When the European Union first put the “right to be forgotten” into effect, it didn’t really give search sites much help. Should search listings disappear simply because they’re embarrassing? What if you’re a notable figure? At last, though, there are…
On Election Night, Merkel, Schröder, Fischer, and other party leaders gathered in a TV studio to discuss the results. Merkel, looking shell-shocked and haggard, was almost mute. Schröder, his hair colored chestnut and combed neatly back, grinned mischievously and effectively declared himself the winner. “I will continue to be Chancellor,” he said. “Do you really believe that my party would take up an offer from Merkel to talk when she says she would like to become Chancellor? I think we should leave the church in the village”—that is, quit dreaming. Many viewers thought he was drunk. As Schröder continued to boast, Merkel slowly came to life, as if amused by the Chancellor’s performance. She seemed to realize that Schröder’s bluster had just saved her the Chancellorship. With a slight smile, she put Schröder in his place. “Plain and simple—you did not win today,” she said.
Turner as Ivins: exuberance, laughter and crusading journalism
Photos by kevinberne.com
Molly Ivins lives!
Seven years after her death, the fiercely outspoken journalist has rematerialized in Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater in a hilarious, caustic Red Hot Patriot, the Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.
The play runs a scant 75 minutes and provides a star turn for Oscar/Tony nominee Kathleen Turner, but above all it offers a platform for Ivins’ convictions, which delighted and infuriated readers at some 400 newspapers across the country, and for Ivins’ satiric wordplay, which won admirers of all political stripes. Opening during the week of the Ferguson decision and protests, it could hardly be more timely.
Created by twin sisters Margaret and Allison Engel, whose varied careers have included stints as reporters, the show skims across Ivins’ life and career in a style that delivers most of her passion as punchlines. Ivins saw humor as a way to make people take notice, not as an end in itself, and she shaped it by exploiting her Texan roots with raw, populist gruffness.
Never a clone of Will Rogers or Garrison Keillor, spoofing without offending, the Ivins we see in Red Hot Patriot proudly declares that she “holds people up to public contempt and ridicule.” Her targets, she notes, are limited to the rich and powerful. Most often they are fellow Texans.
She reveled in disparaging the intelligence of Texas legislators, none more than the congressman who led her to write, “If his IQ slips any lower we’ll have to water him twice a day.” And she had few kind words for George W. Bush, as governor and as president. Her sobriquet for him was “Shrub.”
The play spotlights Ivins’ fury at injustice of any sort, even in the shaping of our Constitution. The playwrights drew this morsel from a 1987 column in the Texas Observer: “…the founders left a lot of people out of the Constitution. They left out poor people and black people and female people.” Turner delivers the line with appropriate sarcasm, carrying the transparent implication that little has changed in the past 34 years.
Wearing jeans, a denim shirt and red cowboy boots that were an Ivins trademark, Turner inhabits the role with obvious comfort, as she well should. She originated it in Philadelphia four years ago and has reprised it from Washington to Los Angeles since then, between other projects.
Another scene, another mood: a working reporter with a tough skin
Turner roams the nearly bare stage with a hefty stride that offers no suggestion of stereotypical femininity, occasionally sits and pecks at the keys of a vintage typewriter, and cruises in and out of emotions with unaffected ease. Although she is the play’s only speaker, she is occasionally joined by a silent young man who rips stories off a teletype and hands them to her. The actor is Michael Barrett Austin, who is undoubtedly earning Equity scale for doing less than he will ever do on any stage.
The play’s dramatic arc is slight, which probably represents its greatest shortcoming. Framed by reminiscences about Ivins’ father, a country-clubbing oilman who represented values that she came to despise, the narrative skips from point to point to point, pausing at any spot only long enough to drop an anecdote and usually earn a laugh.
Photos offer images of her comfortable youth: relaxing prettily on the family sailboat, reclining in debutante’s finery, with her properly posed family.
A few words tell of the two young men she loved and lost, and possibly suggest why she never married. The first died in a motorcycle accident, the second was killed by a single bullet in Vietnam. That bullet left her with a rage about American wars that never cooled. Prompted by events in Iraq, she wrote this a few weeks before her death in 2007 at the age of 62. (They’re not in the play.)
“What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn’t supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?”
But most of the play covers her life in journalism, starting in an era when women were rarely hired to write about anything other than the social scene, fashion and cooking. Ivins pushed that barrier aside.
Backed by black-and-white projections, Turner sardonically chronicles several journeys from Texas to points north and back. The most notable stopping point was with the New York Times, which sent Ivins to cover Elvis Presley’s funeral because no one on its culture beat knew anything about Elvis. Later it exiled her to Denver, where she cheerfully demolished her big-city career by describing a chicken-slaughtering festival as a “gang pluck.” The pun was too much for the Gray Lady of journalism.
So it was back to Texas again, and eventually to years of joyful struggle for a poor-but-idealistic weekly and later to the syndicated column that brought her fame.
It’s a fascinating story, bristling with passion and an exuberant flair for comedy, but too often lacking the flesh that would turn a sketch into a portrait. Even an actress as skillful as Turner left me wishing for more.
Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins runs through Jan. 4 in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets are $29-$89, from 510-647-2949 or http://berkeleyrep.org
Several retailers are offering the excellent Samsung 840 EVO SSD for $190 and $350 for 500GB and 1TB respectively, but Newegg is tossing in a free download of Far Cry 4 with either one to sweeten the deal. Just add either one to your cart, and the game download coupon will appear automatically at checkout.
When scanning a menu, many of us are just justifying the profiteroles rather than actually choosing a dessert. Pizza Hut wants to skip your super-ego middleman and just let your id order that triple-cheese bacon pepperoni directly. It’s “Subconscious…
The only thing as bad as being tortured for months as a captive of jihadists in Syria was dealing with the U.S. government afterward, according to one former American hostage.
FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — Demonstrators temporarily shut down three large malls in suburban St. Louis on one of the busiest shopping days of the year and then marched in front of the Ferguson police department to protest a grand jury’s recent decision not to indict the police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Several stores lowered their security doors or locked entrances as at least 200 protesters sprawled onto the floor while chanting, “Stop shopping and join the movement,” at the Galleria mall in Richmond Heights a few miles south of Ferguson, Missouri, where Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Brown, who was unarmed, in August. The action prompted authorities to close the mall for about an hour Friday afternoon, while a similar protest of about 50 people had the same effect at West County Mall in nearby Des Peres. And several dozen demonstrators led to a temporary closure of the Chesterfield Mall.
Later Friday night, a group of about 100 protesters marched down West Florissant Avenue Florissant in front of the city’s police and fire departments chanting, blocking traffic and stopping in front of some businesses.
“I served my country. I spent four years in the Army, and I feel like that’s not what I served my country for,” said Ebonie Tyse, 26, of St. Louis. “I served my country for justice for everyone. Not because of what color, what age, what gender or anything,” she said.
Fifteen people were arrested, according to Missouri Department of Public Safety spokesman Mike O’Connell. He said charges would include peace disturbance and impeding the flow of traffic, and two people would be charged with resisting arrest and one with assault.
Monday night’s announcement that Wilson, who is white, wouldn’t be indicted for fatally shooting Brown, who was black, prompted violent protests that resulted in about a dozen buildings and some cars being burned. Dozens of people were arrested.
The rallies have been ongoing but have grown more peaceful this week, as protesters turn their attention to disrupting commerce. Elsewhere on Friday, protests in Chicago, New York, Seattle and northern California — where protesters chained themselves to trains — were among the largest in the country on Black Friday.
In Oakland, more than a dozen people were arrested after about 125 protesters wearing T-shirts that read “Black Lives Matter” interrupted train service from Oakland to San Francisco, with some chaining themselves to trains. Dozens of people in Seattle blocked streets, and police said some protesters also apparently chained doors shut at the nearby Pacific Place shopping center.
In Chicago, about 200 people gathered near the city’s popular Magnificent Mile shopping district, where Kristiana Colon, 28, called Friday “a day of awareness and engagement.” She’s a member of the Let Us Breathe Collective, which has been taking supplies such as gas masks to protesters in Ferguson.
“We want them to think twice before spending that dollar today,” she said of shoppers. “As long as black lives are put second to materialism, there will be no peace.”
Malcolm London, a leader in the Black Youth Project 100, which has been organizing Chicago protests, said the group was also trying to rally support for other issues, such as more transparency from Chicago police.
“We are not indicting a man. We are indicting a system,” London told the crowd.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon on Friday announced that he will call a special session of the General Assembly to provide funding for public safety efforts related to protests. A news release from his office said that due to the increased presence of the State Highway Patrol and the Missouri National Guard in the region, the state’s financial obligations for emergency duties are on track to exceed what had been appropriated.
___
Associated Press writers Jim Salter, David A. Lieb and Alan Scher Zagier in St. Louis, Mae Anderson in New York, Sara Burnett in Chicago and Kristin J. Bender in Oakland, California, contributed to this report.
Remember Samantha Hess, one of the first entreprenurs to get involved in
the revolutionary cuddling industry? She’s also the one reinventing
everything, by taking her startup out of the bedroom and moving it to a
more professional environment.
Ebay has had some of the best deals of Black Friday, and we expect that trend to continue through to Cyber Monday, so prepare for the madness with a $50 eBay gift card for only $45. It’s delivered via email, so you’ll definitely have it ready to use when the deals start picking up again. No brainer. [eBay]
News of another Toyota recall has surfaced, this time revolving around the 2015 Sienna minivan. Says the auto maker, which announced that it will be recalling the cars on Wednesday, certain 2015 Sienna Minivans are being recalled due to potential issues with the overhead assist grips on the right and left sides of the second row. Those with affected models … Continue reading
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