Adam Bulger

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom

2009-07-24T22:27:00.001-07:00

The book is out now. What are you waiting for?My interview with Thompson is in it. At first he hates me, then he likes me. It's an epic story of a young journalist interviewing his idol and only acquiring the skills to do so halfway through the encounter. Go buy it now.

World's Weirdest Museums

2008-07-25T17:47:00.000-07:00

11 Oddball Museums
Forbes Traveler July, 2008

If Night at the Museum had been set somewhere other than New York’s Museum of Natural History, it would be a very different movie. This 2006 blockbuster starring Ben Stiller made hundreds of millions of dollars and, reportedly, boosted museum attendance. But it could have been a much stranger beast. Instead of Teddy Roosevelt and Sacajawea, one night in Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum could've led to a romance between Siamese twin skeletons and the corpse of an obese woman whose fat has turned to soap. At the Venthaven ventriloquist museum, the big laughs could've given way to the scariest Twilight Zone episode ever.

World-class museums aside, a lot of people find second-rank museums lacking. At best, they're hermetically sealed repositories of dusty culture; at worst, they're tourist traps teeming with children on field trips. Sometimes, you gotta take a walk on the weirder side.

Doug Kirby, publisher of the book series and website Roadside America, has catalogued bizarre museums and other attractions best avoided by elementary school field trips. By heading off the beaten path, he says, “you’ll see amazing things—but just duck your head and make sure your tetanus shot is up-to-date.”

There’s little chance of being physically injured at Kentucky’s Venthaven Museum, the world’s only public collection devoted to ventriloquism. Many visitors are unnerved by the hundreds of dummies that line bleacher-like seats, waiting to dredge up childhood nightmares inspired by the Twilight Zone and Poltergeist. According to curator Lisa Sweasy, who leads tours by appointment only, visitors are charmed by tour's end.

“There are no scary ventriloquists,” she says. “Some people will come in with a prejudice against them, but that always goes away once they've learned more.”

Venthaven’s exhaustive focus on dummies is unique, but the museum’s singularity of focus isn’t. The Museum of Toilets in New Delhi presents a complete history of the world’s commodes. Exhibits include a reconstruction of Louis the XVIII's toilet-and-throne combo and a microwave technology toilet that (they say) we’ll use in the future. Meanwhile, over in Iceland, the curators of the Phallological Museum focus on the symbol of the phallus from ancient times straight through to the present. There is also a sizeable collection of Icelandic animal penises.

Clearly, some museums are founded by men and women with an intense interest in one subject. Others are motivated by what Kirby calls water-cooler value. Because many small and strange museums lack the wealth and clout of larger institutions, they’re forced to become more creative in their exhibitions. “We don’t have the resources of the Museum of Natural History or MOMA," says David Wilson, founder and curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technologies in California. "So what we’ve done is look to the margins, to the edges of things. And we find an extraordinary body of stuff there.”

Wilson was awarded a MacArthur fellow “genius” grant for his work with the 20-plus-year-old museum, which "provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts" emphasizing things that "demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities." In other words, it's a whimsical but not frivolous collection of objects that interest Wilson, such as microscopic sculptures and a collection of trailer park art. One advantage of running your own museum, says Wilson, is "you can present pretty much whatever you want.”

Other weird museums have firmer footholds in history and science. And some, like their legitimate counterparts, strive to educate the public. The Glore Psychiatric Museum in Missouri grew out of State Lunatic Asylum Number Two. In the 1960s, asylum official George Glore began collecting and displaying artifacts and replicas of antiquated devices for treating mental illnesses, like a human-sized hamster wheel meant to treat patients suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder. According to museum spokesperson Kathy Reno, the museum is intended to help remove the stigma associated with mental illness.

On the other end of the learning curve, there's the Museum of Bad Art in Massachusetts, which is dedicated to mocking artists who erred in their attempts to create beauty. If you’ve ever been mad at Picasso for being a better artist than you—of if you've ever muttered "My kid could paint that!"—this is the place for you. In its own way, even the MOBA is trying to educate the public. “People who don’t know anything about art, and are intimidated by serious art museums and art galleries, like the idea of coming someplace where it’s okay to have a laugh,” says Louise Sacco, MOBA's Permanent Acting Interim Executive Director.

Whether you're looking for laughs, scares or a few moments of squirmy discomfort, somewhere in the world is an obsessive curator waiting to show you his or her collection.

Jon Stewart Interview

2008-06-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

Faking Sense of the World
Hartford Advocate June 12, 2008

According to a 2007 Pew poll, Jon Stewart is one of the five most-respected broadcast journalists in America. It doesn't matter that he began his career not as a sleeves-rolled-up, coffee-swilling print journalist but as a comedian whose resume includes residency at Manhattan's Comedy Cellar, a cameo in Half Baked and three short-lived MTV shows.

The Daily Show started out as news parody, but with Stewart at the helm since 1999, it has grown increasingly sharp and political. Stewart is not just a smart-ass; he's actually smart. And while he can be glib, he's arguably one of the most moral people on television news.

One of the few people who don't take Stewart seriously these days is Stewart himself. When accused of committing journalism by Bill Moyers last year, Stewart countered that he's only a comedian. Stewart dismissed his own work as that of "a tiny, neurotic man, standing in the back of the room throwing tomatoes at the chalk board."

Stewart is amazingly punctual—he called exactly at the scheduled time—and extraordinarily nice. As a former chain smoker who went cold turkey in 2000, he gave me useful advice about quitting cigarettes and talked freely about every other subject—but still wouldn't admit to being anything other than a working comedian who happens to have one of the best TV shows on the planet.

Advocate: Is your stand-up work mostly current events-driven or do you use it as a chance to get away from what you do on TV?
Stewart: It's a combination: It's events material, or it's a story about something horrible that might have happened to me on the drive up. And obviously, bits I've been working on over the years. I weave everything in and out, and hopefully present a nice little evening of comedy.

I might do a Q&A, or maybe just be a sing-a-long. It could take all kinds of shapes: charades, Pictionary.

So it's like a traveling, troubadour kind of show.
That's exactly right. It's like a minstrel show, except without any conceivable musical talent.

Or blackface.
Right. It's the old-world style of minstrel show, not the modern racially driven version. I think it's a chance to make some larger observations—if I have any larger observations to make. It's not as tied to current events as the show, and it's a different format. I'll be standing, for one thing. It'll give people an opportunity to see what stumpy legs look like.

I'm sure you're sick of this question ...
Sagittarius.

Nice. I was going to ask if it's difficult to adjust to comedy in a post-Bush world.

Oh. As a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal—in all of those areas, I am looking forward to the end of the Bush administration with every fiber of my being.

You're tired of the "subliminable" jokes?
Yeah, there are times when you play on the lack of erudite commentary from the President. But that's not the heart of what we do. I am sick of deconstructing their propaganda, because it's pretty much the same as it's always been. It's just repeating something over and over again until we believe it and we hope that you believe it.

[Comedian and Conan O'Brien writer] Robert Smigel said in a recent interview: "For Obama, it could be a John Kennedy situation where everybody is going to invest all this hope and optimism, idealism." He was saying that satire might be more difficult under an Obama administration. Do you think that's true?

I think that the satire of what that is would be tough. But certainly the interplay between that idealism and the established cynicism would work for satire. If someone was to introduce hope and idealism into our political system, I think the tension that would create in other areas would certainly be ripe. You would think that if you bring oxygen to the organism, the organism lives. But there may be other organisms in there that thrive in darkness and in a more anaerobic environment. Watching those creatures writhe will always be interesting.

Larry King asked you on his show if it would be terrible for you as a comedian if everything was good.
I was a little stunned by the question. It was a little crazy, the idea that I absolutely would cheer for the destruction of mankind if it would give me three to four minutes of jokes every night. But to be fair to Larry King, I don't think he was really paying attention. It was more like, "How long do we have left in this segment?"

That describes the last two decades of his career, doesn't it?
[Laughs.] Don't mess with the King, baby. You mess with the bull, you get the suspenders.

Is it fair to call The Daily Show liberal?
I think the metric by which television is considered liberal is literally based on the metric of liberalism in each person's soul. Peoples' senses of humor tend to go about as far as their ideology. There are people who believe I say things they didn't agree with because it's too liberal, and there are people who don't agree with things I say that believe I'm a conservative shill. I don't get wrapped up in peoples' definitions of what we're doing here.

You've said you're not a warrior for anyone's cause. I imagine that you get criticism from both sides.
I reject the idea there are just two sides. I think that with the amount of ideas and thoughts there are, it's not even going to be consistent with the same person. People can hold liberal and conservative dogma points at the same time. They're not living their lives via platforms. They're living their lives. The whole thing is an awfully tired construct.

I'm sorry I asked.
[Laughs.] You didn't make it up. It exists. Unless, are you the guy that invented it? Then this is an entirely different interview.

When you're interviewing someone like [neoconservative former Department of Defense official] Douglas Feith or [National Review Online editor] Jonah Goldberg, and are basically calling bullshit on them, is it difficult to keep yourself under control enough to have a civil conversation?

In trying to have a discussion, there are moments where I probably lose my cool or train of thought. Or my ability to blink. And it's creepy. But I think it's hard to have any conversation that has purpose to it on a talk show in front of an audience with commercial breaks. I think there are probably much better ways to accomplish that. A six-minute interview isn't the best place to make or debunk a case. So what people get are bastardizations of arguments and perversions of discussions. That's what we specialize in.

So you're saying that you shouldn't be doing what you do every night?
The format of the show suits me. But I think that if you're looking for the kind of discussion that's worthwhile to have, this is not the best format for it. I think there are better formats and better people to do that than me [laughs].

Do you find conservative writers are hesitant to go on The Daily Show? Is there anyone that turned you down you wish could have been on?
Oh, I'm sure. You know, it all goes so fast. We have a woman here that's in charge of getting guests. We make requests all the time. And people are out of town, or they don't want to do it or they want you to have lunch with them first, and you end up being like, "fuck that."
But I don't think it's necessarily conservatives who are avoiding the show. We have a pretty good representation there as we do in anything. I just think it's not a comfortable format for a lot of people.

But people have got to sell books, right?
Yeah. I think that's the only reason people come on the show. People have gotta sell books, people gotta get votes. I don't think anybody comes on the show just because they think it looks like fun. Well, every now and then, we get someone deluded.

Has Stephen Colbert taken the heat off you? There was that Rahm Emanuel memo warning Democrats not to go on his show—do you look easier by comparison?
I'm going to let you in on a little secret, here: Stephen's playing a character on his show. He might not admit this himself, but in real life, he's a very sweet, reasonable man. I don't want to blow anything out. I don't know if you want to put that in there. It might not be for public consumption.

Wow. I feel like Bob Woodward.
Exactly. I'm not going to say where you got this information. I'm just telling you. I'm an anonymous source. Take this to the bank.

But has having The Colbert Report on after The Daily Show changed The Daily Show?
We're definitely of the same genetic material. I think there's a nice complementary relationship. In some respects, it works in the way that the more staid news works with the cable-type news. They're parodies that are increasing the reach of the other parties. The shows paint in different colors, but use the same material.

When [Supreme Court Justice] Antonin Scalia called your show "childish," did that smart at all?

I can say this: he's childish. And shut up. No, that doesn't bother me. It does bother me when Antonin Scalia says he doesn't want to discuss cases like Bush. V. Gore anymore because, you know, we should just get over it. That upsets me more than comments that he makes about our show. You can make a better case that our show is childish than he doesn't have to discuss Supreme Court decisions he's made.

Do you see what you just did? You took on the appearance of childishness to make an astute, well-reasoned point. That's something you do on The Daily Show all the time, and that's why it bothers me, as a fan, that he referred to the show as childish.

Here's the difference: I'm thinking about him, but he's not thinking about me. What he said was reflective of nothing other than the glibness. And in some ways it reflects the seriousness with which he should take our show, which is not at all. What we wish he took more seriously are the decisions he made. But I don't think in any way, "How dare he say that, what does he think he's doing?" I get it.

You've been criticized for trying to have it both ways, acting as a media critic and then retreating by saying you're just telling jokes.

I think that stems from how my interviews don't live up to the standards I ask of news people. And what I'd say in response to that, is, "Why should I do their fucking jobs?" I have a job and my job is on Comedy Central. If I took a job at CNN, I think I'd to have a different perspective on what I do. But I don't do a news show.

It's not a news show, but it's pretty newsy.

I'm working with the tools that are the best for me. People would like to place a standard on our show that doesn't exist. We're not set up for reporting; we don't have an apparatus for that. We're discussing things that hopefully people might get something out of, but it's wildly inconsistent. Just because we hit on points that resonate, or people think are real complaints—that doesn't make us journalists.

You're seen as one of the most trusted names in journalism, according to a recent poll. On The Daily Show, you guys talk about how perception dictates reality. Do you think this is one of those cases?
I think we are so far up our own asses about our own importance. I think that people are arguing about something that doesn't matter. The real issue is that TV news can either bring clarity or noise. And it tends to not seem to know the difference between them. ... We do a show that doesn't try to bring noise. I think that we have a more consistent point of view than most news shows, I'll say that.

What's that point of view?
That theater doesn't make for authentic public
discourse.

David Cross Interview

2008-05-06T19:05:00.000-07:00

The Believer, May 2008

Quick note on the text: this was one part of a two-part interview. I interviewed Cross from the point of view of someone who hated him. Another writer interviewed him as a fan.

I have complicated and conflicting feelings about David Cross’s work, which is appropriate, as he’s a complicated, difficult performer. As I told him when we met, I think he’s talented. He has a nimble mind, great timing, and a knack for absurd humor. However, his performances often seem driven by an anger and smugness that overpower his appeal, particularly in his stand-up. I was managing editor of New York Press when he released his second CD, It’s Not Funny, which was the prime reason for his inclusion on the paper’s “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers” list. We called him “meandering” and “not funny,” and wished that Andrew Dice Clay would inflict bodily harm upon him. Even though some on the staff, including me, were inclined to agree with his liberal anger, we thought Cross’s tone was alienating and shrill.

In addition, Cross has waged public crusades against seeming straw men like Creed’s Scott Stapp, Jim Belushi, and Larry the Cable Guy. I’ve always been confounded by the attention Cross paid them.

I chatted with Cross in late 2007 at his East Village apartment. He was extremely self-aware, willing to speak frankly about awkward subjects with admirable candor and introspection. Honestly, I came away liking him a lot. Also, he had embroidered towels in his bathroom. One read DAVID’S. The other read ALSO DAVID’S. I’m not sure what conclusions should be drawn from that, but it’s the kind of detail that as a reporter I would feel remiss if I kept to myself.

HATER: I understand that you were angry, and [your 2000-2001 stand-up act] was a free-flowing of expression. And, I feel like a dick for saying it, but did you forget to write punch lines?

DAVID CROSS: What I’d say to that is that I’ve never written jokes. I mean, I’ll write things on a piece of paper and riff on them onstage. What I don’t think is fair, and what I think you’re implying, is that there’s nothing funny in it. That’s fine, that’s your opinion.

HTR: I’m not saying it’s not funny. I’m saying that it’s undernuanced at times. It could be more clever or well-constructed.

DC: Yeah, probably. You can continue to craft it and hone it. But that, for better or worse, is not what I do. It might read funnier, definitely, but it would feel false. I think I could have a funnier, more economic set. But that’s the comedy I do. And I understand if people aren’t interested in it and would rather listen to someone else. But I’ll never understand the anger people have toward me. And here is the rest of it.

For the rest of the interview, go buy the magazine. It's on sale at a bookstore near you!

11 Unlikely Summer Movie Heroes

2008-05-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

20 years after 'Die Hard,' heroes are coming in surprising sizes and shapes.
Premiere.com, May 8, 2008

1988 was a watershed year for explosion-laden, bullet-riddled action flicks. Chiseled body builder-types like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren and Carl Weathers racked up massive body counts in Rambo III, Red Heat, Red Scorpion and Action Jackson. But that year's best-remembered action film announced the age of over-grown muscle stars had passed. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis's John McClane was a different kind of action hero. He was an unstoppable killing machine audiences could relate to — a wise-cracking, barefoot beat cop who needed every lucky break he could catch. Flash forward 20 years, and the lasting effects of the Bruce Willis-ification of the action star are evident. The girlyman heroes appearing in this summer's event movies include fresh-faced art house stars, doughy comedians and AARP members. This summer, it seems, almost any Joe can be a hero.

Read the rest of the article (laid out in a lovely slideshow format) here.

Which Rocky are we talking about, Sen. Clinton?

2008-04-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

Scholars and Rogues, April 1

It’s time for Hillary Clinton to bone up on her classic ’70s cinema. Attempting to pander to a Philadelphia crowd, she compared herself to Philly’s most famous fictional son, the Italian Stallion, Rocky Balboa.

The AP reports:

“Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people,” Clinton said in excerpts of prepared remarks to be given Tuesday to a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO.

It’s a hack reference, and it’s a little distressing that she included it in her “prepared remarks” — she needs crib notes for pop culture references? But what’s worse is that it’s an inaccurate one. In her attempt to appear more human by invoking the name of the scrappy underdog fighter, she revealed that there’s a good chance she’s never actually seen the movie. Mrs. Clinton evidently doesn’t realize that in the movie Rocky, the titular character lost the fight - to a black dude!

The victory he celebrates at the end of the movie is about how he “went the distance” in the fight and because he recently won the love and respect of his new girlfriend Adrian. It’s only in the shittier sequels that Rocky actually wins fights. So unless Clinton’s ready to go home and be happy that she tried her best and has gained Bill’s love and respect, she can only liken herself to Rocky II through Rocky V.

Jonathan Davis Article

2008-03-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

Got the Life
Inked Magazine March, 2008

Jonathan Davis is the last guy in America you’d expect to be well adjusted. Think about it: The guy’s whole career has been built on being a fuck-up. And here is the rest of it. For the last 15 years, Davis has battled and exploited his inner demons as the lead singer of Korn, gaining legions of fans that empathize with his tortured childhood and share his dark fascinations. Born with severe, nearly life-threatening asthma, Davis was abused by a family friend as a boy, ostracized and ridiculed by his classmates as a teen, and became a drug addict and a rock star in his 20s. By the time he hit 30, he was one of the most famous singers in the world, with a legendary reputation for drug consumption and skewed fixations. I spoke with Davis the day after he finished his first solo tour, a two-month slog he described as a blur of “shitty little showers and fucked-up shit holes.”Logically, a goth rock deity like Davis should have been clubbing baby seals for kicks or hiring a private detective to bury a bizarre sex video. Instead, he was resting at his Malibu home looking forward to the following day, when he planned to take two of his children camping on the beach. “I love it. I set them out there in the sand and a tent and that’s it,” Davis says.

What? No drugs? No sex? No blood? Sun, sand, and children? Frankly, it doesn’t sound like a day in the life of a rockstar. “I don’t give a fuck. What’s a rockstar? Trying to be a rock star is what got me in trouble in thefirst place,” Davis says.

These days, Davis spends his time off the road earning his World’s Greatest Nu Metal Dad coffee mug. Sober for almost a decade, he is a happily married father of three boys: 12-year-old Nathan, 2-year-old Pirate, and his newborn baby, Zeppelin. During our conversation, Davis’s voice rarely rose above a whisper, but he booms with happiness on the subject of his kids. “I really love my children. It’s the one thing in this world that makes me truly happy, other than music,” Davis says.

?sible that Davis could some day be too well adjusted to sing for Korn? “No chance. I got issues, bro. I’ll always have issues,” he says.

Davis might be living the straight and narrow, but his version seems wider and more crooked than most. His adoring wife Devon is a former porn star (for the record, she was only in girl-on-girl films, which is like the Coors Light of porn). He sings through a microphone set on a $50,000 stand designed by H.R. Giger (the Swiss artist who created the alien in Alien), he’s collaborating on an opera with Clive Barker (the sicko British horror writer behind the Hellraiser movies).

And as a former collector of serial killer art—a topic, he says, he now can’t ??storm lyrics. “I’ve gone to those places and I’ve written what I needed to write there,”Davis says. “I’m not going to go and try to repeat myself, write some fake shit. With each new record, I’m tapping into new things and just exploring different ideas.”

And while he doesn’t party anymore,well,he still kind of parties.“I’m at the parties and I’m chopping up lines of cocaine, rolling joints, and pouring drinks,”Davis says. “I can hang out with everybody, but it’s not for me. I just can’t do it.” When Davis grew up in Bakersfield, his hometown was about as close to the farm town in Footlooseas a southern Californian city can get. While its demographics have shifted a little since then, the town is still called the “buckle of California’s Bible Belt.”Not surprisingly, Davis had a tough time fitting into the sunny, Reagan-loving community, and his tattoos are a testament to that. He has a monstrous bishop on one arm, and HIV—the nickname his tormenting high school peers gave him—on the other.

Even though he grew up listening to English new romantic bands like Duran Duran—he didn’t embrace metal until hearing Pantera in his 20s—Davis was cautioned against becoming a musician by his father, a touring musician himself. “My dad didn’t want me to be a musician because he tried and he went out. It was hard and he wanted to protect me,” Davis says. So he followed his father’s suggestion and, at 17, he became employed in a more wholesome profession; through a high school program, he got a job at a mortuary.

“It was a very fucked-up line of work,” Davis says. “I did it ’cause I really like dark, sick shit. It sounded interesting to cut up dead bodies.” He was interested, but not entirely prepared for the experience. “The first day … I was terrified. I went back to school and I was ghost white. I had just faced my mortality. The first guy I cut open was in a motor vehicle accident. The guy was smashed the fuck up. I’ll never forget the sound of the scalpel opening up his flesh. It still rings in my ears to this day.”

But despite finding success, or at least stability, as a coroner, Davis retained his passion for music. He formed the band SexArt, which gained the attention of two Bakersfield guitar players, James “Munky” Shaffer and Bryan “Head” Welch. Impressed by Davis’ stage presence and voice, Shaffer and Welch asked him to join their band. Loyal to his SexArt cronies, Davis consulted a higher power of sorts. “My aunt’s a psychic and astrologer. She told me all of this stuff was going to happen. It definitely impacted my decision to join the band,” Davis explains.

Welch and Shaffer were experimenting with new dissonant and down-tuned guitar styles. Davis started mining painful childhood memories for lyrics. Korn and the genre of Nu Metal was born. The music was gnarled and aggressive, the vision was dark and personal. Their self-titled debut album was something increasingly rare in popular music: a truly original sound. The lifestyle the band’s success afforded them, while epic and dangerous, was stolen wholesale from classic rock icons. “When I first started, I would watch that Doors movie. I wanted to be Jim Morrison, you know? I tried to be as fucked up as I could possibly be, all the time,” Davis explains.

By 1998, Korn had attained a new level of popularity. They headlined their first Family Values tour. Their album Follow the Leader debuted at number one on the Billboard chart. But the years of partying and touring had taken their toll on Davis, and he hit rock bottom in front of the worst possible audience. “[My son] Nathan saw me fucked up, and two days later my grandfather passed away. That’s when I got sober. Two drastic, traumatic things in my life happened back to back,” Davis says. “I flew into Atlanta for a show. I sat down at the bar. I said it was my last Jack and Coke and my last cigarette. They all laughed at me, but I haven’t touched them since.”

Getting sober changed his life, but it didn’t make it perfect. In 2003, Welch left the band to become a born-again Christian. In his 2007 book, Save Me From Myself, Welch renounced his wanton rocker ways. Surprisingly, Davis has read it: “It could have been a lot worse. There are a couple of things in there he didn’t need to say, but he did.” But, Davis adds, while most of Welch’s accounts of rock star debauchery were essentially true, some aspects were sensationalized. “He never partied a lot like he said in the book. He never had chicks. That was never his style.”

Davis says Welch is now living in a Christian community in Arizona that maintains a cult-like hold over the former Korn guitarist, and he also believes they prevent Welch from communicating with his former band mates. But despite the apparent rift, Davis wishes him luck. “I’m glad he found something to get him sober and make him happy. And the whole God thing, if he needs that, it’s fine. People need God and all that stuff to do something positive in their life. In my opinion he traded one addiction for another. But at least it’s a positive one.”

Welch’s departure didn’t stop Korn, but while on tour in Europe in 2005, Davis had a health scare that almost did. After noticing a series of mysterious bruises on his body, he was diagnosed with a rare blood disease called Immune Thrombocytopenia Purpura, or ITP. His blood couldn’t coagulate, which posed a unique occupational hazard for a heavy metal singer; head banging became potentially lethal. The six-month steroid cure was as painful as the disease. “Steroids make you just go crazy in your head. You’re aggressive and your body aches when you’re coming off of them. You can’t sleep. And when they start weaning you off of them, your joints ache. It really fucks with you,” Davis says. Now completely recovered, Davis is excited to work on his solo projects and more music with Korn. But even more than that, he’s glad to spend time with his kids. “I’m not saying I’m some boring dude. I’m just an artist that’s a really good father. That’s rare. People trip out on that.”

Steve-O Interview

2008-02-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

Professional Jackass
Steve-O talks about taking his act on the road, thinning the herd, and how his finances are his own damn business
Hartford Advocate September 23, 2004

Somebody might have thought to staple their own genitals before Steve-O, but no one made a career out of it. As a cast member of MTV's seminal shock-reality show Jackass, Steve-O's innovative approach to self-mutilation -- like stapling his testicles to his leg or getting a tattoo while off-roading in a Humvee -- made America laugh, cry and cringe. His stunt nature show Wildboyz is in its second season.

A: What can we expect from your live show?
SO: Expect a horrifying display of alcoholism and self-mutilation. We get really drunk and hurt ourselves. We have a set list comprised of acts that censors won't let us do on TV. I'm not going to give away the whole show, but there's blood everywhere, there's vomit, a bunch of urine and broken glass. And also a bunch of testicular trauma. If people want to get kicked in the balls I can pretty much work that out.

A: Is there going to be another season of Wildboyz?
SO: Yeah.

A. How did you guys come up with the idea for the show?
SO: When we were doing Jackass we got tangled up in a lot of wildlife. I don't know. I guess we just wanted to travel the world. And we had Pontius (Chris Pontius, Steve-O's co-host on Wildboyz. He's also "party boy" fromvJackass). He has his homosexual influence and he's a nature freak.

A: Is Pontius gay?
SO: Is Pontius gay? No. but we both think it's funny to act gay.

A: Have you guys ever made out?
SO: We never made out. I mean, for the benefit of paparazzi one time we kissed each other. We only do stuff when there's a camera around. We're only gay on camera.

A: Do you watch real nature shows?
SO: I've never been a fan of nature shows. I mean, maybe a good Predators and Prey. I think everybody likes to watch one animal eat another animal. I did get my personal morals and values from watching nature programming. There ain't no monogamy in the wild, pal. Survival of the fittest. Go after the weakest of the herd. That's our motto. We slay the weakest individuals in the herd.

A: Aside from Pontius, are you still in touch with the other guys from Jackass?
SO: Oh, yeah. If we're all in the same city it's trouble. We all go out and party together. I saw [Johnny] Knoxville a couple of weeks ago at the Video Music Awards. We hung out and did a lot of drugs.

A: What kind of drugs do you like to do?
SO: I'm basically a big pothead. But I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

A: Especially if the gift horse has a bunch of cocaine.
SO: (Laughs) Yeah.

A: What's the dumbest thing you've done this week?
SO: Maybe I used a rubber or two. The dumbest thing I did was mess around with latex. I don't know. I had a family reunion the other day in Canada. Going to that was pretty dumb. I might as well have dressed up as the devil and walked into a church. Let's just say that my extended family isn't terribly proud of me.

A: I heard that you were the only Jackass cast member not to take a percentage of the movie's profits.
SO: That's not true.

A: OK. So what's your money situation like in general?
SO: I'm one lawsuit or injury from being in debt for the rest of my life (laughs). Hey, how unprofessional do you have to be to ask your interview subject about how much money they have? That's actually totally rude. How much money do you make, pal?

A: Oh, I make --
SO: -- I don't want to know. I'm not that rude.

A: What's life like for Steve-O these days?

SO: I'm enjoying myself. Touring really kind of wears you down. Probably the hardest thing is dealing with people all day long. When you got thousands of people coming to see you every night, you just start to hate people. Being onstage isn't bad, but everyone wants to engage you in some conversation you're not interested in whatsoever.

A: Do you kind of want to be left alone?
SO: Kind of. But then I think about the day when no one gives a crap anymore and that's even more depressing.

A: How long do you think you can keep being Steve-O?
SO: I think forever. I don't know if people are going to remain interested in watching me hurt myself for the rest of my life. I'll always be a big ham for attention.

A: Some of the stuff you do must take a physical toll on your body.
SO: I pick my battles fairly carefully. I'm not really interested in becoming paralyzed. I've never permanently injured myself. When I snorted that wasabi, whatever nerves I had in my nose were all so long gone from the cocaine that I didn't care.

A: You were on an episode of the show Blind Date and you poured lemon juice in your eyes. Would you recommend that guys squeeze lemon juice in their eyes when they've run out of stuff to say on a date?
SO: Yeah, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't squeeze lemon juice in your eyes for a date, if you get laid -- Oh God, I'm so hung over right now it hurts. And if you thought I was wasted last night wait until you see me tonight. I am gonna get trashed.

A: Do you get drunk every night?
SO: Pretty much every night, yeah. Recently I had a night where I couldn't deal with it and I didn't get drunk. But that was so creepy. I felt like I was possessed. Everything about not drinking that one night was really weird.

NYC Libertarian Convention

2008-02-22T15:23:00.001-08:00

I don't usually preface the articles I put up here, but I want to qualify this one a little. It was the first cover story I wrote for a publication. I was kind of green as a journalist at the time, and I think it shows in some parts of the article. I still like it a lot, but there are things I could have done differently.

Drugs, Guns & Smokes for the Libertarians.
By Adam Bulger
New York Press, 2004

"Excuse me, do you mind if I ask what you’re talking about?"
The voice belongs to Neil Saunders, a British performance artist with shoulder-length blond hair who is sitting alone at a nearby table, eating a salad. He’s politely interrupting my interview with Jim Lesczynski, the newly elected chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party.

Jim gives him a business card-size explanation of Libertarian philosophy and answers some simple questions. Saunders nods and returns to his table. It was a strange encounter: a pudgy middle-class man with a precision-cut beard giving a scraggly bohemian lessons in freedom.

Unlike Neil, most people have at least a cursory knowledge of the tenets of Libertarianism, especially those attending today’s Manhattan Libertarian Party Convention. The concept is basic and seductive when explained in broad strokes: less government, more personal choice. It’s a simple mantra that attracts, repels and splits people on every frequency along the political spectrum. Free marketers want government out of their business dealings and paychecks, but might not approve of gay marriage; marijuana decriminalization activists like the Libertarian drug stance, but probably don’t support relaxing gun laws. And the "right-wing" Libertarian position on abortion? As one Libertarian told me, "We’re pro-choice on everything."

With such a philosophy, you might expect a Libertarian convention to look like Beyond Thunderdome’s Bartertown. Or, at the very least, like the interrupting Neil Saunders. But aside from one tragically comic mullet (sparse spikes on top, ponytail in the back), Manhattan’s Libertarians are white, middle-aged, professional males. There’s one Asian man in attendance and, among the handful of women, one is the spitting image of Onion columnist Jean Teasdale. I can’t take my eyes off her.

The convention was held on a bitterly cold January afternoon at the 10/50 Restaurant on the first floor of the Skyline, a Midtown hotel whose concrete box exterior would fit nicely alongside an interstate outside Tulsa. Inside, the 10/50 has the ambiance of a country club bar or a cruise ship. Before the convention, 10/50 had recently hosted a few retirement parties and a christening. For today, a podium has been set up across from the door, behind which hangs a banner featuring the Statue of Liberty. The walls are lined with poster-sized enlargements of Libertarian press clippings.

I arrived during elections for state committeeman—the person who will represent Manhattan at the statewide meetings. Thomas Robert Stevens, an adjunct lecturer at Briarcliffe College in Bethpage, is campaigning for votes, expressing his passion for Libertarian politics and describing his ethics lectures, during which he instructs, "Individual freedom is something that is desirable instead of government-supported morality." He would later win the vote.

Earlier, Joseph Dobrian had been elected media relations director. Dobrian is wearing a navy blue three-piece suit and a starched white shirt. His pale complexion and slicked-back hair smacks of a young Dan Akroyd reinvented as a Midwestern funeral home director. A native of the Midwest who moved to Manhattan in 1983, Dobrian has been active in the Manhattan Libertarian Party since 2001, though he has been "a Libertarian at heart for some time."

I ask if New York is a good place for the Libertarian party.

"It’s as good a place as any," he replies. "In large cities, you’re gonna get a lot of people who depend on government services, and that’s why they live in big cities. Traditionally, Libertarians tend to do their best recruiting in small towns, rural areas, in states where there are fewer government services and more personal freedom."

His Midwestern roots show when asked if the Manhattan Libertarians support the legalization of marijuana.

"Darn right we do!"

And crystal meth?

"You bet! I think it should be just as easy to get a fix at Duane Reade as it is to buy a tube of toothpaste."

I thank him for his time, turn the tape recorder off and ask him if he knows where the bathroom is. Turns out, he’s on his way there himself; I should follow him. (Not too close, though, ha ha.)

At the urinal, Dobrian spots an advertisement for a website selling cigars. He finds it ironic that such an ad would be placed in a restaurant/lounge where it’s illegal to smoke.

"This whole smoking ban," he observes, "is Bloomberg’s way of keeping the niggers down."

I look over at him, wide-eyed, as I wash my hands at the sink. This is the organization’s media rep talking. To a journalist.

"I mean that metaphorically—it’s about keeping the riff raff down," he adds.

Oh, I think. Thanks for clearing that up.

Jim Lesczynski is recognizable from his many tv news appearances. For the past few years, he had been the party’s media relations director and the public face of the Manhattan Libertarian Party. During his stint he promoted several high-profile, yippie-like publicity stunts designed to publicize the Libertarian philosophy in New York. The one that received the most attention was the "Guns for Tots" charity drive.

"As you may know, the NYC council introduced a bill last year to make all toy guns illegal," Lesczynski tells me. "We wanted to make a mockery of this, so we sent out a press release saying we’re going to collect toy guns and give them to poor children in Harlem. The press went out of their mind, obviously."

The reporters and cameramen weren’t alone.

"It got so much advance press, we had a whole counter-protest," he boasts. "A lot of activists were coming from outside that neighborhood just like we were; it was a big street theater scene."

Other media stunts followed. Outraged over the cost of cigarettes in New York, Lesczynski staged a cigarette giveaway in Bryant Park. "We had, like, 400 people show up. There ended up being a scuffle among the people there for the free cigarettes."

A more recent event took a turn for the bizarre. In response to the proposed construction of a Jets stadium on the West Side, the Libertarians hired a witch to cast a bad luck spell over any team that played on the grounds. Even though the woman was not a real witch and the hex was pointless—and redundant, as the Jets already have bad luck to spare—Lesczynski relishes the coverage. "We got a write-up in some of the community weeklies and stuff."

At today’s convention, Lesczynski is elevated to chairman of the Manhattan Libertarian Party, and he’s bubbling with enthusiasm.

"My goal is to give Gifford Miller and Mike Bloomberg ulcers," he declares. "I want them to be like Dean Wormer when the Animal House float is coming down the street in the parade and he says, ‘I hate those guys.’"

He predicts success as a political nuisance, though less at the ballot box. Their most recent three Libertarian candidates for city council posted in the single digits.

"We’re gonna run candidates, but we run candidates because it’s a free microphone," he says. "And at this point, it’s about getting the word out to people: Freedom is good, government is bad, we have way too much government in this city. We have too much government in this country and New York City is off the Richter scale."

Later that afternoon, Lesczynski takes to the lectern to introduce the guest speakers, starting with Bernard Goetz. In his introduction, Lesczynski mentions Goetz’s subway shooting and subsequent trial, noting that the "only thing Bernie was ever convicted of was exercising his rights as an American." (Goetz was sentenced to nine months at Rikers for two misdemeanor possession-of-firearms charges.)

Bernard Goetz never stops moving. He has a rare metabolism, as if his body holds an organ that naturally generates methamphetamine. When speaking, his ideas come in frenetic blasts; he uses the same words over and over, making the same points, shifting the phrasing only slightly.

After apologizing in advance for rambling, he gets to the topic for the night: jury rights. But first, he wants to say a few words about "media manipulation." The media he had in mind was New York Press—which he called the "worst form of yellow journalism."

A week earlier, I had promoted the Libertarian Convention in these pages. Goetz reads the modest item to the audience, granting some gravity to the part where I jokingly—and, yes, erroneously—referred to him as "former subway killer turned insane vegetarian."

"I didn’t kill anybody," Goetz emphasizes, eyes darting around the crowd. "And I don’t think I’m insane."

(Mea culpa, Bernie. Indeed, you are no subway killer, but a subway shooter. I hereby offer a rewrite: "Former attempted subway killer with bad aim turned questionably insane vegetarian, Bernie Goetz...")

The bulk of Goetz’s presentation concerns jury rights, but the scattered presentation makes it hard to grasp, much less locate, his thesis. Jury members, he says, are encouraged to vote with the law whenever their conscience is in conflict with it. He sees this as a rank injustice.

An audience member suggests that people lie to get on a jury and then later vote their conscience. "That’s what I’m saying," he replies emphatically. He believes that serving on juries is the easiest way to impact society. "If I were on a jury for drug sales, I’d vote not guilty," he says—to loud, resounding applause.

This is not only a noble act, Goetz claims, but a safe one. It’s not likely that the state would go through the expense of prosecuting someone simply for withholding information.

An audience member brings up the case of Colorado woman Laura Kriho, who had deadlocked a jury presiding over a drug case; it was later discovered that she has a prior LSD conviction and a history as a hemp legalization activist. She was then taken to court. Goetz, unfamiliar with the case, views her as an anomaly that didn’t impact his argument.

If legal precedence couldn’t hinder Goetz’s argument, technical difficulties could. When the room’s air vents threatened to drown him out, he opted to talk over them, noting that the sound was "not as bad as a subway train." (Unfortunately, he did not go on to say, "On a subway train, I can barely hear myself think over the sound of my own gunfire," or "Thanks, I’ll be here all week.")

Goetz ended his talk with a short discussion about his proposed 2005 mayoral run, reminding everyone that he ran as an independent in 2001.

Next was David Kaczynski, Ted Kaczynski’s brother. The Unabomber’s brother. The younger Kaczynski was thrust into the national media spotlight in 1996 when he squealed on his brother to the FBI. A practicing Buddhist, he speaks in soft, lulling tones that match his earth-toned sweater. Tonight, he gives a well-rehearsed speech about Ted, his own interactions with law enforcement officials and his thoughts on the death penalty. As the executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, he’s no slouch on the subject.

Kaczynski’s not a Libertarian, but he knows how to slant his schtick for the crowd. He begins by asking, "If we don’t trust [the state] to deliver the mail, we trust them with the decision of who should live or die?" Nods of agreement all around. He then segues into his life story and thoughts on capital punishment.

The cash bar had been open for a while, and its effects were apparent in the unruliness that met Goetz’s speech. But something about Kaczynski’s demeanor lulled the crowd.

The restlessness re-emerges when Tim Bailey, a representative of the NYC Bill of Rights Defense Campaign, speaks about the Patriot Act. Like Goetz, Bailey’s presentation is jumbled and full of false starts; unlike Goetz, he lacks the charisma and tabloid cred. When a long stretch of stuttering and dead air is capped off by Bailey’s inability to remember the name of the judicial branch of the federal government, the audience turns on him, volleying a series of hostile and often nonsensical questions. Joseph Dobrian shouts a request for the crowd to settle down. Amidst the crowd’s indifference and microphone feedback, Bailey ambles to a painful finish.

The evening is capped off with a speech from keynote speaker, Saying Yes author and Reason magazine’s senior editor Jacob Sollum. His speech concerns what he termed "voodoo pharmacology," or "the idea that drugs control people and force them to do evil."

This, he says, is "one of the central premises of the war on drugs."

I couldn’t agree with him more, but I’d also spent more than five hours at the 10/50. I bailed on Sollum’s talk. I bailed on the free steak. There’s only so long one can sit in a restaurant packed with Libertarians preaching about freedom.
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Tom Morello Interview

2008-02-20T19:04:00.001-08:00

Rebel Music
Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello on rock 'n' roll, politics and kicking ass
Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate October 27, 2005

Tom Morello has brought avant hip-hop punk metal guitar style to two of the mightiest bands of the last 20 years, Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. While Audioslave -- composed of the instrumentalists from Rage, and former Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell -- are less political lyrically than Rage, they still rock truth to power.

Advocate: How did Audioslave get together?

TM: When Zack [de la Rocha, former lead vocalist] left Rage Against the Machine, Tim [Commorford, bass] and Brad [Wilk, drums] and I spent a lot of time at [legendary producer] Rick Rubin's house, scheming about what we were going to do. The name that Rick brought up, again and again, was Chris Cornell. Actually, the fellows in Rage had all been huge fans of Soundgarden, Badmotorfinger particularly. So we called Chris and asked if he was interested in meeting.

I told him I wanted the next band I'm in to be the best band I've ever been in. I didn't want to do a project, a one-time, super group collaboration or anything. We want this to be the real thing. If you're up for that, jam. He was up for that. We got together and in the first 19 rehearsals, we wrote 21 songs.

A: I read that Chris Cornell opposed Audioslave being as political as Rage.

TM: That's misstated. Chris was not interested in being the singer of Rage Against the Machine. Which we did not want him to be. Chris had a long history of writing lyrics before he became acquainted with us. We've always been a fan of his lyrical work as well as his great voice. My twin passions are political activism and rock 'n' roll music. They intersect in various ways. And with Audioslave, while the band may be lyrically less political, we do things like go to Cuba, go to Live 8, play for hurricane relief. A portion of every ticket from this tour goes to various charities and activist organizations. We may do less talking the talk, but we do a lot more walking the walk.

A: Are you guys still playing Rage and Soundgarden songs at your shows?

TM: Very much so. We're going deeper into the catalogs of both Rage and Soundgarden. It's really exciting for us to play them and the room just explodes. When we decided to look at the material from our past bands, we didn't just decide to do it -- it had to sound great. Chris really owns those songs that we've chosen to do. It's not the least bit strange. It's just awesome. Every night when we make up a set list, we're able to draw from 11 multi-platinum albums. Very few bands can do that.

Chris also does a really cool acoustic set that he does all by himself. It changes pretty dramatically every night. It's some Audioslave songs, some Soundgarden songs, even some Temple of the Dog songs.

A: Audioslave played in Cuba in May. How was that?

TM: It was unbelievable. It was an incredible honor to be the first American rock band to play in Cuba. The performance, to 60,000 to 70,000 fans on a beautiful Havana night, it wasn't something we'll soon forget. We had wanted to do it for some time. Even back in the Rage days we had talked about it, but we hadn't been able to get it together. As you probably know, there's an embargo against Cuba. U.S. citizens can't travel there, let alone bring a rock band with a PA system and all that. It took a lot of perseverance. Finally, the U.S. Treasury Department and Castro himself had to sign off on it. It was billed as a cultural exchange. Before the concert, we were treated to seeing some amazing experiences. We saw Cuban artists, amazing musicians just jamming on the street. We went to this free music school that used to be an elitist country club before the revolution where there were these jaw-dropping jazz musicians. It really humbled us and made us want to give our all when we played.

A: Could you describe Axis of Justice and tell me what you've been doing lately?

TM: Sure. Axis of Justice is a non-profit, political organization founded by me and Serj Tankian, the lead singer of System of a Down. It does a number of things, from education to agitation. We're trying to answer the question that fans have been asking us for years, which is 'How can I get involved?' If you go toaxisofjustice.org, no matter where you live in the country, you can find Axis of Justice-endorsed local grassroots organizations that are fighting the power today.

It's easy to look at problems that confront communities and the country as big monolithic things that you have no chance of overturning. But the way progressive change always happens is when average, ordinary people stand up for their rights where they live, where they work, where they go to school. That's our motto: think globally, act locally.

A: I'm guessing you were disappointed with the results of the 2004 election.

TM: I was disappointed with the result, but not surprised. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that I didn't hold out a great deal of hope that either of the millionaire candidates could take the country in a direction that would necessarily be agreeable. I was supportive of third-party candidates, but worked for the defeat of Bush. As I'm sure a lot of Americans now wish they had.

A: Right now, people seem mad at Bush and Republicans in general, but there's a perception that the Left is too fractured to be effective.

TM: I think that's an accurate perception. Even during the election there was little support for the Democratic candidate, but a tremendous amount of anger towards Bush. There was little alternative presented aside from "this guy is not Bush." And that's not exactly the most rousing rallying cry.

But that's not the way things change. If you're going to sit around and wait for the president or the government to come along and make your life or your country better, you're going to be waiting a long time, no matter who's in office. Democratic administrations have taken us into immoral wars as well. The way that things change is people standing up for their rights no matter where they are, not waiting for the president or the Supreme Court or whoever to wave a magic wand.

A: Do you mind when people call Audioslave and [Guns n' Roses/Stone Temple Pilots amalgam] Velvet Revolver super groups?

TM: I love those dudes in Velvet Revolver. Those guys were very frustrated by the situation. They just wanted to play music and couldn't with the guy from their previous band. So they brought in another guy who would show up. I think they were able to help him, too.

A: Who would win in a fight, Audioslave or Velvet Revolver?

TM: [Audioslave bassist] Tim [Commerford] alone could not only take Velvet Revolver but the entire staff of your paper.

A: We'll see about that. Were you really on Star Trek?

TM: More than once. I'm a super fan of Star Trek, and it just so happens that the executive producer's son happens to be a super fan of my band. That helped to build a bridge. I was on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager and then I was in one of the Next Generation movies.

A: Any word on Zack de la Rocha?

TM: No, you know about as much as I do. The five-year anniversary of Zack's departure from Rage was yesterday. He left to do a solo career.

A: Which seemed to have never happened.

TM: Like I said, you know about as much about it as I do.

Don Rickles Interview

2008-02-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

The King Of Zing
A nearly lethal conversation with Don Rickles
Hartford Advocate, Dec. 28, 2007

Don Rickles has been Don Rickles for a long time. He was a satellite member of the Rat Pack and a personal friend of Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson and Bob Newhart. His act is a stream of harsh, hilarious observational humor about members of the audience. The man has 60 years worth of awesome one-liners in his front pocket.

In our phone conversation, I felt like I was at a Don Rickles show and the only person in the audience. I lost control of the interview early and often.

The 81-year-old comedy veteran is on something of a career roll at the moment. His autobiography Rickles: The Book was released to success and acclaim in the spring of 2007. Mr. Warmth, a documentary about Rickles directed by John Landis, the director of comedy classics Animal House and Trading Places, was broadcast on HBO in December, also to glowing reviews.

As the documentary illustrates, Rickles is beloved, both as a cultural figure and as a man. Offstage, he's sentimental, kind and shockingly loyal to the people close to him (for example, his publicist, whom I dealt with, is the son of his former publicist). A coterie of disparate celebrities and friends ranging from comedians like Joan Rivers and Chris Rock to directors Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese praise Rickles personally and professionally in Mr Warmth.

Don Rickles: Sorry to keep you waiting. I had my phone on "do not disturb." That should tell you how important this call is to me.

Advocate: Well, I uhh —
R: — I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

A: That's what you do, right? At least I know I got the right guy. I saw the documentary Mr. Warmth over the weekend. How do you think that ended up?

R: I thought it was great. I never had such great reviews in my career. I've had good reviews, but these were, on the majority, outstanding. Really outstanding.

A: All these people in the movie were filmed basically heaping praise on you. That must have been pretty gratifying.

R: Well, sure It was better than saying I was a son of a bitch and that they don't like this guy. Who would want that? If I said "Adam, I'm not crazy about you," would you let that in the paper? They're all friends and people that wanted to do it. I was very pleased that they came out and said such nice things about me.

A: People think of you as a hard-hitting performer. You're the most famous insult comedian in the world. They call you Mr. Warmth, which is supposed to be ironic, but it kind of seems like you're really a warm guy, and you're well-liked.

R: Well thank you. You know, it's a persona you take on. You take on this image and you're this raving guy. I got stuck with the word insult. And I tell anybody who's speaking with me that I don't like the word. Insult means someone who is mean, and I've never been mean or mean spirited.
But as for being an insult comic, well, that's the title I was given. What I do is exaggeration. I make fun of people, at life, of myself and my surroundings. I don't really tell a joke, I react to situations. The whole thing is just looking at somebody and showing all our weaknesses and exaggerat[ing] them, and that's how it becomes funny.

A: How did the movie come about? Did John Landis contact you?

R: Well, my son, Larry, — he's a terrific kid and a great producer -- said "Dad, it's about time." I had never had my act filmed before in my entire career. John Landis is a good friend. I met him when I did Kelly's Heroes. Landis, who, as you know, went on to be a very successful director, was an assistant director on that picture. He got wind of the documentary project and said, "Gee, Don, I'd love to be part of this."

A: Did you find the filming to be intrusive or unpleasant?

R: No, not really. They hit all the high points of my life, which was what I wanted, you know.

A: Have you noticed your influence on other comedians?

R: There are a couple of women and men who people say are performing in my style. If they're successful, I say more power to them. But my style is my personality. It's always been that way. Being a wiseguy and having fun. It's always been [that] way for me, when I was in high school, and in the Navy. It's not something I rehearse.
Everything I do on stage, I made up in saloons and stuff. I started doing it in front of people, and that became my performance. I never had writers — except for television shows — I've never had guys sit me down and say this is what you've got to do. It's my personality that makes me one of a kind, and I believe that.

A: You say you're not really a joke teller.

R: No, I'm not. I gather from your interview that you've never seen me.

A: No, I haven't seen you perform live yet. I'm looking forward to seeing you when you play in January.
R: Well, when you do see me, you'll get the idea from when you see me that it's all off the top of my head. A lot of it is a beginning, middle and the end. But it's different every night. I have a lot of jokes in my back pocket I've said over the years.

A: In the documentary, someone says they used to round up people you could make fun of before your shows and put them in the front row.

R: That was years and years ago when I worked out of the lounge of the Sahara hotel, following the great Louis Prima. I used to do three shows a night in front of a lot of people who were out of it, you know. It was tough going. This guy, Johnny Joseph, who just passed away, he was the Maître d' at the Sahara.
He used to say "Hey, I got a skinny guy, I got a fat lady that's not too pretty," and they'd put them right in the front. That no longer exists. That was in the old days when you didn't have anyone, and you needed some props.

A: The legend about you meeting Frank Sinatra is that he wandered into a bar while you were performing.

R: He wasn't wandering. He wasn't out in the desert with Moses. Well the story is his mother was friends with my mother — it's in my book. Did you read my book?

A: I skimmed through it.
R: Don't skim through it. For crying out loud. How old are you? You better go to your goddamn room, put the covers over your head and read the book.
Jeez, I'm embarrassed. You're interviewing me like a personal friend and you haven't even read the goddamned book.

A: Shit, man. Come on.

R: Yeah, shit man. You better start reading it when I hang up. When I meet you in person, I'm going to quiz you and if you fail, you're in deep trouble. The book will tell you a bunch of stuff, so that you won't have to go back to your notes while you're talkin' to me.

A: OK, OK. Well, let's get back to Frank Sinatra —

R: — Well, his mother and my mother arranged it so that he would come in and see my show. It was the first time I had ever laid eyes on the man. I said "Frank, make yourself at home and hit somebody." All the wise guys who were with him laughed, and Frank was on the floor laughing. We became great friends after that. We toured for the last two years of his life.

A: That's when you performed in front of the Reagans, right?

R: Oh, yeah. That was the highlight of my career. Here I am a Jewish kid from the neighborhood, doing my kind of humor. All of a sudden, Frank Sinatra said you're going to be on the show. Reagan's cabinet said that was fine, and I got up there and ripped into him big time.

A: And you also performed for the Queen of England around that time, right?

R: No, I performed in front of Princess Margaret. The Queen of England was bombed in the Palace and couldn't make it.

A: Really?

R: No, it's a joke, you dumbbell! Yeah, the Queen was drunk. Oh, boy Adam, I got to meet you in person. I've got to slap you around a little. You probably don't even know what time it is.

A: You're on the West Coast, right? All right, well, I'm anticipating that you're gonna yell at me for this next question, but why exactly do you call people hockey pucks?

R: Adam, I swear to God, I have no idea. It started out in the early days of my career when I was right out of the service. I worked what were called strip tease joints — a girl came out pretty much dressed compared to today's standards — and did a little dance number. We had all kinds of goofballs in these joints, and I said, "Hey pal, don't be a hockey puck." That's all I can remember. I got hockey pucks up to my you know what.

A: Do people send them to you?

R: No, they come over and play hockey at my house. You, you. You're really starting to get to me, Adam.

A: I'm sorry, Mr. Rickles.

R: I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Futurama Review

2007-12-07T18:52:00.000-08:00

Futurama is Back
The seminal science fiction cartoon returns on DVD
Hartford Advocate Dec. 07, 2007
Futurama returning in any form is great, but a direct-to-DVD version is nearly perfect. The animated show's creators, including Simpsons progenitor Matt Groening, invented a multi-layered television comedy show that looked both backwards and forwards. Steeped in science fiction minutia, the show portrayed a future where every conceivable science fiction scenario had come true, where the incredible is mundane and where everything is possible, but nothing seems to work.

Bender's Big Score, the first of four DVD exclusive Futurama films — they're going to be split up and broadcast as 16 half-hour episodes on Comedy Central in 2008 — is both innovative and antiquated. The format allows them to bypass broadcast television, and include a wealth of special features that reward the obsession the show inspires in its fans (including a full episode of Everyone Loves Hypnotoad, and an equally inscrutably hypnotic Futurama-focused higher math lecture). But considering Blu-ray, Bit Torrent, video iPods and such, DVDs frankly seem like a dying technology. Which is perfect for Futurama.

Even Futurama's biggest fans should acknowledge why the show had limited success in its 72 episode run (seven episodes fewer than the original Star Trek. Or was it? Have at it, nerds.). Certainly it was mishandled by the Fox Network, who shuffled its time slot and ultimately canceled it, but the show had a fundamentally narrow appeal.

It rewarded science fiction literacy, referencing pure mind sugar for geeks like the 1939 World's Fair, Invasion of the Saucer Men and the Grandfather Paradox, but presented them with twitchy, irreverent humor. America just doesn't have the hipster nerd resources to sustain such a project.

There's also a matter of tone. Where the show's most immediate ancestor, The Simpsons, centered on a family and occasionally broke up its nihilism with sentimental warmth, the only mainstream concession Futurama made was the broad humor of an alcoholic misfit robot with criminal tendencies. It might as well have "cult hit" written in binary and Klingon in the opening credits.

Freed from the constraints of pretending to have mass appeal, the Futurama team mine the show's mythology and history for Bender's Big Score, packing the screen with obscure references to past Futurama episodes, and meta-references to the Family Guy (another show retired, then revived by Fox) and South Park. The plot, a giddy mix of Primer-style time-travel anomalies, alien con men and a surprisingly affecting romance, would have been pretty much impossible with broadcast television's constraints on time and ambition.

A lot of it's very funny — I mentioned the alcoholic misfit robot, right? — but more importantly, it's viciously smart. The speculative ideas are precise and fully realized. As the creators explain in the commentary track, every complicated time leap was fully sketched out, and scrutinized for logic and clarity. Time travel paradoxes aren't just acknowledged, they're exploited for punch lines.

If after watching Signs you angrily questioned why an alien race allergic to water would invade a planet with water covering two thirds of its surface, Bender's Big Score will be extremely satisfying. If you never considered that, well, maybe Futurama isn't for you. On the bright side, re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond are on TV, like, all the time now!

Voting Machine Clash

2007-12-07T17:46:00.000-08:00

No-Confidence Vote
A Trinity professor and the secretary of the state square off over new voting machines
Hartford Advocate Nov. 24, 2005

Last week's voting machine demonstration at the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven in Woodbridge was strange. Although the center is a massive space, the actual demonstration was held in a cramped alcove. The six machines on display -- two each from the three companies that had made the cut for consideration, Avante, Danaher and Diebold -- were swarmed with people. There were no lines, no clear sense of order.

The event was the third of five statewide demonstrations of the three voting machines that had made the state's final cut for selection. Avante's and Diebold machines were high-tech touch-screen voting machines with interfaces clearly influenced by Microsoft Windows. The Danaher machine looked like the clunky lever voting machines that the new machines were supposed to replace. Each machine produced a hand-countable paper receipt, in accordance with a state bill passed last February.

"We have had 500 or more people on average at every demo this week," said Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz. It was more than she expected. "I was lying awake on Sunday night thinking 'What if no one comes?' Then we got to Buckland Mall and there were 75 senior citizens lined up early to try to check it out."

Last week's demonstrations were the culmination of a long, much-delayed voting-reform process. In 2004, Bysiewicz's office issued a Request For Proposal, or RFP, to voting machine vendors in order to begin replacing Connecticut's approximately 3000 voting machines, and to complywith the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which established standards on voter procedures. The state hopes to have the process completed by Jan. 1, the deadline set by Congress for HAVA compliance.

One style of machine was conspicuously absent from the statewide display, in spite of the actions of voter advocacy group True VoteCT. The group, which formed about a year ago, is a coalition of computer science professionals and others with expertise in issues relating to voting technology.

Through their research, the group's members determined that optical scan technology was the best voting system for Connecticut. Optical scan systems work similarly to SAT scoring. A voter would mark up a dots on a form similar to the one familiar to anyone who's taken a multiple-choice test in the last 30 years.

"Optical scans have been around for a long time," True VoteCT organizer Ralph Morelli said. "It's a proven, mature technology."

Morelli, a tenured professor of computer science who has worked at Trinity College for 20 years, is a strong advocate of optical scan technology. He says the optical scan automatic paper trail would ensure transparency, avoid programming glitches that can occur with other machines, and cost less than those touted by the state.

The members of True VoteCT claim that Bysiewicz has largely ignored the group's optical scan recommendation throughout the process, and say the bids she requested are for "Direct Record Electronic (DRE)" machines, or e-voting machines. Bysiewicz and her staff have repeatedly denied that they are excluding any technology, particularly optical scan.

Morelli and other members of his group have made their concerns known to Bysiewicz. In addition to attending public question-and-answer sessions and round-table discussions of voting reform, True VoteCT members have sent several dispatches to Bysiewicz's office (which may be found on thewww.truevotect.org website).

On Sept. 19, Morelli sent a letter to Bysiewicz, asking her to reconsider optical scan technology and strongly recommended that she look into one particular machine called the Automark.

In Bysiewicz's reply, dated Oct. 5, the secretary noted that the group had consistently lauded Automark. Questioning the group's independent credentials, she refused to meet with members of True Vote on the grounds that they were endorsing the technology.

"Although you assert your organization is a 'non-profit, non-partisan advocacy group' without 'any kind of relationship with voting machine vendors,' the bulk of your letter is devoted to extolling the virtues of a single product by a single manufacturer, the Automark by ES&S," Bysiewicz's letter states.

Morelli and his fellow True VoteCT member Rich Sivel laughed when asked if they were shills for Automark.

"No one in the group has any interest in the company. No one in the group has any stock in the company. And in addition, we have a healthy skepticism about the technology," Sivel said.

A copy of Bysiewicz's response was sent by someone to Trinity College president Jim Jones. Morelli's letter was not written on college letterhead, and Morelli identified himself as a member of True VoteCT, not as a Trinity professor. He included his business card in the envelope, he says, so that he could be easily contacted.

Bysiewicz said she understood the inclusion of the business card to mean Morelli was speaking as a representative of the college. Morelli said he was surprised that the letter had been copied to Jones.

"I asked [President Jones] if he knew the secretary -- I assumed that's why she might have copied him on the letter," Morelli said. "He said that he didn't know her, and that we should be applauded for working on the issue."

When asked if her office routinely sends copies of letters to the bosses of her correspondents, Bysiewicz said, "That's something you'd have to ask my communication office."

DMV Technology

2007-12-07T17:21:00.000-08:00

Identify Yourself
New Connecticut DMV technologies cause worries
Hartford Advocate Feb. 10, 2005

On Jan. 11, Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Gary DeFilippo sent out a media advisory concerning steps the DMV is taking to reform the agency. Two bullet points briefly addressed potentially troubling technological changes the agency is undertaking.

The first said the DMV would begin performing "high-tech match-up[s] of faces in its license file to determine if the same face is on a license or if a different one is there." The second said a new document-authentication "proofing process using state-of-the-art technology will be used to determine the validity of passports, out-of-state driver's licenses, military identifications, etc."

The aim is to "combat both the issuance of licenses in criminal matters of identity theft and to illegal aliens or those without the proper immigration and naturalization documentation."

DMV spokesman Bill Seymour confirmed that the DMV is seriously upgrading its hardware.

"We're going to do a couple different kinds of face match-ups. The first kind of face match-up is where we compare your face now to your face when you came in the last time to have your renewal," Seymour explained. "The next match up we're going to do is faces to addresses in our database. That way we can make sure we have one face for one address and not the same face for multiple addresses."

Viisage, a Littleton, Mass., security technologies firm, is supplying the DMV with face-recognition technology (FRT). Viisage has manufactured Connecticut driver's licenses since 2002 -- presumably the license photo library can be easily navigated.

Proponents of FRT believe a face can identity a person as accurately as a fingerprint or a DNA sample. Viisage will provide the DMV with biometric technology that allows for searches and matches of faces in databases.

Viisage is one of several companies at the forefront of biometric technology. According to the website of the Biometric Consortium, a U.S government-funded group that records and studies the technology's development, "biometrics are automated methods of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic. Among the features measured are face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice."

Biometric technology digitizes and analyzes faces, voices and other identifying features. Then the data is converted into a numeric code that becomes, to a computer, as unique and instantly recognizable as a Social Security number.

In theory, biometric face-matching can be instantaneous and precise. A computer can read a line of code and match it to another line. The problem is that biometric technology currently seems about as exact a science as phrenology; it failed in three of the most public tests it has faced.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans wanted science-fiction solutions to problems caused by terrorists whose weapons are barely above the level of cavemen, and were willing to sacrifice privacy for them. Biometric technology became white hot. Stock prices skyrocketed for companies involved with biometrics. The first day of stock trading following the Sept. 11 attacks saw a 90 percent increase in the value of Viisage's share price.

Shortly after Sept. 11, Viisage CEO Tom Colatosti notoriously claimed that biometric face-recognition technology could have been a factor in preventing the Sept. 11 attacks. "If our technology had been deployed, the likelihood is [the terrorists] would have been recognized," he told a group of reporters.

But even before Sept. 11, the United States was pushing biometrics technology really hard on both the federal and state levels. Tests of the technology, before and after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, did not turn out very well.

In a summer 2001 experiment in Ybor City, an entertainment district in Tampa, Florida, the whole city was put under surveillance. Hidden video cameras recorded activities in public spaces like open-air shopping malls and outdoor restaurants. Law enforcement officials used biometric technology provided by a New Jersey company called Visionics (which would later fold into Identix). The experiment was fraught with false positives. The most dramatic is the story of Ron Milliron. According to the St. Petersburg Times:

"Rob Milliron, then 32, wound up on a surveillance camera one day while at lunch in Ybor City. Tampa police used his photo to demonstrate the system to local news media. A woman in Tulsa, Okla., saw his picture and fingered him as her ex-husband who was wanted on felony child neglect charges. Three police officers showed up at Milliron's construction job site, asking if he was a wanted man. Turns out he had never married, never had kids, never even been to Oklahoma."

The Ybor City program was shut down in August 2003. Ultimately, no arrests were made because of the surveillance. Local cops deemed the experiment a failure.

"It was of no benefit to us, and it served no real purpose," Capt. Bob Guidara of the Tampa police told the Associated Press after the experiment was shuttered.

In 2002 Viisage took part in a Super Bowl biometric experiment, scanning the faces of people at the game, allegedly looking for terrorists. At first, the experiment was deemed a modest success -- 19 suspects were fingered due to the technology. No arrests were made because of the surveillance, though.

Then, Viisage and rival security technology firm Identix went head-to-head in a study at Logan Airport that lasted from January to April of 2002. Working with a database of 40 employees, the competing companies tried to identify faces in the crowds. That test had a reported failure rate of 40 percent.

"This is a high-tech Band-Aid that's not going to make us any safer, and will give us a false sense of security," Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Technology and Liberty, told the Boston Globe after the results of the Logan Airport tests came to light. "As someone who flew 100,000 miles last year, I don't want to risk my safety on this technology."

Applying biometric technology to photographs -- how the DMV is using the technology -- is likely to be a more accurate use of the approach than scanning faces in crowds. With photographs, particularly institutional identification photographs, the circumstances are far more controlled than in the case of videotaped people in a crowd. All the backgrounds are the same, faces are the same proportion and caught at the same angle. Crowd photography variables like lighting and shadows are eliminated.

However, judging from other reports on biometrics, there are still more factors to consider.

Last December, the New York Times reported that international passport guidelines advised people posing for passports that, "only closed-mouth, 'neutral' expressions will be allowed," so that they could be read by biometrics instruments. Throwing a bone to the irrepressibly cheerful, the guidelines state that a "smile with closed jaw is allowed, but is not preferred." So don't you dare smile with an open mouth unless you want the terrorists to win.

The assumption is that while faces change as people age, the mathematical value of their features stays fundamentally the same over time. Once the biometric features of the face are determined, the theory holds, they can be used as identification throughout an individual's life. Critics argue that this premise is fundamentally flawed, claiming that skin diseases and aging can throw biometric data out of whack.

In light of last year's scandals at the agency, few argue that the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles needed restructuring and reform. But it's not clear how much face-recognition technology and biometrics directly addresses those problems.

In August 2004, an employee at the Norwalk DMV was charged with accepting bribes in exchange for providing illegal immigrants with driver's licenses. Further investigations uncovered over 400 other fraudulent licenses issued by that employee in 2003 alone. Three DMV workers have been charged in connection with the investigation.

The scam the DMV employees worked was notably low-tech. The operation relied on corrupt insiders working at DMV offices and a lack of supervision of those employees. A high-tech scan of faces in a database provides for more accountability, as does the agency's implementation of biometric fingerprint-scanning systems for recording employee use of machines.

But still, the question of motivation lingers. Viisage provides identification work for six other states' DMVs. A recent Associated Press article listed Rhode Island, North Carolina, Delaware, Illinois, Oklahoma and another state that declined to be identified because of security concerns, as customers. Viisage also works on U.S. passports and, according to the Viisage website, provides services for the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, several city law enforcement agencies and, curiously, for Pakistan's national identification program.

Despite repeated inquiries to Viisage and the public relations firm that represents the company, I was not able to speak with anyone representing the company. As a result, I don't know whether Viisage maintains a central database of photographs and biometric data or if its clients create their own using Viisage's technology.

If Viisage controls the database, well, that's quite a bit of technology in the hands of a private company. If it doesn't, it's easy to imagine how several databases that share the same technology could be linked up.

Of course, Viisage is not the only company that works with biometrics or face-recognition technology, nor is it the largest. Firms such as Identix and Digimarc are also major players in biometric security.

Since Sept. 11, the idea of a national identification card and information database has been floated and rejected several times. All of these unconnected pools of centralized information, though, could easily be channeled together after a national crisis.

Sarah Silverman Review

2007-09-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

Hartford Advocate Sept. 27, 2007

It can be hard to say why something is funny, but sometimes it's just as difficult describing why something isn't funny. In both instances you run the risk of looking humorless, uptight or obtuse.

Take the curious case of Sarah Silverman, whose Comedy Central show The Sarah Silverman Program is entering its second season. She's a dirty alt comedienne, endorsed by some of the greatest comedy forces of the day (David Cross, Vice Magazine). Respecting publications, from Vanity Fair to The New Yorker, have lavished her with praise. By saying she's not funny, you risk looking like a prude, or someone out of touch with the comedy zeitgeist of the moment.

But Silverman has never been and never will be funny. She's like Jenny McCarthy, except less blonde and more wry. Like McCarthy, Silverman's an avid student of four of the most wretched forms of comedy: fart jokes, fake dumbness, zany faces and bad puns. Of course, The New Yorker would never run a glowing review of McCarthy under the headline "Quiet Depravity."

Of course, she's not exactly Jenny McCarthy. Silverman is good looking, but approachable, so dudes think they have a chance with her and women don't hate her for looking like a cartoon version of sexual attractiveness. But more importantly, Silverman's vapidness is presented ironically. Even when a joke flat-lines — which happens constantly in her stand-up act and television show — it doesn't really flat-line. It was meant to flat-line, and that's the gag.

The fake filth performs the same function. Silverman and her writers seem to believe that a joke doesn't have to be well crafted or even make sense if it has the appearance of being potentially insulting. Let's pick an issue and display horrible taste about it.

It makes for frustrating television. The first episode of the second season of her show contains a key scene where she fondly remembers past abortions. I wasn't insulted. I was impatient, waiting for the jokes to start. A couple of great comic talents are wasted on the show, including Brian Posehn and Jay Johnston, who, like Silverman, got their start on HBO's Mr. Show. They're miscast and typecast, respectively — Posehn's big galoot persona is muted playing a domesticated gay man and Johnston plays an awkward, stiff cop like he did on several Mr. Show sketches and episodes of Arrested Development.

In her stand-up, Silverman acts like an eight-year-old who just learned her first swear word. On the show, she also adopts a faux-naive persona, but adds an unhealthy dollop of faux cluelessness.

It seems like a female variation on Chris Elliot's destructive idiot man-child shtick from Get a Life. That show worked because it was a dark deconstruction of the then-dominant family sitcom genre. The Sarah Silverman Program isn't a parody of anything — it's a platform for absurdist edgeless "edgy" jokes.
Even when the show wades into a deeply fraught issue, like abortion, it's just an excuse for subpar jokes about how clueless Silverman's character is. It's both as subvervise and pleasant as a migraine.

Right Wing Counter Protest

2007-09-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

Where Eagles Dare
The Counter-protest Group The Gathering Of Eagles Cause A Ruckus As Bush Comes To New London's Coast Guard Ceremonies.
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate May 31 2007 (No longer online)

The first encounter I had with right wing protest group the Gathering of Eagles was watching an Eagle upbraid young, female demonstrators outside the New London Coast Guard Academy.

The demonstrators had come to protest President Bush’s visit as commencement speaker last Monday. The heavy-set man with a personal PA system challenged the “hippy girls’” loyalty to their “homo,” “girly-man” boyfriends. Later, he accused the anti-war protesters of getting paid to attend the May 22 protest. An anti-war protester yelled that he paid $20 for gas to get there. The Gathering of Eagles member suggested he “should have driven a hybrid vehicle.”

He ran out of steam, one-liner-wise, after that, but he and other less-light-on-their-feet Eagles with megaphones and speakers droned on for the next hour or so, including a long droning “swim to Cuba” chant during a Latino anti-war speaker’s speech.

Before the protest, the group’s Web site, gatheringofeagles.org, said the group planned to “welcome the families of the graduating Coast Guard academy” and “support … these families and graduating cadets.” The group, at least nominally, was worried the Coast Guard graduation would be unfairly disrupted by the anti-war rally planned by the ANSWER coalition and other anti-war groups, including Veterans for Peace and Connecticut Opposes the War.

“We believe that ANSWER’s protest was very ill-timed, and a very bad location. … For ANSWER to protest the President on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of these people’s lives so far, that was shameful and very disgraceful,” Connecticut Gathering of Eagles organizer Jim Bancroft said. (Turns out he shouldn’t have been so worried — the Presidential motorcade avoided the protest. Neither the demonstration nor the counter-demonstration impacted the ceremony.)

Bancroft claimed an early remark by an anti-war speaker changed the Eagle’s gathering’s purpose from a celebration of the cadets to a hectoring of the anti-war demonstration.

“We were there to welcome the President. When we got there, the first thing that happened was someone called us baby killers,” Bancroft said, adding that the slur was stated sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m.

His claim seems extremely unlikely, in light of an ANSWER’s spokesperson’s version of the timeline.

“Our sound permit didn’t start until eight. We might have done a sound check, but they would have just heard ‘Check, check,’” ANSWER organizer Tahnee Stair said.

Elliot Adams, a Vietnam veteran and the president of Veterans for Peace, attended the rally, and said he viewed the Eagles with resigned sadness.

“I feel sorry for them. A number of them are vets, and I understand the misplaced anger associated with [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder],” Adams said. “With PTSD, you have what’s called misplaced anger that goes off in all directions. It’s a real common thing.”

He added, “Also, they believe in the American dream, and they don’t just see that we’re losing it.”

The Insulting Bartender

2007-09-25T08:22:00.000-07:00

Smart answers to stupid drinks
Originally appeared on WOOF.com, a long-defunct website I was an assistant editor for, sometime in 1999. Was reprinted in Think Magazine later that year.

Want to figure out who your date really is? What they order may tell you more than you think. New Jersey native Adam Bulger explains.

Rum and Coke: The drink's okay, but it's ordered by so many eighteen-to-twenty-two's that they should change the name to "My First Highball" and have a Mattel logo on the glass.

Scotch and Soda: It's not 1960s, your friends are not named Sammy, Dino, or Frank; and that whole Swingers retro look is getting tired.

Cosmopolitan: Remember that time when you were working the door at the Limelight and you wouldn't let me in because I was wearing sneakers? Go to hell.

Sex on the Beach: What? You got an exotic dancer waiting for her drink back at your table, or something?

Bourbon: You're a good 'ole boy, never meaning no harm, but, apparently, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow. If I were born with a name like Cletus or Rosco, I'd be sucking down a hundred-fifty proof liquor, too.

Tequila Shots: Congratulations on turning twenty-one. Don't let any of your frat brothers throw up on my shoes.

Budweiser: Whassuuuuuuuuuup? You're a sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Here's a new concept for you. It's called other brands of beer. Look into it.

Mint Julep: The War's over. The South lost. Get over it. Better hurry back to your table, looks like your date, Blanche DuBois, is getting overcome by the vapors.

[Any drinks whose titles include Freeze or Electric:
Dude, you've been spending way too much time at TGI Fridays.]

Gin and Tonic: The G&T was invented by British colonialists when they were treating malaria with quinine-spiked tonic. The Limeys added gin to make the combination palatable. So what does that say about you? It says that you're a pale-skinned imperialist and the sun never sets over your hangover.

Margarita: Okay, fine. Whatever. Just understand that the first guy who puts a Jimmy Buffett song on the jukebox is gonna end up in the basement with duct tape over his mouth.

Jello, Body, and Test Tube Shots: You enjoy drinking, incoherently hitting on girls, and sleeping in closets. You hope you won't be the first of your dorm-mates to pass out. The last time you passed out first they pulled the old ''hand in warm water'' trick on you.

Jagermeister: No, I don't want to hear the story about how you lost your teeth, and no, my refusal does not constitute "fighting words."

White Wine Spritzer: Without looking at you, hearing you, or knowing anything about you, I am supremely confident that I can kick your ass.

Sam Adams: Obviously, you're a dude in your mid to late twenties and you're either wearing a suit or some kind of corporate casual equivilent. You're an investment banker in your mid-twenties and you're nervous about what beer to order in public. You have a subscription to Playboy, but you think about men when you masturbate.

Long Island Iced Tea: You cats from Long Island sure do get wasted. Does that come from having to put up with Billy Joel and Rosie O'Donnell?

Whiskey Sour: You're an old man who has been drinking steadily since the mid-eighties. You smoke Camel straights and like to get into fights with strangers. And could you please come home? Mom's getting worried.

CT Murderball

2007-09-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

Connecticut Murderball
Hartford Advocate December 28 2006 (No longer online)
By Adam Bulger

Depending on how you read the situation, the Connecticut Jammers are either having a bad year or a great one.

The state’s wheelchair rugby team’s one-and-nine record isn’t impressive, but other factors have to be considered. Like how the team’s roster has swelled to 10 players thanks to recent mainstream exposure to the sport, and some of the team’s troubles are explained by the addition of players new to the game.

“My team is fairly new and fairly young. I have a bunch of new players, which is good, but it’s going to take us a while to get back up to speed,” Jammers coach Bud Harvey said. “Some of my older players are starting to retire. We’ve lost a couple of experienced players and gained a couple of new players. We’re in a building year.”

Earlier this month, the annual Connecticut Classic Wheelchair Rugby Tournament was held in Wallingford. Four teams — the Jammers, the New York Jets, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Casco Bay Navigators — competed in a six-game round robin tournament.

The Jammers took the court for their second game of the day at around 1:30 (I missed their first game which was played at the ungodly Saturday hour of 9 a.m.) to play the Philly team. Techno music played over the PA system as the 10-man team rolled up and down the indoor basketball court in a series of drills.

Soon the game got underway. Several of the players moved the angled wheels on their specially designed wheelchairs with surprising dexterity and speed. The metal and plastic plates covering the chairs’ spokes clanged loudly when one player battered another with their chair, and the audience responded with concerned gasps.

The concern is understandable. Quad rugby is played exclusively by people with disabilities affecting both their arms and legs. The players themselves think the concern is unfounded. Sure, quad rugby is a high-impact sport, and collisions not only happen, they’re encouraged. But the injuries are mostly minor and the game’s benefits outweigh the minor risks.

“You’ll see a scraped elbow here and there, but the sport’s pretty safe,” Jammer Rick Farmiglietti said. “I’m usually good to get knocked out of the chair about once a tournament.”

In quad rugby, a player scores by carrying the ball through the goal. Moving the ball across the court, players must dribble or pass the ball every 10 seconds.

The Jammers seemed overmatched by the Philadelphia team. It looked like the Jammers were a little lost on the court. Four of the team’s 10 players were rookies, including Clinton Cowen; the team hasn’t quite had a chance to gel yet. For two of the latest additions to the team, Joseph Stramando and Jon Sigworth, it was the second and first times they had played in competitive games, respectively.

Sigworth, a freshman at Wesleyan University and a former extreme unicyclist, broke his neck while mountain biking in northern India earlier this year. After finding out about the team through Villardi, he was anxious to play.

“I had my accident early this February. I went to a practice wearing my neck collar. They said I could roll around in a chair for a while, but that I couldn’t play until I got my neck collar off. I was like ‘Darn it.’ But I’ve been playing with them since July,” Sigworth said.

Unlike the other players on the team, Stramondo is not a quadriplegic. The Trinity College administrator and voting member of the state’s Independent Living Council has a rare form of dwarfism called micromelic dysplasia, and uses a motorized wheelchair. His fellow Independent Living Council member Jim Quick encouraged him to join the team.

“My Disability is something I’ve lived with all my life, and organized sport is something I haven’t had the opportunity to do, and especially not organized sport that’s this exciting,” Stramondo said.

Quad rugby was invented in Canada in 1977. While other sports like wheelchair basketball were already established, quad rugby — or murderball, as it was called originally — was the first sport that allowed quadriplegic athletes of all functioning abilities to have important roles on both offense and defense. Despite the name, it has little in common with traditional rugby.

“Rugby and wheelchair rugby are totally different as far as the rules go,” International Quad Rugby Association official John Bishop said. “The name ‘rugby’ was chosen because of the similar camaraderie and the aggressiveness of the sport.”

The game spread like a virus to countries all across the globe, and now is considered the fastest-growing wheelchair sport in the world, played in 26 countries and a featured part of the Paralympic Games.

The game made its way to Connecticut in the early ’90s when a group of dedicated wheelchair athletes started playing ramshackle games outside Gaylord rehab hospital in Wallingford.

“We were practicing on a tennis court in the parking lot. We were basically using everyday chairs that we would duct tape pieces of wood over the chairs so they wouldn’t fold up when we hit each other,” Jammers co-founder Jimmy Quick said.

Quick added: “It was pretty gruesome in the early days.”

Quick, the former president of the Connecticut chapter of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, was a member of the national wheelchair rugby team in the mid ’90s. This season marks his return to the sport after a five-year hiatus.

Gaylord rehab hospital has been active with the team since its inception.

“We’ve sponsored the team for about 10 or 11 years. We sponsor the team financially through fund-raising we do through the sports association,” Gaylord Hospital Sports Association Coordinator Todd Munn said.

Despite Gaylord hospital’s support, the team is currently looking for a place to play.

“We need a gym and we need storage. Ideally, it would be a basketball court on a Saturday or a Sunday for three or four hours,” Jammers coach Bud Harvey said.

The sport is currently enjoying a surge of popular interest thanks to the acclaimed 2005 documentary Murderball . The movie documents the rivalry between the U.S. wheelchair rugby team and Canada’s team. Despite the sport’s Canadian roots, America has traditionally dominated quad rugby. However, when one of America’s star players, the cantankerous Joe Soares, became Canada’s coach after getting cut from America’s team, the Canadian team took the gold medal in 2002. The movie documents Soares and players for the American team preparing for the 2004 paralympic game.

The film is gripping, entertaining, human and at your local Blockbuster right now — rent it immediately. Thanks to its success, the Connecticut Jammers and teams across the country have enjoyed renewed interest among both disabled and able-bodied people.

“Just before the movie came out we were struggling to field a team and have enough athletes that have the spinal cord injury level come out and be on the team. Murderball drummed up a lot of interest among people both injured and not injured,” Munn said.

A review of the film on the Web site quadrugby.com said Murderball “doesn’t dispel myths and stereotypes. It takes big fat bites out of those sugary sweet, pathetic images and stereotypes, chews ’em up and spits ’em out.”

One reason why the movie is so engaging is its frankness. Joe Soares, for instance, comes across as one of the world’s biggest assholes. The honesty makes the film entertaining, but it also makes it more important. There’s a temptation on the part of a lot of able-bodied folks to think of disabled people as saints, or objects of pity. As coach Harvey said, often upon meeting wheelchair-bound people you only see the chair; seeing past the disability and seeing the person is a challenge for a lot of people.

“You’ve got to be able to get over the chair. The instant response is to say ‘look at these poor guys.’ There’s nothing poor about these guys,” Harvey said. “They are tough and they don’t cut each other any slack. They’re human beings and deserve and demand to be treated like human beings.”

In the recent tournament, the Jammers and the other teams’ players didn’t look like saints. In fact, many of the goateed, tattooed crew wouldn’t look out of place closing down a disreputable dive bar on any given Tuesday night. The guys I talked to are really good dudes, and aspects of their lives are heroic, I suppose. But they’re not saints. They’re, for lack of a better classification, normal dudes who happen to be in chairs. “People are always like ‘you’re a saint, or you’re an inspiration’ — I hate it when people say I’m an inspiration,” Jammer team member Joseph Stramondo said. “I’m an inspiration because I can wipe my ass? Thanks. I don’t want to be your inspiration; I want to be your equal.”

Several members of the Jammers told me they believed quad rugby helps to shift people’s perceptions because it’s an aggressive game with a sexy allure.

“I think the game breaks a lot of barriers down because they see people trying to have fun with sports like everybody else and being crazy like everybody else,” Quick said. “We aren’t china dolls. We’re not going to break.”

Immigration Rally

2007-09-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

The Immigrant Throng
An Anti-immigration Rally Meets An Immigration Rights Rally.
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate August 17, 2006

The anti-illegal immigration rally held at the Capitol building in Hartford on August 8 was political spectacle of the purest sort, as was the counter demonstration organized by local activists. Held in the shadow of the state’s Democratic primary, the event was coordinated by part of a national anti-illegal immigration group called the 21st Century Paul Revere Riders. Like the Minutemen, the riders are opposed to illegal immigration, only they express that opposition by traveling the country on motorcycles.

Hartford was their 40th, or maybe 41st stop — event organizer Frosty Wooldridge wasn’t sure. It was the first time the counter-protestors had encountered them, though, and they took advantage of it, outnumbering the Riders two to one.

The counter-demonstrators had gathered at Minuteman Park outside the Armory when I arrived around 11:15. I recognized a lot of faces from other demonstrations. They were seasoned veterans, and had come prepared. Seven “peace keepers,” who were there to marshal the protesters, wore bright yellow vests and talked with members of the crowd. They had professional-looking signs and banners, along with immigrants’ rights literature and shirts.

Organizations ranging from Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) to the Connecticut Chapter of NOW endorsed the rally. Maggie Russell of Latinos Contra La Guerra (Latinos against the War) was partially inspired to protest the event by her parents, who are immigrants.

“A lot of groups in Hartford are enraged. We live in such a diverse city,” Russell said. “It’s filled with immigrants, from the North End to the South End.”

Hartford activist Jerimarie Liesegang, who came along with Queers without Borders, said there were parallels between immigrant struggles and those of gay people.

“The issue affects a lot of people in the communities. There are gay people in the immigrant community and immigrants in the gay community,” Leisegang said, noting that the protest represented “general bigotry.”

There was evident energy in the crowd, and they looked ready to face the Riders and pronounce their counter message.

“By no means am I saying that they don’t have a right to talk. I’m just going to talk louder,” Russell said.

The counter-rally was primarily organized by Peter Goselin of the National Lawyers Guild’s Connecticut Chapter. Thanks to a tip off from local activists who monitor anti-immigration web sites, he heard about the event. The loose-knit coalition protesting the event formed quickly.

I asked him if anyone in his coalition brought a chopper. He apparently didn’t think the question was as funny as I thought it was.

“This whole business of motorcycles is they’re trying to make a fake working-class statement. But they’re not working people,” Goselin said. “These are people who are able to take the summer off.”

At a quarter after 12, no motorcyclists had shown up, and it looked like maybe none would. The six police officers stationed by the north entrance to the Capitol looked bored and drank Gatorade. Just as I was working out an angle about a motorcycle immigration rally that didn’t happen, Earl Jackson and Bruce Coolbeth pulled into the Capitol building’s parking lot on their bikes. Jackson, who wore a yellow T-shirt reading “no amnesty for illegals,” had heard about the rally through an XM Satellite radio show hosted by Libertarian Rollye James. Coolbeth, whose arms and neck were covered in tattoos, had “South Vietnam University” written on his bike windshield.

“I’m more socially liberal than you’d probably expect,” Jackson said. “It’s not so much about immigration as it is about border security. If your basement is flooded, you should plug up the hole first.”

Waiting for the motorcycles to show, I walked back to the counter-protest. On Capitol Ave, I saw Diane and Bob Black and Larainne Bellito walking towards the Capitol building holding anti-immigration signs. The trio, who looked as suburban as a minivan, told me they came from Danbury, where they were a part of an anti-immigration group with hundreds of members.

“Obviously, not everyone shows up at every rally, because they have to work,” Diane Black said.

As we spoke, the counter-protest marched by, and the Danbury group’s comments were lost in the din of megaphones, chanting and drumming.

“These are the people who call us racists because we’re trying to protect our country,” Bellito said.

Maybe it was the sun, but when I met Frosty Wooldridge all I could think was that he looked like Will Ferell in some Grizzly Adams-themed comedy sketch. He wore an American flag bandana on his head and a leather support belt around his waist. His face was red from sun and wind, and he seemed a little rattled. Before handing me a list of six illegal immigration bullet points he wanted to impart, he tried to recite them from memory. This led into a great exchange where I would tell him he was on four, not three, and so forth.

“We don’t know the intentions of millions of illegals. We don’t know their terrorist intentions; we don’t know what kind of diseases they’re carrying,” Wooldridge said when he got the order right long enough to stay on point.

I asked him what diseases illegal immigrants were carrying over the border. After a short, but dramatic pause, Wooldridge blurted out “leprosy,” like it had only just then occurred to him.

Which, of course, did absolutely nothing to kill the Ferrell comparison. Incidentally, John Shanley, professor of medicine and director of infectious disease at the UConn Health Center, said that while leprosy does still exist and is found in immigrants from South and Latin America, it is far less contagious and easily treated than its scary Biblical reputation implies. Shanley said tuberculosis, the other disease Wooldridge accused illegal immigrants of infecting Americans with, presented far more of a health risk.

Wooldridge and his crew started the rally. Until they plugged in a megaphone they were in danger of getting drowned out by the counter-protesters, who had finished their march and gathered nearby. The anti-immigration people mostly wore jeans and T-shirts, with the notable exception of one gentleman who wore an Uncle Sam suit over an Iwantyououtofmycountry.com T-shirt.

The speakers were more boring than scary or funny, with the exception of Rick Chiesa, who ripped out a Larry the Cable Guy “git-r-done” during his speech.

Speaking after the event, Goselin cautioned me against writing Wooldridge and his group off as a collection of buffoons. Goselin said that in his writings and public statements, Wooldridge has dehumanized illegal immigrants, portraying them as scum and carriers of disease.

“This is not the language of immigration reform. This is the language of eugenics. This is the language of the master race. That’s what Frosty Wooldridge is,” Goselin said.

Sin City Law review

2007-09-24T16:59:00.000-07:00

Viva Las Violence
New Sundance documentary series explores the consequences of crime in America's playground
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate September 6, 2007

What happens in Vegas does not always stay in Vegas. Debt, STDs and criminal charges travel. As the new Sundance Channel reality series Sin City Law implies, a more honest marketing campaign for the city of sin might be billing it "the unhappiest place on earth."

The show takes place in the innards of the Clark County criminal court system. The gleaming surface of Las Vegas is present mainly in short shots that cut between scenes, with glitz providing ironic contrast. The eight-part documentary series focuses on four notorious court cases, and while the courthouse is strikingly well designed, the show's primary aesthetic is unadorned honesty.

The series doesn't gradually wade to progressively more intense tragedy, it tosses the viewer into the deep end with the first case, which follows Beau and Monique Maestas, siblings accused of stabbing a three-year-old girl to death and paralyzing the girl's 10-year-old sister in a crystal meth-induced mania.

I don't throw around the word "evil" a lot, but stabbing children over crank? That's pretty much evil distilled to its most petty and human form.

The Maestases seem like Jerry Springer guests, poor and poorly educated, with misplaced priorities and a hair trigger sense of indignity. They're products of a jaw-droppingly awful childhoods, illustrated by the comments their sister makes about family visits to their incarcerated father. Looking at a photograph, she casually says "this is when we visited him and he put his hand up my shirt."

Beau pleads guilty, and, in an attempt to save his sister, claims that he full responsibility for the attack. However, evidence indicates that Monique shared responsibility.

The moral center in this first trial is public defender Alzora Jackson, who represents Monique. A soulful black woman in her 50s, Jackson not only provides Monique the best defense possible, but also helps to pick out an outfit for the accused child murderer to wear during her hearing. She also gives Monique extremely good advice, advice that seems to have unfortunately come several years too late, when she tells Monique that during the trial "you have to control your impulses."

Interspersing news footage and images from newspaper articles, Sin City Law touches on the darkness at the center of the modern soul more than any reality show. The series is an onslaught of pure sober truth. In the second case, Pascual Lozano's mother puzzles over why her surrogate son would rather be executed than rat out his fellow gang members during his trial for the 2002 murder of a 9-year-old girl.

The crimes of Sin City Law aren't reenacted or illustrated with fancy graphics or edits. Sin City Law is mostly set in courts. The bare bones presentation of emotional subject matter makes the show all the more effective. Attorneys argue the fate of a murder in a back room of the court where cameras weren't allowed. Instead, they film a woman wiping computer screens with the attorney's conversation playing as an audio track. It's a surreal and chilling moment.

Horse the Band review

2007-09-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

Horse the Band
A Natural Death
(Combat)
Hartford Advocate August 9, 2007

I haven't heard such a fluid mix of cheesy synthesizers and death metal guitars since, I don't know, either Andrew WK or maybe never. Songs start out like the music from Contra or a John Carpenter soundtrack, then break into silly death metal mosh jams. The dudes in the band are clearly skilled musicians. The keyboards, guitars and drums tightly synch in a manner that's almost disconcerting. The sounds themselves don't really mesh, which is actually kind of fun. While the music's not always listenable, these guys deserve gold stars for originality and balls. — Adam Bulger

Chthonic Article

2007-09-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

Made in Taiwan
Taiwanese black metal band Chthonic comes to Hartford, again
Thursday, September 13, 2007

Black metal bands aren't knocking down my door, asking how to stand out from the crowd. That's too bad. If they did, I would give some very useful advice. Like make sure you're from someplace weird, like Taiwan, and then get involved with a political cause that only subscribers to the Economist would understand.

Musically, I'd suggest including spooky atmospheric songs in between the over-the-top operatic metal ones. Or employing a native folk instrument that no metal head in the world has ever heard of into the music. And, lastly, having their band's name begin with a silent "ch." All of that advice and more was taken by Taiwanese melodic black metal quartet Chthonic (pronounced "thonic"). On their seven studio recordings and in their hundreds of live shows, the 10-year-old band employs many seemingly standard black metal moves, and combines them with a distinct Taiwanese flavor that makes everything seem novel.

Their onstage makeup and outfits, which at first glance appears similar to King Diamond or Kiss style, are derived from Taiwanese Taoist priests and pay tribute to the Eight Generals, face-painted figures that figure in southern Chinese ritual dance. And their lyrics fulfill requirements for black metal, but also have a Taiwanese twist. While their Scandinavian black metal compatriots sing about the devil and Vikings, Chthonic's lyrics are about the conflicts between ghosts and gods in traditional Taiwanese folk stories.

"It would be ridiculous for an Asian to write about Vikings or the anti-Christ. We write about Taiwanese mythology and folklore, and we think that's the right way," lead singer Freddy Lim said.

Chthonic shares musical DNA with other leading metal groups. At their heaviest, the guitars are fierce, the drums are battering and Lim's vocals swing from guttural growls to stratosphere-soaring screams. It's loudness polished to a high shine in the mold of Emperor and Enslaved. It's the definition of "Ozz-festian."

But their quieter, spookier sounds are what sets them apart. Their sounds are unique to the genre, notably their use of the folk stringed instrument called a hena, or erhu, which adds a haunting element to their music.

"I was looking for the right instrument for a melody that couldn't be played on a keyboard or a guitar. The core meaning of those melodies are sad, and the hena fit perfectly," Lim said.

They're playing Hartford twice this month; their first was an intimate show last week at the Webster Underground, and the next will be on Sept. 21, opening for Cradle of Filth on the Webster's main stage. The shows are part of Chthonic's Unlimited tour, across America and Canada.

"We're going to play unlimited to the end," Lim said.

The tour name refers to their Taiwanese roots and the message they hope to convey. "The second meaning is to let the fans know that Taiwan is still limited by the United Nations," Lim said.

Taiwan has a thorny political identity. The island, located off the coast of China, has one of the world's 20 largest economies. Self-ruled since 1949, the country had a seat on the UN by the name "Republic of China" until 1971, when the Chinese government claimed sovereignty over Taiwan and threatened military force if it tried to secede. Applications to have Taiwan recognized as an independent nation by the UN have been repeatedly denied, most recently this year.

"Taiwan is as independent as America or Canada. We vote for our own government, we have our own army, everything," Lim said. "The only difference is that we have a country that always wants to block our way, which is China."

Metal is often a bastion of nihilism, but Lim is at the forefront of a political movement. He's active in the movement within Taiwan that seeks recognition as a country independent from China. Lim organized a huge a concert in Taiwan for the cause. On Sept. 16, Chthonic plays a New York show to coincide with the beginning of the Sept. 18 UN session.

The Taiwanese government is evidently grateful, as they've footed some of the bill for the tour. Also, Taiwanese show support in other ways, attending concerts and making sure the band doesn't go hungry. Lim said the gifts of Taiwanese food were overwhelming.Their tour bus was overloaded with Taiwanese delicacies.

"Taiwanese Americans always attend our shows. Maybe one percent of them are metal heads. There are some older people. At some of our early shows they tried to get close to the stage and were smashed by the mosh pit," Lim said.

The rocking call for Taiwanese independence has garnered attention from surprising sources. Articles about the band's politics have appeared in high-end daily newspapers like the Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune, and the band has been interviewed about its political beliefs on National Public Radio and at the National Press Club.

The focus on geopolitics sometimes frustrates the band — they'd prefer the music to speak for itself — but they understand that it's necessary.

"This tour is a musical tour and the biggest priority for us is our musical career. But if we can't join the international society, we have no other choice," Lim said. "If a French musician or a German musician suffered the same thing, their citizens would treat them like us."

Ex-Offender Reform Article

2007-09-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

Lockdown
Activists seek more help with substance abuse and job placement for those behind bars
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate September 20, 2007

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, the Connecticut legislature held a special session to discuss the state's criminal justice program in light of the brutal July triple murder in Cheshire. Lawmakers explored the state's ability to share information between law enforcement agencies, and considered proposals about three-strikes laws and increased prison construction. An important voice, advocates say, was missing from the discussion.

"The people who are not part of this dialogue are the people who know something about what it would really take to prevent people coming out of jail from re-offending," Peter Goselin, coordinator of the Connecticut chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, said. "Those are people who have been through that process."

An ad hoc collection of social justice groups, spearheaded by three-month-old ex-offender rights organization the Clean Slate Committee, spoke on behalf of the currently and formerly incarcerated at a press conference on Sept. 11 outside the Legislative Office Building. A part of Connecticut drug policy reform organization A Better Way Foundation, Clean Slate aims to change the way the state treats former offenders.

"They're talking about building more prisons, they're talking about GPS tracking, they're talking about electronic bracelets," Clean Slate's David Samuels said. "Nowhere in that conversation is there any talk about rehabilitating inmates while they're incarcerated."

Connecticut offers tax incentives to companies that hire former convicts and employment services for the formerly incarcerated. Samuels believes they're ineffective. "The policies on the books that supposedly address the issues of discrimination against ex-offenders have no teeth," Samuels said. "There's nothing on the books that provides ex-offenders with the legal avenue of taking an employer to court."

While a handful of Connecticut businesses hire former offenders, nothing legally compels private sector employers to consider former offenders for work. One state legislator noted that when former felons compete in the job market against non-felons, the former felons lose out, perpetuating a cycle of incarceration.

"We have 400 ex-offenders coming into Hartford a month. There are scant services for them and very little housing," State Representative Art Feltman said. "People bounce around and look for work, and get turned down for work because of their criminal records, and everyone is surprised when they end up back in jail. No one should be surprised given how few options they have."

Several former convicts I spoke with had employment problems stemming from their criminal records. Hartford resident Stanley Johnson, 41, who was released from prison in 1992 after serving 18 months of a three-year sentence on drug charges, was recently fired from a job because of his criminal record.

"On the job application, it asked if you've had a felony within the last five years," Johnson said. "I hadn't had one within five years, I applied for the position. Once they realized I had a felony, they let me go."

Johnson said the recent incident was part of a long pattern of employment issues. "I've been back and forth, see-sawing between jobs just because of my background and felonies," Johnson said.

Jeff Sherman, 49, of Bristol, was released in 2002 after serving 11 months for drug charges. At that time, he re-started his house-painting business. While many of his former clients signed on with him again, many were wary of hiring him again because of his criminal background.

"Some people looked at me and figured once a drug addict, always a drug addict. I'm self-employed, but if I went in somewhere and filled out an application, I'm sure it would hold me back," Sherman said.

Under the tenure of current commissioner Theresa Lantz, the Connecticut Department of Correction adopted what's called a re-entry model of corrections, which emphasizes job readiness for convicts.

"Basically, their discharge planning starts the second they get in. They know day one what they're going to need once they leave here so that they won't come back here," DOC representative Stacy Smith said.

Samuels contends that inmates with release dates are often denied access to those programs, in favor of inmates serving life sentences. As a result, Samuels said, many released prisoners encounter difficulties with jobs, putting their parole in jeopardy. "When a person goes to see a [parole officer], the one thing they're going to hear is, 'Find a job or else,'" Samuels said.

James Hanton, 44, of Bridgeport, said that while he was on parole, employment concerns were placed ahead of treating his substance-abuse issues.

"I got into some issues with the director of the halfway house. His issue was work, work, work. My thing was that I had to get into some outpatient treatment, because being clean in prison and being clean out in the world are two different things," Hanton said.

Smith said prisoners are allowed into drug treatment and job-readiness programs based on their records. "Individual histories determine what programs people qualify for," Smith said.

Samuels said the criteria are flawed, claiming that people with release dates, the people who could benefit the most from those programs, are often excluded from them. Hanton, who was imprisoned for a robbery he committed to feed his addiction, was able to get into the tier-two program after a protracted legal battle.

"The Attorney General's office was sitting there, trying to defend their position on this. Basically, the court was going to make a decision in their favor until I said to the judge, 'Listen, I'm right around the corner from parole. Do you want to be my next victim?'" Hanton said. "That's how I got through to him, and he ordered the treatment."

Samuels and his allies characterize Connecticut's justice system as a criminal factory, a system that — intentionally or not — encourages recidivism. Barbara Fair of New Haven-based criminal justice reform group People Against Injustice and others worry that in the wake of the Cheshire murders, things will get worse for former offenders.

"Because of their knee-jerk reaction to what happened in Cheshire, the people on parole are going to have to pay," Fair said. "All the persistent offenders are going to have to pay dearly."

Fair's son was released from prison the morning of the press conference. She's already seen firsthand how the state has begun cracking down on former offenders.

"Already, my son's parole officer told him he had to be on a bracelet for 90 days, with a 9 o'clock curfew. Which is ridiculous," Fair said. "Like my son said, 'If I'm going to commit a crime, and I know I have to be in the house by nine, I'm going to do it before nine.'"

Berlin Turnpike article

2007-08-27T18:45:00.000-07:00

Turnpike at Crossroads?
With a spate of new developments in place, Berlin now has to deal with its image, and the oldest profession in the world on the Berlin Turnpike
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate August 22, 2007

Driving south from Hartford on Route 15, which for the stretch between Hartford and Meriden is commonly called the Berlin Turnpike, you’ll notice several shifts in the landscape. The sections of the pike in Wethersfield and Newington are dense with big-box stores, strip malls, chain restaurants, gas stations and motels.
Farther north, in Berlin, the landscape becomes less crowded, and trees and unpopulated properties become more commonplace. Industrial parks, homes and stores are scattered among cheap motels. The crowded retail sprawl of the north end is absent.

However, the Berlin section of the Turnpike has gone through significant changes over the last several years. It’s becoming denser with retail stores and new developments. There are still several empty properties, but with a newly opened liquor store, a gas station/mini mart and a Dunkin’ Donuts currently under construction, they increasingly seem like the exception, not the rule.
“We’ve had quite a few changes on our strip of the Berlin Turnpike,” said Hellyn Riggins, director of Berlin’s Department of Development Services.” Newington built up quickly, but people have discovered Berlin.”
Unfortunately for the town, the new construction is set against a long-standing problem that has become more pronounced in the last year: prostitution on the pike.
“It’s a sporadic problem that pops up once in a while. It’s really only one or two individuals that seem to ply their trade on the turnpike,” Berlin Chief of Police Paul Fitzgerald said. “We arrest them, they go to court. They go away for about a month and then they come back.”

Berlin officials note that Berlin’s population has risen dramatically in the last five years. As a result, the town has been very aggressive about marketing their section of the pike for development. It’s not just a question of more things on the Berlin section of the turnpike. The nature of the businesses is changing.
“Obviously, we have areas for industrial. Most of it nowadays is becoming more retail,” Berlin Mayor Adam Salina said.
The Newington section of the pike is so developed that there’s little room for more construction. The logical thing seems, at first blush, for retail to push further south, into Berlin. And to an extent, that’s what’s happening.
“Retail is starting to filter down into Berlin,” Salina said.
Another important element is that the town of Berlin and surrounding areas are attracting more people.
“We have the people. We have the population. You need to have numbers to attract businesses. Berlin is attracting those numbers more and more,” Riggins said.
The nature of Berlin’s section of the strip and the way the residential neighborhoods that are around the road prevent the Berlin section of the turnpike from perfectly replicating the look and density of development on the Newington section.
Homes were built closer to the turnpike in Berlin than in Newington and Wethersfield. As a result, the lots are often too small to support a store like a Best Buy or a Target.
In addition, the road is surrounded by protected wetlands areas.
The easiest things to slot into the narrower spaces are strip malls. Considering though, that strip malls are among the most maligned commercial style, that poses some challenges for the town. While more retail would be good for the town in many ways, strip malls are viewed as ugly and undesirable. Riggins said that the town is being vigilant about quality control with the buildings. Her office is monitoring the aesthetic nature of the buildings that are going up. However, the town has realistic expectations of what the turnpike can support.
“We don’t expect the turnpike to look like a quaint New England town,” Riggins said.
She added: “we’re looking for quality architecture and style.”
As an example, she pointed to the new building housing the liquor store. It’s a strip mall, but one that’s dressed up with a roof furnished with cupolas (the things that look like little houses on building tops). She showed me a sketch of the currently under-construction Dunkin’ Donuts, and noted its relatively subtle signage and its elegantly designed outer lamps.

Some in the town are confident that the increased development on the turnpike will deter prostitution and other illegal activity.
“Good business and good industry kind of scares other kinds of businesses away,” Fitzgerald said.
But Laura Michaud, the founder of a group called No-VIP which opposes adult businesses on the strip, worried that more business would mean more places for prostitutes to hide.
“It might increase their odds. I don’t know. I think that rather than looking at these women as criminals, I’m sure they’re drug addicts,” Michaud said. “The real solution would be for them to get treatment.”
A Berlin police detective said that the women had been offered social services. However, the arrest reports don’t seem to support Michaud’s supposition about drugs; according to one report, an alleged prostitute told an officer where to buy crack upon the undercover officer’s request. Otherwise, the arrest reports have been drug free.
There seems to be few secondary effects of the prostitution on the pike. By all accounts, it’s a safe place to live and work.
“This is more of a poor impression than a dangerous situation,” Fitzgerald said. He stressed that while the women may be visible, they are few in number.
“I think they travel the length of the turnpike. I haven’t heard much about Newington, but I know they’re in Meriden. They might not like to travel down to Newington, or maybe they’re more discreet in the motels,” Fitzgerald said.
Prostition on the turnpike is not a new problem for Berlin, but it seems to have spiked recently.
“We’ve gone years without this sort of activity, but in the last six to eight months there’s been a number of reports. Everyone is aware of it,” Berlin police detective John McCormack said. It’s a visible problem — the women walk on the road in the daylight. In the last year, three women have been arrested on prostitution charges on the Turnpike: 41-year-old Kimberly Bowers, 46-year-old Catherine Smith and 42-year-old Vicki Wilson. Bowers and Wilson have of both been arrested twice. Berlin police detective John McCormack said that Bowers was unable to make bail, and was currently being held by the town.
Michaud, who lives in a house facing near the turnpike, said that when she and her neighbors organized to fight the adult entertainment store VIP from moving onto the turnpike, prostitution quickly became a point of concern.
At first, Michaud and her group were hesitant to alert the police when they saw a woman who they believed might be a prostitute. They weren’t comfortable with accusing people of prostitution. “You don’t want to think that just because someone looks down on their luck, you don’t want to automatically label them as a prostitute,” Michaud said.
But eventually she and her neighbors decided to start alerting police when they spotted the women. So in the last year, the Berlin police force has stepped up enforcement of prostitution. But proving that women are prostitutes is sometimes difficult.
“It’s a difficult arrest to make. We do occasionally arrest people for walking on the turnpike, not just women. If you’re a pedestrian on the turnpike and you’re on the road, you’re supposed to walk to the edge of the road facing traffic,” Fitzgerald said. “There are different rules for pedestrians. Obviously, these individuals will [flout] those rules because they’re trying to attract attention.”
The prostitutes seem to act boldly and recklessly. A Berlin police detective told me the women have flagged down unmarked police cars that the average citizen would recognize as an unmarked police car. Records of undercover operations show the women being forthcoming about being self-described “working girls.” In one notable report, the accused prostitute said “you got me” after being told that she was under arrest.
Berlin’s police have not yet aggressively prosecuted the men who hire prostitutes — commonly known as johns.
“Initially, we wanted to make the case against the women, hoping they would move on,” Fitzgerald said. “If they return and that doesn’t appear to have worked, then we might go after the johns.”
The johns haven’t been targeted in the past, Fitzgerald said, because arresting johns isn’t as effective a deterrent as arresting the women.
“The problem is with the johns is that it’s a different person every time. How do you get that message out? You can arrest one john today and they might be in the paper but that doesn’t scare every other john away,” Fitzgerald said.

Connecticut For Lieberman

2007-08-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

Whose Party Is It?
The two leaders of the Connecticut for Lieberman party -- one who is for him, one against -- squabble over who gets to be chairman
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate August 16, 2007

It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to forge accurate declarative sentences about the Connecticut for Lieberman political party. It seems that every attempt at a simple statement of fact needs to be qualified. Attempt to list a series of facts about it, and you end up with a paragraph pockmarked with parentheses.

Fairfield University politics professor John Orman is the elected chairman of the party (but he opposes Lieberman).

Cheshire resident and medical physicist Stuart Korchin is the chairman of the party (but no one elected him).

The party exists to advance Senator Lieberman's political career (except it doesn't, and Lieberman doesn't support it).

The second annual meeting of the party was held on August 9 (except one of the battling party chairmen contends it wasn't really a meeting at all).

There are two men claiming control of the party, which was started by Lieberman supporters after Lieberman lost the democratic primary to Ned Lamont on August 8, 2006.

The party is simultaneously one of the smallest political parties in Connecticut, with a membership numbering in the low two figures, and one of the most powerful, as it holds one of the highest offices in the state (sort of — sorry, last one.).

The man the party is named for is not a member of the party. And Korchin says he didn't consider inviting or even informing Lieberman about the Aug. 9 meeting when he planned the party's most recent event.

"[Lieberman's people] don't have much interest in doing much with the party right now, and I can't blame them to tell you the truth," Korchin said. "The party is really very small. I don't know that they're terribly interested."

Korchin, who some have accused of being a shill for Lieberman, denies having a relationship with the senator.

"I've met him. I've met him on more than one occasion, but not recently," Korchin said. "And he and his office have certainly not given any endorsements to what I'm doing or what the party's doing."

Korchin said he contacted party members about the event. Since Lieberman is a registered Democrat, that means he's likely blissfully unaware that the meeting took place. Actually, more than likely, as Korchin opted to not send him an invitation.

"I have no reason to contact his people," Korchin said.

Speaking before the Aug. 9 meeting, Korchin said he expected about 30 party members to attend the meeting. Assuming that's true — Korchin wouldn't tell me where or when the meeting as held — that would represent a 1900 percent increase from the previous CFL meeting Korchin organized; below the minutes from that meeting, held August 9, 2006, are reproduced, almost in their entirety.

"A meeting of the CONNECTICUT FOR LIEBERMAN Party was held at [Korchin's home in Cheshire] at 4:30. Membership currently consists of Stuart R. Korchin, a registered member of the party, attended. There being no current business, the meeting was adjourned."

Speaking before the meeting, Korchin promised this year's event would be much more involved. Lieberman isn't up for re-election until 2012.

"I have some items on the agenda, mainly about the future and what we're going to be doing in terms of activities," Korchin said. "I don't think we're going to make any endorsements this meeting, but I'm open to suggestion."

Another notable non-attendee to the meeting was nominal party official John Orman, who said he was not informed about the gathering.

"I'm the chair of the CFL, and it's unusual that the chair wouldn't be invited to a CFL meeting," Orman said.

Orman, a longtime state political activist, joined the party after Lieberman was elected to the Senate. Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz's office told him that no one was registered with the party, and Orman — who opposed Leiberman's bid for the senate — took the opportunity to "punk" the newly independent Senator by hijacking the party.

"What we said was that if the state was going to allow a fake institution to exist, we were going to turn that fake institution into a real party to hold Joe accountable," Orman said.

The political punking hit a snag after Korchin saw a New York Times article about Orman's takeover.

"First of all, it wasn't true. I was already a member of the party. Obviously, he was declaring he was the only member of the party, which was false," Korchin said.

Evidently, there was a problem with Korchin's registration.

"I don't know if it was the town registrar or a mistake at the Secretary of the State's office," Korchin said. "The people at the Secretary of the State's office were unaware I was already registered with the party."

Subsequently, Orman held his first party convention, which Korchin attended as one of the six registered party members. Korchin contests the legitimacy of that convention, saying that Orman took control of the party illegally.

While both men enjoy using interpretations of fine points of election law to their advantage, they sharply contrast in attitudes towards Lieberman.

Korchin is a Lieberman supporter. Orman switched his registration as a Steven Colbert-style political joke, and a way to protest what he views as legislative improprieties on Lieberman's part.

"He had this promise to start a new party. I consider that to be a false petition. He told the Secretary of the State he had every intention of forming a new party, but then didn't. To me, that was like electoral fraud," Orman said.

The Secretary of the State's and Lieberman's offices did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Trachtenburg Interview

2007-08-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

A Family Affair
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players bring their loopy genius to Hartford for the first time
By Adam Bulger

If J.D. Salinger ended his self-imposed exile and moved to the Lower East Side, he'd invent the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. The three-piece ensemble is fronted by Jason Trachtenburg and supported by his wife Tina, who accompanies her husband's pop ditties with ancient slides collected from estate sales. The real star of the show, however, is their 13-year-old daughter Rachel who plays drums and sings harmony. Rachel, who has been performing with the band for the entirety of their seven-year history, has become something of a celebrity, appearing on magazine covers and a popular YouTube video where she performs Syd Barrett's "Effervescent Elephant."

The society-tweaking presentation of America through slides, the familial nature of the performers and the genuinely catchy music create a perfect storm of cute, smart and funny. It's indie rock fun for the whole family, by a whole family.

A: How did the slide concept come together?

JT: With everything we do in the band — which is me, my wife Tina and my daughter Rachel — we're trying to create a ground-breaking artistic statement. That can mean creating an entirely new genre, as well. The possibilities are there. We tapped in on the concept of combining the slides with music, taking these images we found from estate sales and using songs to narrate those songs.

I was a struggling songwriter up until about the age of 30 or so. I was having trouble finding an audience for my music. Tina said "you gotta do something. You've been trying for ten years and nothing's happening. Why don't you try and reach your audience and really communicate with them through the visual medium of imagery through slide show projection?"

A: You play catchy pop songs that could stand on their own. Do you ever want to ditch the slides?

JT: I think the audience has come to expect the full presentation. They want to see the slides; they want to see Rachel on drums. They want the dynamic of a family band, and I don't blame them.

A: Rachel is 13 now, and she's kind of becoming a celebrity.

JT: She has a lot of skills, and she's very sincere. She could teach kids a lot of things, through her experience. She's working on her own show, which focuses on things kids can do themselves. It's something for kids that isn't dumbed down or patronizing, like a lot of Disneyfied culture.

A: Does her celebrity worry you as a parent?

T: Actually, that might be a better question for Tina.

A: Hello.

Tina Trachtenburg: Hey.

A: Well, the question is whether Rachel's celebrity worries you as a parent?

TT: Not really. I don't know if there's much to worry about. We live a quote unquote normal life. I think you should worry about are the ones that come from your basic tragic situation. She just has a really great family and friends and support system. She has tutors and teachers and us teaching her. There's a conglomerate around Rachel.

Right now we're doing puppets for the Rachel morning show that we're debuting in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She's also performing it in London.

A: When I was 12 or 13, I think I didn't want to have much to do with what my parents were doing.

TT: I think about that too. When I was 13 the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with my parents. With Rachel, I guess we're quote unquote cool parents. We do fun stuff. We're not sitting in an office. We're not doing things she can't do.

A: There's the Alex P. Keaton syndrome, where cool parents' kids rebel by being stiff and corporate.

TT: That's always a possibility. She said something to me like "It'll be interesting what I'll do when I'm 21, because by then I'll have already toured the world and been in every bar and rock club." Her friends will come and stay with us and they can't wait to go to a bar. Rachel's like "Whatever. You want to go to a bar, I'll go there. They're dumb. It's boring unless you're performing. You stand around, they drink and smoke, and talk to each other. It's dull."

A: Does she rebel against the concept of the band. Does she ever wants to do hip-hop or something?

TT: She doesn't like that kind of music. She likes classic rock. ... Doing the slideshow players is more Jason's thing. ... It's a fun family thing we do. Rachel, who has now picked up the ukulele and started playing a lot of ukulele songs — she loves that. Drumming, she likes, but I don't think she loves it like the ukulele. It's not her passion.

A: A major part of the band's appeal is that a cute little girl plays in this quirky rock ensemble. Is there an end date in mind — like OK, you're 16 and it's not so cute anymore?

TT: I guess we're not thinking about that. By her having her own show, that really broadens her thing. If she doesn't want to be in the band anymore, she can always get out of the band. She can do her own show, which she loves doing. I don't know if it would ever not be cute. When she's 16 it'll still be fun to see a family still doing some songs.

Turbonegro Record Review

2007-08-14T12:56:00.001-07:00

Turbonegro
Retox
(Cooking Vinyl)
Hartford Advocate August 02, 2007

Have Turbonegro come to praise rock or to bury it? Are they trying to be Motorhead or Spinal Tap? Jack White or Jack Black? On their new record the Norwegian butt-rock MVPs rock it out like they have something to prove, with snaky intertwining guitar lines and shout-along choruses. It's fierce and fun, with seemingly no potential for irony. But then they have crazy funny song titles like "Everybody Loves a Chubby Dude" and "Hell Toupee." The second song, which actually seems to be about hair, contains the near perfect post scum rock couplet "Other day I was doing a bump/and then I found myself taking a dump." Are these the words of a candid, depraved rocker or a committed, convincing satirist? Does it matter when the riffs approach the level of Appetite for Destruction? Well, it does, sort of, and I have a feeling I'll be unraveling this mystery at top volume for the next couple of months.
— Adam Bulger

Cops Against the Drug War

2007-08-14T12:39:00.001-07:00

You Know the Drug War is Going Badly When Law Enforcement Turns Against It
Originally published by the Hartford Advocate in August 31, 2006, no longer online

The idea that America's 35-year-old war on drugs has serious problems isn't new. Multiple long-standing organizations ranging from NORML (The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) to Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute have advocated drug legalization for decades.

The debate has even permeated American popular culture to a degree, with films like Traffic and Maria Full of Grace exploring the human impact of drug prohibition.

The message that drug policy reform group LEAP is bringing to Connecticut in a series of speaking engagements in September - that the drug war is unwinnable and indefensible - is neither novel nor unique. It's the people making the argument, not the argument itself, that's noteworthy. The members of LEAP, which stands for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, are retired and active police officers and government agents who helped shape and enforce America's drug laws. These are veterans of the front lines of the war on drugs who are now speaking against it.

"[What better group] to challenge the efficacy of the policy than the people tasked with promulgating that policy?" LEAP member Mike Smithson asked.

Smithson said he believes LEAP's message is supported by the majority of Americans, but needs the authority that the police and other law enforcement veterans in LEAP offer for it to resonate.

"We believe that most of America is opposed to this prohibition, but are afraid to say it," Smithson said.

The group is largely the brainchild of retired New York State Police Captain Peter Christ. While Christ doubted the effectiveness of drug laws during his time as a cop, he still enforced the law.

"I went into law enforcement with the hope that I would see the stupidity of my position. I hoped I'd look into the drug business, see its effects and say "boy am I ever wrong." What really happened is the more I saw, the stronger my position became," Christ said.

When he retired after 20 years on the force in the early '90s, he started working full-time to change those laws. After attending conferences by NORML and the Drug Policy Foundation, Christ realized many cops shared his stance, and enlisted them in the cause.

"I started talking about creating an organization of law enforcement people basically modeled after Vietnam Veterans Against the War. That was a group of people that you may not have agreed with their position against the war, but you couldn't dismiss them by saying they didn't know what they're talking about," Christ said.

He hooked up with Jack Cole, a 26-year veteran of the New Jersey state police, to create an organization of his peers who advocated ending the drug war. With the help of three other retired police officers, Cole and Christ founded LEAP in 2002. From those beginnings, membership swelled to over 5,000 in four years.

Their website, www.leap.cc , has a 12-minute video in which speakers make the case against the government's prosecution of the drug war. The video has made the rounds of the blogosphere, including being featured on Time magazine's daily dish.

"Prohibition doesn't work. ... The bad thing is that it creates crime and violence that need not exist," Christ said.

When he speaks, Christ says the war on drugs has destabilized society.

"We know from studies that 85 percent of the drug-related violence in our society is not related to drug ingestion and the high from the drug, but from people fighting over the market place," Christ said.

Christ was careful to distinguish between being against the war on drugs and supporting drugs.

"There's a drug problem, the use and abuse of these dangerous substances, which I am not minimizing. It's a serious problem we have to deal with as a society," Christ said. "Then there is a crime and violence problem attached to the drug problem the same way we had it attached to alcohol prohibition."

Christ believes the war on drugs enables rather than fights the drug problem.

"When you institute a blanket prohibition, at that instant you give up all your ability to regulate and control that thing. Who regulates the purity of these drugs on our streets? The gangsters and the mobsters. Who determines the selling points and sets the age limits? The gangsters and the mobsters," Christ said.

"We at LEAP believe that a regulated and controlled marketplace is superior to a prohibition marketplace that creates crime in our society."

Eric E. Sterling was Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary from 1979 until 1989 and is now a LEAP speaker. Sterling, who helped write many of the drug laws passed by Congress in the 1980s, now says that much of the drug legislation in the '80s resulted from misguided political opportunity seeking.

"I began to see the way in which criminal justice and drug policy were taking a backseat to political opportunity," Sterling said.

Sterling said the policy set in the '80s has had a regrettable effect on America's legal system and economy.

"Most people are not aware of the enormous economic consequences of what we are doing. By giving out millions of felonies for drug offense convictions over the course of your anti-drug crusade, we have put a tape worm into the American economy that is sucking a lot of life out of it. One out of nine men in America has a felony conviction," Sterling said. "Once you have a felony conviction your ability to get a job is dramatically reduced. Once that happens, your role in the global economy is substantially undermined."

The felony convictions have a cumulative, debilitating effect on our consumer-driven economy. We're making it harder for potential consumers to consume.

"Your felony conviction becomes part of a background check that goes into your credit score. Even if you have a job, and can afford a car, your ability to finance it is greatly lessened. Your ability to buy a car is dramatically reduced," Sterling said.

As an attorney and a veteran of national legislation writing and advocacy, Sterling said the effect the drug war has had on the way America enforces its laws has been dramatic.

"At another level, in the criminal justice system itself, the drug laws are enforced through lies and perjury," Sterling said.

The dishonesty underlying the prosecution of the drug war, Sterling said, has influenced the rest of our legal system.

"In courts, judges and prosecutors blind themselves to the lies that are routinely told in support of drug cases. When cases go to trial and drug suspects testify against friends and partners to get reduced sentences, lying again is frequent," Sterling said. "Witnesses know that unless their performance is adequate, they're not going to get the plea bargain deal they're hoping for. This is routine. The habit of perjury has become ingrained and routine in the criminal justice system. Judges and attorneys have become inured to fraud in the courts."

One prominent local law enforcement official indicated that while the war on drugs may be flawed, legalization and regulation of drugs is a long way off.

"There may be a need for some changes [in the drug war]. But I am not advocating the legalization of drugs," newly appointed Hartford police chief Daryl K. Roberts said.

A former vice cop, Roberts has seen the effects of drug addiction firsthand. He said that while gun-related violence would be his highest concern as chief, he would also have the Hartford force concentrate on enforcing drug laws.

"I was in vice narcotics for 10 years, four and a half as a detective and five as a sergeant. It's a high priority because I do think it's a catalyst for a lot of our crimes. A lot of our crime comes back to our drug dealing. When you use drugs you're not just destroying yourself, you're destroying your neighborhoods and families."

Roberts said that because of the nature of drugs and addiction, he believes they should remain illegal.

"Whether drugs are legal or not, they still have the same harmful effects on the body," Roberts said.

Hunter Thompson Interview

2007-08-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Hunter S. Thompson Interview
BY ADAM BULGER
Freezerbox.com 03.09.2004

This interview took place in early March 2003, shortly after the publication of Kingdom of Fear.

(To Answering Machine) I had an interview scheduled with Hunter Thompson--

(Explosion of music over the telephone.)
Hey hey hey hi. Sorry, this thing is just dragging on longer than I thought. I'll call you, I'd imagine, in like ten minutes.

OK. Sure.

(TWENTY MINUTES LATER.) Hello?

I got caught up in some goddamn weird old English romance of some kind.

Was it something you were writing, or reading?

I was watching a movie. (Yelling to someone in the room.) Sense and Sensibility, I think. I couldn't believe it, I was wrapped up in this ancient goddamned thing.

Jane Austen, right?

Yes, it is.

I've never seen it, I think I've read the book, though.

Goddamn, I must be in a unique mood of some kind because I got completely into it.

Really. I wouldn't think you'd like that.

I wouldn't either. I've never been into Jane Austen, particularly. But that was well done. A nicely done movie.

OK, then. What is the state of the American dream today?

Oh, god. That's a pretty pre-thought out, written-on-a-list kind of question. Not very good. Yeah, I would say not. The American Dream ran out with the American century. I'm still figuring it out. That's a pretty strong statement. I'm still putting the pieces together right now.

What do you think Horatio Alger would do if he was alive today?

He'd probably be a terrorist.

Do you think its possible for a man to be free in present day America?

Well, it depends on who it is. I'm doing pretty well. I don't know about you. I have a feeling it's going to be more of a struggle than it's been for a while.

Why's that?

Look around you. The military state we're being sort of formed into--shit, I wrote about this last night, I forgot what I said. The military structure--did you read the book I just wrote?

Yeah. Kingdom of Fear. I thought it was a very apt title.

Yeah, more so than I realized when I came up with it.

What do you think of how the Bush Administration is cracking down on civil liberties?

The Bush administration is a heap of Nazi shit. Bullshit. Yeah, you can put it that way. I don't know what your audience is ready for. What kind of target...

In the 70s you had a meeting with Richard Nixon and you talked about college football. What would you say if you had the same face time with G.W. Bush?

Oh, ahhh. To put this on realistic lines. I was the only person in the press corp who could talk about football, and Nixon wanted to talk about football. I don't know. I don't think Bush would want to talk to me. I'm a journalist, of course I would talk to him.

But the impression that I had was that Nixon probably didn't want to talk to you that much, either.

Well he sure as hell wanted to talk about football. Once I got into the car we became instant buddies. He was good company. I enjoyed him. He got me on the plane, showed me all around. I almost dropped a zippo into the gas tank of his Lear jet.

On purpose?

No, no, no. I liked him, at the time there. He was good company. That's all we talked about was football. I was warned that if I mentioned wars or tear gas or protests or anything like that he'd [inaudible].

Do you think you'd be able to talk baseball with the former owner of the Texas Rangers?

Well, I don't know baseball that well. I met Bush at some point, long ago and I don't know what the hell I'd talk to him about now. I mean, Nixon wasn't honest about anything but football. And Bush? I don't know. I'd be curious to talk to him, I'd like to ask him what the fuck he's doing. But I know I wouldn't ask that either. I'm a professional journalist. I would conduct a professional interview. I don't know. We'd probably find something to talk about.

What do you think of the state of political journalism?

Very bad. Very lazy and almost cowardly in its obsequiousness.

What important questions are they not asking?

God damn, man. Who wrote these questions for you?

I did.

Well, they're all kind of pertinent, but let's take a break and kind of work up to some of these.

OK. I'm going to ask you some more softball questions. What are you driving these days and what's its top speed?

Oh Jesus, you really are one of these, aren't you? It's snowing out. I drive a Jeep Cherokee through the snow.

If they offered you the post of the governor of Samoa today would you accept it?

Oh. That's interesting. Well, yeah, if I thought I could really have free hand. It would be an adventure. I'd try it for a year.

You're the last public figure to use a cigarette holder. What's the deal?

For one thing, it is not a holder. It is a filter. A big difference. A filter clears a full ounce of scum and tar a day, keeps it from ruining my lungs. The first time I used it, I saw what came out of a filter and I never stopped.

How does that compare with your double life as a character in the Doonesbury comic strip?

Well that's a horrible piece of shit. I got used to it a long time ago. I used to be a little perturbed by it. It was a lot more personal. The bastard was, well, I don't read it or follow it. It no longer bothers me.

What's the best drug to write on?

You've got dumb questions.

Um, sorry. Have you ever done ecstasy?

Yeah. It seemed kind of mild and talky. I didn't mind it. It's not in the nature of the kind of drug I am normally accustomed to, it was a quasi-drug, I guess.

What kind of music are you listening to?

Let's see. I just got the new Bob Dylan box set from the Rolling Thunder tour from 1975. It's kind of a big package with a book and several CDs in there. It's maybe the best rock and roll album I've ever heard.

You don't think that was after his peak?

Shit. You really are dumb. You have to listen to it and find out. If you think that, you really are ignorant. What do you want to talk about--Eminem?

Is writing still fun for you?

Yes.

What's the best firearm for home security?

Twelve-gauge short-barrel shotgun.

And what's the best for just fucking around?

Machine guns are kind of nice. You can have a lot of fun with them. It's like watering the lawn. I don't get to play with them very often.

Ralph Steadman said that you almost killed him in a gun-related explosion while he was visiting you in Aspen. What happened?

I don't know that story, but no doubt it's right. I can think of several times. Ralph is well acquainted with my lifestyle.

He also said that you claim that you are one of the few people who should be allowed to own a handgun, and he said that you definitely shouldn't be allowed to own one.

(Laughs.) Ralph is one person who definitely shouldn't be allowed to drink whiskey.

Why's that?

I'll wait for his reason why I shouldn't have handguns. Whiskey is not beneficial for Ralph.

You were a very vocal critic of the Clinton administration, but you were in correspondence with Sandy Berger, Clinton's Defense secretary. Are you guys still friends?

Oh, yeah, definitely, he's a good boy. I disagree with a lot of my friends. Just because he's my friend doesn't mean he has to agree with me.

Are you still in touch with Patrick Buchanan?

Occasionally. We're still friends. Patrick is a libertarian, or at least in that direction. I think of politics as a circle, not a spectrum of one line not just right and left. Patrick and I are often pretty close. Patrick's an honest person. He's a straight guy and very smart guy.

His magazine, the American Conservative, is really interesting. It's all anti-Bush, basically.

I'm pleased with that. I frequently agree with him. He's an intelligent--you might call him a politician.

He did run for President a couple of times.

Yeah, he's a politician.

Why exactly did you try to deliver an elk's heart to Jack Nicholson's house?

I thought it would be fun and it's in the spirit of our relationship. A little humor. I don't know, it just came to me tonight. I had a few bombs, you know. We do that pretty frequently, exchange bizarre presents. I couldn't have foreseen the horrible circumstances around it. He had just gotten in from LA. I didn't know it, but he had a stalker. I saw him the afternoon he got in. I said I'd see him later. I figured, shit, I have some presents for the kids. I was supposed to get there a little earlier. I feel a little queasy looking back on the night. Of course it was all in good humor. It went wrong in so many weird ways. I went out there and sort of did my thing and left, feeling rejected sort of. Bear in mind I was pretty much wanked up, in the mood I frequently get in with Jack. He's pretty fast. He's one of the natural aristocrats of our time.

He's fast?

Oh, yeah, we have a good time talking. Jack is quick. One of the smartest people I know.

What do you think of how the Hell's Angel's have gone mainstream?

Don't confuse the Hells Angels that I wrote about with what the Hells Angels are now. I consider Sonny Barger to be a friend of mine.

Really. Even after his boys beat you up?

Shit, he didn't do it. You swim with sharks, you're going to get bit once in a while. I wasn't surprised by that. In fact, I thought it was long overdue by the time it happened. I always got along fine with Sonny. I haven't seen him in a while. He's an extreme case of a sociopath, but I like him.

After Altamont, too.

That was way over the line. I've seen stuff like that before. Not kill people in that sense, but I wasn't surprised at all at the Angel's behavior. That's what they do. The Stones and Rock Scully, the people who decided to have the Angels as their personal security, I would blame them.

You would blame the incident on whoever chose the Angels as security.

Right. I don't know who I would have chosen, but that's a guarantee of an explosion and a disaster.

Do you ever watch Fox News?

Very rarely.

What do you think of their level of discourse?

I think it's low and dumb.

I heard that you and Allen Ginsberg had the same weed dealer in the 60s.

That's an obscure and arcane story, isn't it? But yeah, yeah. I had met him before in New York during his poetry readings and things. In San fransicisco, it turned out that we did have the same weed dealer. That's when you bought weed in tins, tabacco tins. Ten dollars, fifteen. I lived in an apartment right next store to the guy he was buying it from. I was working on the Hells Angels book. I got to talk to him about it, and he was a big help. Allen was a good one.

You liked him a lot.

He was the real thing, in the way. He was involved in everything. Allen was a gentleman and an honest man. He was fun, wonderful sense of humor. He helped me with the book. He took some time.

How was he in a crisis?

He did that ohm thing [starts chanting] OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHM. He just tried to hum it away. I first saw that in La Honda. There were Cops, he was trying to get people out of jail. I was being a journalist I had, more or less a neutral zone pass. I could go back and forth between the Angels and the cops. I could negotiate. I had gone down there. My son was two years old at the time.

In La Honda?

No, I was out in Sonoma. I went down to La Honda for a little fun. I took my kid with me. Fun, you know. Allen and I got in a police chase. I was driving. The cops had pulled some people over. It was a madhouse over there, that whole La Honda scene. Blinking, blazing, lights going on all the time. I know that I've described that some place else, so I won't get into it. We stopped to intercede on some other arrest the cops were making. As a journalist I could do that.

You have claimed to be the most accurate reporter people could read. A lot of people would disagree. How would you defend that claim?

With the exception of typos, I have some ungodly types in my work. In terms of my...I might not get the dates right every once in a while. I try to be more accurate than other journalists, which is not that difficult. You have to distinguish between what happened and what the situation was. I'm not doing a very good job of this. And imagination.

Do you think that's due to your willingness to put objectivity by the wayside?

Well, you can't be objective when you're dealing with passionate situations, politics and so forth. I guess you can, I never have. For instance if you were objective about Richard Nixon, you would never get him or understand him. You had to be subjective to understand Nixon. You have to be subjective to understand the Hells Angels. Would you be objective about Altamont, I guess. A million people gathered, a riot started. I was supposed to be there.

Oh yeah?

I took one look at it on the last day and figured fuck this. Like a million people. Guaranteed explosion and disaster. Imagine having gone in there early and going down by the stage and not having a helicopter to get you out? I know people who were trapped under there for eight hours! Just horrible... then I don't know... it [inaudible] of police brutality. I can't really be objective. I can claim I am. Well, I mean, free press, street press, it's the goddamned street press right now that's the only, that's doing this job with us, on us, with Bush and passing propaganda. Just, uh--disgusting!

The mainstream press, you mean?

Yeah, the mainstream press is uh, is uh, in the bag, in the pocket of Bush and the military and they seem to like it there! Not all of them, I've got a lot of good friends, good people in journalism, that feel more strongly than I do, or at least as strongly.

Right.

The uh, New York Times, eh, yeah, it's a different animal. There's not too many papers like that. But the press in general, the media, the TV, is doing a disgraceful job in covering this situation in this country and around the world. This is where I have to bring some subjectivity into it that I believe is right! A president that came in here, uhhh... about two years ago...

Right, barely elected.

Barely elected, yeah, and I guess it's only been two years, and he's taken this nation from a, uh, um, let me think looking at it from a, uh, just objectively, from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war.

Right, but I mean, there were those assholes who flew the plane into the World Trade Center.

Who were they indeed? Now, [cough] do you believe that, that a bunch of Arabs jumped up from some kind of a campfire and fucking mountains over there and snuck into this country and hijacked those planes and did that by themselves?

Well what are you proposing? I mean I think they were funded years ago by the CIA and it was a blowback, but, I don't think there was any direct... Are you saying there might be some other American agency or some international agency that directly supported them in that?

Uhh, this is tricky territory, but yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

Really.

I can't sit here and jerk up documents like Joe McCarthy, there's no proof of that. But I'm sure there is. And the idea that we're getting the whole story, uh, through the uh, the media, or from the president, is absurd on it's face because you never do, for one thing. And there's so many unanswered questions and loose ends and uh, lets see, well, lies! Yeah, about what happened. That they, in the run-up to that day, the years, I wrote a column about it right after it happened.

Yeah, I've read it. I thought that was great, the thing about your phone conversation with Johnny Depp, right?

Yeah, that was one of them. Yeah, that one and the one right before it. I was just finishing my sports film for ESPN when, I was about to go to bed, and I had been up all night, you know the usual, you know struggle, deadline...

Mmhmm.

And sort of on my way to bed, I saw something on the, heard or saw, something about a plane hitting the World Trade Tower. The first reports were of the "small plane"--like one of those things that sometimes hits buildings around the world. That got my attention just enough not to go straight to bed. I turn around and have a look at the TV set, just in time to see that other one go straight in. Jesus.

Um...

Hang on a second there... there's so many things about who uh, oh boy, this is a dangerous area. But I talked to witnesses, I'm just thinking of one in particular, a guy, a driver who watched the, just happened to be taking uh, maybe the owner of the Giants, I forget who he was, but he was out at the Meadowlands. But he saw both of them hit.

Right.

Direct line of sight. The first one, he didn't get really get a line on, but it got his attention, though he hadn't seen the approach. But the second one, he said, uh, and I heard this from other people, but very few, really, calm and sane accounts the moments of insanity. I happened to see the second one go in, but just the last few seconds, as it came out of the left, stage left, and then plowed right into the front of the center of the TV picture and the center of the building, uh, perfectly. And I wrote that it was one of the most efficient, uh, most skillful and just about impossible um, acts of piloting... That's a very rare, uh, uh pilot... can take a big plane and plant it right as if a target or bulls-eye was on the side of the building. Apparently that second plane approached, and veered off, and made sort of a half-loop and then sort of came back and aimed again and then hit the building.

Right.

Have you heard this, or did you see that, or do you know about it?

Yeah, well I've seen the tape so many times.

But have you seen what would be before the tape that we see, like a minute before the hit?

No, I haven't.

Well, I haven't either, really. But there were eyewitnesses. And several people have said that, but you had to be watching. This guy happened to be at the Meadowlands. Cause I've kind of seen it as something that's really horrible and atrocious but not that hard to pull off. I mean it just seems like they got some box-cutters and they hijacked a plane and they flew it into a building. It doesn't seem like there was that much skill or that much preparation really. It's pretty broadly assumed that there's is a lot more to that story than the uh, the simple, kind of evil guys who just wanted to learn enough about flying to take a plane off but not land it.

Right.

Remember, everything we know about that, that incident, and it was a horrible thing, I mean tragedy! Uh, and about Iraq and about Afghanistan and the people allegedly inside those countries, you know, Bin Laden... Everything we know in this country is spun through the CIA or NSA, but lets call it the CIA.

Do you think that the foreign press is any better off?

Well the foreign press is not necessarily...don't agree with us, do they? No, I would say that, the, just the round-the-world feeling about our invasion of Iraq using, I'm not sure what the hell they're using now as a pretense. Did they say the World Trade Towers?

What, the pretense for invading Iraq?

Yeah, is it more of that stuff or is it...?

No, they want to spread democracy now, that's the message.

Well I've been dealing with these guys for forty years. I've been covering politics and I was in the air force and kind of around that stuff. I know... something about the structures and behavior of the military and politics, the White House. And uh, it gives you a certain perspective, at least to ask questions.

Yeah, your depth of knowledge and personal experience...

Well, plus if you go back and read some of the things I've written, I don't stand by that first column I wrote on the World Trade Tower, uh, tragedy. Like I said, I was just going to bed, and they called back and said, 'you gotta write another column about the bombing in New York.' Nobody really knew what it was. And I wrote a column, and it's in the book.

What newspapers and magazines are you reading right now?

Well, I mean lemme look here, umm... New York Times, New York Observer, The Nation, uh, Consumer Reports, Sports Illustrated. Now I look up and I see the Statistical Abstract of the United States... I see Legal Affairs, uh, let's see, Time, National Geographic, Foreign Affairs Quarterly, uh, The Progressive, The Economist. It goes on and on. It's a, it's a load. But I find that I really stay uh, more, certainly not more knowledgeable out here than I would be if I were in Washington, but the people I know and can call and then see frequently, I stay pretty well informed out here. There's a network that has taken me forty years to cultivate and build.

The end of your ESPN columns it says you live in a fortified compound in Aspen. How exactly is it fortified?

Well it's not really fortified, it's, I put that in there I guess, it helps me keep gawkers away. And it helps to--somebody gets shot out here every once in a while.

You get shot out there?

There was a story about me shooting my secretary a while ago. It was bogus. But now I have, it keeps me a little bit, it keeps people from being too eager to rush in here and knock on the door. I had a lot of that. Huge amount of kinda curiosity seekers.

Ok. What do you think of um, I'm sorry, I'm getting back to my list of questions.

You can tell that right away, 'what do you think of...'

Yeah I know, I'm sorry man.

Go ahead.

What do you think of the state of America today vs. when you were writing in the 60s and 70s?

Ho, it's a whole different game. Yeah, this is a, uh, oh, a corporate, uh state, really. Pretty much on the order of uh...

Like the Weimar Republic, kinda?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. There we go! And it's, ah, I don't know, National Socialism in a way, that would be a good conversation. Let's, wait, let's say something about that. Let me hear, what do you think about that, just, I'll go on, I just want a little, uh... lets see, the thing that fascinates me is, I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich again. I see parallels throughout the Third Reich to the extent where I often refer to this as the Fouth Reich.

The post-American Century then.

Well it's a convenient break you know, the new century. And it just happens to be that we started off with, well, you might call it a bang, you know? Why the voters in this country continue to vote for the same people who plunge them into economic doldrums and real trouble?

Why do you think that is?

That is what brings us I guess to the uh, Third Reich and that comparison. It baffles me, enrages me. And I can't, it seems to me like simple stupidity.

You think people are just dumb?

Well, the education [in this] country, the patriotism, the boom boom boom drum, and the propaganda, and the cooperative media, yeah. That, well come to think of it, the Germans were economically stricken, weren't they?

Yes, that's why they weren't so opposed to getting the Nazis in.

Exactly but, the country on paper, in a state of prosperity. And we know better about who was, you know, what stocks were really worth what. But, it was a prosperous country, seemingly, people weren't wheeling wheelbarrows of dollar bills through the streets to buy a loaf of bread. And, just to watch the quality of life in this country go down and down, and lesser expectations of happiness and freedom and discretionary income, leisure, all the things that seemingly defined this country uh, in the past let's say 50 years. It has been... moving forward and upward, a lot of quarrels in there, a lot of things to argue about, but I don't think it has been, in most peoples eyes, a nation where the current generation of children can, and does look forward to a standard of living lesser and lower than their parents. You know, not live as well.

What's that?

What, excuse me. I, I didn't hear you.

No, I didn't catch your last comment, I'm sorry.

Oh, well it's the diminishing of personal expectations in this country. And the uh, the hope, the feeling of hope. I talk about this all the time to a lot of people: Are you more optimistic about the next ten years than about the last, when you started?

Who, me?

Yeah.

No! I... man, to rip you off, I'm full of fear and loathing. I am a citizen in the Kingdom of Fear. I'm scared every waking moment, man.

Well, uh, Jesus, that's horrible! That's a kind of, uh, prevailing sentiment.

Yeah.

And you know, you look at fear and people, a population that's uh, just riddled with fear and confusion and, uh, loathing, goddamn. Never did it occur to me when I came up with those words that I would be using them to describe the state of the nation 30 years later or whatever.

Yeah, you said that 30 years ago, and fear keeps coming through in your works. I mean it's so powerful, like your use of it. And I was just kinda wondering what you're fearing right now.

Well I don't, I'm past, uh, fearing things. I'm old enough to, not really uh, worry about some of the things that maybe I once did. I'm a successful writer, I'm out here, I'm you know...

I just had one last question, and it kind of plays into what we were just talking about. Your friend Warren Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. [Warren Zevon died on Sept. 7, 2003 - ed]

Yep.

And I just wanted to know how you have reacted to this, if you've mellowed out at all, if this has kind of affected what you're fearing, or your concept of fear.

Well, no, I'm very sad about Warren's situation, but I think it's my job to, uh, console him, to ignore it. They're all quacks out there, and many people have come through fatal uh, prognosis. I assigned him to write the music for this movie we're working on here, the Rum Diaries.

I'm curious about why you're doing the kinda sports-centric thing with ESPN. I know you started as a sports journalist, but...

I got a soft spot in my heart for sports and what the hell, I bet on it, I'm into it all the time, I might as well make some money on it. One of the things I think I've learned over time is I have to make movie on, excuse me, money on, I have to get paid for my vices somehow, or else its gonna be destructive. If you're paid for being crazy, then you're not crazy, is that right?

And when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

I think the real difference is functional and dysfunctional rather than sane or insane. And John Walsh at ESPN is an old friend. And I like it, it keeps me, the column kept me kinda sane, a regular deadline every week. I gotta finish it and read it the next day. I like the regularity of it. I grew up in newspapers. And it just gives me a nice little break every week.

Well, that was my last question.

Well, that's, uh, good luck! And you're gonna need it.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Infocrat, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
And here is the rest of it.

Right Wing Comedy

2007-08-12T08:15:00.000-07:00

Laughing Matters
The vast right-wing comedy conspiracy.
By Adam Bulger
New York Press, Oct. 14, 2003

Julia Gorin is onstage cataloguing the gory side effects of RU-486, the morning-after abortion pill. She waves her arms emphatically as she describes the blood and doctor’s visits the pill would entail.

"What are the NOW ladies going to be happy about next?" She pauses, then continues: "Wire coat hangers?"

Two tables from the stage, where in a typical comedy club a boozed-out fratboy might be heckling, sits a man who is the spitting image of Carl Reiner in the Ocean’s Eleven remake. The crowd sweats modest urban affluence, with men dressed in Brooks Brothers’ dress shirts tucked into unwrinkled khakis, and women in wool slacks and high heels. The American flag is the accessory of choice: One male audience member wears a flag pin on the lapel of his Patrick Bateman-style pinstripe suit; opening act Robert George had tiny flags on his tie; and Gorin, the headliner, wore a bead-encrusted choker with an American flag centerpiece.

This is not a typical comedy crowd. And this is not a typical comedy show. This is Republican Riot–comedy for and by political conservatives–held last week at the Don’t Tell Mamma cabaret on 46th St., a sublevel club around the corner from a porno emporium.

In addition to topping the bill, Gorin also organized the night, with an eye toward monthly shows and a run that will hopefully culminate during the 2004 Republican convention. She’s a seasoned stand-up comic whose act evolved from observational humor and jokes about dating into political humor during the late 90s.

"Bill Clinton was in office, so there was always something funny to say… The audience responded pretty well, so that encouraged me to move in a political direction. I happen to be right-wing, so my observations are always coming from that perspective."

That same year, she started writing opinion pieces for conservative outlets, and has since written articles such as "Not at Albright" and "The Hours: I Am Woman, Hear Me Bore" for Jewish World Review, FoxNews.com and Opinion Journal. The Republican Riot was her first attempt at producing a show.

"I suffered through nearly a decade of listening to other people’s acts, when they bash Republicans. Conservatives are the butt of all their jokes. And they defend Bill Clinton and talk about how his penis was good for the economy. And the audience cheers."

To counter what she views as a pronounced liberal bias in stand-up comedy, she created a routine demanding that Americans get their heads out of the gutter and instead wrap their arm around President Bush–or her "Georgie," as she refers to him during the act. Democrats ("You gotta love ’em") were frequent targets of jokes, as were immigrants, Iraqis, Europeans (specifically, and obviously, the French) Palestinians and, of course, Bill Clinton.

Sex is an oft-returned-to topic. "Libertarians are Republicans with an unhealthy preoccupation with sex," she jokes, and "the Democrats are against the missile shield because they’re so busy having sex they won’t notice that the bombs are dropping." She defines liberal ideology as "give me liberty or give me tyranny, as long as you give me sex."

This anti-sex slant is a tough sell for a room full of comedy-hungry drunks no matter what the ideological makeup of the audience, but Gorin draws upon years of experience on the comedy circuit. She knows how to brand an identity: onstage she becomes a Chuck Jones sketch of a New York Jew, effecting a high-pitched tremolo voice and kvetch-me-if-you-can nervousness. She airs her insecurities to get the audience on her side, tightly intertwining jokes about her self-image with her right-wing observations.

Her opening act, Robert George, lacks Gorin’s streamlined stand-up mojo; his act is a scattershot volley of one-liners devoid of her smooth transitions. He’s a professional television commentator and a writer for the un-bylined editorial page of the New York Post, which he refers to as the second-least credible paper in New York. The first? The New York Times.
George is a black Catholic Republican, and he opens his set with jokes about the inherent conflicts in his racial, spiritual and political identities. He equates his multilayered personality with the Republican party’s broad diversity, then jokes that the party has some diverse broads, while winking at a lady in the front row.

With the California recall election just one day old, George takes the opportunity to riff: Arnold won by courting the Cali hiphop vote with a band called "Schwarza-niggahs with Attitude" and a song called "Straight out of Austria." After a rendition of that song, he adds, "I might be black, but I’m not crazy." The crowd wants him to succeed, wants him–and Julia–to kill, to be hilarious, to be funnier than Garofalo and Carlin and the other liberal giants of standup. So when Julia’s punchlines flatline or when George’s voice stammers, the crowd is uncomfortable but patient.

The Republican Riot show may just be the New York tip of the Republican comedy iceberg. Brad Stine is a conservative comic who tours with the Promise Keepers, playing to arena crowds numbering in the thousands. A veteran of the secular circuit and the 90s cable-tv comic boom, Stine has found his "very pro-Patriot, very pro-theism, very pro-God" personal philosophy to be in opposition to the stereotypical comedian.

"Comedians are thought of as rock ’n’ roll, spoken-word, edgy, pushing the envelope," he observes, "but to do that from a conservative, Judeo-Christian point of view is unique."
Around the 45-minute mark of his act, Stine will often point out that he hasn’t used a single curse word. No matter which club he’s in, he says, that factoid never fails to garner applause.
He currently brings his brand of pro-American jokery to churches and religious functions, noting he doesn’t "do as many clubs now because [he doesn’t] make as much money."

Stand-up comedy is a format that’s ready-made for conservatives. There’s allowance for the Limbaugh monologue/rant, spots for one-liners and ample space for Fox News-style soundbyte ethos. Comedy club audiences respond to shouting and invective and, really now, how far of a jump is it from Bill O’Reilly to Sam Kinison?

As Stine told me, "There is certainly a huge constituency of conservatives in the United States who have made Fox News the number-one news network… There are millions of Americans saying ‘speak for me, speak for me,’ and they’ve never had a comic do it."

Kiss Convention

2007-08-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

On Kondoms and Kaskets
The Kiss nostalgia machine will eat you alive.
By Adam Bulger
New York Press, 2003

Marketing professionals must look at Kiss with abject envy. Every American under the age of 70 has at least passing knowledge of the Kabuki-theater rock quartet. Kiss is the most recognizable high-concept act in rock: They’re the band that wears make-up and breathes fire, a combination hard-rock band and pyrotechnic circus. They’ve got a hipster-friendly 70s kitsch, comic book/action figure tweeker appeal and a metal/classic rock crossover combo rivaled only by AC/DC and Led Zeppelin.

But the ultimate testament to the breadth of their appeal may have been their appearance at the 1996 Grammys. They were joined onstage by Tupac Shukar, and the patron saint of gangsta rap was uncharacteristically giddy standing alongside the costumed avengers of rock.

The mass awareness of Kiss coexists with a rabid fan base that matches the Shatner cult of Trekkies in its consumption of merchandise and detailed knowledge of the source material. The thousands of conscripts in the Kiss Army act as a built-in sales base for Kiss products, like the recently launched Kiss Kondoms (advertised as "tongue lubricated") and 2001’s infamous Kiss Kasket, an airbrushed coffin embossed with the words "Kiss Forever."

The Army’s devotion to its leaders, however, is far from absolute, and coexists with a pronounced contempt. According to a Gene Simmons-authored press release on Kissonline.com, the original official Kiss website was shut down due to a flood of negative comments on the message boards. Kiss fans compartmentalize their enjoyment of the band, isolating the aspects of the band they like (Ace Frehley, the comic books, the live shows) and enthusiastically trashing everything else. One of them joked that Kiss is an anagram for "we Know It Sucks So what."
For almost two decades, the faithful followers of the schlock rockers have congregated in New York at annual events called Kiss Expos. Kiss Expos are a combination rock ’n’ roll flea market, celebrity meet-and-greet, and performance showcase. There you can buy action figures, matchbox cars, plush cushion slippers shaped after Gene Simmons’ onstage platforms, bobble heads and LEGO toys, comic books, dolls, lunchboxes, garbage cans, teddy bears and even a board game.

The 2003 New York Kiss Expo took place May 3rd and 4th in New Jersey. It was held three months before Kiss is set to embark on a national tour with fellow 70s icons Aerosmith.
The Expo took place at the Meadowlands Sheraton, a 21-story glass monolith that towers over the surrounding wetlands and professional sports facilities. The festivities were spread across three beige banquet halls, spaces usually reserved for corporate events and civic awards ceremonies. Sheraton banquet staff wore black tuxedos and served fried food, hot dogs and $7 dollar mix drinks to the 1200 fans in attendance. The crowd ranged in age from high-schoolers to AARP members.

The Kiss Expo is a family-friendly event, crowded with baby strollers and small children. One infant wore a "Kiss baby" bib, and a married couple in full stage outfits chaperoned their 10-year-old nephew, also in make-up. For civilians: straight-leg jeans and sneakers, rock t-shirts and denim jackets. There was a lot of long hair, but few mullets, suggesting that the old-school rockers have finally wised up. Youngsters leaned toward goth, but were soundly outnumbered by the over-30s, who were too old to rock but hadn’t yet figured out what else to do.

At a typical Expo, the vendors rent table space and provide their own inventory. Some are hardcore Kiss fans unloading their collections, others hawk homemade Kiss goods like mouse pads, blankets and Cub Scout soap-box derby cars. Some are speculators who buy Kiss stuff on eBay with hopes of turning a profit.

The Kiss collectible market is similar to the late-80s baseball card and comic book scene. One older gentleman criticized another fan’s purchase by saying, "I can’t believe that guy paid 40 for that beat-up tour book. Did you see it? I got it from a guy over there for 10 bucks and it was in perfect condition."

Others are regulars on the metal scene. The Grimoire of Exalted Deeds publisher Bill Zebub was on hand behind an assembly of death metal CDs, DVDs and his magazine. Long, straw-like blond hair and White-out skin give the impression that he’s been living on a diet of Twinkies and Pabst for years, but he’s a glowingly nice guy and gave me an issue of his magazine and a documentary about the history of death metal.

Zebub was having a rough time of it, however. "I think death metal fans listen to Kiss," he told me, "but Kiss fans don’t really listen to death metal." He seemed to regret renting the table, as he’d only sold one CD so far.
The man behind him had better luck selling 80s merchandise from the Christian glam-rock group Stryper. His table was covered in black and yellow t-shirts and stacks of the 2001 Stryper Expo videos. When asked how his Stryper-exclusive angle was working, he revealed a billfold packed fat with 100s and 50s. He’d arrived with ten dollars in his pocket.

Away from the center of the merchandise tables, the featured guests earn their fees. Bruce Kulick, Kiss lead guitar player from 1984 to 1995, was on hand to sign autographs and promote his solo album and current gig as the axe-man for the reconstituted Grand Funk Railroad. Kulick is tall, thin and played the role of rock star in his leather jacket and rock boots. A tightly compacted, Jeri Curlish hairstyle failed to fully hide his bald spot.

Michael Kelly Smith, the lead guitar player for 80s hair-metal band Britny Fox was seated next to Kulick’s autograph station. His locks still flow down to his shoulders, but they lack the spiky afro from the days when his band enjoyed one-hitter success with "Girlschool." Britny Fox recently released its first studio album in 12 years, but Kelly wasn’t sure if the band would tour, as his full-time guitar-teaching gig would be jeopardized.

And in the back corner of the larger banquet room: adult film starlet Jasmine St. Claire, signing autographed pictures and talking to fans. St. Claire–most famous for having sex with 300 men in World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2–looked haggard and acted unfocused and flighty. Her skin was taut and leathery; her hair was tangled, almost in dreadlocks. When asked why she was at the Expo, she rattled off six favorite songs. She also had every Iron Maiden album on vinyl, and remains a huge fan of Dio and Dokken. She also told several fans that she was keen on offering her professional expertise to Kulick. When informed of Jasmine’s intentions, Kulick was flattered but terrified.

The Expo’s organizer is Richie Ranno. He’s a thin guy with curly gray hair who on the day of the event was eager to blow me off. The next day, on the phone, he was gracious and polite.
Ranno’s been organizing the New York Kiss fan events for 17 years, a gig that grew from his relationship with Kiss in the 70s when he played guitar for the forgotten pop-metal band Starz that shared management with Kiss. They put out four records on Capitol before breaking up in the early eighties.

He says his transition from rock star to convention organizer was an accident.

"I did it with a partner. We had some Kiss stuff that people seemed to want, and we thought, ‘How are we going to sell it?’ The idea was that the stuff we had was 70s stuff, and Kiss with make-up was [then] a nostalgia thing because Kiss was running around with no make-up."
Their first convention, held in Cranford, NJ, was a success. Ranno soon formed Starz Productions and became the Johnny Appleseed of Kiss conventions–Cleveland, Chicago, Boston and Poughkeepsie soon followed. Ranno also plays with his "all-star" band every Sunday night at the Orange Lantern bar in Paramus, NJ, and hopes for a Starz reunion and tour this summer.
Depending on which original members come on board, this summer’s manifestation of Kiss will either headline or support Aerosmith. Word at the Expo was that original guitarist and fan favorite Ace Frehley was unlikely to join. He is, however, slated to appear at Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy camp on June 18 in New York City. (The five-day camp gives fans the chance to fulfill lifelong dreams of playing alongside members of Kiss, the Who, Mountain and the Hall & Oates’ back-up band.)

For those not inclined or employed enough to attend Fantasy camp, the band is offering backstage passes for their upcoming shows for $1000. Through the official website, Kissonline.com, fans can purchase a Platinum Ticket that guarantees a seat in the first five rows of the show and backstage access. Once backstage, these superfans can have their pictures taken with the band by the tour photographer. But buyer beware: Fan cameras are prohibited and autographs, though possible, are not guaranteed.

West Nile Threatens Connecticut

2007-08-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

Once Bitten...
Due to recent weather patterns, the state's mosquito population is exploding. Is Connecticut set for a West Nile virus outbreak?
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, July 5, 2007

With a recent spike in Connecticut's mosquito population, some state health officials are cautioning that mosquito-borne illnesses, including the West Nile virus, may increase this year.

The University of Connecticut's Agricultural Experiment Station, which traps and monitors hundreds of mosquitoes at 91 locations throughout the state, has noticed unusual growth in the state's insect population. Over the past 10 years, the traps have yielded an average of 225 mosquitoes per trap. In the second to last week of June they collected mosquitoes 350 per trap, and the chief medical entomologist for the CAES, Theodore Andreadis, predicted the weekly average would rise as the summer progresses.

More mosquitoes doesn't just mean ruined picnics.

"We have conditions right now that are quite suitable for rapid amplification for the West Nile virus," Andreadis said."Why I'm saying that is because if you have a very wet spring with a lot of flooding that produces a lot of mosquitoes, if that's followed by very hot weather, like we have right now, that seems to accelerate the whole transmission cycle."

The CAES has monitored mosquitoes as part of the state's mosquito management program, a coordinated effort between the state's Department of Health Services, the state's Department of Environmental Protection and the CAES, since 1997.

Andreadis and his team sort through the mosquitoes to determine what kind of mosquitoes they are — Connecticut hosts about 50 different species of mosquitoes. Determining the species is critical for determining whether they are nuisances or health risks. Different types of mosquitoes can carry different kinds of diseases.

West Nile is carried by the Culex mosquitoes, which are found typically in urban and suburban areas, and Eastern Equine Encephalitis, a disease whose symptoms range from mild flu-like coma and death according to the Center for Disease Control, is spread by Culiseta mosquitoes, which are found in rural places with fresh water marshes. In Connecticut, Hartford and Fairfield counties have historically had the most cases of West Nile, while the southeast region of the state is hit hardest by Eastern Equine Encephalitis.
*
The main infection time for West Nile is August and September.

"You'll see people start getting sick in the last two weeks of August. The peak of people getting sick and coming down with clinical signs, is in early September," said Randall Nelson, a veterinarian for the DHS.

While cases have already been reported in other parts of the country, it hasn't yet reared its head in Connecticut.

The first outbreak of West Nile was in Connecticut's southern neighbor, New York, in 1999. Despite its proximity to the disease's presumed source, Connecticut residents have so far mostly avoided the disease.

"We've been very lucky. Why that is, we're not 100 percent sure. But while some people were seriously ill, and we have had several deaths, in the big picture, if you put it in perspective, we have been quite lucky," Nelson said.

According to the state health department, only 57 Connecticut residents have contracted West Nile (five of those contracted the disease out of state) since the state began monitoring for the disease. In those cases, there have been three fatalities.

I suggested to Nelson that Connecticut is a smaller state, and that the smaller population would account for the lower rate of infection. Nelson disagreed.

"Of course, you need to have a population at risk to get sick," Nelson said. "But beyond that, we do have over three million people living in Connecticut in a variety of residential settings, from rural to urban. So, we certainly have opportunity."

West Nile is a difficult public health risk to assess. Despite years of close study by health officials throughout America, it's impossible to determine how it will spread.

"It has to do with a number of factors, but I don't think we know everything that comes into play," Nelson said, adding that while public health officials have learned a lot about the disease since 1999, there are still many unknowns. "To predict where it's going to crop up, we can't really do that."

Statistically, only one out of 150 people exposed to the virus will show symptoms. And when symptoms are evident, they vary greatly.

"It varies from mild symptoms — some people will just very mild symptoms — a fever, headache, not much more than that," Andreadis said. "But other individuals will develop much more severe complications like nausea or vomiting. The virus can affect brain cells. You can slip into a coma and die."

The best treatment for the virus is avoiding getting bitten by mosquitoes. That doesn't mean we need to stay inside througout August and September. Commercially available insect repellent sprays containing DEET are a reliable method of avoiding mosquito bites. He cautioned people from relying on citronella candles marketed as fighting mosquitoes, as he said the candles are ineffective. Nelson recommended that Connecticut residents outfit their windows with screens to keep mosquitoes out of their homes, and to employ netting for outdoor activities like camping. Because mosquitoes lay eggs in water, emptying out containers that have been filled with water is important.

Andreadis said that Connecticut residents should get used to taking these simple precautions against West Nile, as it has become part of the landscape.

"I don't think, given our ecology, given the species of mosquitoes that carry the virus and our mosquito season, we're probably ever going to experience the volume of cases you see in other parts of the country," Andreadis said. "But you have to understand that this virus has found a permanent home. It's firmly established in North America and Connecticut. It emerges every year."

Barack Obama, UCC Synod

2007-08-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

Obamamania
Does the Right Wing own religion? Barack Obama comes to Hartford to address the United Church of Christ Synod. While the emphasis was on faith, politics crept around the edges.
Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, June 28, 2007

Within hours of his keynote speech at the United Church of Christ Synod, presidential hopeful Barack Obama was a top story on the Drudge Report.

According to the headline on the right-leaning newsfeed website, the junior Senator from Illinois claimed during his speech in Hartford that the Christian right had "hijacked" faith.

The headline was prominently displayed on the site through late Sunday, underneath a headline about Republican former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney complaining about attacks on his religion; the stories seemed meant to be read against each other — in other words, making Obama out as the aggressor.

Seeing the Obama story on the Drudge Report surprised me. I attended Obama's speech along with a reported 8,000 UCC members and, according to the church, 166 registered journalists, in Hartford on June 23, and the hijacking comment didn't register with me at all. I was surprised when I checked my notes from the event that I had even written the comment down. It seemed like a boilerplate stump speech comment, an example of one of Obama's great political skills — the ability to comfortably mix Christian language with political ideas. It fit into the day's agenda of liberal Christian ideals.

Looking over the transcript of the speech, it was at least partially clear why I ignored the comment that would later be drudged up. First, it was a few words in the middle of a paragraph, couched within a statement about the need for unity and the ability religion has to unite.
"Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart," Obama said

Obama mentioned the Christian right, but it wasn't the shot across the bow Drudge implied it was.

"Part of [the reason faith has become divisive is] because of the so-called leaders of the Christian right," Obama said.

The church members I spoke to after the speech didn't seem struck by the hijacking comment, either. A couple people said, that comment was very much in keeping with the rest of the Synod.
"With the UCC, for the most part, we agree with that, so it didn't hit us as anything out of the ordinary," UCC member Nicolle Dahlen said.

The 45-minute speech, which was met with several standing ovations by the crowd, set Obama's personal journey of faith against what he saw as a "hunger" in America for "a sense of purpose" among many Americans to "relieve a chronic loneliness."

Obama recounted how he was raised without religion, and became a churchgoer late in life, partially out of expediency. As a community organizer in Chicago, he dealt with several churches. Obama said that at that time, a pastor told him that if he was organizing churches, it might be helpful if he "went to church once in a while."

The catalyst for Obama's involvement with the church was his work with community action. Touching on speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Obama talked about the relationship between social progress and faith. The Christian right, Obama said, has worked to erode that relationship, exploiting peoples' faith to fight Democratic political initiatives.

"I think he was talking about how the radical Christian right has used faith to divide. How can we say that everyone does not have a spirituality around them? Religion doesn't belong to just a few people," said Nancy Rucker, a UCC member from Storrs.

To me, the most striking thing about Obama's speech was how eerily relaxed he seemed giving it. He was speaking in front of thousands of people, and seemed about as anxious as someone talking to a beloved house pet. Even when he made a mistake — like when he said he earned $13,000 a month (instead of a year) as an organizer in Chicago before quickly correcting himself to say $13,000 a year — it didn't look like his heart rate was raised by even a beat.

The content itself was fairly unremarkable, not because it was bad, but because it wasn't anything Obama hadn't said before. Much of it was taken almost verbatim from Obama's autobiographical book The Audacity of Hope.

It wasn't supposed to be a political speech, as several UCC officials made pains to say. Several church members emphasized to me that the UCC had asked Obama to be the keynote speaker before he announced he was running for president.

A speaker announced early in the day that Obama campaign buttons and T-shirts were not allowed within the Civic Center.

However, signs of political maneuvering were evident. Campaign staff manned Obama tables placed outside the building, across the road from buildings tagged with Dodd's '08 political graffiti.

Two politically minded entrepreneurs from Brooklyn were hawking American Apparel style T-shirts with hipster silk screen renderings of Obama's image outside the civic center entrance.
Sarah Gager and her boyfriend Andy had traveled up from New York with bags of silk screened T-shirts.

Gager laughed when I asked when the Dodd version of the shirt would be ready.

It's probably the fallout from getting up at seven on a Saturday, but I was initially irritated to high hell by the Synod. Watching two singers stand against a backdrop reading "Let It Shine" sing "Solar Power, inexpensive energy" to the tune of the hymn "Angels We Have Heard on High" (you'd know it if you heard it — it's the one that goes "Glor-or-ee-or-ee-or-ee-a), I thought the group combined all the annoying aspects of earnest liberals with all of the annoying aspects of Christianity. I warmed to the idea, though, when the entire crowd, numbering in the tens of thousands, sang along.

Partially it was the effect of being surrounded by thousands of voices in relative unison, but mostly it was the realization that with the critical mass of these numbers, something constructive might come out of these kinds of ideals.

Shortly after the holy solar power sing-a-long, Bill Moyers, the former host of PBS's news magazine show NOW and the current host of Bill Moyers Journal, was introduced as the first keynote speaker. Raised a Baptist, Moyers has attended services at a UCC Church for over 40 years.
But even if he wasn't involved with the church, he would fit the UCC's vibe perfectly, mixing a liberal slant on current events with literate references and a deep religiosity. He talked about the biblical figure Saul and Emily Dickinson in the same sentence, and deftly connected
spirituality with social action. Speaking of the conflict he saw between power and justice, Moyers said that "nothing seems to embarrass the political class in America." Not the disparity of wealth in America, not the Iraq war, not the response to national crises.

"It's justice that measures the worth of a state, not empire," Moyers said to a standing ovation shortly after a Tupperware container full of chocolate chip cookies passed through my aisle.

This paper's own columnist, Alan Bisbort, was quoted in the material handed out to the Synod-goers. In his last column, he suggested the UCC adopt "Christian but not insane" as their motto, and that quote was excerpted in the "General Synod Digest." If nothing else, this shows the church's ability to tolerate even the craziest op-ed columnist in the country (Just kidding — nobody beats the Biz!).

But in all seriousness, the church's embrace of the quote speaks volumes about its views and its character. Embedded within the statement is the supposition that Christianity has become, at least in some quarters, insane. Including the quote was a sign that the UCC is separated from the Christian right.

"That liberal Christian voice is one that isn't heard that much. What's mostly heard is a rather strident right leaning voice in America," said Philip Price, a UCC member from Atlanta, Georgia. "So it was exciting to hear so many folks affirming their faith, not with a leftist view-point, necessarily, but with a compassionate viewpoint."

At times the Synod seemed more like a political convention than a religious one. There were conferences on topics such as immigration, gay rights, and morally responsible business.

The UCC members I spoke with uniformly embraced the church's liberal stances. However, those views rankle at least one member. Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan White House political director, wrote in the latest issue of conservative magazine The American Spectator that he and other right-leaning members of the church had objections with the church's liberal bent, writing he decried UCC officials' "zealous insistence on presenting the UCC to the national media as a liberal church" and using its member's money for "liberal political causes."

Lord claims the liberal bent has had an adverse effect on the church's membership, writing that: "as a direct result of the liberal politics running the hierarchy, the church has lost over one million members in the last four decades."

One church member suggested that the right wing hold over American Christianity is a question of perception and marketing.

"I can't blame them if they're more media savvy. I can't blame them if they're better at getting in front of the cameras," said Atlanta's Philip Price. "I think the progressive voice has not been as astute or smart at getting the message of what we believe out there in the same way."
The people I met were almost all self-described liberals. One young church member said that issues aren't always addressed.

"The church is pretty liberal and supportive. But there are some people who try to stay away from it and pretend it's not an issue," said Nicolle Dahlen, a 20-year-old church member from Rochester, Minnesota. Dahlen had spent most of the Synod working an LGBT booth. "In the last three days we sold $3,000 worth of buttons and T-shirts and stuff. The turnout's always really awesome at Synod, but because this year is our 50th anniversary, there was about 8000 people here," Dahlene said. "Which was pretty intense."

At the encouragement of the event's speakers, many of the 8,000 attending the Synod spilled out of the Civic Center and onto the surrounding streets. On Saturday, the streets and restaurants of downtown Hartford were packed with church members. My heart swelled with civic pride at the prospect of someone telling their friends back home in Sioux City, Iowa about the great chicken curry quesadilla they had at The Russell.

Jordan Polon of the Greater Hartford Welcome Center said she was overwhelmed by the number of people asking for her assistance. She didn't mind the crush, though.

"These are the nicest people I've ever met," Polon said.

Lil' Bush Review

2007-08-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

Bush Bash
The decider-in-chief rendered as a shrimpy little cartoon on Comedy Central
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, June 21, 2007

It's weird. People talk about Comedy Central cartoon Lil' Bush like it's an audacious gut punch to the president. While the show's not without its charms, it's far from revolutionary. Bush is as popular as salmonella right now. Mocking him almost smacks of lazy writing. It's Leno territory.

Nobody thinks of Bush as the megaphone-toting cowboy standing on rubble on 9-12 anymore. He's the strutting idiot in the "mission accomplished" flight suit. Sure, it's interesting there's a whole animated TV show devoted to mocking him, but it would be a lot cooler if it was better.

The show's central conceit — portraying Bush and his staff as toddlers — is its biggest problem. First, it's confusing. Bush 41 is in office in the show, yet references to current events — like Bush 43's war in Iraq — are referenced constantly.

Many of the gags are predicated on juxtaposing the Bush administration against the formulas of cartoon shows, which doesn't work. The first episode features an extended Josie and the Pussycats-style musical scene that's more distracting than funny. Adult Swim has been on TV for six years — does anyone in America still think Hanna-Barbera parodies are clever? I was shouting at the TV, demanding more Abu Graib references.

All of which would be fine if the show was more precise. The cartoon features a Donald Rumsfeld character, six months after his real life counterpart was shitcanned. Voiced by Iggy Pop, Lil' Rummy is Lil' Bush's most trusted advisor — couldn't the Godfather of punk voice a larval version of Karl Rove instead? Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, the brightest of Herbert Walker's awful spawn, is portrayed as a feral manchild. Lil' Bush at one point chastises the Condoleeza Rice character for using fuzzy math, a reference to a seven-year-old presidential debate. Even worse, there's a tepid Monica Lewinsky gag dating back to the Mesozoic era.

Lacking cutting edge South Park style topicality, the show falls back on gross-out humor. In the second episode, Lil' Cheney not only has sex with Barbara Bush, he gets lodged inside her uterus afterwards. Maybe that's water cooler fodder, but it's a cheap gag that detracts from the smarter jokes the show occasionally attempts.

Lil' Bush isn't the first time Comedy Central show devoted to mocking G Dubs. That's My Bush, produced by South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker, aired on the network in the spring and summer of 2001. Starring a befuddled-looking Timothy Bottoms as Bush, the show was a satire of sitcoms, not politics. It featured a sassy maid, and a Larry Dallas-style wacky neighbor. Bottoms reprised the roll, minus the 30-yard stare, in the 2003 hagiographic made-for-television movie DC 9/11: Time of Crisis.

It's unlikely that anything from Lil' Bush would likewise be re-purposed as praise for the decider in chief. But in order for the show to succeed as the comedic assault on Bush it's intended to be, it needs to evolve into a much darker beast.

There are some inspired riffs, particularly showing Baghdad's Green Zone as a scene out of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Also, even though the Lil' Bush's character utters his fair share of malapropisms, his most prominent character trait is misplaced self-assuredness, not stupidity. The character believes his own bullshit — there's a perfect moment when he declares his love for tatter tots, pauses slightly and says "decisive."

That's a joke worth being jealous of. More of that, please.

Global Warming Denying Weatherman

2007-08-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

Don't Need a Weatherman
Former local TV weatherman Art Horn storms the state, saying global warming's a myth
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, July 26, 2007

On Wednesday, July 11, four days after the Live Earth concert and the night that the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report stating the Northeast region was at dire risk of global warming-related disaster, former TV weatherman Art Horn told the 12 people assembled in the community room of Granby's police department that man-made global warming is a myth.

With his rumpled shirt, and TV-friendly delivery, Horn's demeanor matched a junior high school science teacher. It was a very effective presentation. Horn's assertions — mainly that the earth was going through a natural warming period and that the data linking industrial carbon emissions and climate change is incorrect — were presented in colloquial, easily understandable language.

The crowd appeared to watch Horn's slide show intently. They rolled along when Horn mocked global warming advocate groups. They laughed at his jokes, nodding over his insinuations about the pocket-lining motives behind Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. Gore's company, Generation Investment Management, Horn noted, deals in carbon offsets, directing investor money towards businesses involved with non-carbon emitting energy production.

"Global warming is a business. It's an industry," Horn said near the presentation's end, adding: "If you don't believe in global warming, you're almost like a heretic or a heathen."

An audience member asked if Horn had read Michael Crichton's environmentalist-vilifying novel The State of Fear. Horn hadn't and regretted it. After more questions, Horn turned to the prospect of carbon taxes.

"If global warming is a myth, we'd be taxing ourselves for nothing," Horn said.

Horn has been giving the presentation Global Warming: Fact or Fiction, since last fall, at libraries and other public meeting places throughout Connecticut, Massachusetts and Florida. He conducts the presentation, and other weather-related one-man shows with titles like The Wonders of Weather, through his company the Art of Weather. In addition, he produced the 2006 Emmy-nominated public television documentary Hurricane: Direct Hit.

He started the speaking company in 2004, while he worked at the local NBC affiliate WVIT. A year later, he was informed his services were no longer required by WVIT, and he focused his energy on his independent business. He's been a full-time speaker since, bringing his self-described infotainment presentations to venues ranging from assisted living facilities to cruise ships. He's also provided expert testimony on weather-related court cases; think someone slipping on ice and suing the owner of the property where the slip occurred.

A self-described political moderate, Horn said he first conceived of the global warming presentation to engage with the popular topic of climate change, and he started from the premise that global warming didn't exist.

"There's such confusion in the general public about it because there's been such a drumbeat from the advocates of global warming," Horn said. "It's not a two-sided discussion. All you hear is that global warming is real, that it's man-made and it's going to kill you all."

And while the presentation and information about global warming appears to lean politically to the right — his site links to the right wing Web site World Net Daily and he has given global warming testimony on local conservative radio host Brad Davis' show — Horn maintains the presentation is not political.

"I'm not on a crusade. As part of business and what I do, this is right up my alley. It's something I have some experience with and feel reasonably qualified to talk about," Horn said.
Unlike many TV weathermen who don't have meteorological training, Horn has a Bachelor of Science in meteorology.

"There's no licensing for meteorologists. If you know a little weather speak, almost anyone can call themselves a meteorologist," Horn said.

Put simply, the theory behind global warming is that the rise of man-made carbon dioxide gases in the atmosphere is causing the earth's temperature to rise. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, including water vapor and ozone, warm the planet by absorbing the sun's radiation. Normally, that heat is cooled by the earth's oceans and land masses. The increase in carbon dioxide in the industrial age has offset that balance, causing heat to rise worldwide.
Horn believes the danger presented by man-made carbon emissions has been overstated. In his presentation, Horn notes that carbon dioxide accounts for about three percent of green house gases and water vapor makes up almost all of the rest.

In addition, Horn says, only about three percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is man-made. The amount of man-made carbon in the atmosphere, Horn says, composes less than a tenth of the total atmosphere. According to Horn, such a small percentage couldn't possibly have an effect on global climate.

Why have temperatures gone up and why are the icebergs melting, then? Horn ascribes rising temperatures to a natural warming and cooling cycle the earth has always gone through. In his presentation, he shows slides of paintings from the 1400s, when he says a little ice age occurred, and says concerns over warming are silly since he believes the world could be in store for another little ice age.

"The things that control climate are complex. A lot of it has to do with the sun ... and the changes that occur to it," Horn said. "The oceans play a huge role. They go through fluctuations. The Pacific Ocean warms up."

The global warming myth, Horn believes, has been drummed up by a media "that never saw a gloom and doom story they didn't like" so that media-savvy, politically connected businessmen like Al Gore can make money through carbon offset enterprises.

Horn said that he wasn't alone in his beliefs about global warming, citing Web sites such as icecap.us and climatescience.org.

"I'm not alone. There are many world-respected meteorologists that feel the same way," Horn said.

Members of the scientific community who support the existence of man-made global warming say that while many of Horn's assertions about the atmosphere are correct, his conclusions are not.

"Quite often in these arguments that are put forward by what I call science skeptics, they do something called Ignoratio elenchi, or logical fallacies. The first statement is correct, and there is no logical connection to other," said Bill Chameides, the chief scientist at nonprofit environmental advocacy and research group Environmental Defense.

While water vapor is far more present in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, Chameides said Horn misstates the symbiotic relationship between water vapor and other greenhouse gasses.
"We add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and that makes the atmosphere warmer, which causes there to be more water vapor in the atmosphere, which causes it to be warmer still. The fundamental cause of global warming is the rise of carbon dioxide," Chameides said.

The balance of greenhouse gasses is delicate, and even a relatively small increase could nudge temperatures upwards.

Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that Horn's suppositions miss out on critical nuances of climate science.

"He's looking at cold numbers about how much water vapor there is, and how much carbon dioxide there is and drawing very simplified conclusions that sound scientific but are missing a lot of the key points about climate," Ekwurzel said.

Horn's assertion that the earth's temperature fluctuates through hot and cold periods is common and correct, Ekwurzel said, but even with the low periods taken into account, the world's temperature has risen considerably more in the industrial age. Chameides said Horn's conclusions about natural temperature fluctuations are indicative of Horn's general logical missteps.

"The first statement is that the earth goes through warming and cooling cycles. That's true. The next statement is therefore the current warming is due to the same cycles," Chameides said.

"There's no logical connection between the two statements. ... Physics tells us that greenhouse gasses cause global warming."

Ekwurzel or Chameides both discounted Horn's claim that only three percent of carbon emmisions are man-made.

"The claims are common if you haven't been trained in climate science," said Ekwurzel. "He's looking at the composition of the atmosphere and drawing conclusions without understanding all the various properties of water vapor versus carbon dioxide and so on."

Recycle Bicycle

2007-08-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

Getting Your Hands Oily
In New Britain at Recycle Bicycle, kids are taught how to put together bicycles, and how to grow up in the process
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, June 21, 2007

Stacy Hall was surrounded by chaos and bicycle parts. The Louisiana-born Recycle Bicycle shop volunteer was surrounded by a group of New Britain kids aged nine through fourteen. Hall seemed to be everywhere in the shop at once, with his Creole accent booming over the fray of enthusiastic kids giving advice and instruction.

"You don't need no brakes?" Hall asked a boy who was eager to bring a rehabbed bike home. "That's what the dead man said, too."

Hall and his fellow volunteer Jason Daniels — AKA Mr. D — were leading about a dozen kids in the "Earn a Bike" program through bicycle repairs at the Recycle Bicycle shop at 85 Arch Street in New Britain. The kids were mostly new to the program, but some had worked long enough to earn their 10 "good faith hours" and go home with a loaner bike.

Several of the kids told me they were looking forward to getting their own new bike after working a total of 48 hours.

Later, the same energy was present, but the kids were intently focused, working on bicycles. 13-year-old Alexis Lopez, a brash youngster who wore his hair in cornrows, puzzled over how to remove a part from the bicycle in front of him.

"People donate bikes to the bike shop. If they ain't that good, then we strip them and if there's good pieces, people might take them and put them on their own bikes," Lopez said.

I watched him for a couple of minutes as he tried different techniques to remove a pesky part. It was his third week in the program and he was still learning his way around the innards of bicycles. Mr D. worked with him, giving him a minimal amount of instruction, as he wanted Lopez to figure it out himself.

By then, the whole group of kids were scattered throughout the work space, putting chains on bikes, removing pedals and performing other tasks.

"They're alright. You gotta holler at them and everything because some of them need that," Hall said.

"I don't think you could call what Stacy does hollering," Mr D. said, causing an explosion of laughter among the kids.

When asked what he would call it, Mr. D responded with a grunt that caused a second laugh explosion.

"Bothering each other, fighting in the store, intimidating each other — that doesn't happen here. I'm the baddest one here," Hall said.

Hall gave an example of a recent success story, and directed me a newspaper clipping on a wall about a BMX racer named Hector Gonzalez. "We got a guy, Hector Gonzalez. He's getting all A's in school now, but he used to be a terrible kid. He was! Now he's graduating in another week or two," Hall said. "He's got all A's, sponsors for his racing. Complete turnaround."

The program began ten years ago by New Britain High School teacher Cliff Parker, after Mary Anne Drury, a coordinator for New Britain's weed and seed community development program, asked a crowd at a community meeting if there anyone was interested in fixing bicycles that were donated from the New Britain police impound.

Parker and his fellow cyclist Mark Hoffman agreed, and set to work on the bikes in an unheated, unlit garage. After a year, they moved into a city-owned property on Oak Street, and started receiving funding from the weed and seed program, and grants from the American Savings Foundation and the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain. Later they moved to their present downtown New Britain location.

While a significant number of bikes are still donated by the New Britain police, donations come from a variety of other sources as well. The store now offers repair services, bike tune ups and sells new and reconditioned bicycles. New Britain courts assign juvenile offenders there for community service.

In addition, the New Britain BMX Racing team is run out of the shop, and a BMX course dedicated to the team is evidently under construction. Parker estimated that over a thousand New Britain kids have gone through the program, and that three hundred are currently involved.

While the shop is a step up from the program's first location, its intended purpose has remained the same.

"From its inception, the idea was we weren't just going to get bikes and give them to the kids. We were going to get the kids to fix the bikes," Parker said. As the program grew, Parker noticed reoccuring patterns about the kids who came to the shop to work.

"What we realized about three years in, is that we attracting kids who, in a large part had failed in school in every conceivable way," Parker said. "It just seemed this kinetic, physically engaged, moderately structured mentoring situation we created & was appealing to the kids that were the least successful at school."

Working with bicycles, Parker said, provided a tangible goal whose progress could be steadily observed.

"What we found was our kids could see the relevance of learning here in a way they couldn't see it in school," Parker said.

The bicycle the kids earn through the program provide incentive to stay, and through rehabbing bicycles, they experience goal-oriented working.

"If the bike doesn't work, it doesn't work& You can't say, oh, great job, and the wheel falls off. You've got to say great start, but it still doesn't work," Parker said. "There are real parameters of success and failure that can not be ignored, no matter how supportive you try to be or the trial and error process."

Parker and his crew had planned to move the shop down the road into an empty storefront by this time. That plan had to be put on hold when the building caught on fire the night before Thanksgiving. They plan to move into the space in September. With the display space available there, they'll look more like a professional bike shop.

Well, as professional as a bike shop managed by boisterous associates of the earn a bike program can look.

"Who knew that teaching these kids to be sales people — when the product is something that they liked and had some knowledgeable command over — would be an incentive to teach them how to be involved in the business world?" Parker asked.

Food Not Bombs

2007-08-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Panic in the Park
Hartford's Food Not Bombs causes a stir, but is unshaken
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, June 28, 2007

Hartford's chapter of Food Not Bombs has weathered a storm over the last month. First, a drop in volunteers forced them to temporarily downgrade their twice weekly sessions of serving free vegetarian meals in Bushnell Park (they're starting up again in July, and volunteers are encouraged to e-mail hartfordfnb@hotmail.com).

And secondly, they inadvertently caused a hilarious panic in the park. On Sunday, June 11, one of FNB's leftover cardboard boxes put the city of Hartford in a tailspin, a turn of events the FNB crew found extremely puzzling.

"That sinister-looking cardboard box with a cupcake drawn on it and decorated with a bedazzler?" FNB volunteer Sean Murphy said, ruefully.

It was a cardboard box labelled "Not Bombs." Unless it was a terrorist group with a sci-fi level understanding of nanotechnology and with a Magritte-like approach to labelling, it was pretty clearly not a threat. Still, the Hartford police mobilized in force and created one of the funniest overreactions to a nonthreatening object since, well, I have to go back to the Boston Mooninite Box on this one.

The reaction was especially odd as it wasn't the first time such a box would have appeared in the park after an FNB session.

"We respect every place we go to and don't leave messes around," Dave Rozza said. "But what happens is sometimes we get down to the park and people come late and we have food left over, so we leave it in a box and people can take it. Usually it's gone quick."

Hartford police did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the recent troubles, Hartford's FNB have kept rolling along. In the 13 years since the group started in Hartford, they haven't missed a Sunday. In addition, the Hartford group's scope has extended beyond Hartford.

"We were the first Food Not Bombs to respond to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, and one of the first emergency responders in general," Rozza said.

The dozens of people who showed up at their most recent Bushnell Park event seemed pretty happy to see them. They were surprisingly effusive about the quality of the vegetarian food served by FNB, with one woman calling it delicious, and another man praising its "nutrify-ing" nature. That was a surprise considering the cook's somewhat self effacing assessment of his talents.

"I make delicious slop. Actually, slop is a bad description. I make delicious vegetable slurry," Murphy said.

The only complaint had nothing to do with the food. Bobby Houston, a man who said he was homeless by choice, complained over the political content. The lack of it.

"We don't always talk about anarchist politics at FNB. We try to keep it apolitical and not preachy at all," FNB volunteer Ken Tong said. Like others in the group, Tong is a committed anarchist, but said the primary purpose of the FNB is to simply feed people.

"All you have to do is voice concern," Houston said.

Rozza was surprised at the request for more of a message along with the food.

"That's never happened before," Rozza laughed.

Salvia

2007-08-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

Meet the New Drug
Controversial yet legal, the herbal psychedelic salvia is readily available in Connecticut. But does it work?
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, August 2, 2007

The cluster of kids gathered by the counter mentioned salvia when I walked into the head shop. The four college-age rocker-looking kids and the store's owner were discussing legal highs, like herbal ecstasy and various smokable herbs. Those were good, they said, but none of them produced as intense an experience as salvia.

By a strange coincidence, I was there to buy salvia divinorum, a legal herbal drug with alleged hallucinogenic properties. A member of the sage family of plants and native to Mexico, salvia is sold as a leaf or an extract that can be smoked or chewed. The potency of extracts increase as the cost goes up. Salvia graded as 10X contains 10 times more Salvinorum A, the active ingredient of salvia, then the same amount of salvia leaves, is generally the cheapest. Salvia graded as 50x is more expensive. Salvia experts told me that the labelling system is misleading, as the potency of salvia varies widely.

Once I said I was a reporter and interested in buying salvia, advice was dispensed rapidly and haphazardly, from both the customers and the store's owner. I was handed a pamphlet about the herbal drug that included a short history and a long list of instructions, which emphasized in all capital letters that I should not drive or operate any type of machinery while under the influence of salvia.

I was told I shouldn't take it alone. I was warned that I would most certainly drool while I was on the drug. The smoke from the cured leaves was harsh, they said, and I couldn't just roll it up and smoke it; a water pipe was needed to cool the smoke. The high lasts about 20 minutes, but would seem like an hour.

Cautionary stories about friends and peers were shared. This one guy who smoked salvia thought a glass coffee table was a well and tried to swim in it. A girl took the drug and believed her body was made out of Lego pieces.

According to Bryan Roth, a director for the National Institute of Mental Health, those experiences illustrate the dissociative experiences salvia users typically have.
"For most people it's pretty overwhelming because they're more or less instantaneously transported to an alternative universe," Roth said.

I walked out of the store with a plastic lid filled with 20X grade salvia (the highest grade available at the store) and a small red water pipe. I felt pretty spooked. I had assumed salvia's effects were going to be as negligible as smoking banana peels. As anxious as I was, I decided not to enlist the aid of a sitter. I was first of all a grown man who hasn't required tending by a babysitter in the last quarter century or so, and secondly averse to having people watch me drool. Thirdly, my girlfriend was out of town, and she is the only person I think I'd really trust in such a situation.

I went home and struggled to remember how to load screens into a bong (it's been a while) and spilled the contents of the salvia container onto my coffee table. I made a Rhapsody play list, including "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd, a song I planned on using as a ripcord I could pull if I started freaking out, and poured myself a glass of water and opened a can of beer and put them on the kitchen counter.

I pulled two hits from the bong and, as instructed, held the smoke in as long as I could. The effects of the salvia kicked in almost immediately. The music I was playing — Spiritualized's Live at Royal Albert Hall album — suddenly seemed extremely intense. My computer was nearby, and I typed out the sentence "If I knew it was going to do this to the music, I would have done it to the whole apartment."

When I looked up from the typo-ridden sentence, the air seemed like it was streaked with waves, and the walls seemed to pulsate. I stood up to get closer to the music, which seemed to be capable of taking me on an intense journey.

I was both elated because the drug worked and panicked because the drug worked. I was down the rabbit hole, and wondered if I should have heeded the warnings of the head-shop kids.
Then, two songs into the play list, the rush subsided, leaving behind an unpleasant lightheadedness. I felt over-heated and ripped off. For the next couple of hours I was tired, mellow and stupid. I felt hung over the following day.

Judging from the dozens of videos of salvia trips uploaded to the video-sharing website YouTube, my mild experience with salvia was not the norm (or maybe I can just handle my shit better than most, or my self-administered dosage was too low). The salvia users on the internet videos freak out like crazy in trips that last nearly a half an hour.

The videos straddle the line between hilarity and deeply disturbing — a mix the Internet was made for. Reactions range from giddiness to seeming regressions into atavistic states. The salvia-takers, who are mostly white males who appear to be in their early 20s, remove their pants, babble like idiots and, yes, drool.

Thanks to media reports, governmental action and maybe even those YouTube videos, salvia divinorum has snowballed into a topic of concern nationwide. It's illegal in Delaware, Missouri and Louisiana. Other states, including New Jersey and Louisiana, have proposed banning it, and two proposals have been forwarded to prohibit it at the national level. Currently, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency classifies salvia as a drug of concern, but has not yet defined it as a scheduled narcotic.

Salvia isn't some recently-created designer drug. Native to the Oaxaca region of Mexico, salvia has been used in shamanistic rituals and as a healing agent for centuries. It's been known to the industrialized world since the 1930s and sold commercially since the mid 1990s.

Interest in salvia seems to have spiked in the last two years. In the past two months alone, newspapers across the United States and Canada have run editorials and articles with headlines like "Hallucinogenic Salvia a Growing Threat" (San Bernardino County Sun), "Salvia: Harmless Recreation or a Dangerous Drug?" (Wisconsin State Journal) and "Herb Poses Dangers to Users" (The Calgary Herald).

The headlines imply salvia is causing some sort of an international drug apocalypse. A reader could easily infer that the streets of San Bernardino, Wisconsin and Calgary are piled high with strung-out salvia heads, and the city emergency rooms and morgues are clogged by the shattered bodies and tattered corpses of salvia users. Evidently, that inference would be incorrect.

"There's not a single documented case of overdose. There's not a single documented case of an emergency room visit. There's not a single documented case of addiction," salvia researcher John Mendelson said.

Why all the fuss and why now, then? Jag Davies, the director of communications for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that studies the possible medicinal and therapeutic benefits of drugs like MDMA and LSD, said salvia is following a familiar trajectory for naturally-occurring controlled substances.

"It's a very similar pattern, and we've seen it happen over and over again throughout history. Salvia, for example, is a plant that's been used for thousands of years in Mexico by indigenous people with relatively little side effects when used in a safe context that's part of the social order of the society," Davies said. "Then it starts getting spread in underground circles. Once it gets to a critical mass, the media goes into hysteria mode."

The arguable critical mass event for salvia was the 2006 suicide of Delaware teenager Brett Chidester. Sometime before taking his own life, the 17-year-old honors student told his mother he had experimented with salvia. Reportedly, in his conversations with his mother, Chidester said he didn't like the drug. In his suicide note, Chidester reportedly wrote that he couldn't go on living after he "learned the secrets of life." The rest of the note hasn't been made public. Pro-salvia websites and sources have contended that the line wasn't in reference to Chidester's salvia use, and speculated that other factors — divorced parents, acne medication, drinking, etc, — led to his decision to take his own life. Chidester's mother has maintained that salvia, along with depression, were the major contributing factors in her son's suicide.

The Delaware state legislature, led by Democratic state senator Karen E. Peterson, passed Senate Bill # 259, nicknamed "Brett's Law" in the spring of 2006. The bill made salvia divinorum a schedule-one controlled substance in the state, which prohibited its sale and use.

The precise way salvia divinorum acts in the human mind isn't yet known. Articles about how the drug affects mice, chimpanzees and other animals have appeared in scientific and medical journals for years. The first human study with controlled conditions is only now currently underway. John Mendelson, senior scientist at the Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center, is operating the study, and he told me that the neurochemical makeup of salvia is unique.

"It really represents something completely new in medicine. Basically, salvinorum A [salvia divinorum's active ingredient], what kids are using now and is available on the net, activates a unique set of receptors," Mendelson said.

Mendelson and others believe the potential medical applications for such a substance are great.
"They appear to mediate some effects of bipolar disease, some forms of mania and possibly HIV," Mendelson said. "There's a lot of excitement around something that specifically and potently activates kappa receptors."

Mendelson said he's worried that the pressure in many quarters to make salvia illegal would have a negative impact on the scientific study of the plant. If the drug were classed as a controlled narcotic, obtaining salvia would become exponentially more difficult for researchers.
"I think the politicians who are pushing control here are just idiots. They're ignorant. They hear that some kids have gotten high and they want to make it illegal. They don't consider the consequences of that," Mendelson said.

The possible consequences extend beyond the scientific community. The most dramatic consequence, Mendelson feared, would be on the drug's recreational users.

"Some people will go to jail for it and have their lives completely ruined. And right now there's no underground commerce in this drug, and there will be," Mendelson said. "How stupid can you get — to actually ask for a new drug abuse problem? With scheduling, it'll actually make kids say 'This stuff is good and it really gets you loaded.' It's like the government seal of approval."

Salvia is available in several stores in the Hartford area that sell paraphernalia — an employee at one store told me it was popular. According to state police public information officer Trooper William Tate, Connecticut hasn't encountered problems relating to salvia.

"If there's no law that's applicable to the substance, there's no action that can be taken," Tate said.

A search of the Connecticut Legislature's website for salvia didn't return anything.
However, some local merchants are hesitant to sell salvia. The Trading Post in Canton, which sells water pipes and legal purported psychoactive substances, for example, does not sell it. Trading Post owner Bill Buell said that while he recognized salvia would sell, he didn't want to be responsible for its possible consequences.

"I just, I don't know. I don't see how any good can come out of it. I'm not comfortable with it. I'm just not comfortable with what it can do and the potential problems it can cause," Buell said.
A store owner who does sell salvia said he had his reservations about the drug.

"It really shouldn't be legal," the store owner, who asked not to be identified, said. He worried that someone would take salvia and drive a car or otherwise cause an accident.

GG Allin

2007-08-12T07:18:00.001-07:00

Naked Aggression
A documentary looks at the life and death of reviled "scum punk" GG Allin
By Adam Bulger
Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies
Hartford Advocate, August 9, 2007

I think it's important that the world remember GG Allin, but I'm not exactly sure why. As the 1994 documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies attests, the self-proclaimed "scum rocker" was vile, violent and, arguably, intellectually indefensible. Allin's shows were blood-soaked, shit-smeared messes that almost invariably ended with either a police raid, an assault or a riot. Sometimes all three.

For extreme tactics, no one compares with Allin, who died in 1993 of a heroin overdose. He considered his audience to be his enemy, and not metaphorically. He brutalized the people who came to his shows, men and women alike.

He played at small clubs, loaded up on cocaine and laxatives, and would regularly shit on stage, with the smell would overpowering the room, clearing people out. His performances would have been brutal endurance contests if the shows weren't habitually shut down three songs into the set or less. He was at the border of performance and violence, and he didn't let pesky concerns about art stand in the way of brutality.

The documentary Hated, which was re-released this month in a special edition, is one of the most shocking movies ever made. That's not hyperbole — I challenge anyone to not flinch while watching a woman piss in GG Allin's mouth, causing him to vomit, but not stop. Or when he eats a hot dog freshly pulled out from someone's ass.

But the violence against women is the most shocking part of the movie. He grabs a woman at a concert by her hair and drags her across the floor and flat-out assaults another at a spoken-word performance.

Allin was fascinated by serial killers (which, in a post-Marilyn Manson world, seems more like the sign of a hack than a deviant) and corresponded and met with infamous killer clown John Wayne Gacy, who provides the glowing quote that opens the movie. Allin was a no stranger to the institutional life himself — before the film was shot, he served two years in prison for assaulting an underage girl. When he's asked about his future plans in the movie he says he wants to stay a step ahead of the law, which he was ultimately unable to do; his 1992 tour was interrupted when he was arrested for violating parole.

His outlaw-ness wasn't sexy, though. It was dirty and repulsive, a brutal display of awful animal instincts. He performed naked, but his lumpy body and tiny drug- shriveled cock were displays of ugliness, not Red Hot Chili Peppers-style athletic sexiness.

In the period of Allin's life captured in the documentary, Allin wore aviator shades and hooded jackets. He probably would have been tickled to hear that the year after he died, the a widely distributed police sketch the Unabomber stole the look, minus the Genghis Khan moustache.
Allin's music was actually pretty good. He mostly played poppy hardcore songs that were simple, fast and catchy. He even put out a David Allan Coe-style country record that's eminently listenable.

There's a moment in the film where Allin sings Warren Zevon's "Carmelita" on a beat-up acoustic guitar. There's been a lot of versions of that song — Linda Ronstadt's is probably the most famous — but Allin's out-of-tune guitars and buzzsaw vocals sell the story of a man "strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town" better than anyone.

The film periodically cuts away to a GG Allin fan named Unk for comments. Looking like a nerdier and pudgier Lou Barlow, Unk attempts to provide insight into the appeal of GG Allin. He says he thinks Allin's onstage antics were hilarious. There's a moment where Unk talks about Allin's hatred for authority figures, and says that Allin hated authority figures for just having authority. Allin's wasn't a thought-out rebellion. It was a reaction, like kicking out your leg when a doctor hits your knee with a hammer.

But maybe it's good that he didn't think out his rebellion. The film contains a real eye-opening segment with former bandmate Chicken John, who left the Allin's backing band, the Murder Junkies, because he thought Allin lacked imagination. Promising to kill yourself onstage, a promise Allin made but failed to pull off, was nothing, John says. He should do something that would really register, like killing the president.

Todd Phillips directed the film while a student at New York University. Phillips went on to direct mainstream comedies, including the undisputed classic Old School and the unfairly maligned Starsky and Hutch.
As a rookie documentarian, he pulls off a job that's both amazing and disappointing. He's mostly not to blame; as he explains in his director's commentary, none of his documentary subjects wanted to cooperate. With limited access and modest resources, getting relevant footage was a challenge. He expertly strung together what he had — concert footage, interviews, news stories and talk show appearances — and created a formal, composed documentary about a bent, wild subject.

The film is visceral and fascinating, but something feels missing. We get the feelings about Allin, but not all the facts. There are interviews with Allin's childhood friends (Phillips says in the director's commentary were told that they were being filmed for an MTV documentary) who recount Allin's lifelong misanthropy and early encounters with drugs, and superbly bleak footage of northern New England, where Allin grew up. But the rise of GG Allin and the Murder Junkies from obscurity to infamy, a story one would assume to be like a cross between Eddie and the Cruisers and Taxi Driver, isn't outlined in the movie.

Thankfully, the bonus features on the disc fill in a lot of blank spots. The interview with Allin's mother is particularly revealing, as she talks casually about Allin's hellaciously brutal childhood. Allin's birthname was Jesus Christ Allin — a purported fact that sounded like it could have been self-attributed mythology. He became GG when his younger brother Merle couldn't pronounce Jesus, and called him Jee-Jee instead. That was apparently the only cute thing about Allin's developmental years; the family lived in a cramped New Hampshire cabin that lacked electricity, and no one was allowed to speak after dark.

Merle, who later became his brother's bass player, is interviewed at length in another bonus feature, and provides one of the film's commentary tracks. It's refreshing to see that he's grown out the Hitler moustache he had in the original film. In an interview with Murder Junkies drummer Dino, who looks like a punk rock mannequin, Merle rattles through Allin's history with music, and his progression from Iggy Pop-style frontman into, well, GG Allin. Merle — who seems like an ultra-laid-back dude when he's not cheering on women getting beat up — maintains and lives off of his brother's legacy, selling Allin merchandise on GGallin.com and touring with a reconstituted version of the Murder Junkies.

Thanks to Merle, and the re-release of the film, Allin's legacy lives on. Is that a good thing? Well, if you accept the premise that punk rock is the attempt at expressing pure nihilism, GG Allin was the ultimate punk rocker. Johnny Rotten might have screamed that there was no future, but Allin didn't even seem to have a present. It's the closest to the nasty truth that punk rock implied.