Month: September 2008

Doubt: A Parable was written by John Patrick Shanley and marks a serious departure for the man who also penned screenplays for Moonstruck and Joe Versus the Volcano. While Doubt enjoyed two successful seasons on Broadway and snagged both a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize, Live Arts’ current production marks the play’s regional debut.

Although the play is a compact 90 minutes, it still manages to explore a few compelling moral issues. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, Doubt’s action centers on an impropriety that the progressive Father Flynn (played charismatically by newcomer Timothy Read), the priest and boy’s basketball coach at St. Nicholas, may or may not have perpetrated on a 12-year-old boy. Opposed at every step by the inflexible nun Sister Aloysius (Doris Safie), Father Flynn finds a sometimes-ally in the gushing and vulnerable Sister James (Amanda Pierson Finger) and in the mother of the boy he’s been accused of preying on, the pragmatic Mrs. Muller (Simona Holloway-Warren). The actresses are utterly believable in their adversarial roles, and remind the viewer that strong women also exerted themselves in the patriarchal Catholic Church of the ’60s.

With hints and arguments dropped from every angle, it is nearly impossible for the viewer to decide who is right and who is wrong, who is innocent and who is guilty. In fact, Read—moonlighting from his day job as a pastor to a Crozet Presbyterian church—conducted his own exit poll after the show: “Did he or didn’t he?” Loyal members of his congregation as well as new fans had to answer, “Hard to say.” Even director Fran Smith’s subtle authorial touches pull a viewer’s compass in opposite directions and serve to enhance the play’s ambivalent message: Does the music playing when Flynn takes off his clerical robes signify something sinister? Does the way he crouches low on a basketball when counseling young boys demonstrate his accessibility or his lecherousness?

Shanley’s drama relies on the audience to interpret its lessons. Father Flynn even delivers two short sermons in the work, which make spectators briefly feel like they’re sitting in pews, asked to peel back the many layers of a religious parable. But the play’s explorations of forgiveness versus cover-up, doubt versus suspicion, and innocence versus naivety never weigh too heavily on the audience, often lightened by epigrammatic one-liners delivered by Safie’s Sister Aloysius, who is implacably against sugar cubes and ballpoint pens in addition to pedophilia. The cast does an excellent job of grounding a complex moral tale in a place that is human, empathetic, and ultimately honest in its ambivalence.

I have a personal and rather embarrassing standard for Metallica. It hinges on one question: Does the song lend itself to the daydream in which I stand on a stage, 32nd-note riffs sparking from my guitar, and snarl vocals that proceed to both impress and frighten the crowd, which—incidentally—is composed in equal parts of people I would like to impress and people for whom I have a great hatred.

The majority of Death Magnetic, when held up to this ridiculous yet reliable standard, succeeds admirably.

The band’s 10th studio album, produced by Rick Rubin, was hailed as a return to Metallica’s speed metal days long before it was released in September. And it is. Gone are the bluesy, wandering melody lines that populated the Load albums, as well as the pop-song structures of the Black Album that seemed content with a single riff. Mostly.

Because while Death Magnetic brings back galloping riffs and sonic fury, there are moments when shades of Metallica’s more recent, sludgy past pop up. And they’re not all bad.

Vicious tempos and start-stop precision made Metallica famous way back in the days of tight jeans and mullets. The 2008 Metallica reaches back for both (tempo and precision, not tight jeans and mullets). But they combine them with some of the more “Mama They Tried to Break Me” moments of the ’90s. It works on songs like “The Day That Never Comes” and “Cyanide.”

Instead of relying on those alt-metal years, Metallica uses them to do something they haven’t done for the last decade: write songs with multiple movements and complex arrangements. Or, put another way, songs that make you want to drive fast and punch concrete.

But for all the celebration of Metallica’s return to its first-four-albums form, there is an aspect that didn’t come back. Lyrically, it may be time for fans to learn to live without the Master of Puppets-era James Hetfield.
 
The lyrics for Death Magnetic came solely from Hetfield, and thank whatever deity for that, given the low points from the group’s previous album, St. Anger. Clearly, though, Death Magnetic still exists in that nebulous, post-recovery mode of self-evaluation.

Hetfield was clearly at his best when writing in a persona—songs like “Disposable Heroes,” “One” and “Creeping Death.” But those are nearly 20 years in the past. The songs we’ve got now aren’t bad if one can forgive the occasional poetic inversion for the sake of rhyme, the more-than-occasional metal cliché and the phrase “forever more.”

There are bright moments, of course, songs like “The End of the Line,” where Hetfield is back to barking lyrics and sounding like the same lead man whose staccato shouts on “Creeping Death” hit like spears.

If the early Hetfield of Master of Puppets was metal’s Hemingway, sparse and violent in nature and subject, then the post-recovery, pushing-50 Hetfield is someone different, more personal, drawn to assaying an interior world. It’s just good to hear him do it at this tempo again.

What were they thinking? I’m not really surprised when the managers of large corporations do something dishonest. But I’m surprised when they  do dumb things—against their own self-interest.
 
During the past few months, we have been learning more and more about the mortgage scandal. And major corporations have gone bankrupt, gotten billions of dollars in protection from the federal government, or been forced into mergers.

Across the country, people bought homes with mortgages they couldn’t afford. Then the day of reckoning came and they couldn’t make the monthly mortgage payments.

Maybe some of them honestly didn’t know this was going to happen, but how could the heads of major corporations be so ignorant? Didn’t they have many more options for staying out of trouble? Were the transactions so complicated they couldn’t figure out the buck was going to stop with them? Didn’t they have legal staffs that could explain these “paper” transactions? (If your attorney can’t explain a document to you in clear English, don’t sign it.)

There’s an old saying, “Only a Gooney Bird fouls his own nest.” Crapping on consumers is one thing, but crapping on your own business… Even if the government bails you out, your business will never be the same.

Hadn’t these CEOs ever heard of hedging their bets, or not putting all their eggs in one basket? Or chickens coming home to roost? 

The dirtiest word in the English language is “deregulation.” After the stock market crash of 1929, society soon developed a pretty good idea of the people we couldn’t trust. Regulations were passed to control these people.

Then 25 or 30 years ago, we started hearing more and more about deregulation. So we deregulated and deregulated until…

When I was a boy on the farm, I had a pet rooster. One night, a weasel found a way to get into the chicken house, and killed my pet rooster. I was upset, but these things happen. But we never left open the chicken house door, and invited weasels to live there.

Neither political party is blameless, but it isn’t hard to figure out which political party is most responsible for the mess the United States is in. Here’s a hint: The stock market crashed in 1929 while Herbert Hoover was president. He was soundly defeated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

After that, Hoover was about as welcome at the Republican Convention every four years as George W. Bush was at the convention in 2008.

Is Barack Obama an elitist? Don’t know, don’t care. If he is, then so was John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

We had better elect the best and the brightest. If you had to go to the hospital for brain surgery, would you prefer an elitist or a “good old boy?”

Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School. I’m impressed. If I had applied to Harvard, the next week I would have received a letter. “We received your application…You’re joking, right?”

Some of us went to law schools that got us ready for state bar exams. A select few got ready for much better things.

Al Crabb is a former newspaper editor and reporter who lives in Charlottesville.

Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell is banking on his tough-on-crime stance to help propel him to the governor’s mansion in 2009, but he made an unusual trip to Charlottesville on September 25 to address the local drug court program, the state’s second oldest and among the most effective at reducing recidivism.

The program was almost cut from the state budget last year and will surely be under heavy scrutiny again, considering the shortfall of up to $2.9 billion. McDonnell spoke highly of the program, lauding its cost effectiveness—about four times cheaper than locking up an inmate for a year. “I don’t think there’s anything better we can do,” said McDonnell, and Drug Court staff gave him a banner that proclaimed “Drug Court Works!!!”

However, it was the program’s 194th graduate, Wesley S. Gibson, Jr., who stole the show, regaling the court room with a moving story that involved regaining his father’s respect by repurchasing a drag racing car his father built, a moment that was a turning point in his recovery: “I’m already in the process of making one of my dreams come true.”

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Holly Edwards remains undecided about whether to vaccinate her teenage twin daughters against the human papillomavirus (HPV).

“I am not convinced,” said Edwards, registered nurse, city councilor and perhaps most important, mother, as she spoke to an audience made up mostly of women on September 23 at McLeod Hall in UVA’s School of Nursing. She was one of three members of a panel discussion on HPV and cervical cancer sponsored by the UVA organization Feminism is for Everyone (FIFE) and the Charlottesville chapter of the National Organization for Women.

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease (STD), with more than six million new cases each year and about 10 deaths among women every day. The Gardasil vaccine, manufactured by Merck & Co., is an extra step in the prevention of cervical cancer if coupled with pap smears.

Edwards is among many who still have questions about a vaccine that, starting next year, will be required for all sixth grade girls in the Commonwealth. Virginia is the only state in the nation with the mandate, but it has a relatively loose verbal opt-out policy for parents.

“I am leery of the political will that deemed the vaccine mandatory,” said Edwards, who points out that gatherings like this one are “absolutely necessary” to educate parents and girls about public health. And discussion, she says, is a key component to having a healthy society.

Fellow panelist Dr. Mark Stoler recognized that mandates go against the idea of freedom, but “to protect the population, the mandate is the only way to do it.” Stoler acknowledged the need for men to also be vaccinated, because HPV can result in anal and penile cancer, but focused on the need to educate the masses on the primary targets of this type of cancer and the importance of the vaccine.

“Cervical cancer is a particularly nasty cancer,” he said. “It’s a cancer that occurs in younger women and women who are in the prime of their lives, who are taking care of their children. This is not a cancer of old age.”

But researcher and freelance journalist Cynthia A. Janak, who has been writing about the side effects of the vaccine, said that the risks connected to Gardasil are too great for a mandate.

“It’s very dangerous,” she said. In her research, Janak found that many young women who got the vaccine suffered from fainting, nausea and debilitating migraines.

Panelist Dr. Jennifer Young, fellow in Gynecologic Oncology at UVA, encouraged all mothers to vaccinate their daughters for the simple fact that at least 50 percent of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in life and the cure can be long and painful.

“Imagine having to be in stirrups with a microscope in between your legs for 20 minutes —not fun,” she said. Young also said the mandatory vaccine could reduce the billions of dollars spent each year on curing genital warts, one of the linked effects of the HPV virus.

Nora Eakin, 19, vice chair for FIFE and UVA student, decided to get vaccinated but understands the frustration of parents who are forced to make a decision. “There is definitely not enough information on sexual health around,” she says. “I am not sure if people around campus know about HPV and the vaccine.”

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