Norma Rae

We celebrated Labor Day last Monday by watching one of the most famous labor movies made. Sally Field stars as Norma Rae Webster a textile mill worker in North Carolina. Norma Rae has two kids by two different men, has been married once and is not shy in anyway.

When we first see her in the textile mill in a gritty t shirt and hair up, sweat on her brow and sass on her lips it becomes quite a contrast to how she looks eight hours later when she answers the door to Sonny Webster and goes out with him. Field is stupendous in this role, she is Norma Rae in accent,tone, and bearing.

As she starts dating Sonny ( Beau Bridges) one day when he comes to pick her up for a date she presents her two children to join them. Nonplussed he returns to his house and picks up his young daughter to join them. He is, unbeknownst to Norma, a single father. After an earnest proposal expressing his desire for a good life, a shared life, Norma is married. As she says " it has been a long time between offers."

While Norma's relationship with her future husband is developing she has made friends with a union organizer from New York named Rueben Warshowsky. Rueben, played by Ron Leibman, who also is brilliant, is a fish out of water, a New York Jew in a Carolina mill town, but he believes in the union and is steadfast.

Norma is tired of the working conditions at the mill that have affected her, her friends and loved ones. Of course the bosses are portrayed as typical good old Southern boys who use all the methods available to keep the union from organizing.


The climatic scene in the movie is well known, Norma's silent vigil holding her union sign is one most of us have at least heard of.

It is said that Burt Reynolds, Field's live in at the time of the filming, read the script and said as he handed the script back to field " Ladies and Gentlemen the Oscar goes to Sally Field" He was prescient in this statement and it was well deserved.

This is not a pretty movie. It is grey and gritty with real characters struggling to maintain their dignity. It could be compared to The Grapes of Wrath in how well it portrays it's story of the downtrodden low skill worker in America.

A fantastic movie.

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

The third book in the Bascombe trilogy follows the pattern of the first two books. Earlier we have spent Easter and Independence Day with his character, this time we spend Thanksgiving weekend with Frank.

In the year 2000 as the disputed Presidential Election hangs in the balance Frank Bascombe has moved from Haddam, New Jersey to the shore in Sea Clift. He owns his own real estate office where, he admits, he has a cash machine that he does not have to work to hard at. Frank has a Tibetan American sales agent named Mike Mahoney, his daughter is home for the week after deciding that she is not a lesbian after all, and his son Paul,who we last saw struggling with emotional problems and occasionally barking like a dog, has moved to Kansas City where he writes greeting cards for Hallmark.

Franks second wife Sally who he married in the interim between books two and three has left him for her first husband, the same husband that she had declared dead after he disappeared when her children were young. Frank's first wife Anne is making noises about a reconciliation and the kids are coming to his house for a Thanksgiving feast he has arranged with an organic caterer.

Like all the books in this series we learn more about Frank's inner thoughts than perhaps any character we will ever meet in literature. It seems that Frank has the strongest internal dialogue of anyone ever met. What seemed odd in book one, and sometimes overbearing in book two ( which was the best received winning both the Penn Faulkner and the Pulitzer ) in this book seems of a perfect tone. Perhaps it is because the character has become like an old friend, one whose idiosyncrasies are not those that you would pick out but now embrace as part of the person you care about. One wonders if we have seen the end of Frank, looking at the arc of the stories and the obvious comparisons to the Updike Rabbit series it seems at least likely that we will see Frank as he moves on to the next world. I look forward to it.

This book, as Frank is older, shows him dealing in his mid fifties with prostate cancer and thus leads to many ruminations on death and acceptance of the changes in life that come with age. For me, perhaps, I see myself in Frank. He tries to be a straight up guy, he rarely if ever has any motive other than what is spoken and often wonders why people do not understand that. At the same time Frank has been around, he is a good judge of character and has been known to upset his loved ones by observations they ask for but would rather not hear. Of particular interest in this book is his relationship with his son Paul. Paul has found some level of success but the jury is still out on happiness. In the end Frank has to admit to himself that he loves his son, he wants him to prosper, but for whatever reason despite his best attempts he does not really understand his son. Not a day any parent wants to have but one many of us will have to come to grips with.

Like all parts of the " permanent period" as he calls it, this too involves realizing you have to let go of things that you cannot change so that those things do not consume you and your happiness.

The set of books in the series is now available in a Everyman's library addition. If you have three months of reading to spare and consider yourself a connoisseur of late twentieth century American literature you could perhaps find no series more relevant than the Bascombe books.

For me I see myself in Frank. I think the gift of Richard Ford is that perhaps we all can.

If I Was a Priest by Bruce Springsteen

A couple of weeks ago a Springsteen fan site tweeted out an old recording of this unreleased song. Interestingly I had just a week or so earlier read somewhere about Springsteen's original audition and the record company executive being stunned by the lyrics that Springsteen sang.

This song was the song that stunned the record man. Still the song never found it's way to an album. I guess even in 1973 Bruce had more material than he needed.

The lyrics in question? " If Jesus was the Sheriff and I was the priest, if my lady was an heiress and my mother was a thief." Certainly this was an indication of many of the songs to come, the characters like Blind Terry and the Rat that we would soon be meeting.

It was true in 1972 when he appeared, he was the next Dylan, and in 1974 when Jon Landau called him the future of rock and roll he was not wrong. He was more right than he could have ever imagined.

Find this song online. It is a masterpiece.

Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance by Patterson Hood

My affinity for The Drive By Truckers is well known. Therefore when I tell you that this solo record by lead singer Patterson Hood is wonderful you will not be surprised. I accept that I find many albums that I find worth raving about as excellent.

What is most interesting is the while 95 percent of new music is schlock, the five percent that is good is, in some cases, very good. With pop radio now an abyss of rap and tween acts one does have to work a little bit to find music worth hearing.

Fortunately one can find their way. Rolling Stone and NPR frequently give pre release streaming of recordings. In fact this album by Hood is currently being streamed by Rolling Stone.


The album is not a big stretch for Hood, not far from the Drive By persona, If anything, perhaps the music is a little softer, there are none of the loud, outlandish, drinking, bad boy, songs one often finds on a Drive By album. I do like those songs, Let There Be Rock is a scorcher. Still I think most of the fans of the Truckers would admit that it is the talk songs and the songs like Angels and Fuselage that keep us coming back. With this in mind Patterson Hood delivers in spades on this album.

" She's so sweet, she rots my teeth, every time I kiss her" is a memorable line from Better Off Without. That my friends is a pretty damn good line, not one you are going to hear on your hit radio station. The song is brilliant.

For those of us who put Three Alabama Icons as one of the highlights of Southern Rock Opera then another talk song is welcome. ( untold pretties ) is Hood talking about his reminiscences of growing up in Northern Alabama, the loss of his grandfather, the plan unknown even to the the protagonist of making an escape ending with the line " You cannot only carry Hell around so long before it's a drag." Again not a cookie cutter lyric. For those of us old enough to remember when REM was on top of the world Hood's voice recalls the talk song Belong they recorded in the nineties.

After the Damage is a pretty song in which he bemoans his lover leaving him, " after the baggage and babies." Some pretty strong backing vocals from Kelly Hogan highlight this song.

The title song is one you need to listen to on a Saturday afternoon before you start drinking or a Sunday morning after you have. With his sing drawl Patterson Hood can tell a story like few people in music. Hood tells how the " ghosts' in his old families house " are a comfort to him." We all have ghosts.

You are not going to hear a single from Patterson Hood but perhaps the most accessible song on the record is Come Back Little Star. Again featuring Hogan on backup vocals, Hood talks to a past lady friend " you always had a drink in your hand but your liver ain't what it used to be." Begging her to come back and take him with her and telling ' that the dreams we made leave him lying here lonely."

All in all this is as strong an album as you will hear this year. The singer's voice is unique, a cross between a drawl and a croak. He would get tossed off Idol for sure which goes to show that singing is about so much more than voice, something those shows often miss.

Listen. Learn. Love. Patterson Hood delivers a home run.

Why Geography Matters by Harm J. de Bilj

My oldest son shares my interest in politics, history and geography. With that last spring he signed up for an AP Human Geography course for this his Senior Year. The down side, at least for him, was an assignment for the summer to read this book.

Continuing my habit to read the books my children are assigned I picked this book up and read it as well.

The author, looking at his Amazon page seems to be quite an expert on the subject and he certainly is a strong advocate for the importance of Geography. As the book was written in 2007 he certainly feels that our government could have prevented much of the troubles of the Iraq War, especially the presumption that " we would be welcomed as liberators", if they had known more about the history and people of the religion.

It seems without doubt however that his political slant is a bit evident in the book. I do not have an issue with that, I do think, however, that having a slant, however slight, even if it is impossible not to, negates the effectiveness of this book as a textbook. That said I also think that one did not to be a human geography expert to know that we would not be welcomed as liberators.

The book was interesting. Sections on the growth of Europe under the European union, more people live in that union than in the United States, to be from England to Russia's Western doorstep. Also of note the question of further expansion into countries such as Turkey.

China is a major subject. I did not think this was addressed as well. Certainly anyone keeping up with the world knows that China and our relationship with China is perhaps the most important in the world. Still, at least for me, there was no information here and nothing that was revelatory.

The highlight of the book, the strongest section, was on global warming. Perhaps my fifth grade project on the planets set me up to have this interest but I am always fascinated by lessons which examine the physical size of the Earth and the solar system. Throw in measures of time and I am usually on the hook. What the author does in this section however is point out that while Global Warming is real one might want to be very careful about assuming it is man made and that even if it is man caused or man accelerated perhaps our interest in it is clouding a more important discussion.

What might be more important than global warming. Global Cooling. what he points out is climate wise we are still in, get this, an Ice Age. For the last million years we have been an Ice Age. Ice Ages, however, are not all cold. There are periods called Glacial and Interglacial. In the Interglacial periods the temperature warms for about ten thousand years. It was during an earlier interglacial that the ancestors of man moved out of Africa. It was also during an interglacial that the population of man shrunk by over ninety percent as a result of the end of an interglacial period. We know this shrinking of the population, or bottleneck as it is called, happened several times from our DNA. I earlier wrote of a book I read on that subject.

Interestingly the author points out that the ascent of man has occurred completely in this Interglacial which might well be nearing its end. How do we know. After every episode of global warming the earth in this million year epoch has retreated to a glacial period. In a sense global warming is dangerous, but more so because at the end end of that period ice and cold awaits us. It will not affect you and me, this cold period, but it is an example of how self indulgent to our importance we are that humans do not realize the infinitesimal time we have been important on the Earth.

This section alone makes the book stand out. I found it to be fascinating. I do believe in Global Warming, I think this book shows however that like most subjects, there is alot more to it than just the platitudes and lip service that is spoken.

Keith Urban in Concert

My wife and I went to see Keith Urban last Saturday night at the Bangor Waterfront. We have gone to many shows that I was interested in, it was an easy decision to go see Keith Urban one of my wife;s favorites.

I cannot say that I was on pins and needles for the show but certainly by the time Saturday evening came around I was looking forward to the show.

When we arrived at the show we noted that the previous night's full moon was still shining bright this night. The opening act was a fellow named David Niall that my wife was familiar with, some of the songs were identifiable as hits based on the crowd reaction.

The crowd was energetic and excited. A great deal of young college age girls, high school girls, and women too old to be dressed the way they were. I joked to my wife that one wonders if these, truthfully very pretty young ladies, thought that Keith might offer them a date that night if they looked extra good. Urban took the stage and I have to admit here and now that I do not know a great deal of his songs. I have not paid much attention to country music over the last couple of years.

Still I did find out in watching the show that Urban can truly play the guitar very well. He did play the song Stupid Boy, a song I am a fan of, that features a good bit of guitar work.

The show was fine but I think what it is most important to talk about here is the way Mr. Urban treats his audience. Which was absolutely incredible. Many musicians speak well of their fans, many claim to love them and appreciate them, however I have never seen a musician be as thoughtful as Keith Urban was.

During the show Urban brought up some young girls to have a picture taken with him, he went into the crowd a few times, at one point giving his guitar to a young girl. He had a sing along during the song " I Want To Kiss a Girl" in which he brought up four folks to sing with him and engage in a singing contest. Anyone who was at the show will not soon forget the wild man. a fellow named Ryan, that he brought on stage with him. Frankly I do not think that Mr. Urban will be forgetting his visit to Maine and his new friend Ryan.

In introducing his band members he lets them each take the stage and sing a bit of a song. After hearing the three folks sing With or Without You, American Girl, and It's A Long Way to the Top ( from AC/DC) makes clear that Urban owes more to the classic rock of Tom Petty than to the traditional country of years past.

As the show ended and my wife were filing our way out I was surprised to see the members of the band, including Urban, on stage posing for pictures ten minutes after the show ended. They were speaking to individuals until, it seemed, that most folks ( in the pit) that wanted to say a word or touch a hand received an opportunity to do so.

I can take or leave the music though I think Urban has a strong sense of what makes a hit and continues to put some vibrant guitar effort into all his music. For me, however, what is the most important thing to remember is that Keith Urban, married to a movie star, has a strong sense of how lucky he is and how important it is to show genuine gratitude to the people, his fans, who make him successful.

Urban convinced me. A good singer, a great performer, a better person.

Engines of Change by Paul Ingrassia

Paul Ingrassia made his name as a journalist writing primarily on the auto industry. His most recent book is called Engines of Change. In this book Ingrassia tells the tale of America in the story of fifteen cars.

The author points out that this is not a list of the most successful cars but the cars that in one way or another had a major impact on society.

Any story about cars in America has to begin with Henry Ford and the Model T. Ford invented the assembly line in the production of his cars, created the five dollar a day wage, and also, importantly, year by year lowered the price of his cars to make them more affordable. Today when we see technology such as flat screens, computers, and the like and their prices go down lower and lower we can remember Henry Ford.

The proliferation of tailfins in the 1950's, the Corvette, the Corvair and the rise of Ralph Nader, Lee Iacocca, Hayley Earl, John Delorean, the Mustang and the Minivan are all discussed in their own chapters.

Well written, filled with interesting pieces of information, the infatuation with cars and how integral cars are to the American experience, indeed our national psyche, this is a very good book.