents because we knew we wouldn’t be able to have sex as often once we were parents,” Rednour explained. This isn’t just an issue of time management, but a way of reaffirming your passion for each other that you can draw inspiration from down the road. More from DAME: "I Donated My Dead Body to Give My Life a Purpose" After all the stress kids can bring, “it’s pretty easy to get snarky and resentful with partners and turn on each other,” said Rednour. “Why do you think there are so many divorces once people become parents? If you have some reserve intimacy ‘in the bank’ then it’s easier to believe your partner/spouse when they say ‘I want to fuck your brains out right now but I’m exhausted.’” In other words, they’ll remember how hot you were for them and be assured that you still want them, even if you’re too busy or tired in the early days of parenting to make good on that desire. And new moms (who, in all likelihood, are probably too busy to do more than skim this column): Here’s some good news. Wright wants you to “remember that it's a stage. The baby won't always be a baby, and any lack of interest due to exhaustion and hormones will shift with time. You will feel like yourself again, probably sooner than you expect.”
“He had a vision for rock ‘n’ roll long before the music existed”: Peter Guralnick digs deep into the history of the man who made Elvis Presley
The music writer Peter Guralnick has spent his long and celebrated career warming up for his new book. The author of books about country, blues, soul, and a definitive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, he’s now turned to one of the great taproots of American music. “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll” describes the life and cultural context of the Sun Records founder. And it looks at Phillips’s relationships with Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner (whose “Rocket 88” is sometimes called the first rock song), Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, all of whom he recorded. “It’s worth pausing, for a moment, to consider how lucky it was that Presley walked into Phillips’s studio and not someone else’s,” Dwight Garner wrote in a rave New York Times review of the Guralnick book. “Another producer (that term had not yet come into use in the record industry) might have put him to work singing country-pop ditties with string sections. He might have been another Eddy Arnold.” We’re also lucky that Guralnick – who wrote the script for a Phillips documentary made by A&E – tackled Phillips’s complex life and times. We spoke to him from his home near Boston. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The subtitle of your book is “The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll.” I don’t think you’re the first person to call him that, and the phrase served as the title for a documentary years ago. Overall, give us a sense of how important Phillips was to the birth and early evolution of the music. What I think was remarkable about Sam, besides the fact that from a tiny little storefront studio in Memphis, so much music came out of such a tiny space, from something that was essentially a one-man operation. From Elvis to Carl Perkins to Johnny Cash to Jerry Lee Lewis, [he created] what was essentially the dominant strain of rock ‘n’ roll during the first few years of its existence. What I think is extraordinary about Sam is that he had a vision for rock ‘n’ roll long before the music existed, long before he was even able to give expression to it… Years before he even conceived of building a recording studio, he conceived a music that could bridge all gaps, that could deny category… An African-American-based music that could leap across the chasms of race and social origin and class. And when he opened his studio, the first hit he had come out was [Ike Turner’s] “Rocket 88.” It doesn’t matter how you label it – the fact is, it was an extraordinary hit, it sold over 100,000 copies. In his first public utterances, in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he spoke of that same vision. Of “Rocket 88” being the kind of music that could appeal to all kinds, that could reach a mainstream audience, that could bridge that gap. While the record may not have fully realized what we envisioned for it, that was clearly what he was looking to achieve from the moment he started recording anyone. He had the same vision for Howlin’ Wolf. What was the racial situation like in the South when he was growing up? How much black music was he exposed to? Anybody growing up in the South would be exposed to a lot of black music unless they were deaf to it, either for reasons of prejudice or because they couldn’t hear. The South has always been different from the North because while the legal system was always tangled in segregation, everything about day-to-day life argued against the formal practice. Whereas in the North, where segregation was not institutionalized, there was far greater separation. So for Sam, growing up initially on that 323-acre farm outside of Florence, Alabama – his father rented the farm, but didn’t own it, and couldn’t hold onto it after the depression hit – he had sharecroppers, both black and white, working in the fields. Sam worked with them. What he was drawn to most of all was the sounds that were all around him – it could be a whippoorwill, it could be a hoe striking rock, it could be the music that came primarily from the black sharecroppers. But he was also acutely aware of the racial disparities which existed. And we’re talking about a 6- or 7-year-old kid. When I spoke to his family… they weren’t altogether thrilled by the manner in which he expressed himself. Or the views he expressed. He was drawn to this music; he was drawn to all sorts of music. H loved John Philip Sousa. He loved hillbilly music. He loved gospel music. What he was most drawn to was black music of all kinds. After he went to church with his family, he would go to the black church, a block and a half from the church he attended… He described himself as being spellbound by the music coming out of there, particularly in the summer when the windows were open and you could hear every beat of the music. So when he opened his studio it was explicitly to give some of “those great Negro singers of the South an opportunity to record” – I’m not getting the quote quite right – where previously they’d not had one. How central was that to his ambition to open a studio? That was entirely what he opened his studio for. This was the Memphis Recording Service, not Sun Records. But he was stymied – how do you get some of these African-American artists to record? Joe Hill Louis, the great one-man-band who performed frequently on Beale Street, just wandered into the studio one day and asked him what he was doing. Sam said, Well, I’m opening a recording studio, and explained what his purpose was. And Lewis said, That’s just what Memphis needs. And Joe Hill Louis became Sam’s ambassador to the [black] community. I’ve spoken about “Rocket 88.” Ike Turner bumped into a friend, Riley B. King [B.B. King], who told him, You should go up to Memphis – I’m making records with this man, Sam Phillips. How did the rockabilly musicians find the place? Elvis was the first, and it was really in the wake of Elvis that everybody else came in. Jerry Lee Lewis talks about reading an article in one of the fan magazines about Elvis Presley, that spoke about Sam Phillips and how he’d recorded B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf. Most of the so-called rockabilly singers were well aware of B.B. King. Elvis came into the studio – there’s no way of proving this – in the immediate aftermath of a story that ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, I think it was, about the Prisonaires, a group Sam had just recorded in July of 1953, who were incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. They recorded there and a reporter described Sam as a man open to talent of any kind, who was looking for original talent, would record people no one else would record. I don’t think there’s any doubt, this is what emboldened Elvis to go in there. And his excuse for going in there was to cut a personal record – one side for three dollars and two sides for four dollars. He was trying to put himself in the way of discovery of this man he’d heard about. Elvis was such a walking encyclopedia of music of every type – he was an ethnomusicologist without a degree. And it was the openness of Mr. Phillips. That drew him to the studio, and then he kept coming back again and again… Then Sam set up a rehearsal with Scotty Moore, and that’s what, on July 5, 1954, led to “That’s All Right.” It was a torturous process; it took a lot of patience from the man in the booth. It’s not that he didn’t recognize Elvis’s talent – he didn’t recognize the thing that best expressed Elvis’s talent, or had any hope of selling. That’s a great song. It was through the success that Elvis enjoyed throughout the South, particularly the mid-South – he was a star in the region – that led to everyone from Johnny Cash to Carl Perkins, to lesser-known talents, they were all drawn to the studio. It wasn’t just the success Elvis had – it was the original sound coming out of the studio. You got to know Phillips a bit, starting in the ’70s. What was it like to be around him? It was great – the most unexpected and biggest fun in the world. He was probably the most charismatic man I ever met. From the moment I met him in ’79. I was inspired by that first meeting. I had no idea that what he would talk about would so encapsulate a philosophy of the creative life. He’s talking about having the courage of your convictions, doing everything in your powers to realize your vision…. He was a person insistent on his originality; he wasn’t a rude person but he wasn’t interested in small talk. As he said, “I love chaos.” It was a remarkable experience knowing him over 25 years…. He kept his distance; he didn’t give himself over all at once. He was a solitary person, like so many people who lived his life in public. There was nothing that could have been more challenging or more fun. The music writer Peter Guralnick has spent his long and celebrated career warming up for his new book. The author of books about country, blues, soul, and a definitive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, he’s now turned to one of the great taproots of American music. “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll” describes the life and cultural context of the Sun Records founder. And it looks at Phillips’s relationships with Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner (whose “Rocket 88” is sometimes called the first rock song), Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, all of whom he recorded. “It’s worth pausing, for a moment, to consider how lucky it was that Presley walked into Phillips’s studio and not someone else’s,” Dwight Garner wrote in a rave New York Times review of the Guralnick book. “Another producer (that term had not yet come into use in the record industry) might have put him to work singing country-pop ditties with string sections. He might have been another Eddy Arnold.” We’re also lucky that Guralnick – who wrote the script for a Phillips documentary made by A&E – tackled Phillips’s complex life and times. We spoke to him from his home near Boston. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The subtitle of your book is “The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll.” I don’t think you’re the first person to call him that, and the phrase served as the title for a documentary years ago. Overall, give us a sense of how important Phillips was to the birth and early evolution of the music. What I think was remarkable about Sam, besides the fact that from a tiny little storefront studio in Memphis, so much music came out of such a tiny space, from something that was essentially a one-man operation. From Elvis to Carl Perkins to Johnny Cash to Jerry Lee Lewis, [he created] what was essentially the dominant strain of rock ‘n’ roll during the first few years of its existence. What I think is extraordinary about Sam is that he had a vision for rock ‘n’ roll long before the music existed, long before he was even able to give expression to it… Years before he even conceived of building a recording studio, he conceived a music that could bridge all gaps, that could deny category… An African-American-based music that could leap across the chasms of race and social origin and class. And when he opened his studio, the first hit he had come out was [Ike Turner’s] “Rocket 88.” It doesn’t matter how you label it – the fact is, it was an extraordinary hit, it sold over 100,000 copies. In his first public utterances, in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he spoke of that same vision. Of “Rocket 88” being the kind of music that could appeal to all kinds, that could reach a mainstream audience, that could bridge that gap. While the record may not have fully realized what we envisioned for it, that was clearly what he was looking to achieve from the moment he started recording anyone. He had the same vision for Howlin’ Wolf. What was the racial situation like in the South when he was growing up? How much black music was he exposed to? Anybody growing up in the South would be exposed to a lot of black music unless they were deaf to it, either for reasons of prejudice or because they couldn’t hear. The South has always been different from the North because while the legal system was always tangled in segregation, everything about day-to-day life argued against the formal practice. Whereas in the North, where segregation was not institutionalized, there was far greater separation. So for Sam, growing up initially on that 323-acre farm outside of Florence, Alabama – his father rented the farm, but didn’t own it, and couldn’t hold onto it after the depression hit – he had sharecroppers, both black and white, working in the fields. Sam worked with them. What he was drawn to most of all was the sounds that were all around him – it could be a whippoorwill, it could be a hoe striking rock, it could be the music that came primarily from the black sharecroppers. But he was also acutely aware of the racial disparities which existed. And we’re talking about a 6- or 7-year-old kid. When I spoke to his family… they weren’t altogether thrilled by the manner in which he expressed himself. Or the views he expressed. He was drawn to this music; he was drawn to all sorts of music. H loved John Philip Sousa. He loved hillbilly music. He loved gospel music. What he was most drawn to was black music of all kinds. After he went to church with his family, he would go to the black church, a block and a half from the church he attended… He described himself as being spellbound by the music coming out of there, particularly in the summer when the windows were open and you could hear every beat of the music. So when he opened his studio it was explicitly to give some of “those great Negro singers of the South an opportunity to record” – I’m not getting the quote quite right – where previously they’d not had one. How central was that to his ambition to open a studio? That was entirely what he opened his studio for. This was the Memphis Recording Service, not Sun Records. But he was stymied – how do you get some of these African-American artists to record? Joe Hill Louis, the great one-man-band who performed frequently on Beale Street, just wandered into the studio one day and asked him what he was doing. Sam said, Well, I’m opening a recording studio, and explained what his purpose was. And Lewis said, That’s just what Memphis needs. And Joe Hill Louis became Sam’s ambassador to the [black] community. I’ve spoken about “Rocket 88.” Ike Turner bumped into a friend, Riley B. King [B.B. King], who told him, You should go up to Memphis – I’m making records with this man, Sam Phillips. How did the rockabilly musicians find the place? Elvis was the first, and it was really in the wake of Elvis that everybody else came in. Jerry Lee Lewis talks about reading an article in one of the fan magazines about Elvis Presley, that spoke about Sam Phillips and how he’d recorded B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf. Most of the so-called rockabilly singers were well aware of B.B. King. Elvis came into the studio – there’s no way of proving this – in the immediate aftermath of a story that ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, I think it was, about the Prisonaires, a group Sam had just recorded in July of 1953, who were incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. They recorded there and a reporter described Sam as a man open to talent of any kind, who was looking for original talent, would record people no one else would record. I don’t think there’s any doubt, this is what emboldened Elvis to go in there. And his excuse for going in there was to cut a personal record – one side for three dollars and two sides for four dollars. He was trying to put himself in the way of discovery of this man he’d heard about. Elvis was such a walking encyclopedia of music of every type – he was an ethnomusicologist without a degree. And it was the openness of Mr. Phillips. That drew him to the studio, and then he kept coming back again and again… Then Sam set up a rehearsal with Scotty Moore, and that’s what, on July 5, 1954, led to “That’s All Right.” It was a torturous process; it took a lot of patience from the man in the booth. It’s not that he didn’t recognize Elvis’s talent – he didn’t recognize the thing that best expressed Elvis’s talent, or had any hope of selling. That’s a great song. It was through the success that Elvis enjoyed throughout the South, particularly the mid-South – he was a star in the region – that led to everyone from Johnny Cash to Carl Perkins, to lesser-known talents, they were all drawn to the studio. It wasn’t just the success Elvis had – it was the original sound coming out of the studio. You got to know Phillips a bit, starting in the ’70s. What was it like to be around him? It was great – the most unexpected and biggest fun in the world. He was probably the most charismatic man I ever met. From the moment I met him in ’79. I was inspired by that first meeting. I had no idea that what he would talk about would so encapsulate a philosophy of the creative life. He’s talking about having the courage of your convictions, doing everything in your powers to realize your vision…. He was a person insistent on his originality; he wasn’t a rude person but he wasn’t interested in small talk. As he said, “I love chaos.” It was a remarkable experience knowing him over 25 years…. He kept his distance; he didn’t give himself over all at once. He was a solitary person, like so many people who lived his life in public. There was nothing that could have been more challenging or more fun.
#MerryChristmas Starbucks! Watch the absurd “war on Christmas” call-to-arms over red coffee cups
The War on Christmas Season starts earlier every year. Days after Starbucks announced the ritual switch from white cups to red that signals the traditional end of Pumpkin Spice season — complete with custom emoji and everything — the paranoid culture warriors found this season’s cause célèbre. This year’s #redcups are just that — red cups, vaguely reminiscent of the lowly Solo cup, even, stripped of decoration other than the ubiquitous Starbucks logo. And people are
pissed
. Not just any people, of course, but the people who readily share videos on Facebook posted by a guy named Joshua Feuerstein. If you were thinking that it was time the Christian right found its very own Guy Fieri, wait no longer. Feuerstein’s a professional fundamentalist Christian social media evangelist — sure, that’s a thing — specializing in carefully-orchestrated videos designed to go viral like “Dear Mr. Atheist … allow me to destroy evolution in 3 minutes!” Feuerstein, who is quite a bit rougher around the edges than your average Duggar, sports a kind of Fred Durstian throwback bro-aesthetic to go with his incredibly shallow sense of where faith and public life should and could intersect. And now he’s taking Starbucks down, because the coffee chain had the audacity to eschew the “winter seasonal” graphic designs that decorated red cups in previous years in favor of a simpler look. Where have the snowmen and reindeer of yesteryear gone? Why does Starbucks hate Jesus?! In a video that has been viewed more than 7 million times at this time, Feuerstein opens with a little joke that he’s hoping will get him a job on the Trump campaign: “I think in the age of political correctness we’ve become so open minded our brains have literally fallen out of our head. Did you realize Starbucks wanted to take CHRIST and Christmas off of their brand new cups? That’s why they’re just plain red.” Feuerstein continues: “In fact, do you realize that Starbucks isn’t allowed to say Merry Christmas to customers?" Shots. Fired. “I decided instead of boycotting, why don’t we start a movement?” St. Paul would be proud, bro. Here's the plan: He went into Starbucks and placed his order, and when the cashier asked his name, he gave them
“SNL’s” inexplicable Trump fiasco: Why the Donald’s unprecedented hosting gig deserves all the criticism
It's easy to see why "Saturday Night Live" has decided to let Donald Trump host the show tonight. From the protests being held at NBC to the drama surrounding some promos Trump cut for his appearance, "SNL" has garnered a healthy dose of what every show wants—attention and controversy. The ratings will surely jump, and "SNL" will be able to maintain its place in the cultural conversation for another week. So it's understandable. But that doesn't mean it's not bizarre and objectionable on several levels.
From what I can tell, Trump is the first top-flight presidential candidate to host "SNL" during the middle of an active campaign. Political cameos on the show are a time-honored staple—hello, Val!—and politicians have hosted before, but they've all been in between races, with the exception of barely-a-candidate Al Sharpton in early 2003. This time, "SNL" is giving Trump an extended platform it's not giving to any of the other candidates in either the Republican or Democratic race. This isn't illegal—the equal time rules for candidates are byzantine and stacked in favor of not actually giving people equal time—but it's a notable and rather strange intervention by "SNL" nonetheless. Trump may be, in many ways, a joke, but his presidential campaign long since crossed the line from entertainment into serious reality. The haste with which NBC yanked a promo in which Trump called Ben Carson a "total loser" shows the risky waters the network is wading in.
Then there is the very real fact of Trump's racism. It seems an eon ago, but his comments about Mexicans and Latinos were toxic enough that a certain network called NBC severed all ties with him. Now that same network is welcoming him back with open arms, much to the chagrin of Latino groups. It's not the greatest look for "SNL," a show that has an appalling record when it comes to Latinos. And that's before you get to Trump's tacit acceptance of anti-Muslim racism—something nobody ever has to pay a price for—or his openly bigoted birther crusade. Let the hilarity ensue!
Now, "SNL" is not required to have its hosts pass political litmus tests, and it has no particular responsibility to endorse or reject any views. (Hell, Hillary Clinton has enough objectionable beliefs all by herself.) However, just because it's a comedy show doesn't mean it's exempt from scrutiny. We're talking about a program with enormous influence. At best, its willingness to play with Trump is representative of a wider problem. It says something—if not about "SNL" specifically, then perhaps about the rest of us—that Trump is able to peddle such open racism and not only get away with it, but be rewarded for it with such a highly coveted prize. "SNL" will surely lampoon Trump, but this time, Trump will be in on the joke. The satire never stings quite as much when its subject is going along with it.
"SNL" is giving Trump a prime opportunity to neutralize some of the more rancid parts of his candidacy, all while delivering Lorne Michaels a nice bump in the audience figures. It's a win-win for everyone—everyone, that is, except "SNL," and Donald Trump, and maybe all of us in the world of Internet content, who will disseminate every last clip of this dire ordeal to you, the reader. Can't you feel the fun?
The renewable energy source that’s more dangerous than coal
DESCHUTES COUNTY, ORE. - More than 100 feet beneath the crowns of arrow-straight pines, the forest floor around Peter Caligiuri was overgrown. He pointed at clumps of trees taller than him, but so thin he could have wrapped his hands around their trunks. Before the era of modern firefighting, regular brush fires thinned out woodlands like these. Now, with smaller wildfires kept at bay, small trees can flourish, fueling fiercer blazes when forest fires inevitably arrive. “The understory would have been occupied by a lot more native vegetation; diverse vegetation,” said Caligiuri, a Nature Conservancy forest ecologist working with other groups and the federal government to restore forests around Bend — mostly by thinning them out. “What we’re seeing here in central Oregon is emblematic of a lot of the problems we’re seeing across the Intermountain West.” Instead of leaving them to burn in forest fires, Oregon officials want these skinny pines and other trees cut down and burned in power plants. Wood is an increasingly popular source of energy in Europe, where it’s richly subsidized. But wood energy can accelerate climate change. Living trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and burning dead ones releases more carbon dioxide than coal. Oregon officials say burning waste wood and forest thinnings from its large logging industry and forestlands would protect the climate, while improving the natural environment. But their ambitions go beyond that. The governor’s office wants to know whether the last coal plant in the state could be converted to run on wood — a substantially riskier proposition for the atmosphere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to make critical decisions about this kind of energy as it cracks down on power plant pollution. Its decisions will affect how a fuel known as biomass — wood and other organic material burned for energy — can be used by the states to meet new pollution rules. In doing so, the agency will walk a fine line between promoting the use of wood energy that could accelerate deforestation and global warming, and defining the limited sources of wood fuel that could help ease those problems. The European Union makes no such distinction. Through a loophole in its clean energy regulations, all wood energy is treated as if it releases no carbon dioxide. That accounting trick is allowing European national governments and their energy sectors to pump tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air every year — without accounting for it. That helps them keep that pollution off their books, but not out of the atmosphere. Burning wood only helps the climate in special circumstances, like when waste is used for energy instead of being burned off in a field, or when trees are planted on barren land to eventually produce fuel. The EPA will decide which types of wood energy can count as clean energy on a state-by-state basis. By letting states propose their own rules, the federal government risks allowing Oregon, Virginia and other states with large forestry industries to downplay the climate impacts of wood energy as they devise their plans to reduce climate-warming pollution. The Clean Power Plan — 1,560 pages of electricity rules finalized in August by the EPA — represents an unprecedented effort by the U.S. government to start forcing states to control climate pollution from their power industries. Most states already allow wood burning to count as renewable energy generation. The EPA will allow states to propose increasing their use of wood energy to help meet the new greenhouse gas reduction rules. Wood energy is considered renewable because trees can regrow. But it’s not a clean energy source like wind turbines or solar panels, which convert energy from the environment to electricity. Wood is a fuel, meaning it must be burned to produce electricity, which releases pollution. Analysis of European data suggests that converting a modern coal plant to run on wood pellets increases carbon dioxide pollution by 15 to 20 percent. And for power plants in Europe and parts of Asia that are burning wood pellets (many of which are being produced in the U.S. — all for export) for electricity, carbon pollution can be even greater, because fuels are needed to produce and transport the pellets. If the EPA is too lenient when it rules on plans submitted by Oregon and the other states, that could threaten not only the climate, but America’s forests. Many of the wood pellets being burned for electricity in Europe were made from trees chopped down in the U.S., including from sensitive wetlands in the Southeast. Allowing this practice to grow could compound the threat that it poses to some of the world’s most heavily logged areas. The EPA has already hinted that Oregon’s hopes for burning waste wood and forest thinnings could count toward pollution reductions under the Clean Power Plan. That’s based on advice from a panel of scientists it has convened. But it could be more than a year before states learn whether industrial levels of wood burning are deemed acceptable — and, if so, how. “We would like to see bioenergy play a significant role in our efforts to reduce carbon emissions,” said Margi Hoffman, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s energy advisor. “We would like to see smaller-scale projects listed as carbon neutral,” she said — while acknowledging that biomass energy projects “of a certain size and scale” don’t meet that definition. Fears ahead of the upcoming EPA ruling are rooted in more than 20 years of climate research that warns wood energy can’t be used at large industrial scales without harming the climate. Seas have risen more than a half a foot since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Climate change is making heat waves hotter and causing heavier downpours. Pollution from wood energy compounds those problems. “Biomass energy is going to be part of a mix of new forms of energy that gets us off of fossil fuels,” said William Schlesinger, president emeritus at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies whose research frequently deals with climate change. Logging debris can safely be used for energy, he said, and fast-growing grass and some plantation trees will sometimes be “OK.” But Schlesinger said cutting down old trees to fuel power plants — a scenario that’s already playing out in the Southeast, where many of Europe’s wood pellets are being produced — will exacerbate climate change, the very problem for which wood energy is often pitched as a solution. “There need to be some rules and regulations put into place that trace the origin of biomass, so you can’t go out and cut an old-growth forest and pelletize it and say, ‘That’s carbon neutral,’” he said. Wood Pellets Emit More Carbon Than Coal 
DOWNLOAD While forest-rich Oregon sees environmental wonder in burning waste wood to provide electricity, Massachusetts sees the dangers of it. In 2012, following the commissioning of a study into the potential climate and forestry impacts of wood energy, Massachusetts adopted rules to limit its use. The different rules in Oregon and Massachusetts reflect their economic, physical and political landscapes. The EPA is comfortable with that diversity. It will allow states to set their own rules under the Clean Power Plan. But it will wield a veto. “It’s complicated,” said Robert Sussman, an energy industry consultant and Yale Law School lecturer who was a senior advisor in the EPA from 2009 to 2013. “On the one hand, the EPA is saying that combustion of biomass could be carbon neutral under certain circumstances. But then it’s turning around and making the path for industry and the states complex.” Under the Clean Power Plan, states that want to use wood energy to meet pollution targets must “adequately demonstrate” that the fuel they use — be it wood chips, wood pellets, mill waste, almond shells or trees killed by beetles, for example — will “appropriately control” increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Only wood-burning power plants built after 2012 will be considered eligible. 
The EPA will decide how states like Oregon can burn trees to comply with new pollution rules. If its rulings are too lax, they could add to warming and threaten forests. Photos by Rod Parmenter. Dominion Resources doesn’t expect to convert its larger power plants to run on wood to help meet Clean Power Plan requirements. Without access to the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies that European governments provide for renewable energy — virtually guaranteeing profits for even the most expensive projects — large-scale wood burning might not be feasible for American power plants. “The cost of converting large pulverized coal units to biomass would be too high to consider,” company spokesman Dan Genest said. The EPA hasn’t said how it will decide whether a proposal to burn wood for electricity would “appropriately control” rises in greenhouse gas pollution. Its rulings will be crucial — both in reducing real-world pollution and in setting an example to counter the destructive one being set by Europe. The agency has so far made two broad statements: it won’t treat all wood burning as carbon neutral, but waste as fuel may be treated as such. In a memo signed last year by senior EPA official Janet McCabe, the agency indicated that it “expects to recognize” the climate benefits of “waste-derived and certain forest-derived industrial byproduct feedstocks.” It also said it may approve state plans that include the burning of what it vaguely described as “sustainably derived agricultural and forest-derived feedstocks.” Those ambiguous statements have triggered consternation among scientists and environmental groups. They wonder what “sustainably derived” will mean. Sustainability can refer to environmental practices that have “little-to-no bearing on the carbon implications of biomass use,” the Cary Institute’s Schlesinger and dozens of other scientists wrote in a letter to McCabe. For some wood fuels, the agency may require states follow a new system for measuring climate impacts. “The EPA needs to set up a factor that they multiply by the smokestack emissions,” said Oregon State University forest ecology professor Mark Harmon, a member of the science panel that’s advising the agency on wood energy’s climate effects. “What really counts? What really is being added to the atmosphere — or maybe taken out of the atmosphere, in some cases?” Even when it helps the climate, wood energy isn’t all forest restoration and atmospheric rainbows. Like fossil fuels, wood energy is dirty energy. Burning wood releases pollution that creates haze and ozone, triggering emphysema and asthma attacks. That’s why some local air quality districts ban residents from using fireplaces on the smoggiest days. Waste wood may also have been treated with pesticides, paint and other poisons, which can be released as air pollution when burned. Wood energy’s pollution, combined with its climate impacts and its potential to contribute to deforestation, has seeded deep opposition to it in the U.S. When Oregon lawmakers were debating a bill that would eventually declare wood energy to be carbon neutral, the Sierra Club’s state chapter testified in opposition. Scientifically, the legislation was “deeply flawed,” the group pointed out, warning it could accelerate climate change and sully the air. Power plant owners can take costly steps to reduce air pollution, but those that burn wood have fewer regulatory requirements than those burning fossil fuels. Among other differences, wood-burning power plants can release more than twice as much pollution as coal or gas plants before they’re affected by federal clean air rules. “There are real public health impacts if you live next to one of these facilities, and the facility isn’t run really well,” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The influential American nonprofit campaigns against the overuse of wood energy, such as in Europe. The potential role wood energy could play under the Clean Power Plan won’t become clear until the EPA begins assessing state plans, which are due next year. States could receive extensions for two years beyond that. Meanwhile, the agency is consulting with its panel of scientists and calling for public comment as it tries to hone its approach to regulating pollution from wood energy. The NRDC says the EPA is correct to conclude that wood energy is not always carbon neutral. It says it will pressure the agency to be highly critical of state proposals to count electricity from waste wood as zero carbon under the Clean Power Plan. “If you’re going to say that it’s zero carbon, it doesn’t just have to control carbon a little bit — it’s got to control it all the way down to being equal to wind power or solar power,” Greene said. “It’s unclear from the final regulations how the EPA will determine if that standard has been met.” By potentially deferring to the judgment of Oregon, Virginia and other states, the federal government risks allowing harmful types of wood energy to be counted as clean. Momentum toward tackling global warming is growing stronger around the world, led in part by the U.S., which is striving to be a leader on climate action. Any mistakes now by the EPA threaten to entrench the European approach and entice other countries to follow, undermining global efforts to tackle climate change.
DOWNLOAD While forest-rich Oregon sees environmental wonder in burning waste wood to provide electricity, Massachusetts sees the dangers of it. In 2012, following the commissioning of a study into the potential climate and forestry impacts of wood energy, Massachusetts adopted rules to limit its use. The different rules in Oregon and Massachusetts reflect their economic, physical and political landscapes. The EPA is comfortable with that diversity. It will allow states to set their own rules under the Clean Power Plan. But it will wield a veto. “It’s complicated,” said Robert Sussman, an energy industry consultant and Yale Law School lecturer who was a senior advisor in the EPA from 2009 to 2013. “On the one hand, the EPA is saying that combustion of biomass could be carbon neutral under certain circumstances. But then it’s turning around and making the path for industry and the states complex.” Under the Clean Power Plan, states that want to use wood energy to meet pollution targets must “adequately demonstrate” that the fuel they use — be it wood chips, wood pellets, mill waste, almond shells or trees killed by beetles, for example — will “appropriately control” increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Only wood-burning power plants built after 2012 will be considered eligible. The EPA hasn’t said how it will decide whether a proposal to burn wood for electricity would “appropriately control” rises in greenhouse gas pollution.The EPA’s panel of science advisors has agreed that some kinds of waste wood can be burned to produce electricity — and benefit the climate at the same time, said Joe Goffman, an EPA air official who helped draft the new rules. “We’ve opened up the door for states to submit plans that include some kind of biomass component,” Goffman said. “If states include biomass as a component in their plans, they can essentially present the case as to why their approach is appropriate.” Most states have standards in place that require utilities to include renewable energy in their electricity supplies. The standards tend to focus on promoting renewable energy — rather than reducing climate pollution — and wood energy is a renewable alternative under these rules. Under the EPA’s new power plant rules, states will also need to start considering the climate effects of wood burning. Massachusetts already does that out of concern for the climate and its forests, limiting the types of wood that can count as renewable fuel under its standards. Since 2012, its efficiency standards have been so high that a wood-burning power plant would also have to heat buildings to qualify. In Virginia, which is home to a large forestry industry, the rules are looser. Dominion Resources used investment tax credits, available from the federal government, to help it switch three of its small coal plants in Virginia to run on wood chips. It’s allowed to count that energy toward its state renewables requirements. Each of the converted plants produces about 50 megawatts of electricity — a typical size for a U.S. biomass plant, capable of powering thousands of homes. Virginia’s power regulators allowed the company to pass on more than $160 million in costs to its bill-paying customers.
The EPA will decide how states like Oregon can burn trees to comply with new pollution rules. If its rulings are too lax, they could add to warming and threaten forests. Photos by Rod Parmenter. Dominion Resources doesn’t expect to convert its larger power plants to run on wood to help meet Clean Power Plan requirements. Without access to the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies that European governments provide for renewable energy — virtually guaranteeing profits for even the most expensive projects — large-scale wood burning might not be feasible for American power plants. “The cost of converting large pulverized coal units to biomass would be too high to consider,” company spokesman Dan Genest said. The EPA hasn’t said how it will decide whether a proposal to burn wood for electricity would “appropriately control” rises in greenhouse gas pollution. Its rulings will be crucial — both in reducing real-world pollution and in setting an example to counter the destructive one being set by Europe. The agency has so far made two broad statements: it won’t treat all wood burning as carbon neutral, but waste as fuel may be treated as such. In a memo signed last year by senior EPA official Janet McCabe, the agency indicated that it “expects to recognize” the climate benefits of “waste-derived and certain forest-derived industrial byproduct feedstocks.” It also said it may approve state plans that include the burning of what it vaguely described as “sustainably derived agricultural and forest-derived feedstocks.” Those ambiguous statements have triggered consternation among scientists and environmental groups. They wonder what “sustainably derived” will mean. Sustainability can refer to environmental practices that have “little-to-no bearing on the carbon implications of biomass use,” the Cary Institute’s Schlesinger and dozens of other scientists wrote in a letter to McCabe. For some wood fuels, the agency may require states follow a new system for measuring climate impacts. “The EPA needs to set up a factor that they multiply by the smokestack emissions,” said Oregon State University forest ecology professor Mark Harmon, a member of the science panel that’s advising the agency on wood energy’s climate effects. “What really counts? What really is being added to the atmosphere — or maybe taken out of the atmosphere, in some cases?” Even when it helps the climate, wood energy isn’t all forest restoration and atmospheric rainbows. Like fossil fuels, wood energy is dirty energy. Burning wood releases pollution that creates haze and ozone, triggering emphysema and asthma attacks. That’s why some local air quality districts ban residents from using fireplaces on the smoggiest days. Waste wood may also have been treated with pesticides, paint and other poisons, which can be released as air pollution when burned. Wood energy’s pollution, combined with its climate impacts and its potential to contribute to deforestation, has seeded deep opposition to it in the U.S. When Oregon lawmakers were debating a bill that would eventually declare wood energy to be carbon neutral, the Sierra Club’s state chapter testified in opposition. Scientifically, the legislation was “deeply flawed,” the group pointed out, warning it could accelerate climate change and sully the air. Power plant owners can take costly steps to reduce air pollution, but those that burn wood have fewer regulatory requirements than those burning fossil fuels. Among other differences, wood-burning power plants can release more than twice as much pollution as coal or gas plants before they’re affected by federal clean air rules. “There are real public health impacts if you live next to one of these facilities, and the facility isn’t run really well,” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The influential American nonprofit campaigns against the overuse of wood energy, such as in Europe. The potential role wood energy could play under the Clean Power Plan won’t become clear until the EPA begins assessing state plans, which are due next year. States could receive extensions for two years beyond that. Meanwhile, the agency is consulting with its panel of scientists and calling for public comment as it tries to hone its approach to regulating pollution from wood energy. The NRDC says the EPA is correct to conclude that wood energy is not always carbon neutral. It says it will pressure the agency to be highly critical of state proposals to count electricity from waste wood as zero carbon under the Clean Power Plan. “If you’re going to say that it’s zero carbon, it doesn’t just have to control carbon a little bit — it’s got to control it all the way down to being equal to wind power or solar power,” Greene said. “It’s unclear from the final regulations how the EPA will determine if that standard has been met.” By potentially deferring to the judgment of Oregon, Virginia and other states, the federal government risks allowing harmful types of wood energy to be counted as clean. Momentum toward tackling global warming is growing stronger around the world, led in part by the U.S., which is striving to be a leader on climate action. Any mistakes now by the EPA threaten to entrench the European approach and entice other countries to follow, undermining global efforts to tackle climate change.
This Rachel Maddow interview is Bernie Sanders’ best moment in weeks
It has been a rough couple weeks for Bernie Sanders as Hillary Clinton found her footing and re-established herself as the Democratic front-runner after impressive performances in the first Democratic debate and before a House panel investigating Benghazi. But at an MSNBC forum in South Carolina last night, answering a speed round of quick questions from Rachel Maddow, Sanders might have had his best moment in some time -- he's charming, funny, self-aware, and gets in some great digs at the mainstream media. Watch below, as Maddow -- as she jokes -- tries to get Sanders to hate her as much as he does the rest pf the press. It has been a rough couple weeks for Bernie Sanders as Hillary Clinton found her footing and re-established herself as the Democratic front-runner after impressive performances in the first Democratic debate and before a House panel investigating Benghazi. But at an MSNBC forum in South Carolina last night, answering a speed round of quick questions from Rachel Maddow, Sanders might have had his best moment in some time -- he's charming, funny, self-aware, and gets in some great digs at the mainstream media. Watch below, as Maddow -- as she jokes -- tries to get Sanders to hate her as much as he does the rest pf the press. It has been a rough couple weeks for Bernie Sanders as Hillary Clinton found her footing and re-established herself as the Democratic front-runner after impressive performances in the first Democratic debate and before a House panel investigating Benghazi. But at an MSNBC forum in South Carolina last night, answering a speed round of quick questions from Rachel Maddow, Sanders might have had his best moment in some time -- he's charming, funny, self-aware, and gets in some great digs at the mainstream media. Watch below, as Maddow -- as she jokes -- tries to get Sanders to hate her as much as he does the rest pf the press. It has been a rough couple weeks for Bernie Sanders as Hillary Clinton found her footing and re-established herself as the Democratic front-runner after impressive performances in the first Democratic debate and before a House panel investigating Benghazi. But at an MSNBC forum in South Carolina last night, answering a speed round of quick questions from Rachel Maddow, Sanders might have had his best moment in some time -- he's charming, funny, self-aware, and gets in some great digs at the mainstream media. Watch below, as Maddow -- as she jokes -- tries to get Sanders to hate her as much as he does the rest pf the press.
Slavery, the Nazis and the KKK: We can’t face the past, and it’s poisoning our future
No quotation from American literature, with the possible exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “boats against the current” passage, is repeated as often or carries as much resonance as William Faulkner’s most famous line: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Startlingly enough, both quotations make virtually the same point; Fitzgerald’s boats, a flotilla of isolated human souls riding the current of time, are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun” was published 26 years after “The Great Gatsby,” and it’s entirely possible the echo is deliberate.) Even as we move forward from generation to generation and from birth to death, we cannot escape history, whether on the personal and emotional level or the larger cultural and social level. Both of those eminent American writers understood, in their different ways, that their country was at war with its own past. Both men were shaped to a large degree by the bigotry and prejudice of their times – both held views we would today consider frankly racist – while on the page they struggled as hard as they could to transcend those limitations, and write themselves into the future. They wrote about a nation profoundly shaped by history -- by a 200-year pattern of immigration, migration and resettlement; by successive waves of religious revival; by slavery and the extermination or forcible removal of the native peoples; by the causes and effects of a bloody internecine war that ended 150 years ago and to which most 21st-century Americans have no ancestral connection. They also wrote about a nation that is endlessly eager to erase its own past and start over, like John Wayne’s Ringo Kid at the end of “Stagecoach” or Fitzgerald’s James Gatz, the dirt-poor North Dakota farm boy who dreams of better things. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about this: Much of the entrepreneurial zeal, endless inventiveness and “Yankee ingenuity” that transformed America from a backward agrarian society into the world’s leading industrial power over the first few decades of the 19th century stemmed from that impulse, unleashed upon a continent rich in natural resources. If half our cultural birthright is a troubling history whose consequences we feel everywhere around us and whose big questions remain unresolved, the other half is Henry Ford assuring us that history is bunk and we are free to reinvent ourselves however we like. So much of America’s intractable political insanity and intense cultural division, circa 2015, is rooted in a dispute over the nature and meaning of the past that I’m tempted to pronounce that all of it is. That isn't entirely fair, of course, but even the most urgent political issues of the day -- including the mass incarceration of men of color and the right's long war to defund all aspects of the federal government except the military, the intelligence agencies and the secret police -- represent old conflicts decanted into new containers. As the latest Anonymous hack has revealed, the Ku Klux Klan, a remnant of the same terrorist organization that undermined Southern Reconstruction and subjugated supposedly free African-Americans to white hegemony for a full century, still has 5,000 members in 41 states. But even the Anonymous hackers agree that today's Klan is something of a historical relic, like Civil War nostalgia on the dark side. Power in America today no longer relies on guys in white hoods. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House one spring day in 1865, bringing an end to the noble Southern cause that his great adversary, Ulysses S. Grant, described as "one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse." But despite appearances the Confederacy had not been defeated, and today's Republican Party represents its values almost perfectly. For reasons that are both obvious and deeply perverse, people in small Northeastern towns celebrate the Rebel flag their own ancestors shed blood to defeat. Eight hundred thousand died in that war and slavery came to an end, at least as a legal institution under that name. But with the defeat of Reconstruction it was transformed into a long-term system of white supremacy whose persistent effects, and whose very existence, must be repeatedly denied or minimized or greeted with a puzzled shrug. Why are black people still overwhelmingly poor and poorly educated? Why are they far more likely to live in substandard housing in poorly served neighborhoods, far more likely to be victims of crime and to be shot by police? One of our two political parties, the one that has been increasingly dominated over the last three decades by the great-great-grandchildren of the Confederacy, is pretty much built on the premise that those problems can only be black people’s fault -- or, in the more beneficent view, can be blamed on diabolical white liberals who led the innocent black folk astray with “free stuff.” They certainly can’t have anything to do with the fact that African-Americans were enslaved until 150 years ago, had few or no political rights until 50 years ago, and throughout their history on this continent have been redlined and ghettoized and marginalized and covenant-excluded and financially exploited by an endless array of swindlers and usurers and predatory lenders. Those things, we are constantly and nervously assured by red-faced men on television as they project their own fears and anxieties onto Black Lives Matter protesters or Quentin Tarantino or whomever else, are in the past. In the discourse of the American right, the past can only be one of two things: A) a story of glorious patriotism and heroism, or B) something that did not happen or does not matter. We don’t need to summon Faulkner in order to observe that police brutality and the shootings of unarmed black men are not in the past, and neither is our society’s worsening economic inequality, which includes a shocking racial disparity. According to a U.S. Census Bureau survey, the median white household in 2011 held just over $111,000 in total wealth. For the median black household, that number was barely $7,000 – 16 times less, or 8 cents in black wealth for every white dollar. (For Latino families it was nearly as bad, about $8,400.) If that difference is attributable to some deficiency in black people or African-American culture, rather than the undead hand of the past squeezing the life out of our society, then whatever is wrong with them must be really, really bad. I wanted to speak to Philippe Sands about all this, because the question of historical responsibility is precisely his area of expertise. Sands is an international human-rights lawyer who has investigated and prosecuted crimes against humanity at the World Court, and is also a principal subject of the fascinating new documentary “What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy.” He is the child of Jewish refugees who fled Hitler before the Holocaust, and the film is about his increasingly personal relationship with two men whose fathers were prominent Nazi officials. I suspected he might have something to say about the past not being past, and about how it shapes us and how we should try to understand it. If we agree, as Sands emphatically does agree, that his friends Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter are not responsible for the crimes committed by their fathers, or that I (just for instance) am not responsible for my direct ancestors who owned slave plantations in the Caribbean and owned slave ships in France, then why aren’t we free to lock the closet door of history, wash our hands and walk away? Mistakes were made! At some distant point! Not my fault! Niklas Frank represents one approach to this problem: His father was the notorious Hans Frank, "the Butcher of Poland," a close adviser and friend of Adolf Hitler's who served as the governor-general of occupied Poland, where he supervised the mass murder of roughly 4 million people. Niklas despises his father for what he did, which is reasonable enough, but also seems consumed by that loathing to an exaggerated and extreme extent. He always carries with him a photograph of his father's corpse, taken after he was hanged in Nuremberg as a war criminal. At the other end of the spectrum is Horst von Wächter, a genial and sweet-tempered man who is interested in art and mysticism, and does not hate his father at all. Sands clearly feels great affection for Horst (who was named after Horst Wessel, an early martyr of the Nazi movement) and spends much of the film trying to convince him to face the truth about his father. Otto von Wächter was not a mass murderer on Hans Frank's scale, but that's a difficult standard to match. Still, he was in charge of the infamous Krakow Ghetto, and served as the governor of Galicia (then a Polish province) when several massacres of Jews were carried out -- including the one, it turns out, when many of Philippe Sands' relatives were marched into a field near their village and shot. Horst makes regretful noises about all this, but continues to dodge and evade the evidence of where his beloved father was and what he did. It finally becomes clear that nothing will dissuade him from the delusion that Otto was a benevolent man compelled to follow orders, who did his best in difficult circumstances. Why, I wondered, did Sands keep pushing? What did he hope to accomplish? “That's a really, really core question, isn't it?" Sands responds. "What was I looking for from Horst, and what did I want? I make very clear, and it is absolutely my position, that Horst himself bears no responsibility for the actions of his father, for the sins of his father. He was his own person. He was a child. What I was looking for was an acknowledgment of the facts. And I think the reason that I was looking for an acknowledgment of the facts is that I understand the failure to acknowledge the facts as, in some way, an apology for what happened. And from there it’s a thin line between apology and acceptance, between acceptance and complicity, between complicity and active engagement. I suppose it’s that sense that if we don’t recognize the facts for what they are, we make it possible, or more likely, that those kinds of facts may repeat themselves. “I think that’s the unstated driving force that is at work behind me. And this question is universal. This story reaches beyond, say, the Jewish community or the Germans and the Austrians. A Cambodian student of mine watched this film and was incredibly affected by it, thinking about his own country under the Khmer Rouge. I had an Argentine student who lives in Buenos Aires today, with parents and grandparents who had different roles and responsibilities under the dictatorship, some acknowledging it and some not. I think it’s a universal theme, and the answer to your question is a very complex assessment and reflection. For me, it goes back to the need to acknowledge that the community of which we are a part, for reasons of blood and history, has engaged in difficult or problematic things. We need to have an honesty about that.” When I shift the topic to the Confederacy and American history, Sands seizes on it instantly. While he was raised in England, his wife and children are Americans. “When that issue comes up around the breakfast table, about the Confederate flag, it’s a matter of incredibly active debate,” he says. “Our kids will say to us, ‘How can it be that 150 years on, there’s still a dispute about all of this and some people want to show that flag while other people don’t want them to?’ For me, I wonder what the difference is, in general terms, between that and what we see in the Ukraine [in the film] with a group of characters gathering, you know, in Nazi uniforms for a re-enactment, or a burial of Ukrainian and German war heroes? What is the difference between that and a re-enactment of the Civil War? It’s a desire for a particular community to find connection and legitimacy with the past. And in finding connection and legitimacy, the danger is that you reinforce the conditions that continue to work their unhappy consequences. “And we have to understand, equally, that this is not just historical material. I’ve been very involved in the last years on the issue of torture, for example. And I think that the amnesia in the United States about engaging with the fact that the country turned to torture once again after September the 11th -- I think it’s going to have enormous consequences going forward. Even though it may not be perceived as having consequences within the United States, outside of the United States it was a huge moment for those who hold the United States to a higher standard because it is the world leader on human rights. It becomes too bloody easy to wheel it out and say, ‘Look, if they can do torture, then I can do torture.’” If the past is not really past – the past of “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation,” the past of Auschwitz and the Krakow ghetto, the past of American slavery and its endless repercussions – then it is still with us, and still shaping our behavior. As Sands makes clear, willful historical amnesia can be found in all parts of the world, but America has developed it into a poisonous and intoxicating high art. Our powerful national identity is rooted in the mythological notion that we are different and exceptional, free of the depressing chains of the past that hold other nations back from greatness. At this point in our history that belief is literally driving us insane. Sands talks sadly about his friend Horst, the child of Nazis who does not want to know what really happened, and who drifts ever closer to denying that it happened at all. “Things unsaid have long-term consequences," says Sands. "You think by pushing things under the carpet that you sort them out and they go away. But you’re doing the opposite, and they only get worse.” "What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy" is now playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. It opens Nov. 13 in Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Washington; and Nov. 20 in Denver and Columbus, Ohio, with more cities and home video to follow.
