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October 28, 2005
Back to the future
The editor’s mail pile, which is mostly but not entirely electronic these days, includes many letters lamenting the ham-handed firing of Ruth Smith and other employees at New Hampshire Audubon. It is clear that Audubon has made a mistake – one that will cost it both moral and financial support from the community and from its wider constituency.
I’m surprised, however, that not one letter writer has suggested that Audubon’s board of directors step in and reverse this decision. In other words: Hire Smith back and get rid of the president who canned her.
To support this proposition, here’s a gross generalization gleaned not from any close knowledge of the situation but from the passion with which people familiar with Audubon have defended Smith: Presidents are a dime a dozen; Smith is one of a kind.
x x x
Three good reasons to read the Sunday Monitor this week:
Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson is about to leave for England, his church’s homeland, where he will try to calm troubled waters. But Robinson isn’t just the church’s first gay bishop. He’s also New Hampshire’s bishop. Monitor reporter Annmarie Timmins and photographer Javier Manzano will give readers a close look at Robinson on the job here at home.
How did the tourism industry weather a most inglorious leaf season? Monitor business reporter Lisa Arsenault has the answer.
It’s another big Saturday of sports. The UNH football team plays a big Atlantic-10 game at U-Mass. Concord High hosts Nashua North at 2 p.m. at Memorial Field, and Merrimack Valley plays at Route 3 rival Pembroke. John Stark and unbeaten Franklin also have games. Plus, the Pittsfield boys go for a state soccer title while the Pittsfield girls try to play their way into the title game. Our sports staff will give readers full reports on these events and more.
Posted by Mike Pride at 11:30 AM | Comments (1)
October 25, 2005
Art from the American Century
The current exhibit at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester features four American artists and Alfred Stieglitz, the man who nurtured them. I love art, but I’m a word person, and sometimes even when the pictures excite me, I take away text from an exhibit as much as I take away images. I wrote down some of the words I took from this one, and I want to share them with you, but first a few words about the art.
The four artists are John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, who were born between 1870 and 1887. Except for O’Keeffe, who was Stieglitz’s wife, they are not household names.
I’ve looked for Marin’s pictures in museums and galleries for more than 30 years. I was first drawn to them by Henry Miller’s account of a visit with the artist in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Marin is known as a watercolorist. Until Sunday, I had never seen his White Mountain landscapes or his later, larger oils of the busy Manhattan streets beneath buildings that bend like weeds. Nor had I known he was ambidextrous, which led me to see him as Edward Scissorhands waving his arms before his canvas with a brush in each hand. The three people with me, two of whom paint, looked closely at the canvases trying to discern which strokes Marin had painted with his righthand brush, which with his left.
Marsden Hartley’s Maine paintings are dense and wonderful. They literally take you into the woods or to the edge of the ocean. The O’Keeffes here show her range. There is a barn with straight true lines, a striking vista of a V separating two white cliffs and several vintage O’Keeffe works with their sensual shapes. The surprise of the show for me, and for my wife the star, was Arthur Dove. We spent an hour and half at the Currier, and I’ll bet she stood for half of it staring at his canvases. For the most part these are colorful abstractions, closer to the O’Keeffe than the Hartley, although it would be a mistake to see the painters in this group as a school. They might share the goal of favoring form and color to convey feeling, but the Stieglitz Circle was nothing like the Hudson River School, for example, in the sharing of technique and subject.
Seeing these artists reminded me that we are already moving some distance beyond the 20th century – the American century. It made me think about the vast number of artists, particularly in mid-century, who created American art. And it made me see the willed aspect of this burst of creativity. Or at least it was willed on the part of Alfred Stieglitz.
Stieglitz sold the pictures in this exhibit to a collector named Duncan Phillips, with whom he carried on a correspondence for many years. I don’t know that Stieglitz was 100 percent genuine in his letters to Phillips – I mean, as much as Stieglitz disparaged commercialism, he was writing to a good customer. But I chose to take him at his word, especially since the two quotations I’ll share from letters on display in Manchester were written 17 years apart. One refers to art, the other to the country itself – not just its art but also its moral place in the world.
From 1926: “You see, I have a passion for America and I feel, and have always felt, that if I could not believe in the workers in this country, not in the imitator of what is European, but in the originator, in the American himself digging from within, pictures for me would have no significance.”
And from 1943, with the country at war: “My fight becomes more and more for America, but not in the narrow sense but in the world sense. If we don’t lead the world I am afraid we are in for centuries of darkness, and don’t think for one moment I am speaking of America in terms of nationalism.”
Posted by Mike Pride at 07:55 AM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2005
We have a winner
A confession: I used to gamble. I cleaned up in a poker game in Army basic training once, taking a month’s pay from several pals. I felt terrible about it. Later, I cut the cards with a soldier buddy in Germany for a trip to the Oktoberfest, including airline tickets and hotel. I lost. I felt terrible about it.
I don’t play the lottery. This is not a matter of principle, even though I don’t think the state should raise money on behavior that can be addictive and destructive. It’s more that I’m a penny pincher. Plus, as the saying goes, the lottery is a game for people who failed math. At least when I cut the three of clubs and lost the trip to Munich, I had started with a 50-50 chance.
Now Sen. Judd Gregg, who’s good at math, and lucky in general, has won the lottery – half a mil after taxes. He is notoriously unresponsive to the media and spends little time with constituents, but after his lottery win, he suddenly loved microphones with the passion of Jesse Jackson.
I understand what New Hampshire voters like about Gregg, but there’s another side, too. He’s smart, honest, flinty and consistent, but he’s also stand-offish. His politics is artful. He talks like a fiscal hawk but walks like something else, playing for pork with the best of them and carrying water for a president whose attitude toward deficits keeps real conservatives awake at night.
Gregg has always been lucky. He was born rich. He is well educated. He avoided the draft. When he wanted to step up politically, opportunities opened up. When he was most vulnerable, his opponents faltered.
And now he’s won the lottery – not the big prize, but big enough. I think I know how his constituents reacted to this news. It gave a sinking feeling even to many people who have voted for Gregg every election in his 30 years in public life. I mean, if you made a list of people you’d like to see win the lottery, where would Judd Gregg’s name be on it?
No, the lottery is for the mother frightened about whether she’s going to be able to pay for oil this winter. It’s for the retired cop who umpires the Little League games. It’s for the teacher whose kid just got into Yale.
It’s a free country, but what’s a guy who won the lottery at birth doing taking money out of the pocket of someone whose life would be transformed by it? What’s a millionaire politician doing playing Powerball?
Posted by Mike Pride at 04:11 PM | Comments (3)
October 14, 2005
Pollyanna?
Although it is a plaint we often hear from readers, it is bad form for the editor to say at a news meeting: “Hey, how about putting some good news in the paper?” But I did say that one day this week as we were critiquing the previous day’s A-section content.
We try to give people a balance of news, reflecting what’s going right in the world and in our community as well as what’s going wrong. And our editors work hard to find world and national stories that will brighten a reader’s day.
But the news lately has been relentlessly grim. It’s not just the aftermath of Katrina or the endless sequence of death and chaos in Iraq. It’s 20,000 to 40,000 dead in an earthquake in Pakistan. It’s Guatemalan officials, after Hurricane Rick, abandoning buried communities and declaring them graveyards. It’s rising fear of an avian flu pandemic. And, in our own back yard, it’s a downpour that destroyed lives and property.
This last story hit close to home. On its much smaller scale, it was more shocking than Katrina. New Orleans is below sea level, its vulnerability to hurricanes a mystery to no one. But anyone who has driven the back roads of southwestern New Hampshire knows how permanent the dwellings and the landscape there seem. Or seemed. The roadside streams do rush and foam in April, but by mid-summer they have dropped off into a long, still nap. That they might run wild, sweeping away houses, crumbling roads and taking lives, was unthinkable until Sunday.
The floodwaters in New Hampshire compounded the idea that nature was somehow mocking human efforts to bring order to the world. A war gone amok, gas prices soaring, taxes sure to rise, bigger deficits looming, higher inflation a certainty, a run of natural disasters – I guess it is no wonder the news in the front section of the paper this past week seemed especially depressing.
It’s the Monitor’s job to cover these events and developments fully, but our readers’ lives are not all gloom and doom. Far from it. That’s why I don’t think asking our editors to make room for stories on the lighter side makes me a Pollyanna. Even in hard times – maybe especially in hard times – newspapers should show readers the big picture and provide them with some relief.
Posted by Mike Pride at 04:12 PM | Comments (4)
October 12, 2005
What's news?
One challenge of the news business is deciding what is news. Journalists learn to use their brains and all their senses to answer this question.
My eyes tell me there is brown grunge on the maple leaves on trees near the roads in my neighborhood. My guess is road salt could have something to do with this, but I’m hoping a Monitor reporter will look into it. Maybe it will be a story (if it is widespread and new), maybe not.
Anyone’s eyes can see that autumn isn’t up to snuff this year. That realization led to the centerpiece story and photos on tomorrow’s front page.
Our noses tell us how successfully the city is combating the odor at the Concord sewage treatment plant. Unfortunately, especially for those who live near it or downwind of it, this is one of the city’s longest running stories.
Thanks mainly to readers, our ears lead us to many stories. Ken Jordan called today to make sure we had seen the obituary of Joseph D. Shields III. I had read it and noted that in addition to a successful medical career, Shields once played in the Milwaukee Braves organization. What Ken added that I didn’t know was that Shields was “the Matt Bonner of his time,” meaning Concord’s most celebrated schoolboy athlete. Ken thought our sports department might want to follow up. I passed his idea on.
Our reporter Meg Heckman had her ears open at a recent conference on covering aging. The first result was last Sunday’s fun look from Meg and photographer Ken Williams at how people define “old.”
Some content comes from thinking and talking. We aspite to give Monitor readers as many stories as possible that they won’t find elsewhere. For the Opinion pages, we’ve begun brainstorming about how to expand our local reach. We hope our latest talks will lead to local commentary on what it’s like to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, on a dispute over the flooding of local property and on the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Many stories are in the paper because they’re important news events that anyone would recognize. The terrible flooding in southwestern New Hampshire is a current example. But journalists have some discretion in what we write about, too. In exercising this discretion, we rely on our senses, our thinking caps and our readers’ good advice.
Posted by Mike Pride at 05:13 PM | Comments (1)
October 11, 2005
Going, going, gone
There will no doubt be some great baseball played over the next three weeks, but I won’t watch much of it. I’m somewhat relieved, as another Yankees-Red Sox series would have been a gut-wrencher for this fan. The last month of the season was already a grind. It seemed to be a grind for the players, too. By September, they had stopped looking like the boys of summer.
Frankly, neither team had the arms or the chemistry of champions in 2005. All summer long, conversations with both my Red Sox and Yankee fan friends never went far without someone saying how flawed the teams were.
Still, you hope against hope. For Red Sox fans, it was pleasant to bask in the glory of 2004 and to believe the old magic might reappear in the playoffs. Our Tim O’Sullivan took this view when Boston lost the opener to Chicago 14-2. The headline on his column read: “Relax fans, they’re looking ahead.” Even after the Red Sox lost the second game, our Dave D’Onofrio’s front-page column was headlined: “A bad spot, but it’s familiar.”
That second game was my first look at the Chicago reliever Bobby Jenks. With my East Coast bias, I had been saying that neither the Angels nor the White Sox scared me. Jenks scared me. Champions have lights-out closers. Jenks is one.
As for the Yankees, my gosh, what a strange ride. I’ve liked the Yankees since I was a boy. I grew up liking the Red Sox, too, but if you live in New England, you have to choose. You can’t root for both. The rivalry is too personal. But I find it hard to believe George Steinbrenner and his front office abandoned the formula that combined bought and homegrown stars with solid journeyman – Paul O’Neill, Scott Brosius, Tino Martinez in his first tour. It is beyond me why the Yankee brass has to keep proving to itself that money isn’t everything.
The poster boy for this philosophy is Alex Rodriquez. For all the beauty of his game at times, how hard it is to like him. What an irony it will be if he wins the MVP. At crunch time, it is as though his $252 million contract is an anvil on his back. When he came up in the ninth inning last night, I muttered under my breath that Joe Torre ought to give him the bunt sign. Even though the Yankees were two runs down, and even though A-Rod had led the league in homers, I knew he was going to hit into a double play.
So now we fans – of the Red Sox and Yankees alike – face a long winter with nothing to taunt each other about. When spring returns and we emerge from baseball hibernation, we’ll be as eager as ever for the next chapter in the greatest rivalry in sport. Even so, there is so much wrong with these teams that it is hard to imagine either can make enough moves to hide or fix all the flaws.
Posted by Mike Pride at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2005
Soltani's folly
As you’ll read in the Sunday Monitor’s Capital Beat column, Chairman Tony Soltani says his same-sex marriage commission is not finished yet. In fact, it was finished before it started.
The commission voted last week to support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. How can a group so intent on crowing its prejudice come up with a thoughtful, judicious proposal on how New Hampshire should deal with this issue?
Soltani has bristled anytime anyone has suggested that he and his commission aren’t serious about their mission. Well, Soltani voted in favor of the amendment, too. What a leader.
This issue should matter to all who care about equal rights for minorities, but the prospects in the coming legislative session are poor. The governor says he opposes gay marriage, and Soltani’s commission is a joke. The constitutional amendment won’t pass, but it could be an effective stalling tactic. The best hope is that wiser legislators somewhere are quietly working toward a fair solution.
How long?
Posted by Mike Pride at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2005
Justice in a vacuum
America’s Most Wanted at this point in our history is the non-activist Supreme Court justice. The ideal justice, an oft-reprised line goes, will put his or her personal beliefs aside and simply interpret the law on the foundation laid by James Madison and the gang. We heard Chief Justice John Roberts labeled as such a judge during his confirmation process – just an umpire, he himself said he would be. And we’re hearing the same thing about Harriet Miers.
In today’s Monitor, we ran a Washington Post story in which a man who knows Miers well describes her as a born-again Christian who believes that life begins at conception and that abortion is taking a life. He and others assert that as a Supreme Court justice, she would disregard her own views and rule only on the basis of the Constitution and the law.
Whatever her intentions might be, I doubt it. For more than 30 years, a Supreme Court majority has found that the Constitution bestows on women the right to decide for themselves, within clearly drawn restrictions, whether to terminate a pregnancy. If Miers believes abortion is taking a life, how can she possibly accept this interpretation of the Constitution? She would have to conclude that the Constitution condones taking a life.
The idea of some distinct, easily drawn line between a justice’s fundamental moral beliefs and how he or she interprets the Constitution is bogus. The big questions before the Supreme Court include assisted suicide, abortion rights, gay rights and church-state separation. These issues matter to all Americans. They also matter to the justices – personally.
To the cases that come before them, even justices who purport to be conservative, non-activist originalists bring their own morals, opinions, politics and life experience. We citizens should want them to. In eulogies to Justice Harry Blackmun a few years ago, friends observed that he recognized that there was life outside the court. The alternative is justice in a vacuum.
Americans are scratching their heads over President Bush’s stealth nominee. Many are doing as I just did and trying to assess how she would vote on Roe vs. Wade and other social issues. I don’t expect the Senate hearings to clear much up. I do expect that if Miers is confirmed, she will bring all her baggage to the Supreme Court. Hard as she might try to rise out of herself and interpret statutes by only the considerable light of the minds of the founders, she will not be able to do it.
Posted by Mike Pride at 04:10 PM | Comments (4)
October 03, 2005
Mountain vistas
Maybe the fall foliage is late - who really knows? But if you want an early taste of the colors of autumn, head for the Art Center in Hargate at St. Paul’s School, one of Concord’s hidden gems.
Until Oct. 15, the gallery features paintings by the White Mountain Artists. Benjamin Champney, a New Hampshire native who lived in North Conway and painted in the White Mountains for five decades, is synonymous with this group. But many artists spent at least some time working in the bracing air and amid the stunning vistas of the Whites during the 19th century.
We saw the Hargate exhibit on Saturday. Although the subjects are large – mountain landscapes – many of the paintings are small. This is part of their charm, as is the familiarity of the scenes to anyone who has spent even a little time in the mountains. You will swear when you see the bared tooth of Chocorua’s peak or the white cap of Mount Washington beyond the trees that you have stood where the artists stood. And perhaps you will be right. You will also ask yourself how these artists were able to contain such majestic views on such small canvases and boards.
Champney is well represented in the exhibit, and there are better known artists, too, including Albert Bierstadt. If you go, don’t miss the one small painting by Robert Scott Duncanson. He was born to a Canadian father and a free African-American mother in upstate New York in 1821. He did most of his painting elsewhere but stopped in our mountains long enough to join the ranks of White Mountain Artists.
The Hargate is a small gallery, and a tour of the paintings takes no more than a half hour. The gallery is open from 10 to 4.
Posted by Mike Pride at 07:15 PM | Comments (0)