Solo Piano Man Jim Newsom talks with George Winston, one of the original creators of the Windham Hill sound.

Water World Following your instincts, then taking pleasure in serendipities.

Child's Play Tom Robotham reviews a recent performance of Pilobolus, the “arts organism” that has been delighting audiences for nearly two decades.

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Transcendent Vision By Tom Robotham Justin Kauflin's debut CD is a testament to his remarkable artistry, wisdom and faith

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June 09, 2010 (9:00 AM)
COMEDY NIGHT AT CHESTER’S UPPER DECK IN VIRGINIA BEACH
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3RD ANNUAL BOOKS IN THE PARK IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BARNES AND NOBLE AT TIDEWATER COMMUNITY COLLEGE
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TReehouse Magazine

The Best and Brightest

By Tom Robotham

Reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. – Paraphrase of a comment attributed to Mark Twain

This morning after I got up and grabbed my walker, I hobbled into my home office and turned on my computer. I don’t really understand these new fangled devices, but with the help of some young friends I’ve managed to master the basics.

You see I am quite old. Last month, I turned 54. I thought about staying home and celebrating my birthday with a glass of lukewarm prune juice, but instead I decided to go to the Taphouse in Ghent. I’m especially fond of that particular tavern because in addition to young people I run into some old fogies like me. Some are over 60! We know that our time is running out, and we figure we might as well enjoy a few beers from time to time while we can; before you know it, after all, we’ll have to resign ourselves to drinking Ensure through straws.

I was reminded of this harsh truth just the other day by an article on AltDaily.com, under the headline, “Youth in Revolt: How the Norfologists Will Inherit the City.”

“It’s an ugly truth,” co-editor Hannah Serrano began, “(although to some, perhaps heartening): the people in power in today’s Norfolk are eventually going to retire and then die.”

Interlopers in Afghanistan

American and British Interlopers in Afghanistan

by RICK SKWIOT on JULY 29, 2010 · 0 COMMENTS

in AFGHANISTAN,BOOKS,LITERARY COMMENTARY,RICK SKWIOT,GEOPOLITICS

The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan, by Ben Macintyre

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby

Western forays into tribal Afghanistan go back some two centuries and seldom have produced good results. But they have resulted in some good books, both fascinating and funny.

Josiah Harlan’s improbable life’s journey—from Pennsylvania Quaker to Afghani military leader and prince to American Civil War colonel—makes for compelling reading as crafted by Ben Macintyre in The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan. Harlan was likely the model for Daniel Dravot and in Rudyard Kipling’s short story of the same name, which was made into a marvelous film by John Huston in 1975, with Sean Connery as Dravot and Michael Caine as his sidekick Peachy Carnehan.

But it also serves as an indictment of British colonialism and a cautionary tale for Western nations trying to deal with Afghanistan and its tribal currents. However, Harlan’s story is so fantastic it would never have worked as novel—not believable. Kipling’s short story ”The Man Who Would Be King” seems more of a tall tale than realistic fiction.

A merchant seaman jilted by his fiancé in 1822, he vows never to return to the United States. Harlan jumps ship in Calcutta and passes himself off as a doctor to British rulers there. Over the next decades he ingratiates himself with Indian and Afghani royalty, leads armies, invades distant lands, becomes fluent in various local dialects, is thoroughly seduced by Afghan culture, and ultimately reigns as a prince of an Afghan land in the Hindu Kush. Along the way he studies the flora and fauna with scholarly interest and thoroughly enjoys himself despite brushes with death, disease and duplicitous potentates.

The book as constituted was made possible by Macintyre’s 2001 discovery, in a tiny museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania, of Harlan’s missing handwritten autobiography, unread since his death in San Francisco in 1871. The result is a great, page-turning adventure by a renowned British journalist. (I’ve reviewed two other Macintyre books here recently, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat.)

Another improbable—though hilarious—foray into Afghanistan, this time by two Brits, came in 1956, as chronicled by amateur traveler Eric Newby in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

After a bad day at the office, the then 36-year-old London fashion salesman decides to quit his job, kiss goodbye his wife and children, and mount an ill-conceived exploration of mountainous Afghani hinterlands with an eccentric foreign service friend luxuriating in Rio.

After two days of mountain-climbing school in Wales, they drive off toward Kabul. Within weeks they find themselves scaling 19,000-foot mountains, inching up near perpendicular rock with the aid of an instruction manual.

Along the way they are accused of vehicular homicide and beset by dysentery. They endure thirst, hunger and near death on icy precipices. They insult the natives and each other.

The subsequent account of these travels and travails, now in print for some fifty years, has influenced countless other bumbling travel writers. You can hear its echoes clearly—in concept, structure and humor—in Bill Bryson’s recent bestseller, A Walk in the Woods.

As rude as many an ugly American abroad, Newby and companion Hugh Carless angrily berate a Mullah who has just immersed their camera and packaged food in a river, and tell mocking Pathans to “____ off!” Carless cuffs a Tajik boy for purposefully leading them astray, only later to discover him the son of their chieftain host. They argue continuously with their balking Afghani packmen and between themselves.

Somehow they blunder on toward their whimsical destination, Nuristan, where no Englishman has set foot for 60 years. Facing for the first time sheer, ice-covered rock in a looming mountain, the blasé Carless remarks:

“It’s nothing but a rock climb, really.”

“I can see that.”

“Just a question of technique.”

A commodity of which they seemingly possess little.

Carless, who speaks fluent Persian, chafes Newby for his slow uptake with the language. Secretly studying a dubious language guide, Newby memorizes “basic” phrases, such as “I saw a corpse in the field.” Sadly, this phrase has occasion for use, when they discover a young traveler on the road “who has lost everything,” his skull bashed in with a rock.

Danger lurks everywhere for these unarmed and blithely confident Brits: not only crevasses and precipices but also thieves, bears, disease. Both Newby and Carless suffer from dysentery most of their hike and often go thirsty rather than drink from cool, inviting streams. Particularly after discovering the source of their contamination:

“‘You know those little huts they build over the streams,’ I said. There was one outside our house, built over the stream from which the drinking water was fetched. It was a pretty little hut; Hugh had particularly admired it. He called it a gazebo.

“‘What about them?’

“‘I’ve found out what they’re for. No wonder we’re getting worse.’”

To spin his seductive and tickling narrative, Newby employs understatement, self-effacement, savage wit, honed irony, and unrelenting honesty. The result is a web of foible, reluctant courage, stupidity, and curiosity—i.e., a human story, into which we are drawn by his endearingly flawed humanity.

At the center, however, always lies Newby’s curiosity. It impels him on his trip and keeps him trudging on despite bad food, bad water, bad weather, sleepless nights, blisters, scrapes, and threats to his life. He gives precise, detailed descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna—including the human animal: the Tajiks, Pathans, Kafirs, Rajputs, and others he encounters along the way. As when, at night, he enters a desolate Afghani town:

“A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted.”

But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is by no means a trifle, all laughs and landscape. Newby also recounts Afghan history, now made even more pertinent by the war there. Such as the 1895 forced conversion of tribal pantheists to Islam—this done with the swords of Abdur Rahman’s armies. Further, if one wanted to get an intimate picture of tribal life in Afghanistan before the onslaught of war three decades ago, this would be an excellent place to start.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush launched Newby on a career as one of Britain’s best and best-read travel writers.

By Rick Skwiot

Western forays into tribal Afghanistan go back some two centuries and seldom have produced good results. But they have resulted in some good books, both fascinating and funny.

Josiah Harlan’s improbable life’s journey—from Pennsylvania Quaker to Afghani military leader and prince to American Civil War colonel—makes for compelling reading as crafted by Ben Macintyre in The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan. Harlan was likely the model for Daniel Dravot and in Rudyard Kipling’s short story of the same name, which was made into a marvelous film by John Huston in 1975, with Sean Connery as Dravot and Michael Caine as his sidekick Peachy Carnehan.

But it also serves as an indictment of British colonialism and a cautionary tale for Western nations trying to deal with Afghanistan and its tribal currents. However, Harlan’s story is so fantastic it would never have worked as novel—not believable. Kipling’s short story ”The Man Who Would Be King” seems more of a tall tale than realistic fiction.

Unpatriotic Patriotism

By Tom Robotham

ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, many Americans wore their patriotism on their sleeves—literally. They also wore it on their chests, backs, heads and even butts, as they sported clothing with American-flag designs.

This sort of thing has been popular for a couple of decades—and the irony of it never ceases to amaze me. I’m old enough to remember a time when wearing the image of an American flag, or some portion of it, was regarded as profoundly disrespectful and unpatriotic. Indeed, hippies and yippies wore such clothing for that very purpose—to show their disdain for the American establishment. Conservatives railed against them. More power to both sides of the cultural divide during that era. At least they knew where they stood and what they were doing.

Today, many people have no idea what they’re doing. They embrace vague notions of patriotism with the mindlessness of the docile masses in 1984; they place plastic flags—made in China—on people’s lawns without their permission. They fly plastic flags or paste flag decals on their cars, thereby cheapening the symbol. And they display actual flags in a manner that is blatantly in violation of the flag code, leaving the banners out for days at a time (you’re supposed to take it in every night) and letting them grow tattered in the wind, sun and rain (you’re supposed to burn worn out flags).

Will Busking Take Off in Norfolk?

I concluded that Florida’s assessment was accurate. Among other things, I pointed to the lack of street musicians—or “buskers,” as they’re sometimes called. In most large and mid-sized cities, buskers are pervasive. In New York, they’re as common as hotdog vendors. In Norfolk, by contrast, they’re as rare as…well…hotdog vendors. (One city official told me recently that allowing more food vendors on the street would be a terrible idea because they would compete with area restaurants that pay property taxes.)

Street musicians, I argued, are like “canaries in a coal mine.” If there’s a thriving street-performance culture, it’s probably a pretty good indication that the environment is conducive to all kinds of creativity activity. In any event, street musicians make daily life more interesting.

Jesse Scaccia and Hannah Serrano—who publish Altdaily.com—have embraced this notion. In fact, they’ve gone a step further: They’re actively encouraging busking in Norfolk. Tonight (July 1), from 7 to 10, they’re hosting a celebration of street performance in association with the closing of Art Everywhere—an initiative that allowed artists to display works in empty storefronts throughout downtown.

Meanwhile, Scaccia and Serrano are also trying to get the city to clarify its laws.

Currently, the relevant code doesn’t specifically mention street performers. It refers simply to “expressive activity…protected by the First Amendment, including but not limited to leafleting.”

It’s important to note that the language about leafleting was added only about a decade ago after an anti-war protestor was told he couldn’t hand out fliers in downtown Norfolk. The American Civil Liberties Union had to remind city officials that James Madison would have had a problem with this. Officials relented and rewrote the code. But as Joe Jackson reported in Port Folio Weekly at the time, the city had had an abysmal record on civil liberties for decades. The most notorious example was a move by the city in 1981 to prohibit the Naro Expanded Cinema from showing an award-winning film dealing with gay culture. The city attorney and vice squad went so far as to confiscate the copy of the film. When they refused to return it to the distributor, the ACLU stepped in and forced them to do so.

Today, city officials are a lot more tolerant of all kinds of expressive activity, from the screening of provocative art films to singing and playing on the street. A few years ago, in fact, I asked Mayor Paul Fraim if there were any laws on the books prohibiting busking. “I don’t know of any,” he told me, “and if there were, I’d probably want to change them.”

Subsequently, however, I saw two cops harassing a kid with a guitar on Granby Street.

The problem lies in the interpretation of the word “soliciting,” which is against the law. Busking, after all, does not just involve playing music for its own sake. It’s a way for musicians to make money. They open their guitar cases or put out donation jars and hope that passersby will toss in a few coins or an occasional bill.

Is this soliciting?

Scaccia says no. On a flier promoting the July 1 street-performance event, he states that “accepting tips is not the same as asking for them.”

I certainly agree. But those aforementioned cops seemed to have a different interpretation.

Scaccia also argues that “buskers are not loiterers,” since the law defines loiterers as people who “warrant justifiable and reasonable alarm….”

But again, this wording is too vague. If a street musician is wearing tattered clothes and therefore appears to be homeless—or is playing, for example, David Bromberg’s “Cocaine Blues,” which includes the line, “I’m simply wild about my good cocaine”—is that cause for alarm? Certainly some people would find such a musician offensive.

In an effort to encourage busking on the streets of Norfolk, Scaccia is pushing for clarification of the city code, with a line stating that “street performing is permissible as long as all other requirements under the city code are not being violated, including but not limited to profanity, sound…levels and crowd size.”

I would argue for additional clarification stating that acceptance of tips is permissible, as long as no one is approaching passersby and asking for money. I would also argue that the limitation on profanity is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. Who’s to say, after all, what constitutes profanity? In 1999, I was told by an executive at Pilot Media Companies that profanity was prohibited in all of its publications, including Port Folio Weekly. Among the words that were banned was “dork,” since it means “penis” in Yiddish. (I kid you not.)

The point is, speech should be protected without qualification, so long as the speaker is not getting in someone’s face in a physically threatening manner.

That said, I applaud Saccia and Serrano for pushing this initiative.

The question remains, will it bring buskers out of the woodwork on a regular basis?

I hope so. But I’m skeptical, for a variety of reasons. First, buskers have little incentive to play on the streets of Norfolk because there is very little pedestrian traffic. Go downtown at 5 p.m. on any weekday, and you’ll see what I mean. Unless there’s some special event going on, you’ll often see only a handful of people. And that’s understandable. There are any retail outlets downtown, outside the mall, which keeps people off the streets. People who go downtown tend to park and walk into restaurants. They don’t stroll because there’s nothing to see. I suppose this creates a kind Catch-22. People don’t walk the streets because there’s no street culture—and there’s no street culture because people don’t walk the streets.

Beyond this, however, is another problem. Norfolk’s leaders want a vibrant downtown, but they’re afraid to let it happen spontaneously. They want to control it, fearing that if they don’t the city might revive the bawdy reputation it had back in the 1940s and ‘50s. This creates a stifling environment.

In short, the vitality of street culture in this town won’t change until that attitude changes. Authorized events, held in cooperation with the Downtown Norfolk Council, the Downtown Civic League or other official bodies are all well and good. But the bottom line is that if city leaders want a vibrant downtown, they need to get out of the way and let people do their thing.

By Tom Robotham

In 2002, shortly after author Richard Florida suggested that greater Norfolk is the sort of the city that doesn’t hold much appeal for the “creative class,” I published a story in Port Folio Weekly examining this claim more closely.

I concluded that Florida’s assessment was accurate. Among other things, I pointed to the lack of street musicians—or “buskers,” as they’re sometimes called. In most large and mid-sized cities, buskers are pervasive. In New York, they’re as common as hotdog vendors. In Norfolk, by contrast, they’re as rare as…well…hotdog vendors. (One city official told me recently that allowing more food vendors on the street would be a terrible idea because they would compete with area restaurants that pay property taxes.)

Street musicians, I argued, are like “canaries in a coal mine.” If there’s a thriving street-performance culture, it’s probably a pretty good indication that the environment is conducive to all kinds of creativity activity. In any event, street musicians make daily life more interesting.

The United States of Money

By Tom Robotham

ON JUNE 23, the Naro Expanded Cinema hosted a one-night screening of a new documentary called Casino Jack and the United States of Money. At the invitation of Naro co-owner Tench Phillips, I introduced the film and hosted a discussion afterwards.

To my mind, Casino Jack is one of the most important documentaries to come along in years. The central figure in the story is Jack Abramoff, the notorious Washington lobbyist who was sent to federal prison after being convicted of fraud and bribery. But make no mistake: This is not simply the story of one con man. It’s the story of the rise of the radical right and the story of a system of government that’s rotten to the core and stinking of hypocrisy.

What makes Abramoff stand out is that he was unusually gifted in his ability to take advantage of this system with a combination of subtle manipulation and unbelievable hubris. In many other respects, however, he shared the qualities of other leading figures on of the radical right. (I refuse to use the term “conservative,” because these people are not conservative in any way shape or form.) Like his friends—former Congressman Tom DeLay, Christian-Coalition wunderkind Ralph Reed, and rabid anti-government crusader Grover Norquist, among others—he was driven by both reactionary idealism and utter cynicism.