Gary Tischler • November 6, 2012

Violinist Joshua Bell is no longer the boyish phenomenon of the classical musical world. Now 44 – and still boyishly handsome and charismatic – Bell is a bona fide superstar in his world, which includes a host of other stars, from Yitzhak Perlman to Hilary Hahn.

These days, Bell continues to keep a hectic travel schedule and performing schedule that will include a Nov. 1 performance at the Music Center at Strathmore, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at 8 p.m.

With Sam Haywood on the piano, he’ll be performing works by Schubert (Rondo for Piano in B minor, Op. 70) Strauss (Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat Major, Op. 18), and Prokofiev (Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D Major, Op. 94).

Bell is by now a familiar visitor to Washington concert halls and performing arts venues, having played often at the Kennedy Center and at the Music Center at Strathmore since it arrived seven years ago.

“Each offers pleasures and challenges for a musician and they do for me,” Bell said in a telephone interview. “Like many musicians, I admire the acoustics and the environment at Strathmore, it creates a kind of intimacy and sound that’s rare. And of course, the Kennedy Center is a very special place for me. Every time I come here, it’s something of a homecoming for me. I was here for the first time at a Kennedy Center Honors when I was only 17, so each occasion, it’s something comfortable and welcoming for me.”

In the middle stages of his career, Bell still likes his challenges, and his tastes remain eclectic. In 2011, he created one of the finest amalgams of classical and pop music ever recorded with “Joshua Bell at home with friends”. Home is a two-floor penthouse in New York that includes a recording studio, and his friends were folks like Sting, Jeremy Denko, Josh Groban, Kristin Chenoweth, Frankie Moreno, Jonathan Gunn, Regina Spector, David Finck, Anoushka Shankar and the late Marvin Hamlisch. The music was rangy from “My Funny Valentine”, to “Look Away”, Spector’s “Left Hand Song”, music from “Porgy and Bess”, to Sergei Rachmoninoff to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and others. The result was bliss.

“I loved doing that, of course, but I don’t think that’s going to be indicative of where I might be going,” he said.

Prior to that he had also participated in a cultural experiment which saw him playing a very expensive violin at a Metro Station during rush hour, performing Brahms, documented in a Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post Magazine story. Bell got meager recompense, and was rarely engaged by passers by, few of whom stopped. “Well, it was interesting experiment,” he said.

Lately, he’s taken on a major challenge when he was named the new music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the venerable and conductor-less chamber ensemble founded by Sir Neville Marriner in 1958. In response to the announcement, Bell said, “I have felt a particular affection for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields ever since I made my very first concerto recording with them under the baton of Marriner when I was just 18 years old. Since then, the orchestra has come to feel like family to me, as we have shared so many cherished moments together.”

“It’s taking on a major responsibility, it’s a bit of a risk,” he said. “But it lets me explore with the institution and the orchestra certain kinds of music which will be challenging, but it’s also something I’ve thought about for some time now, to explore the symphonic repertoire.”

With Bell, it appears that challenges are about knowing when to take them on. “There are some pieces of music that I haven’t done, because I felt I might not do them justice in terms of recording them.”

Recently, Bell and Jeremy Denk record “French Impressions”, with sonatas by Ravel, Saint-Saens, and Franck, marking the two men’s first recital together and allowing Bell to pay tribute to his mentor Josef Gingold with a recording of Cesar Frank’s “Violin Sonata.”

Bell has been in the heat of the public eye since he was 14, he’s one of those performers who packs a lot of charisma, with a riveting performing style and his oft-mentioned good looks. Truth be told, he doesn’t really think that how he looks matters, even though the classical music business, like many things in our modern times, likes to market musicians who look good on an CD cover. “I personally don’t think that’s important at all,” he said, “You’ve got to remember the great Fritz Kreisler was a very handsome man, women loved him, I’m told, but this is about marketing. It has nothing to do with music or your place in the world.”

Gary Tischler • October 31, 2012

George McGovern died Sunday at the age of 90 as the 2012 presidential race rapidly approached its climax. It has been a campaign that has been one of the most contentious campaigns since, well, 1972, when McGovern and his followers took the Democratic Party on a rambunctious, liberally liberal and ultimately disastrous crusade against incumbent President Richard Nixon and the incumbent Vietnam War.

McGovern was an unabashed liberal, and an unabashed patriot, a war hero who bled for the blood of young American men in an unpopular war, a man who led a sometimes stolid, stoic American life coming out of a small-time upbringing on the flat plains of South Dakota to rise to the U.S. Senate for three terms, the pure head of the liberal wing of the Democratic party and his party’s standard bearer in 1972.

The result—a campaign that featured an assassination attempt that knocked Alabama governor George Wallace out of another third-party run, a not-always-hidden dirty tricks campaign by the president’s forces, the demise of centrist Maine Senator Edmund Muskie’s campaign amidst tears in New Hampshire and McGovern, seen as the anti-war heir of the slain Robert F. Kennedy, taking the helm of the party.

That campaign and the man are worth remembering today: his was a life that was marked by decency, sacrifice, the triumphs inevitably accompanied by defeats and tragedies almost as much as the Kennedy clan’s. McGovern’s unrepentant, uncompromising challenge to the nation was to defeat Nixon and end the war. Coming from a man who had flown terrifying bomber missions over Nazi Germany during World War II and was decorated for his heroics. This message should have echoed with great effect throughout the land, but McGovern became the victim of being swept away with the spirit of the party at the time, which, if you listen to commentators of the time, or saw any part of the convention, was an outburst of left-wing, counter-culture ebullience, an in-your-face cultural challenge of rock and roll music, tie dyed t-shirts, afros, beards, mini-skirts, drugs and license which made Middle America shake in its boots.

McGovern’s quite idealistic, resounding, powerfully affecting “Come Home, America” acceptance speech might have made some dent in the final result had it been heard by most of the nation. But with battles and celebrations over all sorts of speeches and issues dragging things out, it wasn’t heard until 2 a.m. As McGovern said then, “Welcome to my sunrise service speech,” an hour when most Americans had indeed gone home.

More trouble followed from the get-go. It was discovered that Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton, his choice for running mate, had electric shock treatments, and was eventually forced from the ticket even after McGovern unwisely had said he backed Eagleton “one-thousand percent.” Few takers for the job could be found, until Sargent Shriver, Kennedy family icon and former head of the Peace Corps, accepted like the good and loyal soldier he had been all of his life.

The Watergate break-in occurred at the time, and while it was being reported, McGovern railed against it, suggesting deeper, darker doings from an unscrupulous Nixon administration. He turned out to be a prophet, a fact which gave him no solace “You know, when somebody says you’re ahead of your time, it just means you have a terrible sense of timing.”

His opposition to the war was honorable, and almost visceral, coming as it did from the experience of war. “I am fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in,” McGovern said.

His convictions, his campaign convinced few and ended up in a historic defeat, getting only 38 percent of the nation’s vote—and carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, losing his own state.

The defeat stung, and lingered, as it might have done with any person in a quest for the most powerful job in the world. In 2008, McGovern was in Washington at the National Press Club participating a panel on the media and elections. A 20-something woman asked him how long it takes getting over losing a presidential election. “I’ll let you know when it happens,” McGovern quipped, 36 years after the 1972 election.

McGovern was not done with suffering—he lost his U.S. Senate seat in the Reagan Republican sea change, and two of his five children died young after battling alcoholism.

Personal tragedy, even of the Shakespearean or Greek kind, does not add up to a legacy, of course; it is a part of the river of life’s stories. McGovern’s legacy remains his steadfast principles, his almost quixotic run against Nixon who himself was forced to resign the presidency, his honest opposition to the Vietnam War and his leadership on fighting world hunger, a passion and cause he shared with Republican Bob Dole, who shared with him a lost presidential campaign and World War II heroism.

President Bill Clinton, who worked on his 1972 campaign in Arkansas, honored him with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called him “always a gentleman and an outstanding member of the greatest generation.”

As a political figure, McGovern was transcendent, with the result that the party, after his devastating defeat started to move more to the center. He was principled—a rare quality today when many politicians, of both parties, seem to have few positions which they are not willing to discard for a sign of movement in the polls. As a man, he never lost touch with the many multitudes and factions that make up our country.

The late journalist Tom Wicker once described McGovern’s antagonist Richard Nixon as “One of Us,” meaning he was the sometimes dark, uncertain face we sometimes saw in the mirror. If that is indeed the case, then George McGovern was the best in us—that which flickers sometimes in our own mirrors.

Gary Tischler •

Billy Collins. As you’re talking to the two-time U.S. Poet Laureate—and once New York’s as well—you kind of want to stick out your hand and say hello, even though he’s in Florida, and you’re here, where you are at home in Adams Morgan. The name has a rock-solid feeling to it, a reality you cannot deny, as real as someone standing next to you waiting for the light to change. You wonder, too, how his fortunes might have fared had he been born in a different place with a different name, say Thaddeus Slowisky, would people even approach him in such familiar ways.

Talking with Collins—I won’t presume the “Billy,” although he doesn’t mind being called that—is an oddly familiar experience, like meeting an Irishman in an Irish bar, where the spoken word will surely ensue. Collins, by heritage and background, is Irish—big and happy surprise, that—and he writes poetry that thousands, maybe millions, of people read and have read. They have also downloaded, heard in the flesh, so to speak, or spoken out loud themselves, or listened to on National Public Radio, or stumbled across like a grand field of verse and video on YouTube, where he is as omni-present as a Taylor Swift song, but not nearly so irritating.

I bring this up not because Collins’ poems are like a Taylor Swift song—although it’s likely he will one day suddenly write a poem about the comparison and it will be pointed, mysterious and funny all at the same time—but because in that rarefied, often academic, will-o’-the-wisp world of literature, of which poetry is its most literary branch, Collins is an odd duck. He is hugely popular, maybe, as the New York Time noted and more than one commentator noted, the “most popular poet in America.” By poetic standards, Collins has made quite a bit of money plying his art, once getting an astounding (for poetry) six-figure advance for three books not yet written.

Of course, that kind of success—popularity plus money—are the whipping sticks used by less fortunate and more obscure poets, not to mention lean and thinly high priests of literature, to try to dismiss the worth of the work. Collins, in turn, dismisses the success while not shunning it. “These things are nice, no question,” he said. “But they have little to do with the writing and creation or value of poetry.” As for those honors, he said, “I was dumbfounded being named laureate. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do besides give a talk.” These honors were bestowed in 2001 and 2002, but Collins did do things. He created a special program to teach poetry in high schools called “Poetry 180,” using 180 poems he selected, as well as coming up with a sequel for 180 more.

“I’m proud of that, sure,” he said. “I think young people today are very susceptible to poetry, not perhaps in its formal processes, but there you are. It’s an exciting time for poetry, I think.” Collins can make you laugh or smile. Each of his poems, you suspect, involves serious business, and Collins is serious about the craft, art and worth of poetry. It may have something to do with the Irish background—or the fact that his mother recited poems to him regularly. It is a truism that in the company of that tribe, which can be magical, joyous and musical, there always comes a moment spent in encountering and discussing God, the bitter end, matters of the universal universe. This happens all the time in poetry.

As a poet and a human being, Collins is not one for living in a cave. He splits his time between homes in New York and Florida, does readings, gives talks, and teaches and continues to write poems that ambush poetry readers.

We got to talking about the Irish a little, about dogs, about process, about the puzzle of his popularity. “I’m said to write about everyday life or the stuff of everyday life,” he said. “That’s true enough, I suppose, but it’s not that simple. There’s the surface, there’s what lies beneath, so to speak, and perhaps things I haven’t thought about. Ideas, images, they do come up sometimes without being sent for.”

He came to being a poet a little late in life—influenced by professors, by other poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the beats, when he was, admittedly, young. But Collins and his poetry are like nothing and nobody, influences be damned. For one thing, we had this little chat about dogs, because I mentioned that I missed walking my dog who had passed away earlier this year. He sympathized—he had lost his dog the year before. And perhaps not surprisingly, some of his poems are about dogs. He believes, as many dog owners do, that we try to live up to what our dogs think of us. Then again, there’s “The Revenant,” a poem by Collins which suggests an altogether different, sly, counter-sentimental view that perhaps dogs know us too well and carry an honest grudge to the grave.

Collins’s poems—often funny, hence a literary prize for a Mark Twain Humor category—are rooted in classicism—in terms of referencing—in jazz—in terms of an often improvisational style—and, yes, in the commonplace, which he manages to make most uncommon and in a formalism that isn’t Victorian or iambic. They seem more like haiku, although not as short.

As for myself, I think Collins is constantly awake in the world, sometimes buffeted, sometimes embracing the wind and the trash it leaves behind. His imagery comes from music and dreams and the stuff of daily breathing, as fanciful as a baby, as real as a cold call. He inspires, and he puts solid words out there that make you think about real time, not virtual time. Recently, a minister at a Georgetown church invoked Collins in a sermon, read and used his wondrous poem, “When I Was Ten,” in a sermon on “Everyday Miracles.” That’s what Collins does, he makes for all time everyday miracles called poems.

Gary Tischler • October 28, 2012

This book, by a veteran novelist and author of seven books, is not for everyone. It’s full of shades of grey but not the kind that are on the best-seller list right now. It requires more patience than any typical reader of the novels of the promiscuously prolific James Patterson, and it absolutely helps if you love John LeCarre, worry about the CIA, and like a little history—diplomatic, political, and literary—with your fictional servings.
Mostly, if you love spy novels, you’ll love “The Double Game”, and I say this with a major proviso: this is not a great spy novel, but it’s a great novel about spy novels.

The book is the kind of celebration and homage that only a writer and reader besotten with spy novels and their authors could write. Fesperman already has good street cred as an author of spy novels and/or thrillers with “Lie in the Dark” (Winner of the Crime Writer’s Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award), “The Small Boat of Great Sorrows”, winner of the Ian Fleming Dagger Award for best thriller, and “The Prisoner of Guantanamo”, winner of the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers.

What he’s done in “The Double Game” echoes a lot of latter-day spy fiction and the rumors of the work of real spies—in particular the CIA’s greatly paranoid spymaster and counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, who went, Ahab-like, searching for a mole in the CIA.

In “The Double Game”, Fesperman has as his hero, or anti-hero, a former journalist and public relations man named Bill Cage, experiencing a later-mid-life crisis after a promising career with the Washington Post was squashed years ago. He’s divorced, has a grown son, and pondering the turn his life took after he had written a story about Edwin Lemaster, a top CIA spy and spy novelist, in which he printed a wistful remark by the writer that he once considered going over to the other side during the cold war.
Nothing good came of the revelation, but now a mysterious and cryptic message sends Cage, whose father is an experienced retired diplomat living in Vienna, after the truth about Lemaster, who may have been a double agent, or something even more complicated and sinister.

Cage, following a Hansel and Gretel trail of messages in pages torn from (original) editions of famous spy novels, goes to Vienna, Prague and Budapest, where he’s accompanied by a girlfriend from 30 years ago. He’s shadowed by sometimes dangerous spies, encounters book sellers with double lives, and leaves a train wreck of tragedy behind him, all the while led on by his mysterious handler, whose identity isn’t revealed until the very end of the book.

As some of the people Cage encounters along the way meet unfortunate ends, he begins to question the trustworthiness of his father and the crafty and competent old flame Litzi Strauss. Cage’s world is turned upside down, and danger lurks at every turn.
Things, as they say, get complicated, and sometimes so murky, that you lose the thread of who’s who and who was who, while trying to keep up with the genre references at every turn. For Cage, this is a journey into his own past—he spent his youth living with his father at dad’s postings in Prague, Budapest, Vienna and Berlin, and unknowingly played a part in the delivery of clandestine messages.

Festerman displays an obvious affection and love not only for spy novels, but also the tradecraft and lore of spies in the cold war eras, and something else: old books. Cage spends a lot of time in old and rare bookshops talking with old and rare birds and collectors, some of whom have spent a lifetime doubling as and dabbling with spies.
If it’s flavor and atmosphere you want, you can’t get much better than Cage’s forays into the capitols of the old Austro-Hungarian empire—you can practically hear the zither music from “The Third Man” begin to swell and expect to meet a grandson of Harry Lime, the great, cynical, mysterious character played by Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s wonderful film about Brits, Americans, Russians and black marketers clashing in the ruins of Vienna.

If you want clarity of plot and heroic figures, “The Double Game” (it’s the fictional title of one of LeMaster’s novels), is a little short of these. One of the problems is that Cage is a decidedly un-heroic figure who is lucky just to survive his adventures. On top of that, he’s a bit of a whiner. On the other hand, the steady statesman that is Cage’s father (with a surprise secret to hide) and the swashbuckling Litzi, not to mention all the old spies and book collectors that populate then novel, are immensely satisfying creations.

Festerman has also provided a handy and downright pungent appendix of all the authors and novels he’s referenced in the book, by date and by author. He includes, of course, the fictional Edgar Lemaster and his works, but also the novels of the late J. Burke Wilkinson, a long-time Georgetown resident and state department official (“Night of the Short Knives” and “The Adventures of Geoffrey Mildmay”). That’s going the extra mile, which is something you should do for “The Double Game”, too.

My favorite spy writers in no particular order.
John LeCarre— “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Smiley’s People” are in many fans’ estimation the finest spy-counter spy novels ever written, complex, ornate, with George Smiley at the center, trying to find the mole in the British spy establishment. “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”, a shorter, earlier effort gets to the cold, unromantic heart of the cold war and its spies. He adapted well to modern times and settings like “The Constant Gardener”.

Aaron Latham—“Orchids for Mother”, a sharp, crisp thriller with an Angelton-type character at its center.

Eric Ambler—The first hugely popular writer of spy fiction, whose theater of operations included pre-war, wartime and post-war Europe in such books as “The Levanter” (his last), “Epitaph for a Spy” and “The Mask of Demetrios”.

William Buckley—For his charming Blackford Oakes series, a hero with panache, American style, with a conservative edge.

Len Deighton—For his spy series, “Berlin Game”, “Mexico Set” and “London Match”, and “The Ipcress File” cold as a silencer against your neck.

Ian Fleming—Without Fleming, there would be no Bond, and without Bond, well, we shudder to think.

Alan Furst—Still going strong, this writer created a series of books set just before the start of World War II and after, books so saturated with the atmosphere of places like Paris, Warsaw, Istanbul, that you wanted to light up a non post-coital cigarette. “The Spies of Warsaw”, “Night Soldiers” and many others.

Graham Greene—He put the literary in novels that had intrigue and the works of very human spies at their center like the haunting “The Quiet American”, “The Human Factor” and “The Confidential Agent.”

James Grady—For “Three Days of the Condor”, paranoia and conspiracy perfectly presented.

Robert Littell—For the grandiose and epic “The Company” and “The Defection of A.J. Lewinter”

Charles McCarry—“The Tears of Autumn”, a plausible plot centering around the Kennedy Assassination as well as “The Secret Lovers” and “The Last Supper”, the latter a novel on the theme of expediency.

In Washington, where the world’s largest intelligence agencies reside, there’s no shortage of fans and readers.

Gary Tischler • October 24, 2012

Before RGIII blots out the sports sun in Washington and maybe the world, let’s remember when baseball revealed itself to us, kissed us smack on the lips, and then like a feckless bride-to-be, left us standing at the altar, jilted for this time, the words “I do” already forming on our mouths, then stunned into silence.

Let us — before we succumb to our sporting lot in life, the yearly bout of Redskin mania, win-or-lose, and the startling charms of an astonishing rookie — one last time celebrate the coming of Natitude and appreciate the joys and sorrows of young Werth and the rest of the Nationals and the sunshine and sadness saga of the last five games of the astonishing 2012 season of baseball of the Washington Nationals.

The whole season exceeded all expectations by fans and the Nationals themselves, including the team’s first appearance in the post-season of any sort since the 1930s. The five-game series with the seasoned defending world champions St. Louis Cardinals further showed the dramatic rollercoaster ride baseball can provide for fans and players alike. As one baseball sage, oft-quoted, said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” He failed to mention that when it is over—perhaps when the fat lady sings on some other stage—the effect is stunning, like an unforgiving punch in the mouth from someone you love.

The billions and billions of dollars and high television ratings that professional football generates does not negate the fact that it is NOT America’s game, but it has successfully marketed itself as such. Sure, we all remember where we were and what we were doing when the Redskins won their first Super Bowl—drunk and disorderly outside of Nathan’s at Wisconsin and M, watching people spinning from lamp posts, jumping up and down the roofs of parked cars.

Except for Bertram Abramson and perhaps two or three more, none of us remember when the Washington Senators won the World Series in 1924, because most who saw it are–to put it impolitely–dead. But we do and can go to the records of the day, the Baseball Encyclopedias, the stories by the much beloved Shirley Povich. Baseball has its own literature—part poetry, part hard numbers—that are unmatched by any sport, except perhaps some still missing epic fragment describing the events of an Olympiad in ancient Greece. Baseball brings out the romantic in us, as well as the statistician and mathematician. We’re forever writing fall classic poetry and figuring out new combinations of numbers that will tell us with runners on third and first has started the most double plays by a short stop, or who has dropped the most throws to first base in the second inning of any game.

I think that both tendencies point to what we really think of baseball, that among all team sports, it can contain the closest thing to mystery—even now with staggering player salaries which tend to remove them further from us, and the steroid scandals, which make hash of the very numbers we find mystifying. Baseball is about winning and losing, to be sure, like any team sport, but it’s also about how we live life, daily breathing, rising and sleeping interrupted by spurts of drama.

Here is the essential differences between watching the Nationals and watching the Redskins. The action in a football game are a series of miniature explosions in which 22 men on the field, disguised in warrior-like outfits of helmets, bulky pads, gloves, shoes, sometimes painted against the sun, sometimes bristling with tattoos, rise up in unison, rush at each other with unnatural speed and power. The quarterback yells, the defenders yell at each other, the linemen take the stance, the gibberish of the count is hollered out, the ball is snapped, runners move or not, receivers run down the field, and defenders run after them, the linemen collide and a play unfolds—run up the middle, pitch to the outside, throw down the field, screen pass, or, as happened Sunday, the quarterback runs 76 yard down field in a matter of seconds and wins the game.

Baseball is a game of silence and stillness at its core. Each half inning begins the same way—players trot out to the field, the pitcher takes the mound, the catcher—the only one with major protective gear—squats. The outfielders and infielders wait, while the pitcher decides how to throw to the batter. Essentially, nobody is doing anything until the pitch. What ensues is a kind of dance in which most of the dancers don’t dance but react.

Baseball is the opposite of football—not in its lack of violence—but in its definition of teamwork and what a team is. On the field, every individual is naked in spite of their uniforms, every act of symmetry, speed, throwing, hitting and throwing and pitching is glaringly scrutinized, especially in the time of the jumbo tron, the big screen, not just on the field but on television. That’s why it all becomes at some point theater, drama and resolution, both modest and sudden.

The Nationals won two games in the series: one when a rookie managed a two-run single after all the star bats had gone silent; the other when the $100-million plus star Jayson Werth worked St. Louis pitcher Lance Lynn for 12 pitches—seven of them foul balls that were all potential outs—and hit a 96-miles-per-hour fast ball perfectly on the last pitch, winning the game, tying the series, saving the day. “Walk off, play on,” read the Washington Post headline. Jubilation, unreasonable but worthy, ensued, accompanied by its unnatural outcome, hope unquestioned.

The day for which the game was saved came the next day, and it illustrates an entirely different aspect of baseball. It will break your heart, make you breathless and sadden and sour your days and nights for a year. If Jayson Werth felt the joys of victory, Drew Storen, one of the Nationals’ most effective relief pitchers, felt the uncommon, crushing, tantalizing despair of defeat, along with thousands of Nats fans. He was, to put in terms of how it was described, a strike away from victory, from the last out, from moving on to the National League championship series.

“Closed for the season,” cried the headline. Storen had given up four runs, three hits, allowing the Cardinals to come back from what was once a 6-0 deficit to a 9-7 victory. There is no explaining such a thing. It’s like coming home from a wedding to find your house has burned down. Only minutes before all this happened, one local broadcaster had eagerly and confidently said “and when we win tonight.” Baseball invites things like that and never lets you forget them.

These things do pass: we in Washington have found a baseball team to cheer for not because we must but because they’re good, better than good. The loss doesn’t mean they’re suddenly a mediocre team, but a heartbroken team which failed at a critical moment, an inch ago, days before in the series. It will still be the same team next year, and so, we follow the most enduring cry of baseball: “Wait ‘Til Next Year.”

That’s part of baseball, too. It hinges equally on the most amount of success and the least amount of failure, because a .333 batting average is a success, which means you succeed in only a third of your at bats. It also matters when you succeed. The Nationals’ last game was a matter of when. Brutally, it wasn’t then.
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Gary Tischler •

That Woody Guthrie, he’s some big-time feller, even at a hundred.

Women loved him, and he stood up and spoke up and rambled across the country in the Dust Bowl and Depression days. He had the love of friends, whole generations of musicians, the good folks of this country, which has never abated, even though he passed away in 1967 at the age of 55 of Parkinson’s disease.

He sang about vigilantes and deportees, and people who got hit over the heads by riot police and scabs, and he sang the most innocent, playful songs written for his kids, and he rode the rails where the sun hit him all the time, and he sang about unions and he railed against fascists, homegrown or monstered overseas. He wrote the songs, and they spread into other hands and singers and musicians. This year, just about everybody who ever heard of him sang his songs, in his homegrown Oklahoma, in a place called Skid Row in Los Angeles, in New York and small towns, celebrating this year which was his 100th year, had he lived that long.

He’s alive as you or I. I can vouch for that because that was a mighty lively little hootenanny they threw Oct. 14 at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall called “This Land Is Your Land—The Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration” for which a couple of thousand people showed up and in the end wound up jumping up and down on demand and singing their feelings. They looked pretty much like each other. I suppose you could call them baby boomers for want of a better cliché. They dressed down, lots of blue jeans, lots of less—less hair, less glitter, less polish, less ties, less tony jewelry, less socks, but lots of memories, it seemed.

There was lots of music and musicians—and most of them were of a certain age, too, and some of them had heard Woody sing, or collected his songs. One had lived with him for a time, and another was his daughter. (His son Arlo Guthrie did not attend because that morning his wife Jackie died of cancer.)

They all had something in common: they played his music, it seems, a ton of times during their time of singing others’ songs; his songs were the first music some of them heard or, in John Mellencamp’s case, the first two songs he played on a guitar.

So, they all came together, marched on stage between tunings. They sang their songs and sang his words. They were as different as they could be, but they shared some things: banjos, guitars, drums, ukuleles, strings and fiddles along with a dusty glamor. They marched on by and by, singing and strumming, fiddling and whistling, and picking and wailing and clapping and tapping their cowboy boots, and often, fiddling around as in “less guitar, less vocals,” or the other way around for the techies backstage, who would come out like ninjas between musicians.

And it was grand. At turns, the proceedings resembled a tent meeting, an oft-described hootenanny, those folky get-togethers of the 1950s and 1960s and big-time concerts led by the likes of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, but those two weren’t here. Sometimes, it sounded like a union rally, which must have seemed heartening for the much beleaguered laborites of these times, the working stiffs, government and private. Every time “unions” were referenced in a Woody song, and that happened often, there were cheers from the audience, because unions rattled in Woody’s songs as much as ramblers and gamblers and trains and fascists and migrants and laborers. Politics, those of the Dust Bowl and Depression, the war(s) and big government and big business and such, simmered in the songs like hot pepper and a bitter taste, like the melancholy that made the love songs delirious.

Out they came, and there was the Old Crow Medicine Show, singing Woody’s greeting song “How Do You Do,” inviting, pickled with banjo and accordions and it went from there. Actor Jeff Daniels popped out periodically to read from Guthrie’s writings, songs and letters.

Folks like Jimmy LaVave and Joel Rafel, both acknowledged Guthrie experts and followers and singers, sang things like “Reckless Hobo” and “Hard Traveling,” the music of the folks Guthrie had eulogized, celebrated and bled for, being one of them to his holy shoes full of holes. More and more instruments came, the guys with the harmonica hooked to the guitar, the accordions and their endless rolling sounds and the wonder of the c-note, the ukulele.

D.C.’s Sweet Honey in the Rock appeared in Dashiki chic, singing “I’ve Got to Know,” and Donovan, the sunshine-through-my-window man, rock star, poet and artist by way of Scotland in the 1960s sang a children’s song that Guthrie had written and said that Ramblin’ Jack Elliott had introduced him to Guthrie’s music. People just sort of admired the hell out of each other, outdoing their love for Woody by way of music.

Judy Collins, one of the folk queens of the 1960s along with Baez and Joni Mitchell, came out like a startling, still beautiful witchy woman, dressed in shiny black jacket, black boots and slacks and hair as white as a page of paper, but wilder. Yet other sang Woody’s ode to Pretty Boy Floyd, where he was a kind of Robin Hood, and the main crooks were the bankers, as in “some people rob you with a gun, some people rob you with a fountain pen.” Ani DeFranco, folkie supreme, sang “Deportee,” which sounds as modern as gunfire on the Arizona border, saying, “This here is a shoutout to Mitt. This song’s for you, Mitt.”

Out came Coot Ryder, who long ago provided the evocative banjo-guitar ripping and running soundtrack to “The Long Riders,” the best of all Jesse James movies, and he sang the powerful “Vigilante” and played powerfully, too. There was the remarkable Lucinda Williams, one of the most wayward, in-your-honest-face female singers today. She sang an uncompleted song about “a woman who folks here at the Kennedy Center might not want to hear about a prostitute who wants to teach a man some things his wife never done,” and she sang it with verve and in a style and eye-and-ear popping fashion all hers.

John Mellencamp—our modern troubadour of the men who work in mills and farms and such—sang, and so did Jackson Browne, who sang for about 15 minutes or so with back ups a delirious love songs that came out of a letter Woody had written to his first wife, about falling in love and first meetings and impressions. It went on and on like the kind of dance you never want to finish.

Finally, Ramblin’ Jack himself came out—thin, all of 81, with a voice as wrenching as ever, cowboy hat, boots, bandana and red shirt. He sat down and said, “I heard of this guy named Ramblin’ Jack, and I think he died.” Not yet: Elliott sang a powerful rendition of “1913 Massacre,” marking him as the grand old man of musical story-telling.

We and they, all together—you could have too—sang together “Bound for Glory” and, of course, “This Land Is Your Land,” led by the powerful-voiced Bob Morello of Rage Against the Machine. He got people to jump up and down like kids who cared about it all.

Later in the dark of the night, you dreamed you heard the sound of a train whistle, the wheels chugging like a woman beating sheets on a wash line.

Gary Tischler • October 22, 2012

In the days after Mitt Romney ran over a seemingly passive, even docile President Barack Obama in the first debate between the two candidates not to mention moderator Jim Lehrer the GOP candidate seemed to bask in the after-glow and poll gains of his victory. Publicly, on the stump, and in his ads, he allowed that he enjoyed himself in the first debate.

In the second debate Wednesday, Romney was still enjoying himself at the outset brisk walk, big smile, happy to hear from the young man worried about finding a job after college, chatting him up per his plan to look more accessible, down-to-earth and personable.

But here’s a fair bet: I’d bet that Romney won’t be talking about this town-hall format debate moderated by CNN correspondent Candy Crowley in terms of how much he enjoyed it any time between now and the next debate of the century, which comes smartly on Monday. It might be that Romney expected the meek and mild version of Barack Obama to show up again. He didn’t. Obama came ready to spar and fight, a little too much so early on, then later, much more in a more measured, self-assured, but still combative way.

Romney once again tried to ramrod his way into taking up more than his share of time by not answering questions and repeating his oft-told tale of the failures of the Obama presidency and touting his five-point jobs plan. Somehow, that didn’t work so well, as could be seen from his early big, and smug smile, turning into a slight smirk, and then, in the end disappearing altogether, his face becoming tense and drawn. He remained, it should be said, aggressive throughout and challenged the president often, especially on his claims on energy issues.

The difference was that the president was no longer staring at his shoes with every Romney assertion. He fought back from the get-go. This debate while getting into new territory and new issues not covered in the previous two debates was not especially substantive, but was special because it revealed the differences between the two candidates as stark in terms of issues as in temperament and personality.

Obama was no Biden, neither Romney nor Clinton, but he stood strong and made it clear that he was passionately fighting for re-election and that this was a battle between two different philosophies of governance. More than that, in this debate, Obama had size, he had passion and he had the gravitas a president should have.

While his supporters claimed that he looked “presidential,” Romney at times had the face of a bully denied a walk in the park. He sounded and looked tense, frustrated and peevish, going so far as to argue with Crowley at one point. He stopped trying to engage the questioners, an interesting lot of 50 individuals who were supposed to be as yet undecided.

One of them brought up the potentially hazardous for the president issue of what happened in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. Romney blasted Obama for going to Las Vegas for a fund-raiser the day after the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens. Obama blasted Romney for making critical statements before the facts were known then took umbrage at the idea that his administration had politicized the events. Obama said that he had on the following day called it “an act of terror.” Romney jumped and all but called him a liar, while Obama repeatedly said, “Check the transcript.” Crowley then corrected Romney and said that the president had indeed used the phrase, “an act of terror,” but that the administration had not responded for two weeks in that manner.

The exchanges left Romney frustrated and not a little embarrassed. Because the exchanges on this point were somewhat pivotal, they’re still being argued about in the media and by Romney reps who said Crowley was essentially biased in what she did.

Not so biased were the new forces in the land on the Internet, the Facebook commentators, the twitterers and texters who latched on to such less earthshaking matters as “binders full of women,” a phrase used by Romney to explain how he had tried to make sure there were more women in his cabinet when he was the Governor of Massachusetts. It was while answering a question on equal pay for women in the workforce that Romney brought up his use of flex time to help female workers, a subject he had never broached through the entire campaign.

Romney repeated his five-point plan to create 12 million jobs ad infinitum. Obama shot back with “He doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan.” What also seemed obvious was Romney’s charting his way toward the moderate middle as best as he could, saying that he would not cut taxes on the wealthy (although continuing or making permanent the Bush tax cuts would do exactly that) and that he wanted to create a path to citizenship for some of the illegal immigrants, although he could not back out of the haunting phrase “self deportation,” which he tried to paint as something benign and innocuous.

What was apparent was that these two men did not like each other even a little. This debate often resembled a bullfight between two bulls they pointed at each, they argued loudly, they tried to steal time, they got into each other’s space, if not face, stopping only at stomping their feet on the floor. For Romney, the aggressive pushing for time was nothing new. For Obama, it was a turnabout he seemed to come out of a deep coma-like sleep and he came out energized which was exactly what he needed to do. He may have stopped the bleeding in the polls, and he may even have started some on the other side. Conservative pundit Gary Wills called it a strategic win for Obama and declared the debate the best presidential debate ever.

Asked as a closer in what way they were misrepresented or misunderstood, Romney brought up the point that he’s been painted as not caring for regular folks, for the common man, the working families. “I care passionately about 100 percent of the American people,” he asserted.

Obama said he was seen as a man who thinks that government can solve all the problems and said the he was not. And then, after Romney’s “100 percent claim,” Obama played the card he’d had all night. He brought the number down to the “47 percent,” which Romney had so easily dismissed in a speech made early in the campaign before a closed-door audience of supporters.

Catch your breath, folks, pollsters and spinners. The third debate comes up Monday, Oct. 22, a debate which many commentators had not considered to be an urgent matter, but has now suddenly became very urgent. It is here we go again the debate that could decide the election. It will concern itself with foreign affairs, which is to say you can expect to hear Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. It will no doubt be great television, and it appears now that this election was really about four debates. All the money spent by both sides on disheartening negative ads, Romney’s primary campaign and the two conventions were essentially meaningless exercises—on the road to four of the highest-rated reality shows ever staged. I guess the first three were the playoffs, and Monday is the Super Bowl. But will the fat lady sing?

Gary Tischler • October 16, 2012

Four of seven candidates for the two open At-large City Council seats showed up for an Oct. 4 debate at St. John’s Church, sponsored by Georgetown Business and Professional Association. Two of them were faces so familiar that it seemed like déjà vu all over again. Two were brand new faces, more or less, on the political scene. One of them was a Republican, the other was a self-styled, newly minted independent.

It was an afternoon with At-large Councilmembers Michael A. Brown and Vincent Orange and challengers Mary Brooks Beatty and David Grosso.

The two incumbents—Brown and Orange—share a long history of familiarity in the District and have often run for office, not always successfully. Brown, son of the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, has instant name recognition and a big personality. “I haven’t been around that long,” he said to us when we caught up with him at the forum. “It just seems that way.” In fact, Brown ran for Mayor in 2008 but dropped out near the end of the campaign and threw his support to Council Chairman Linda Cropp, who lost to Adrian Fenty. Brown also ran for the Ward 4 seat, vacated by Fenty, but in a candidate-heavy field he lost to the Fenty-supported Muriel Bowser, who is up for re-election this year. Four years ago, Brown, a live-long Democrat if there ever was one, ran for the At-large Council spot, once held by Republican Carol Schwartz, perhaps one of the last of the generally moderate-liberal GOP politicians around. Schwartz, who had lost her primary to Patrick Mara, ran as a write-in but both she and Mara lost to the newly-minted independent Brown. District law requires that at least two of the at-large seats be held by non-Democrats.

Orange also seems to have been around longer than he actually has in terms of his political presence. He first ran unsuccessfully for a Ward 5 seat, then won two terms in the seat most recently vacated by Harry Thomas Jr. Orange ran for mayor the same year that Brown did, but also lost in the Fenty sweep. He then ran in a pitched battle against Kwame Brown for the council chairmanship in 2010 but lost despite an endorsement by the Washington Post. Orange then ran for Kwame Brown’s old at-large seat which had opened with his move to Council Chair and won in a close race over Sekou Biddle and Republican Patrick Mara. (Kwame Brown resigned from the District Council this year.)

The new faces are Mary Brooks Beatty, the personable and veteran advisory neighborhood commissioner from Capitol Hill, who was a past president of Women in Government and helped spark the H Street Corridor revival, and David Grosso, the 41-year-old who has been a staffer for former Ward 6 City Council member Sharon Ambrose and counsel for Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, working on the D.C. statehood issue.

Both Beatty and Gross seem more optimistic than most newcomers in a year when the D.C. government and mayor are not being held in high regard: the council chairman has been forced to resign, another councilman is in prison and the mayor’s 2010 campaign remains under a cloud of suspicion and investigation. Incumbents like Brown and Orange—both of whom have had issues on campaign fundraising—are vulnerable to attack and voter backlash. Brown recently reported that a large amount of his campaign funds had been stolen by a trusted aide, and it was reported that Orange had received campaign contributions from a developer who came under investigation for his part in the mayor’s campaign finances.

At the forum, Orange said flatly that he was in favor of term limits, a popular idea given that the District Council is heavy in long-serving members. “Of course,” he said, “you could serve two terms on the council, maybe move on to at large seat, go on to the chairmanship, and who knows maybe run for mayor.”

Brown was attacked by Grosso for his financial affairs, which he dismissed. “Look, in politics, you have people whom you trust and when they break your trust, it happens. People will steal. That’s a fact, and that’s what happened, nothing else.”