Tag: Opinion

CANDY COLLECTORS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Getting ready for the trick-or-treaters tonight means bringing the box of decorations down from the loft of the barn, perhaps carving a jack o’ lantern or two, putting up some spooky lights, and making sure we have bags of candy ready for the kids who come knocking on our door between 5 and 8 p.m. (Dover’s officially sanctioned window).

For readers in other countries, I should perhaps explain America’s Halloween tradition of allowing children to go door to door, knocking or ringing the doorbell, and then calling out “trick or treat” and receiving a sweet morsel in return. In the old days, there was the veiled threat, “or else,” which often led to a prank like having your windows soaped – or worse. These days, it’s often a matter of having any pumpkins left out being smashed in the middle of the night, regardless of your good acts.

Over the years, though, the event’s lost a lot of its edge.

For one thing, as a result of tales about razorblades being found in apples and other urban myths, only commercially prepared and sealed products are acceptable as handouts – no more apples, little bags of homemade caramelized popcorn or cookies, or (my favorite) Rice Crispies squares. It’s almost universally little candy bars, door after door. Gone’s the wide variety you’d compare at the end of the evening. Of course, most kids get candy throughout the year, so it’s no longer the Other Christmas when it came to rare sweets.

For another, concerns about safety mean it’s rarer to allow children to roam on their own. In our neighborhood, at least, almost everyone’s accompanied by a parent – and many of them have better costumes than the kids. For that matter, they often seem to be enjoying it more, too.

The safety issue has led to some weird twists of its own. Manchester, for instance, moved the event to Sunday afternoon – broad daylight. As one neighbor kid at the time observed, how lame! There’s nothing spooky in that! And then there’s the going store to store in the malls. Even lamer.

The one vexing situation is the car that cruises slowly while their children go door to door. Get out and walk, please! You’re being asocial. Usually, these are people who don’t even live in the neighborhood but have chosen to live out in the country, “away from neighbors.” And now they want what they don’t offer in return.

I remember, especially, living in a neighborhood of modest townhouse rentals and seeing the BMWs and Mercedes cruising through. Nobody in the neighborhood could afford vehicles like those, and now we were expected to give their kids little gifts?

I had the urge for a little tricking on my own in return. If I only had a plan …

LEGALIZING POT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 10 Comments

Another of the festering wounds of the ’60s and ’70s is the matter of illicit drug use. It wasn’t just hippies, actually, not once the troops in Vietnam turned to it, too.

It’s a troubling legacy on many fronts. For one thing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world – much of it regarding drug traffic. In other words, there’s a demand for the product, and if you believe in a free market, maybe you need to listen.

I won’t go into the history of banning many of the substances that are now verboten, even if it suggests a political tradeoff in repealing the Prohibition. But the basis of declaring the substances illegal appears to have been made on reasons other than the ones officially proclaimed. Let’s be honest about tobacco and alcohol, including their ability to be taxed, in contrast anything you might be able to grow on your own. (This, let me add, is coming from a former homebrewer.)

On the other hand, the widespread, frequent use of mind-altering substances among the young – and I’m including tobacco, alcohol, and activity-inhibiting legal prescriptions – leaves me deeply concerned.

That extends to the parents who give their kids pot … or even allow them to sell it at school.

That, in turn, points to a divergence between hippies and stoners.

Faced with a decision on the legalization of marijuana, I’m not entirely sure how I’d vote. But I do know the current policy isn’t working – and is doomed to continuing failure.

Why can’t we have a frank discussion on the issue … without all the hubris?

TEN HIPPIE MOVIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

We’ve already looked at music and literature from the hippie era, but now I’m wondering about movies. Yes, there were some that played straight into the stereotypes. Peter Sellars’ The Guru would head my list there.

But there were also others that took the issues and era seriously, even when they were comedies. Not all of them, I should emphasize, come from the ’60s or ’70s.

For a starter Top Ten list, let me propose:

  • Alice’s Restaurant
  • Putney Swope
  • I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
  • Yellow Submarine
  • Brother Sun, Sister Moon
  • Godspell
  • Hair
  • Jesus Christ Superstar
  • Love Story
  • Zabriske Point

Maybe The Graduate, Swept Away, 10, or Hippie Masala belong on the list. But it’s your turn to weigh in, savvy viewers that you are. What other nominees do you propose?

SWEPT OUT TO SEA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The stupidity of some people never fails to impress. You hear of those who refuse to leave the path of disaster or see pictures of families standing by an ocean churned by an approaching hurricane. You know, the foolish ones who then expect emergency personnel to come to their rescue (at personal risk and public expense).

I’ve learned to respect the moodiness of the ocean and its quick changes – the summer thunderstorms that come out of nowhere, for starters. If the Coast Guard or lifeguards say “Get out of the water,” just do it rather than ask questions. If the captain of the boat says “Get down under,” just do it.

Even before the hail or power outages.

How quickly it all passes, too, and everything looks perfectly serene again, with no hint of what just happened.

My wife and I once watched a deluge approach, strike, and return to normal all in the course of a seaside lunch. Fortunately, we were indoors, our table beside the window.

One of my first lessons came a few months after the 1991 Halloween nor’easter now known as the Perfect Storm. In New England, a nor’easter is akin to a cold-weather, slow-moving hurricane. One moonlit night three or four months after this one, I was driving along Cape Ann in Massachusetts and was awed by the depth of sand still piled along the roadway – like plowed snow, in fact – up on ridges out of view of the ocean. Such was the impact of the Perfect Storm.

But this was a calm night and coming to an overlook, I pulled over, got out of the car, and walked out on a ledge a good 20 or 30 feet above the water. I was still back from the edge when a large wave crashed up behind me and swirled off just to my side. I realized the current could have knocked me off my feet and into the brine below. I’m a good swimmer, but fully clothed in icy water driving into rocks would be a fatal combination.  

Yes, I’ve learned to respect the ocean and be wary.

PHILISTINES AND AMERICAN SOCIETY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Before my graduation from college, back in my social activist period, I wondered how American society could possible afford High Art while so many went hungry and homeless – domestically as well as internationally. Then I began to see everywhere a desire for expressiveness even in every ghetto – for that matter, ranging from ghetto blasters to Playboy. There were murals and blues bands. To say nothing of the infusion of professional sports, to which every poor youth, from the inner city to the mining company towns, seems to aspire. So opera and museums and other “Establishment” operations came to lose their exclusivity in my mind. Indeed, over the years I’ve heard that the real classical music lovers are the ones in the cheaper seats, the ones they can afford. Mankind, after all, has a need to reach to the higher realms of thought and the imagination of the spirit; anything less reduces our existence to nothing more than economics, impoverishing everyone in the society.

Look closely, and you’ll also see that in America, Art has become the state religion, no matter the level of state and federal funding exists. In this country, at least, there’s also been a long recognition of the fine arts as an adjunct to wealth, for whatever reasons. Many sense an abstract “goodness” in the products of art chamber music, art museums, Shakespeare festivals, opera, poetry, the “book” that so many people dream of writing even if the artist himself/herself remains (often with good reason!) somewhat suspect, a shady character. Perhaps that’s why these big institutions stand between us and the rest of ourselves, as artists and audiences. Something abstractly “good” even when they themselves admit they don’t know much about the field. Contrast that to the related state religions in America: collegiate and professional athletics, Hollywood movies, and rock concerts, wherein no one actually advocates any common wealth. (The High Priests are paid handsomely, after all.)

Art as the semi official State Religion of today? Or should that be entertainment and its host of celebrity worship? The stamp of approval. The aspiration.

Art as commodity, too. “How much did it sell for?” What was the box office?

At heart, all art is, primarily, either spiritual/religious or secular/amusement in intent and execution. Take Milton or Pepys. Today, the overwhelming materialism of our society reflects an insatiable hunger.

Even as starving artists we’re enmeshed in materialism, one way or another. It’s so easy to hold the artist up in some idealized light or the product itself as the object of worship, an idolatry, totally forgetting to turn to the Source of All. The worship of living genius, from Beethoven and the Romantic era on. Or the pretty faces of mostly Hollywood celebrity today.

As an editor on newspapers where nearly everyone was giving totally (many unpaid hours of overtime, etc.) in an attempt for excellence, I was always appalled by the charge of “elitism,” which comes to mean “give me mediocrity not the truth” or “mere pleasantry” from the same people who would not accept such standards in their professional football team or new automobile.

The shift in the meaning of “culture” from learning and aspiration to the mundane lowest common denominator of daily life. Culture, as in a petri dish of mold or germs, rather than a rare book library or new opera.

Still, if you want to comprehend the view from the top of the mountain, you need to climb it. And be warned: driving, if a road’s an option, loses a lot in the translation. From a religious point of view, at least, we can’t settle for anything less than the best in the end.

CORKING THE STATE LIQUOR COMMISSION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For all of it reputation as the “tax-free state” and “live free or die,” New Hampshire has some pretty convoluted ways of making ends meet. True, we have no sales tax and no income tax, but that simply means finding a lot of nickel-and-dime ways of raising public revenues, starting with a hefty property tax rate. (Renters, of course, get no break on their federal taxes there, either – as I said, convoluted.) And if you dine out, even for breakfast, there’s another big hit, eight percent or so, one of many others. Eventually, it all adds up.

New Hampshire also has a reputation as the go-to state for cheaper liquor, compared to the rest of the Northeast. For all of the official conservative rhetoric of free enterprise, the state clutches its monopoly on the sale of hard liquor, unlike, say, neighboring Massachusetts, with its liberal tradition of neighborhood mom-and-pop “package” stores.

The conflict I see comes in the fact the state is both the regulator of alcoholic beverage sales, ranging from bars to groceries and wine stores and home consumption, and also the distributor. That is, the same agency, the State Liquor Commission, is both the policeman and an active dealer in what it is policing. It’s a situation rife with the potential for favors, favoritism, and outright bribery or corruption. As the Founding Fathers were well aware, whoever polices the police should not be the police. You separate them – the classic separation of powers, each keeping jealous watch over the other.

Not so here in New Hampshire. When it comes to alcohol, the only line of defense might be the Legislature or the Governor and Executive Council as the counterbalance, but that’s not the way it should be, especially when we factor in the possibilities of hefty campaign donations. The enforcer and distributor should be under separate agencies – then, if conflict arises, they appeal to higher authority. As it is, they’re likely to squelch any complainer … or else.

In addition, when it comes to wine, all the supermarkets, grocers, and independent wine shops face a double whammy. They’re required to buy their wine from the state (through the one and only licensed warehouse dealer), even though the state also sells directly against them. In fact, it’s the same agency they must apply to for their very permit to do business in this field. And then the agency adds its own percentage to the product, even if it’s from a winery the state wouldn’t otherwise stock except for the retailers’ order. As I said, convoluted and rife for abuse.

I first noticed this when I found a certain label for sale much cheaper in Massachusetts. Seems the Bay State has one less layer of middleman in the process. So much for the “Taxachusetts” tag we Granite Staters so often brush on our southern neighbor. Tain’t always so.

More recently, I found an example of the state’s monopoly bully at work when a local supermarket was out of several of its more popular varieties. Could it be someone had said something that miffed somebody in the state agency that was supposed to deliver the product, which now was just sitting in the warehouse? Who do you complain to, after all? You can’t switch to a different supplier, either. Where’s the free market free enterprise in this case? The official line may have been that the state was in the midst of shifting from one licensed warehouse operator, which had held the contract for decades, to a new one. But, as the old contractor miffed, the situation “is just the latest example of many where the the commission has cut a special deal” with the new licensee.

For years, I received the weekly release of which bars, restaurants, and convenience stores or supermarkets had their liquor licenses suspended by the State Liquor Commission, usually for underage sales of beverages. Not once did I see a State Liquor Store in that list. Not that they weren’t as prone to violations. As I said, who polices the police?

Yes, New Hampshire gets the revenue. As long as I’m not forced to go to Maine or Massachusetts to get the wine I want, where it’s available, maybe even more cheaply.

Any future MBAs interested in doing a case study? This one could be a doozy.

AN UNFOLDING GREEK TRAGEDY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

For past several weeks, the hottest news story across New England has been over what will no doubt be a textbook case of how to kill your own golden goose in corporate America.

The business is a family-owned chain of 71 supermarkets that has somehow managed to carve out the region’s highest profit rate in a notoriously thin-margin field while simultaneously paying its workers more than its rivals — along with profit-sharing and bonuses — while keeping its prices well below those of the other grocers. (You can imagine, for one thing, that the pilferage that undermines many groceries is nonexistent at Market Basket. Its workers are loyal, at least to the executive responsible for the success — a man who seems to know not just each of them but their family members as well.) Add to that a great deal of flexibility for store managers to respond to customer requests and you can understand the wide variety of ethnic foods found on the shelves; consider the fact that our local Asian restaurants choose to buy their tofu supplies at Market Basket rather than the wholesalers, and you get a sense of how that policy pays off all the way around.

In recent years customers have turned in droves away from the competition, and their loyalty is palpable. Lately, I’ve found parking spaces are always available right by the front doors of those underpopulated stores, unlike Market Basket, where the parking lot and aisles are always overflowing.

Given the win/win/win realities of the still growing Market Basket chain, nobody was prepared for the directors’ decision to ax its successful president. Well, half of the board’s decision.

The half that wasn’t prepared for the impassioned backlash from the public or its own workers, who have essentially shut down the operation.

The board’s decision, as far as anyone can see, was based more on lingering bad blood in the Demoulas family that had previously erupted in a notorious 1990 lawsuit that nearly forced the sale of the company, this time apparently heightened by greed. Seems there’s  a $300 million reserve fund, for one thing.

But if the side that ousted Arthur T. Demoulas and his top aides thinks it can manage the company better than he did, it’s produced no evidence to date. Indeed, each day brings another public relations debacle that has gone unchallenged and signs the victorious side of the board is unaware of what’s happening on the streets. Brand loyalty, as the lore goes, is priceless. And it’s hard to win back. If they’re hoping to sell the chain, its value is plummeting by the hour. How often, after all, have you seen managers and workers stand together in solidarity as they are now?

The daily drama is not subsiding.The region’s newspapers, led by the Boston Globe, have been covering the details thoroughly, and I’ll point you in that direction.

For now, there are the petitions to sign and emails to send.

Here’s one example that was sent to the independent board members:

~*~

Dear All,

I have shopped at Market Basket for 30 years. I appreciated the low prices as well as the availability and quality of ethnic foods. When I learned that the employees were also the highest paid of any grocery in New England, that cemented the choice. I’ve barely walked through the door of a Hannaford or Shaw’s in 15 years.

Yesterday, I went to my local Market Basket, but only to sign the petition and cheer on the workers. I then I bought my groceries at Shaw’s and planned a trip to Costco.

You have had a business model that serves customers, employees, and owners. That this model would be thrown over for no discernible reason except personal animosity and greed is beyond me. I do not know or care if ATD is a good or terrible human being. I do believe he is a supremely competent one. He has run a business that gives customer the lowest prices, employees the highest compensation, and  the owners considerable profit, while maintaining zero debt and ensuring the stability of the company. I have paid close attention to every news report I can find to see if there was any substantial reason for ATD”s removal. Nothing I have heard or read has indicated that new management has better ideas, or for that matter any ideas at all. That, in addition it cared so little for the loyalty and dedication of its employees that made the model work is the final straw.

You’ve lost another customer.

IVAR’S PAINT QUIP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I wish he hadn’t said it. My former landlord in the Yakima Valley, visiting us here in New England, remarked on how many of the houses he saw that were in need of new paint. That was before he saw ours, too.

Now, in this seemingly picturesque location, everywhere I turn, I see houses with peeling paint. Or worse.

I wish he hadn’t said it.

At least he said nothing about roofing.

HOMAGE TO THE BEST … AND BACK TO THE SCREENING ROOM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

We sometimes express a yearning for the return of the Renaissance Man – the individual who could be conversant on all fronts of intellectual inquiry – but the reality today is that it’s impossible even to stay abreast of the developments in one’s own field, much less other more widely shared interests.

Just ask folks who read if they’ve read your latest hot discovery, and you’ll likely get blank looks. It’s just a fact of life, even for works that are in the basic canon.

It extends to the other arts, too, and we won’t even raise the frontiers of science.

That reality hit home the other night when we sat down (finally!) to view Citizen Kane. I knew from my cinema studies (uh, 44 years ago) that the work was then considered one of the four greatest movies ever made, but somehow it had slipped through my viewing. Yes, I’d seen Birth of a Nation and the Battleship Potemkin and likely the fourth work on that tally, though I can’t remember what it was.

And now? I’m in the camp that considers Kane the most important movie ever made. Period. And, as my viewing companion said afterward, “I was ready to respect the movie, but I didn’t expect that I’d enjoy it as much as I did.” Which was immensely.

If you want to know how Orson Welles and his team changed the face of movie-making so utterly profoundly, go to the Wikipedia entry for the movie and then watch Peter Bogdanovich and Roger Ebert’s running commentaries, which are included on the Netflix DVD. Apart from the advent of color, there’s really nothing they didn’t revolutionize. (If you see something they missed, speak up.)

I’m glad we saw Kane after we’d watched The Grand Budapest Hotel. For all of Wes Anderson ‘s wonderful quirkiness, we could now appreciate the ways he and his team paid homage to Welles and the incredible cinematographer Gregg Toland at the head of that list.

We’re now going to have to watch both movies again.

CULTURE SHOCK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 12 Comments

It had been ages since I’d gone to the cinema multiplex – you know, the kind in the vast parking lot beside the mall. Usually, when we go out for a movie, it’s an art house in Concord or a volunteer-run series at the Music Hall in downtown Portsmouth.

But Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was showing, and we figured we’d better make it there fast. No telling how quickly anything that quirky, formalistic, and savvy would be playing. (As we juggled our schedules, we realized it would have to be Monday night, overriding another activity on my itinerary – as we discovered, if you’re going to hit the big-box of showrooms, that’s the night to do it. We practically had the rectangular cavern to ourselves.)

I’ll leave it to others to lavish praise on the witty plotting that continually turned in unpredictable yet seemingly inevitable developments; the impressive casting and stylized acting; the precise cinematography; or the marvelous interweaving of actual sites in Germany (the hotel interior was actually the atrium of a defunct department store), miniature models of varied scales, and special effects to create a sense of fantastic and delightful artificiality. Anderson, as his fans know, is a moviemaking genius with a voice and vision all his own. (For one engaging detailed look at the roots of the story, click here.)

For me, though, the outing also invoked a series of culture shocks. Now that I’m “retired,” income’s tight, I’ll admit. I’m spending much less than I did before, and gasoline’s toward the top of my out-of-pocket budget. So the current ticket price (go ahead and laugh, you debonair rounders, when I tell you it was $11 apiece for three) made me gasp silently. (I know a good Greek restaurant where we could have dined out for that.) (I’m I really turning into this?)

From my end, it’s hard to take the very interior and decor of consumer society reflected in these big-chain outlets. It all feels plastic, cake-frosted, impermanent, unnatural. No one would want to linger in the vast lobby (what’s the point, anyway?), and no matter how plush, the showing rooms are – well, showing room sounds like something you’d find in a funeral home, which may be a good parallel, except that in much of the country, the mortuaries are usually in some amazing Victorian mansions. Nothing cookie-cutter about them, unlike these concealed warrens. None of this matches what I consider a theater or concert hall or even a house of worship, the kinds of places I prefer to assemble with others.

The third shock came in viewing the trailers and commercials. I’m still offended to be bombarded with big-screen ads after paying what I consider to be inflated ticket prices, after all, but to be hit twice with a promotion for a new computer game was especially egregious, especially with its pseudo-documentary interviews with its “creators,” a handful of pretentious nerds claiming social value for violent nihilism. I’m sorry, their world vision leads nowhere but destruction.

Actually, it was the amplified violence repeated in the trailers as well that most aggravates me. What in the American psyche so fosters terrorism of this scale? What justifies the reveling in gore for so many (and at such a price, even before we get to the price on our psyche)? Here’s the road that deserves a sermon of hellfire and brimstone, indeed. Wake up, folks, will you?

No wonder I prefer intimate, small-scale, gentle, playful, European or indie productions! They, in contrast, have soul and reality.

Anderson, I must confess, goes well beyond the small-scale criterion, but he earns the right to do so. And he’s generous to those who contribute to the effort, from the visual artists to the payroll accountants. One of the things that kept going through my mind as we were watching, actually, was an awareness of the lavish investment he was expending in the process and the question of whether he’d ever make it back. Well, maybe it wasn’t any greater than those of the futuristic trailers we’d watched beforehand, but still … Hollywood and Las Vegas have more in common than I’d like.

Maybe their biggest gamble is in making works that demand to be seen on the big screens rather than on our laptops or TVs via Netflix.

If you were a moviemaker or investor, what would you do? Or, as a film buff, what are you doing now?