Summer Season Triple Threat:
Spiderman, Shrek and Pirates THREE?!

By Rob Williams

Well slap me thrice and hand me to my mama! It must be summer movie season!

OK, I wrote the second sentence, but the first one I lifted directly from the script of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

Really. I wrote it down.

But you know as well as I do that NO one goes to summer movies because of the witty script, scintillating acting, or smart plot twists.

No, we go for much better reasons.

Like digitized special effects! Slapstick comedy! Potty humor! Mindless cartoon violence! Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom in pirate pantaloons!

It happens to me every summer movie season. Whatever discernment I have with regard to movies between the months of September and April simply flies out the window. I can’t help it – the summer Hollywood blockbuster is a genre all its own, one that I enjoy burrowing into like a hapless mole, avoiding light, paradoxically, by seeking the darkness of the silver screen.

But enough philosophizing. This May I decided to try an experiment, going to see all three of the “thirds” (Pirates, Spiderman, and Shrek) in one week’s time. And, to make things more interesting, I decided to see each of the three films in different viewing combos – solo, with family, and with friends.

I saw “Spiderman 3” by myself, which, for one week, held the international six-day opening record of $232 million grossed. Cha ching! Now, I grew up watching “Spidey” on television back in the days when I had a TV, and I’ve gotta say that Tobey Maguire has NEVER fully convinced me that, once he dons the rubber latex, he can pummel the bad guys with web-like ease. He is a fabulous nerd as Peter Parker, for sure, with his moped, “awshucks” grin and cerebral geniality. But, watching him get thrown around the city by not one, not two, but THREE villains (gotta love the symmetry) over the course of 2 ½ hours, I found myself wondering – when does his spidey ticker give out? And love interest Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) seems like she’s going through the motions, though there are some fabulous special effects in this film, well worth seeing on the big screen.

“Shrek the Third” – saw that one with my two kids. Our collective verdict? Not nearly as strong as “Shrek 2,” but easy on the time budget, at 90 minutes, and some great slapstick humor (and yes, a few fart jokes) throughout. Highlights included Monty Python genius Eric Idle voicing a Birkenstock-sporting Merlin as an Iron-John wanna be, and Snow White, Fiona, and Cindarella turning into Charlie’s Angels’-like hellions backed by an old Led Zepp tune during the film’s climax.

And then there’s –CHA CHING! – Pirates of the Caribbean,” for which I dressed up in a pirate costume and sailed into the Big Picture’s “Sneak Preview” with a posse of gents desperate for 3 hours of high quality digital diversion. The film has since deposed “Spiderman III’s” scarcely-established international 6-day gross record with ease, bringing in $401 million on 29,000 theaters globally last week.

And what a pirates party it is. Despite the non-appearance of a giant Kraken, (the best part – easily - of a disappointing Pirates 2 film), the third Pirates is by far the most compelling. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom actually act in this installment, ably supported by Chow Yun Fat, Geoffrey Rush, and of course, the real star of the show, Mr. Johnny Depp himself, reinventing his astonishingly beloved Jack Sparrow character with more sharp-witted intellect and less booziness than the previous two films. For more, I give you just a few voices of the more than fifty folks in attendance.

“It is film-making of gargantuan, over-the-top, epic proportions,” observed Warren’s Dan Eckstein. “But after close to three hours and hundreds of deaths, enough is enough.”

“More fun than a bottle of rum and a scurvy pirate wench on a pile of pumpkins,” notes Waitsfield’s Jon Jamieson, who remembered to keep up a steady stream of “avasts” and “arghs” from his seat. “The low point was Keith Richards - mostly his dialogue - there should not have been any.”

“Hoist the colours: Captain Jack, imprisoned on the Bonneville salt flats, sets a pirate ship land speed record and goes on to turn the world upside down, all without smearing his eye liner,” marveled Duxbury’s Chris Jernigan. “The depths of the locker? Argh, me scurvy dog, ‘tis the script that nary a livin’ soul can bring to clarity!”

“Well matey, the colorful Pirate scenes and Keira Knightley did make it worth seeing, but not the nearly three hours of it,” concluded Greg Moffroid of Warren. “It was Pirates of the Caribbean, Part 1, Star Wars and Indiana Jones all rolled into one…arghh, my head still hurts.”

Indeed – so does mine. Hollywood always serves them up big for summer, but rarely as big as this past May. With the “triple threat” still screening globally, you might take the next rainy day or quiet evening, and head to your local theater for some summer celluloid fun.

Spinning the very best tunes from Vermont musicians and the world, every Monday night on WMRW 95.1 fm - low power community radio for the Mad River Valley.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Featured artist: David Wilcox (Vista; 2006)

David Wilcox/Get On
Jazz Mandolin Project/Country Open
Colin McCaffrey/Got the Most of You
David Wilcox/Same Shaker
Allison Mann/Straighten Up and Fly Right
Ekis/Hidden Jar
Rebecca Padula/Time, Speed and Distance
David Wilcox/Party of One
Bluegrass Gospel Project/Down In The Valley To Pray
Josh Brooks/Goin’ To Texas
Grace Potter/Toothbrush and My Table
David Wilcox/Wilford Brandon Hayes
Gregory Douglas/Sail the Sea
Lewis Franco/Remember Where You Came From
David Wilcox/Good Man
James Kinne/Sleeping In On Saturday

A New Musical “Vista”: The Music of David Wilcox

I first heard of David Wilcox in 1990, when my girlfriend Kate, who was radio DJing in Colorado at the time, mailed me a mixed tape (remember those?) of her live “Whole Wheat Show” featuring a song called “Eye of the Hurricane” by this unknown songwriter from Carolina.

I was floored.

Performed in a shuffling style in Open C tuning, the song tells the story of a jaded young woman who hops on her Hurricane motorcycle to go find herself, with tragic consequences. But the tune’s hook is the double entendre of the title, which serves as both a literal reference to the motorcycle, and a metaphorical reference to this young woman’s quest for meaning.

And that’s the genius of David Wilcox.

Sure, he’s got a voice that can melt frozen butter, reminiscent of James Taylor with a bit more emotional edge.

And yes, he can purposefully tune and re-tune his guitar on stage, moving from one open tuning to another with ease, all the while riffing on a story he’s just making up to keep the audience engaged, or (I saw him do this once in Washington), changing a broken string and stalling while he goes through the process.

And of course, he’s got some tasty musical chops. I picked up the guitar myself after I heard the playing of Mark Knopfler and J.T., but I spent months on end actually studying Wilcox’s guitar work, because he gets so much mileage out of one simple six string. Everything I learned about open tunings, I credit to him.

But it’s Wilcox’s writing that is so compelling, a contemporary mélange of songs that explore love (both lost and found), redemption, the tensions involved in living a spiritual life (his music is shot through with biblical themes, though he also is at his most scathing when writing about organized religion and holier-than-thou Bible thumpers), as well as songs that are about plain old fun. And, though he occasionally lapses into clichéd lyrical phrasings, when he is on, there are few better writers.

After gobbling up his first four CDs (Nightshift Watchman, How Did You Find Me Here, Home Again, and Big Horizon), I lost track of his music for a while during the 1990s, in the midst of raising babies, teaching, and plowing through graduate school.

Leave it to my Mad River Valley neighbor Bruce Jones to reacquaint me with Wilcox’s music. His new CD, entitled “Vista,” is Wilcox at his best, just as I remembered him. Spinning his new project has been like rediscovering an old friend.

It’s all here. Love waiting to be seized by one in danger of over-analyzing things, as in the first track, called “Get On”:

And my heart says “C’mon let’s go”/
And my mind’s saying “I don’t know”/
And the train is at the station/but I’m lost in contemplation
And this ticket’s only good for just so long
I can think about it ‘til that train is gone – or just get on…

Or the bluesy “Same Shaker,” which chronicles a “near miss” and the collision of both good and bad luck – “salt and pepper in the same shaker” - a vintage Wilcox theme.

Or “Good Man,” which damns the self-righteousness of the Christian fundamentalist, and then, in a twist, invokes the tragedy of 9/11 in the last verse. I’ll spare you the lyrics and let you be surprised.

The bottom line – you don’t want to miss Wilcox’s Sunday night performance. He is best heard live, because you never quite know what may happen, and you sure to hear many more riffs and stories right out of his head that may never make it onto any recording.

Hope to see you there.

—————————————-

Wilcox performs on Sunday, May 20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Valley Player’s Theater. Call 496.8910 for tickets or more information, or e-mail Bruce Jones at omsongp@gmavt.com.

Corporations + Commons = Capitalism 3.0
Reinventing Our Economies, Restoring Our Commons

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

English folk poem, ca. 1750

Despite breathless cheerleading from the likes of New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas The World Is Flat Friedman; Wolf, Sean, Katie, and other well-coiffed talking heads on the MS/CNN/FOX/BC evening “news” (I use the term loosely); and golden parachuted CEOs of gigantic multinational corporations, most thoughtful 21st century observers agree that this thing we call “globalization” is a double-edged sword. In its current dominant global form, “global capitalism” is driven by multinational corporations along a networked highway created by corp.-friendly international organizations (read: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization) and mechanisms (can you say GATT and Structural Adjustment Programs?). As a result, globalization creates staggering amounts of wealth that enriches the very few at the expense of the many, and leaves even consummate “insiders” like former World Bank head Joseph Globalization and Its Discontents Stiglitz and the Earth Institute’s Jeffrey The End of Poverty Sachs scratching their collective head in dismay.

Beyond the usual now-cliched panaceas – what we need, some say, is more government regulation of multinational corporations! (yeah, right – the phrase “captive regulators” comes to mind) - few seem to have any creative solutions to rein in the consequences of unbridled global capitalism. Short of dramatic climate change and/or the troubling consequences of global peak oil (both appearing more possible with each passing day), the rich continue to get richer and the poor continue to get poorer under the current operating system, as even former World Bank heads seem to conclude.

Into the fray steps Working Assets co-founder and entrepreneur Peter Barnes with an elegant new book called Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. Clocking in at a mere 166 pages, Barnes’ book is what E.F. Schumacher might have called “a guide for the perplexed,” a clear and cogent clarion call that revives an alternative way of considering our most urgent economic and social questions. “For years, the Right has been saying – nay, shouting – that government is flawed and that only privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts can save us. For just as long, the Left has been insisting that markets are flawed and that only government can save us,” Barnes writes in his Preface. “The trouble is that both sides are half-right and half-wrong. They’re both right that markets and state are flawed, and both wrong that salvation lies in either sphere.”

Barnes’ ingenious way out of this dualistic dead-end discourse, so prevalent in what passes for mainstream political “debate” these days, is to re-frame the conversation by invoking the ancient but mostly forgotten idea of the Commons, comprised, Barnes suggests, of three main forks: nature (air, water, animals, plants, forests, etc.), community (like streets, libraries, museums, money), and culture (language, music, the Internet, medicine, mathematics). It is upon our Commons that humans (and corporations, treated by law as “artificial persons”) have constructed global surplus capitalism (what Barnes calls “Capitalism 2.0”). “The notion of the Commons designates a set of assets that have two characteristics: they’re all gifts, and they’re all shared,” Barnes observes. “This broad river precedes and surrounds capitalism, and adds immense value to it (and to us).”

The problems with Capitalism 2.0 are three-fold, Barnes acknowledges, pointing to a trio of “pathologies” governing Capitalism 2.0’s “anachronistic software.” Surplus capitalism has greatly accelerated the ravaging of the natural world, pushing the negative by-products and consequences of the same (air pollution, deforestation, toxic waste dumping - what many economists politely call “externalities”) back into the larger social arena as problems for society as a whole to solve.

Secondly, surplus capitalism has widened the gap between rich and poor, despite 24/7 Big Media propaganda to the contrary. (“The economy grew again yesterday!” takes on a more sinister meaning if we recall rabble-rousing writer Edward Abbey’s trenchant observation that “growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of a cancer cell.”)

Finally, surplus capitalism has produced fewer happy people, not more – ironically enough – until we recognize that the best research (and our own souls) tell us that there are social dilemmas that simply cannot be solved by excessive material consumption. Privatization, Barnes sums up, has its limits – what we must do instead is “propertize” our natural and cultural inheritance without “privatizing” it. “The basic idea is to turn pieces of the Commons into common property rather than corporate property,” Barnes concludes.

But how to do this? As the title of his book suggests, Barnes’ solution to our dilemma is to “upgrade” Capitalism’s operating software to new 3.0 status by reclaiming the Commons. One way forward? Through establishing, over time, a variety of “commons trusts” that would, Barnes says, institutionalize our collective obligations to our fellow citizens, the natural world, and future generations. After we inventory our natural and social assets – the sum total of the Commons – our collective task is to rebuild what Barnes calls “commons sector institutions” around a set of organizing principles – “leave enough and as good in common,” “put future generations first,” “the more the merrier” (referring to creating more inclusive forms of common property), “one person, one share,” and the principle of “income sharing,” which would, as in the case of the Alaska Permanent Fund, in which all Alaskan citizens receive a yearly dividend from the state government based on commonly-held oil assets - return income to all common property owners.

And the good news, Barnes concludes, is that “commons reclamation” (my phrase) is already happening – look at the wide variety of local land trusts, surface and ground water trusts, community gardens, farmer’s markets, revitalized public spaces and time banks, or, at the regional level, air and watershed trusts springing up all over the United States. Barnes also offers some new ideas, including the notion of a Children’s Opportunity Trust and, my personal favorite, a Spectrum Trust (the market value of the spectrum we’ve turned over to Big Media broadcasters to broadcast on our publicly-owned airwaves is $500 billion) – we, the people, have a right to demand something in return for their use of our common assets.

And the best part of all, according to Barnes? Everyone – entrepreneurs, wage earners, parents, capitalists, economists, politicians, lawyers – has a role to play in reclaiming the Commons.

Progressives who flay corporate power, Marxists who dislike capitalism in any form, libertarians who savage the role of the state, and other critics might find much to criticize in Barnes’ book. But this reviewer finds much of practical value in Capitalism 3.0’s eloquent and accessible arguments, despite my healthy distrust of large multinational corporations.

I would add only one caveat – in considering the Commons, size and scale do matter. If we are to begin collectively adopting Barnes’ suggestions in any meaningful way, let us begin in our own communities, in face-to-face contact with our own neighbors. Then, and only then, might we begin to forge something truly sustainable in this new century.

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

Book review by Rob Williams

“The goal of life should not be limited to production, consumption, more production and more consumption. There is no necessary relationship between the level of possession and the level of well-being.

Thakur S. Powdyel
Bhutanese Ministry of Education

I’ve long appreciated writer Bill McKibben’s ability to explore some of the world’s most urgent emerging issues with wisdom, wit, and humor. His work as a wordsmith these past two decades has mirrored our world’s evolving understanding of itself, and his writing, in turn, has played a pivotal role in shaping our society’s consideration of our options and (possible) future directions. A quick survey of my library indicates McKibben’s seminal reporting at work, whether the topic is climate change (The End of Nature), population growth (Maybe One), genetic engineering (Enough), and global environmentalism and sustainability (Hope: Human and Wild).

McKibben also possesses a wonderful literary gift for blending “big picture” research with accessible anecdotes, highlighting stories that often showcase the work of individuals striving to make a difference for the better. He has also proved willing, way before Morgan Spurlock’s fast food documentary “Super Size Me” popularized the technique, to write himself into the story as an observer and participant, as he does in The Age of Missing Information (a 24 hour comparative “nature versus television” info experiment ), Long Distance (his training as an elite cross country skier, juxtaposed with his father’s dying), and Wandering Home (his extended hike across the Champlain Valley).

McKibben’s interest in balancing “big picture” research with personal anecdotes is once again at the heart his new and important book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. “For most of human history, the two Birds More and Better roosted on the same branch,” McKibben observes at book’s beginning. “But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest.” The result? “Now, if you’ve got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand,” he explains, “you have to choose between them.” In other words, McKibben prophetically suggests, “It’s More or Better.”

Like the influential 2004 documentary “The Corporation,” McKibben begins his story in 1712, with Thomas Newcomen’s creation of the steam engine, a coal-burning device that drained water from underground mines at the same rate as a five hundred horse team. Newcomen’s remarkable invention (along with many others) ushered in the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying Energy revolution (from coal and steam, to oil and natural gas), as well as kicking off our three-centuries-long “growth explosion” with all of its astounding benefits: factories, electricity, global commerce, New Zealand kiwis and California tomatoes in New England all year long, ever-cheaper consumer goods, iPods, ear buds. The whole enchilda.

To put it simply, the past three hundred years have generated stupendous wealth for those (First) world players able to ante up, while largely depriving other regions of the (Third) world of those same socioeconomic and political benefits, all in the name of “growth” and “progress.”

But all is not well at Best Buy. “The link between environmental destruction and wealth is deep and long-standing,” McKibben observes. “Clearly, getting rich means getting dirty.” And, all happy talk of “sustainable growth” and “carbon offsets” aside, it is time, he suggests, to grapple with some basic realities of this early 21st century moment. “Growth is no longer making people wealthier, but instead generating inequality and insecurity,” McKibben explains. “And growth is bumping against physical limits so profound – like climate change and peak oil – that continuing to expand the economy may be impossible.”

And then, there’s what McKibben calls the “wild card.” “New research from many quarters,” he writes, “has started to show that even when growth does make us wealthier, the greater wealth no longer makes us happier.” News flash. And one that bears repeating, in the face of the constant barrage of 3,000 commercial messages a day, conditioning us to equate individual fulfillment with consuming stuff.

Once again. Acquiring greater wealth does not make us happier.

To complicate matters further, much of the so-called desperately poor “developing” world are keenly interested in the goodies enjoyed by the world’s wealthy populations, and this situation creates more dilemmas. Take China, a country of close to 1.5 billion emerging consumers. If Chinese consumed meat the way we Westerners do, they’d eat up 2/3 of the world’s grain harvest. If they drove cars the way we Westerners do, they’d burn through the 82 million barrels of oil daily fueling the entire world’s economy, plus another 15 million extra barrels each day for good measure.

And that’s just China.

“The Western economic model – the fossil-fuel based auto-centered throwaway economy - is not going to work for China,” concludes Worldwatch analyst Lester Brown. “”And if it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which has an economy growing at 7% a year and a population projected to surpass China’s in 2030. Nor will it work for the other three billion people in the developing world who are also dreaming the American dream.” In other words, given the uniqueness of our global 21st century moment, the world’s poor nations simply will not be able to “grow” their way out of poverty, and the world’s rich nations are about to smack into what Dana Meadows and other observers have called the “limits of growth.”

So now what do we do?

Bucking the conventional (which is to say “corporate”) wisdom of Alan Greenspan, Sam Walton, and Wall Street’s high priests, McKibben’s solution lies in re-inventing local economies from the ground up. Given planetary climate change, he argues, we must consume less energy more efficiently. In a world of global peak oil, he observes, we must shorten our supply lines for food by revitalizing local agricultural economies, family farms, and farmer’s markets. (No more 1500 mile cross-country junkets for lettuce). So-called “free trade,” which enriches the wealthy and corporate multinationals while turning large parts of the developing world into giant factories and parking lots, must be replaced by “fair trade,” in which global wealth is distributed more equitably. “Nations don’t get richer; people in them do,” McKibben shrewdly notes in one of the book’s most pointed moments, “and often not very many of them.”

If Deep Economy has a shortcoming, it is the book’s relative lack of attention to structural solutions that help solve what are, at the core, structural problems. How do we go about re-tooling the mechanisms of globalization – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO – more than fifty years in the making? How do we challenge the power of what president Eisenhower referred to as the “military/industrial/ (energy)/(media) complex,” which (let’s be honest) works to elite Westerners’ benefit, in a way that provides us as a planetary population with a more sustainable 21st century way forward?

These are big questions, with no easy answers, but McKibben finds hope in the promise of individuals working at the local and the regional level to implement these kinds of changes.

And, as Margaret Mead famously observed, small groups of committed people working together locally is where global change begins.