Reading Vermont’s Historical Landscape

For anyone wishing to understand the promise of a unique place like Vermont, a new and comprehensive account of the Green Mountain State’s past is a useful starting place. Michael Sherman, Gene Sessions, and P. Jeffrey Potash’s book Freedom and Unity: A History of Vermont offers the traveler a remarkable look at how the Green Mountain State came to be. Don’t let the 700 pages intimidate. The book gracefully runs the reader through a comprehensive history of our little section of the globe – a welcome addition to any historian or Vermontophile’s library.

After examining and dismissing a number of thematic organizing possibilities in the book’s introduction – Vermont’s quasi-mythical founding (embodied by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys); Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” (which implicitly isolates Vermont as a regional backwater); the “Vermont is too small to make an impact” school of thought (too simplistic on its face); and Vermont “exceptionalism” (a popular view currently espoused by, among others, this newspaper’s publishers); our intrepid historical trio settle on establishing a thematic framework that explores the historical and cultural tensions between the state of Vermont and the nation as a whole.

And who better to justify such a lens than the famous 19th century Frenchman, traveler, and writer Alexis de Tocqueville, whom our authors quote early and often? “The great political principles which now rule American society were born and grew up in the state,” wrote de Tocqueville in his seminal1830s work Democracy In America, “So one must understand the state to gain the key to the rest.” In case this explanation doesn’t satisfy, the book’s Introduction gives us the voice of Vermont’s most outspoken secessionist (at least, on even-numbered days). Frank Bryan argued for Vermont independence in 1990 in a series of statewide debates with John Dooley, but he switched sides for one of the public discussions and took the opposite position. “Vermont nationalism is a kind of orneriness and that’s the best kind of nationalism,” observed a conflicted Bryan. “America needs us, because we are its conscience and its heart; we are its homeland.”

Bryan has remained on the fence about secession ever since, and 21st century Vermonters remain torn on the question of Vermont independence in the context of U.S. Empire. Current supporters of Vermont independence are likely to be disappointed by this book, as the word “secession” is only used once (in the book’s beginning). Meanwhile, the fascinating but relatively unexplored story of Vermont’s life as an independent republic (1777-1791) goes missing, subsumed by a larger discussion of the various ways the American Revolution’s “contagion of liberty” affected the ways in which Vermonters saw themselves – politically, economically, and culturally - in the context of an emerging United States. (Such is often the way in historical tomes – play to the center more than the periphery).

That said, the book’s authors have done an admirable job of providing a readable account of Vermont’s four centuries of evolution, from “the lure of the land” that marked revolutionary-era struggles; to the “reconfiguration” of Vermont with the coming of the national industrial economy, the railroad, and other epochal changes; to the 20th century tensions that have altered the Green Mountain landscape: flood, depression, war, the interstate highway system, and population boomlets. Accessible writing, as well as a wide variety of maps, paintings, and photographs, make the book an engaging read throughout.

And what of Vermont’s future? While historians sometimes fancy themselves prophets, our three writers are understandably more cautious about reading the tea leaves. “Part of the experience of Vermont at the turn of the twenty-first century is the continuing and difficult balancing act going on throughout the state between responding to the needs and opportunities of large-scale modern economic development and commerce, mass culture, and mass politics, and making commitments to preserve and nurture small-scale economic, social, and political life,” they conclude.” Through these choices Vermonters continue to explore what it means to be and act as an individual and a citizen in the contemporary world.”

And, of course, determining Vermont’s future is not the job of the historian, or the “expert,” or the traveler, French or otherwise. It is the collective work of all of us who live and love Vermont, and are privileged enough to call this unique and special place our home.

First published in Vermont Commons.

The Voices Project:
What Do 1200 Vermont Teens Have To Say?

“I want to change the world
I want to change my life
I want to twist it up and rearrange it right
I want to save the good
I want to leave the bad
I want to make come true all the dreams we have”

- Steve Shannon; “Change”

As someone who has worked with American teen-agers for close to twenty years, I was excited to hear of an innovative statewide educational initiative called The Voices Project. During the last two years, The Voices Project has worked extensively with our Vermont young people, working in collaboration with themto capture - in print, on CD, and on DVD/film – their stories, as well as creating an original theater production with music that will tour our Green Mountain State beginning in September.

The roster of adult leaders working with our state’s teens these past many months is impressive. Directed and produced by Kingdom County Productions’ Bess O’Brien (who gave us the 2003 film “Here Today,” about rising heroin use in Vermont), and supported by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont, The Voices Project tapped into the wisdom of filmmaker Jay Craven, poet David Budbill, musician Chuck Eller, dancer/choreographer Karen Amirault, and a host of other remarkably talented individuals throughout our state.

But even more impressive is the multimedia work of our Vermont youth. After months of research, discussions, workshops, and interviews, The Voices Project has successfully tapped into the minds and hearts of Vermont teens to illuminate their struggles, hopes, fears, and ideas for the future. Steve Shannon’s poem “Change,” excerpted above, neatly captures the unifying thread of all teen voices featured in a three-part multimedia collection being sent to all public schools and libraries in the state. The collection features a wide array of poetry and prose, as well as a CD of seven different teen-produced songs, and a DVD containing four different digital video projects.

What shines through in The Voices Project is ultimately a very simple but powerful message: our young people are bright, talented, and engaged in making sense of the world and their place in it. And they deserve to be heard. “The Voices Project grew out of a vision to connect and give power to Vermont youth, transcending stereotypical views of teenagers,” explains Bess O’Brien in the collection’s introduction. “The results of this effort are sure to awaken our pride and reinforce our commitment to Vermont’s young people.”

The Vermont Guardian talked with O’Brien about The Voices Project.

Q. What provided your original inspiration for creating this project?

A. I had just completed the statewide tour of my documentary film “Here Today” about families struggling with heroin addiction in their lives, and I was reflecting on many of the questions and concerns that came from audience members during the Vermont tour of the film. Many of the concerns had to do with our teenagers, how we could better provide strong communities for them, how we could deter them from getting into addictive patterns, what we could do as adults to support and respect them more. I suddenly thought, “well, instead of wondering what teens want, why don’t we go and ask teens what they want?” That was the first inspiration for The Voices Project. I felt that in order to “do better by our young people” we needed to listen to them, find out who they were, and what they needed, what they had to say.

The idea of creating an original theatre production out of this came from my own background in theatre when I was in my 20’s and knowing how powerful live art can be. I also knew of a play that Elizabeth Swados did in the 1970’s at the Public Theatre in NYC called “Runaways” in which she spent time with kids on the street and then created an original musical from their stories. I wanted to make something powerful, real, brave and alive from the stories that we gathered through eight months of research with teens, and this is what I came up with!

Q. What was the most difficult aspect of putting together this whole two-year project?

A. I guess, for me the whole project was very daunting- very large- state wide, involving more than 1000 teens. The responsibility of involving many diverse groups of kids, of telling as many stories as possible, of getting it right—of not watering it down, making it synthetic or condescending. I wanted the piece to be based on the real lives of teens. The most daunting part was trying to get all that right—we worked hard to constantly be in contact with teens, getting their feedback on the script, the music, the dialogue, the tone. It was important for me to represent teenagers from where they came from, not from where we wanted them to come from.

Q. I read the “Voices” book, listened to the CD, and watched the video DVD. The students’ work is very impressive, and covers a wide range of tough topics, from “big picture” political issues to intimate and personal dilemmas, like body image/eating disorder issues to homophobia to sometimes-dysfunctional family relationships. How did you go about selecting what would appear in the book, and on the CD and DVD?

A. Because we did so much work during the “anthropological dig” with so many diverse kids the writing is very diverse. Exactly what we wanted! The writing that was chosen for the book represents this diversity. We wanted to show kids struggling and yet overcoming the odds. It was important to also include writing from teens living in rural areas, working on a farm, working with their Dads, a sense of place and being close to the land. The work was ultimately chosen for it’s strong writing and content.

Q. Tell us more about the theater production that will travel across the state this fall. What can audiences expect?

B. A. The show will be gutsy, raw, real, humorous, fun, heartbreaking and powerful. It will be full of hope and the transformative power that teens bring to their own lives. The play is a series of moments, scenes between sixteen characters—all going through something in their own lives. The play is also about the outside pressures of the world overwhelming teenagers; the pop culture of “look like this, dress like that, act like this, or you’re a loser,” the war in Iraq, the sense of powerlessness in the face of a world out of control , the pressure to succeed and be perfect in an imperfect world.

Q. How can Vermonters support “The Voices Project” in their own communities?

A. Come see it! Bring your kids! Come as a family. Get your community to come. Get your church, your schoolmates, your friends to come. See the show and then talk about it with your teens. Be open to what the play has to say. There will also be community meetings taking place in a number of towns a week after we perform the show. These meetings are being organized by VPT and a number of statewide teen agencies. These meetings are meant to spark dialogue about the Voices Project and to focus towns on what they need to do to support their youth population.

“The Voices Project” will be touring Vermont throughout the fall, including the following towns and regions.

September 10-11; Barre

September 16-18; Northeast Kingdom

September 24-25; Woodstock and Bellows Falls

September 30-October 2; Brattleboro, Bennington, and Vergennes

October 8-9; Rutland and Burlington

For more information, including specific venues, please call Kingdom County Productions at 802.592.3190.

Advance tickets can be bought through the Flynn Box Office at 1800-86Flynn.

Gregory Douglass Plays The Bundy:
“Stark”- Raving Fabulous!

I’ve written more favorable words about singer/songwriter Gregory Douglass than any other musician whom I listen to, and with good reason. Simply stated, the guy works hard to make great music. The son of an Essex Junction high school music teacher, Douglass threw himself into songwriting as a teen-ager. Now, at the ripe old age of 24, Douglass has toured all over the country, and produced five CDs of original music, including the brand-new eleven song release, appropriately titled “Stark.” This new disc of tunes signals a move away from “Pseudo-Rotary,” Douglass’ last heavily-produced CD project, and a return to a more stripped-down acoustic sound. This is fabulous news for those of us who prefer our Douglass delivery to be pure and unadulterated.

“Stark” serves up some of Douglass’ best stuff to date. After experimenting with heavy production, he wisely returns to a “bare bones” sound, recording the whole CD in his living room with a few microphones, a laptop computer, and the ever-reliable Pro-Tools software program. You’d never know this when listening to “Stark,” though, as Douglass’ acoustic sound is as big as a roomful of chamber musicians. That said, all eleven tunes are short and spare (only two of the eleven songs weigh in at over four plus minutes), compressed little vignettes that, while personal, speak to universal human themes, as well.

I’ve said this before about Douglass, but it bears repeating. Few performers I know are able to consistently deliver such a potent “triple threat” of compelling lyrics, emotive vocalization, and fine musicianship on both guitar and piano. If you don’t believe me, give “Stark” a close listen. The CD opens with “Crazy Love,” not the Van Morrison version, but a Douglass original, brooding, haunted, a dance between hope and despair.

“Sunset boulevard going down/you know I like that sound
we get caught up and merrily go around
lost in what we’ve found
we’re a proud American compound
and we will destroy it all

What is he singing about? Love lost? The war in Iraq? Both? It’s hard to know, exactly, and one doesn’t necessarily pick up on the lyrics immediately, as Douglass’ voice and spare keyboarding work together in tandem to carry us to a different place. In listening to “Crazy Love” and a number of other tunes on “Stark,” I was reminded of “Teeter,” Douglass’ third CD and, until now anyway, my favorite of his projects.

Douglass continues the melding of the personal and political on songs like “Upside Down.” (“All the children at war with good intentions/ for all the reasons inside that no one mentions/ go on, go on, let the radio lie…”) And, throughout the CD, Douglass wields his voice as it’s own instrument, like on the tune “Under the Gun,” where his voice plays counterpoint to Robin Chambers’ under-stated viola work. On one of my favorite songs, “Sail The Sea,” he sings of a young woman who wants to “sail the sea and make her grandfather proud the way her father did in 1960.” The song is vintage Douglass – a little audio movie that captures the complexities of human existence.

While “Stark” is spare, Douglass is wise enough to surround himself with some talented musicians, including legendary acoustic guitarist William Ackerman (a fellow Vermonter), old friend and fellow performer Syd on guitar and drums, and, in one of the neatest collaborations I’ve heard, the Essex high school madrigal choir, which joins him for the final song called “Better Tomorrow.” Listening to Douglass’s piano and vocal work, weaving in and out of the multi-part harmony of the madrigals, one can’t but help feeling like one is in the presence of something magical.

And you can experience all this for yourself, when Gregory Douglass plays the Bundy Center for the Arts (with a full band) on Wednesday, August 17th. I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again here – don’t miss Douglass’ live performance. There will come a time when all of us will be able to say ”I saw him when he was first starting out…”

Historian, media educator, and musician Rob Williams lives in Waitsfield.

Marooned With “The Island”

It is the year 2019 in director Michael (“The Rock”) Bay’s new film. The world has been contaminated beyond livability, and the Island is nature’s “last remaining pathogen-free zone,” accessible only by winning “the Lottery.” Most humans inhabit a completely controlled surveillance-driven security environment, living in sterile cubicles, sporting white lycra jumpsuits (and Puma sneakers – product placement alert), consuming corporately-produced products (Aquifina) and entertainment (X Box boxing in participatory 3D), and performing routinized if essential daily labor. Even their nutritional needs and excretory functions are monitored via a centralized computer network and overseen by an Orwellian cadre of elite rulers and their beefy enforcer minions. Or so it all seems.

Ewan McGregor’s Lincoln 6 Echo (who prefers bacon over tofu) and Scarlett Johansson’s Jordan 2 Delta (who plays a mean game of X Box) are pals who aren’t always careful enough with their “proximity.” One day, Lincoln, who likes to ask questions (you gotta have at least one of these in a dystopian story – think 1984’s Winston or Brave New World’s Bernard Marx) discovers the horrific nature of the world in which he is living, and the truth involves the imminent demise of his friend Jordan. Forty five minutes into a 145 minute film, the truth has been revealed. Or most of it, anyway.

One of the unspoken rules of crafting futuristic fantasy stories built on worlds with completely different realities is being sure to reveal the true nature of said world in piecemeal but creative fashion – showing rather than telling. This approach lends itself more easily to books, with their bias towards nuance, complexity and detailed descriptive power. Even a fairly short dystopian story like M. T. Anderson’s Feed pulls back the veil gradually. It’s harder to do this in movies, impatient as they are with detail and complexity.

So Bay does in “The Island” what most film directors do. He plays to the film medium’s great strength – the visual – and turns a potentially provocative futuristic meditation on eugenics, immortality, class/caste, and corporate power into a summer action flick, complete with shoot-outs, helicopters, nail guns and an extended cops-and-robbers chase sequence that, sadly enough, becomes the movie’s primary raison d’etre.

Normally, this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, if only because McGreggor and Johanssen are fine-looking and talented screen presences. Two problems, though. The first – Bay reaches into his action sequence grab bag and discovers little in the way of new ideas, despite his homage to surveillance films like “Enemy of the State.”

A second and much bigger problem involves the “cat and mouse” nature of the story. In a film like “The Fugitive,” for example, we enjoy watching Harrison Ford, a smart but desperate man on the run, try to outwit the equally smart Tommy Lee Jones’ who is hot in pursuit. But in the case of “The Island,” our two protagonists play characters who possess (we are told) the intelligence of fifteen year olds, and have never run more than one hundred yards at a time on any given day in their lives.

Yet, as the film unfolds, we are supposed to believe that our two lightweights can suddenly adapt both their very limited intellectual and physical capacities to outwit not only the entire LAPD, but a trained army of professional mercenaries and assassins, as well. This leads to scenes ranging from the sublime (our two heroes riding out the collapse of a high rise neon sign) to the ridiculous, as when Jordan and Lincoln hop on a jet-powered rocket bike, having never seen one before, and maneuver the thing like pros through crowded urban streets. Asking the movie audience to accept this bizarre premise is like asking Americans to believe that Muslim terrorists who possessed little in the way of flight training flew a commercial 757 into the hardest-to-reach side of the Pentagon.

By the end, the whole project becomes overly long, a bit tedious, and quite confusing, a feeble homage to dystopian films gone by that weakly attempts to break new ground. Even Ewan and Scarlett look a bit confused, at times, and who can blame them?

Historian, media educator, and musician Rob Williams (www.robwilliamsmedia.com) lives in the Mad River Valley. He serves as board president of the Action Coalition for Media Education (www.acmecoalition.org) and the associate publisher for Vermont Commons (www.vtcommons.org).

“Wedding Crash(ers)” and Burns

Say whatever you want about this relatively lackluster blockbuster movie season. Summer 2005 at the Multiplex has been the summer of Vaughn. Vince Vaughn, that is. The relatively unknown actor (See “The Cell” with J-Lo or Ben Stiller’s sleeper hit “Dodge Ball”) has turned in two memorable performances – first, as a supporting actor playing a paranoid advice-giver in the Branegelina action vehicle “Mr.and Mrs.Smith,” and now in “Wedding Crashers,” where he plays comic relief to Owen Wilson’s somewhat sappy straight man, and is, by virtue of sheer slapstick chutzhpah, the best thing about the movie.

I went to see “Wedding Crashers” while on vacation with my younger brother, who never met a slapstick comedy he didn’t like. And, for the first fifteen minutes, I confess to being absolutely intrigued. Vaughn and Wilson play two sexual predators (honestly, I don’t know how else to refer to them) who crash random weddings, pretending to be people they are not in order to pick up and have sex with nubile young maidens swept up in the romantic enormity of the moment. If this sounds a bit sinister when I spell it out here, rest assured that the film has a whole bunch of fun with this premise, painting our intrepid duo as nothing more than two slightly dysfunctional fellows in the midst of a mid-life crisis, affable if somewhat wacky gents who excel at being the life of any wedding party, while hitting on various members of the same.

And, watching them in action is certainly amusing, at one level. They hatch “Mission Impossible”- esque plans with a wonderful combination of insouciance and bravado, dancing, eating, drinking, and charming their way through reception after reception, and bedding babe after babe. Heck, if you were worried about your own wedding being a bit lackluster, and had no concerns about your own daughter’s safety, you might even consider hiring these two shrewd and sophisticated clowns to ensure that everyone who attended your fellow family member’s special day has a good enough time.

But after fifteen minutes of fun, things take a turn for the worse when Wilson falls in lust (or is it love? Hollywood continually confuses the two) with the daughter of the Treasury Secretary (likeably played, believe it or not, by the usually sinister Christopher Walken) at a hotshot DC wedding. Suddenly, a night in the sack becomes so darn complicated. Wilson gets to do his “puppy dog in love” impression as he gets the two invited to a post-wedding family week-end (see any other of Wilson’s movies), while the likeable banter between Vaughn and Wilson takes a back seat to what becomes, at best, a bland love story featuring all the usual Hollywood clichés: gay siblings, homophobic relatives, romantic tension with a nasty but high-powered rival, etc. ad nauseum.

The film is (usually) smart enough to keep Vaughn on the screen, snapping off one liners and subjecting himself to various humiliating moments for the sake of being a good “wing man,” while finding himself falling for another virginal daughter who turns out to be (brace yourself) an undercover nymphomaniac (Surprise! Who knew!). But the film never recovers from it’s initial interesting premise, crashing and burning at the end when our two likeable imposters meet their mentor (Will Ferrell at his nastiest and least likeable), whose ground-breaking work as a wedding crasher has taken an interesting turn.

“Wedding Crashers is just the movie America needs right now!” gushed one national reviewer enthusiastically. Maybe so, if we need (once again) a crash course fromHollywood in lying, cheating, stealing, posing, and sexual predation, all in the allegedly harmless name of “good clean fun.”

Historian, media educator, and musician Rob Williams (www.robwilliamsmedia.com) lives in the Mad River Valley. He serves as board president of the Action Coalition for Media Education (www.acmecoalition.org) and the associate publisher for Vermont Commons (www.vtcommons.org).