Southern Bookman

Trump takes aim at New York Times, Max Frankel

Donald Trump stepped up his reckless attacks against the media this week by suing The New York Times and well-respected journalist Max Frankel.

The libel lawsuit filed in New York's Supreme Court by the president's re-election campaign claims that Frankel's 2019 op-ed article in the Times titled "The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo" was false in asserting that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. The newspaper published the article while knowing it was false, the suit claims.

In targeting the Times and the 89-year-old Frankel, Trump directly strikes at media legitimacy. With all of its shortcomings, The Times stands as the nation's most reliable news operation. Frankel, who served the Times as executive editor, editorial page editor and foreign correspondent, gained renown as one of the Times' wise men who set the standard for American journalism. The suit's main purpose is to intimidate the news media from criticizing Trump.

ProPublica President Richard Tofel and the now Trump-supporting National Review agree on the suit's lack of merit. Expressions of opinion are protected by the First Amendment, and the Times in publishing the article followed long-established legal standards.

But Trump has vowed to weaken news operations' libel protections. The suit is an escalation of his efforts to undermine American journalism.

 

Joe Biden takes his stand in South Carolina

I've been surprised that the media coverage of the South Carolina Democratic primary has been centered in Charleston.

National reporters must like their shrimp and grits.

A hip tourist destination because of its restaurants, art galleries and old homes, Charleston was also the biggest slave-trading center before the Civil War. It's also where the Confederacy fired the first shots of the "late rebellion. " A towering statue of slavery defender John C. Calhoun rises blocks away from Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church.

Charleston's heavy burden of history has received little attention in the Democratic primary. Putting aside its acute awareness of the past, Charleston is presenting itself as the progressive, sophisticated center of a Democratic surge in South Carolina and neighboring Georgia.

The disastrous Democratic debate was held this week at Charleston's Gaillard Hall, which looks like a Victorian-era opera house but was completed in 2015.

Presidential debates are often held at universities, but the University of South Carolina in Columbia was shunned. The Democratic Party decided to hold the debate in coastal Charleston at a venue that evokes the city's antebellum past rather than at the public university at the centrally located state capital. Clemson and Furman were also ignored.

CBS moderators Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell drew universal criticism for letting the debate sink into a free-for-all of interruptions and candidates talking at the same time. The debate was a debacle for the network of  Ed Morrow, Walter Cronkite and Bob Schieffer.

Along with its foodie scene, Charleston has a small but vibrant digital startup industry. But Greenville and Spartansburg, home to a BMW plant, have a larger high-tech presence. Greenville's thriving downtown district gives the Democratic Party hope that it can turn John C. Calhoun's state of nullification blue.

Hopes are rising that Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison can oust Trump pal Lindsay Graham. But Democrats keep falling short of their aspirations, like the losing gubernatorial campaign of Stacey Abrams in Georgia.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, endorsed by beloved Congressman James Clyburn, appears headed to victory in South Carolina, which has salvaged several sinking presidential campaigns over the years.

Biden's old-school Democratic stances play well in the Palmetto State. Biden, who showed his age  in his justifiable protests of the lack of order in the debate, hopes South Carolina brings his campaign back from disaster. A strong Biden victory in South Carolina would slow Bernie Sanders' drive toward the nomination.

Front-runner Sanders has been biting into Biden's black support, and excites the state's significant number of college students and growing population of digital workers. Sanders has been blasted for praising Fidel Castro, but millennial voters don't have any memory of Fidel and his Cuban dictatorship.

Billionaire Tom Steyer has gained strength through a persistent ad campaign, while Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar are barely visible in polls. A strong showing by Elizabeth Warren would keep her in the race.

Even wealthier billionaire Mike Bloomberg is not on the ballot in South Carolina, although he was allowed to participate in the Charleston debate, again looking like the cranky rich guy shouting at kids to get off his lawn. His support for stop and frisk when he was New York mayor would be difficult to explain to South Carolina black voters. With his relentless ad campaign, Bloomberg is banking on Super Tuesday.

South Carolina, with its fraught racial history and conflict between neo-Confederate conservatives and millennial tech professionals, reflects the country's diversity more than the other states that have held primaries so far. Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada are the exhibition season. The real race begins Saturday.

 

 

 

Adrienne Miller's memoir "In the Land of Men" indicts male misbehavior, gives pass to David Foster Wallace

Must we weep for Adrienne Miller?

A perky young woman from an Ohio small town, Miller rose from a lowly assistant's job at Gentleman's Quarterly to be named Esquire magazine's fiction editor at age 25.

In her ascent, she was subjected to male condescension, sexual harassment and pay inequality. Miller in her memoir "In the Land of Men" gives appalling litanies of male misbehavior, including sexual assault, exacerbated by the culture of the two men's magazines where she worked.

But Miller's account of her love affair with the troubled author David Foster Wallace justifies his mistreatment of her and other women.

While she recognizes Wallace's monstrous misogyny, she's swept away by his charisma, emotional vulnerability and moments of empathy. Considering him the equal of Tolstoy and Shakespeare, she espouses the belief that great artists can do no wrong.

Miller's tortured relationship with Wallace takes up most of the book. Her portrayals of Wallace swing from alluring to tedious, and her despair at Wallace's suicide comes with a sense of relief.

While her presentation of Wallace falters, Wallace gives a riveting account of a sexual assault she suffered when she was a child. She moves from an idyllic description of staying at a salt-of-the-earth religious couple's home each afternoon when she was 7 years old to the shocking incident. With riveting narrative power, Miller tells how she sat on her trusted babysitter's lap as he read her a story, and he exposed himself. He tells the child to not tell his absent wife, saying "mother will be cross."

The book gives a fascinating glimpse into the rapid capitulation of print magazines to the Internet. When Miller begins at Gentlemen's Quarterly, magazines are flush with money and entitlements. Her move into the vaunted chair at Esquire once held by legendary editors Gordon Lish and Rust Hills ends in sorrow, when the magazine that published classic short stories by Hemingway and Fitzgerald stops publishing fiction.

Displaying deadpan humor and Midwestern common sense, Miller freshens the familiar tale of small town girl conquering Manhattan. Her self-effacing viewpoint contrasts with her fast rise in the magazine world. Her success is marred by male condescension and physical harassment. She discovers that her Esquire co-worker David Eggers' salary is twice at big as hers, although she holds the most prestigious position.

Miller gives a heart-breaking fin-de-siecle portrayal of Manhattan's embattled literary culture, clinging to her faith in books.

Like a fairy-tale princess, Miller at the end of the memoir finds true love and happiness. Ending her romance with Wallace, she meets her future husband, with whom she has a child. She  becomes a successful novelist, and now memoir author.

Miller's condoning of Wallace's boorish behavior was blasted recently in the New York Times Book Review. Miller's harrowing story shows that even the most aware woman can fall victim to love's well-chronicled blindness.

 

Atlanta plans health innovation district as Georgia's maternal death rate soars

Atlanta plans to create a global health innovation district while poor mothers die at an alarming rate in Georgia.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's front page Sunday revealed that striking juxtaposition.

A high-tech medical research conglomerate in intown Atlanta would respond to global health crises like the coronavirus outbreak, according to an article by the AJC's Scott Truey. Midtown's burgeoning high-tech district is the likely location for the global health-care hub.

The district would draw upon Atlanta's health-care industry, nonprofit agencies like Care and the CDC, universities and Delta Air Lines' global flight network. Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are being courted for the plan, which supporters claim will bring thousands of jobs.

But the maternal health care crisis in rural Georgia receives less attention, according to an adjacent article by Tamar Hallerman. Georgia's maternal death rate is among the highest in the United States, which has the worst record among developed countries.

Half of Georgia's 159 counties lack an ob/gyn, and many rural hospitals no longer have an obstetrics ward, the article said. Gov. Brian Kemp and House Speaker David Ralston are concerned about the high death rate among mothers giving birth, but claim funding is scarce. One proposal is to extend Medicaid coverage for new mothers to a year, rather than the current two months.

Georgia's Republican Legislature approved a draconian anti-abortion bill that Kemp signed. Yet legislators resist providing care for new mothers and their babies. A total of 61% of childbirth deaths in the state are preventable, according to Hallerman.

Will the glitzy new health innovation district, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft help rural Georgia's endangered mothers and babies?

Returning to "The Godfather"

Children excited about "Sonic the Hedgehog" screamed and ran through the movie theater lobby as a handful of old folks arrived for a screening of "The Godfather."

Dazed parents lined up at the concessions stand for popcorn and candy, as a couple of older people sat at the snack bar eating sandwiches and drinking beer.

Among choices ranging from "Parasite" and "1917" to "Sonic," "Downhill," "The Call of the Wild" and "The Photograph," Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 Mafia saga was an anachronistic artifact. Art film lovers could see the Tulugu romantic comedy "Bheeshma" or "A Portrait of a Lady on Fire."

But I and a few other aging movie fans had come to the Springs Cinema and Taphouse on a partly sunny Sunday afternoon to see "The Godfather." Like lovers of Shakespeare monologues, we knew the famous lines and operatic scenes. But seeing the film on the big screen offered a rare experience.

For years owned by Atlanta cinematiste George Lefont, the theater located behind a suburban strip mall had grown shabby until purchased by local entrepreneur Brandt Gully. While keeping the feel of a vintage neighborhood theater, Gully added new screens, an enhanced sound system, luxury reclining seats and a full service bar in a $2.5 million renovation finished in 2019.

Along with a full selection of commercial, foreign and independent movies, the Springs Taphouse shows a film classic each week through the national "Flashback Cinema" series. After years of seeing "The Godfather" in fragments on cable TV, I was thrilled at the chance to watch the movie from start to finish in the theater.

Unlike other movies from the 1960s and '70s that feel dated, "The Godfather" remains fresh. The postwar automobiles, clothes, hairstyles, business settings and interiors reveal a lost era of beauty that serves as a counterpoint to the film's misogyny and violence.

Taken from Mario Puzo's best-selling novel, the Corleone family saga unfolds in emotional extremes of loyalty, betrayal, ritual and power struggles. In a darkened theater,  the stunning operatic grace of the brutal murders and beatings rises to a higher pitch. 

Gordon Willis' cinematography of light and shadow and muted colors dazzles on the big screen, magnifying the power of visual images: Vito Corleone's dance with his daughter after her wedding, the canopy of the vegetable garden fluttering in the wind after Don Corleone's death, the Sicilian landscape.

I mourned my youth watching the young Diane Keaton, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Talia Shire and John Cazale. Marlon Brando's portrayal of the murderous Don Corleone and the loss of his powers raised conflicting emotions of revulsion and sympathy. The familiar lines, special code for the film's acolytes, kept their force.

As if waking from a strange dream, I returned to the antic lobby, still hearing "The Godfather" theme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Haruki Murakami's story "With the Beatles" evokes lost innocence of 1960s

Haruki Murakami covers several flashpoints of Baby Boomer nostalgia in his story "With the Beatles."

Revealing how pop music enhanced adolescent lives in the 1960s, the story in the current New Yorker presents an era of innocence and young love, free from the political and social turmoil that later shook the decade.

Going beyond simple longing for the past, Murakami reflects upon time, memory, aging, grief and regret. The wistful mysticism of Japanese society co-exists with "Beatlemania" and the emerging dominance of international culture.

Philip Gabriel's translation gives the story the radiance of New Yorker classics by John Updike and John Cheever. Several factual digressions into 1960s films and music accent rather than impede the narration. The tragedies of JFK's assassination and the Vietnam War receive no mention. Japanese guilt over World War II is also absent, replaced by an Americanized prosperity. Yet, an inner desolation brings one character's mental turmoil and another's suicide.

Murakami's focus on "With the Beatles," the Fab Five's second album, evokes a time before the Beatles and the world turned to political rebellion and social protest. A phenomenon from the cute Mop-Tops' first surge of popularity, the album in the story symbolizes youthful sexual longing before the advent of drugs and free love.

The first-person narrator mentions that a young girl he briefly encounters in a high school hallway holds the British version of the album, rather than the Japanese or American releases. He points out that the record's title was changed to "Meet the Beatles" in the United States, a subtle sign of cultural differences.

A discussion of the album's black and white cover showing the Beatles' faces in light and shadow highlights the rising artistic brilliance of popular culture. Astrid Kirchherr's photograph was one of the first images of a new, iconic style.

The Beatles would later produce songs like "Norwegian Wood," evoked in a memorable Murakami novel. "With the Beatles" registers what was lost from the time when the world listened to "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred must strip Astros of championship, suspend their 2020 season

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has lost Mike Trout, Cory Bellinger and Aaron Judge. And LeBron James as well.

Old-school players of modesty, excellence and All-American virtues, Trout, Bellinger and Judge blasted Manfred for his weak handling of the Houston Astros' electronic sign-stealing scheme during their 2017 world championship season.

James, the NBA and athletics world's leading spokesman on social issues, said Manfred must take stronger action to protect the integrity of all sports. With the exception of his opposition to an NBA official's criticism of China, James possesses a well-tuned social conscience. James stars for the Lakers, whose fellow Los Angeles team the Dodgers lost the World Series to the Astros, who've admitted to the cheating operation.

The pressure keeps rising for Manfred to reverse the MLB's policy to not punish players involved in the electronic cheating. He's also ruled out stripping the Astros of their title, which Judge, Trout and Bellinger called for.

Judge, Trout and Bellinger suffered deep personal pain from the Astros scheme. Judge's Yankees lost to Houston in the American League playoffs, and he lost the MVP to Astros star Jose Altuve. Bellinger plays for the World Series-losing Dodgers.

And Trout, considered the best player in baseball, stars for the Angels, who finished second in the American League West, 21 games behind the Astros, in 2017. The Angeles might have come closer to the Astros without the sign-stealing operation.

As a lifelong Astros/Colt .45s fan, I gloried in the Astros championship. The Astros' scandal is a deep betrayal of the team's followers.

Astros manager A.J. Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow were fired over their involvement in the sign-stealing operation. Now, Manfred's job is threatened.

The commissioner must strip the Astros of their title, and suspend the team from playing the 2020 season. Players who participated should also be banned for a year.

Without such action, baseball will crash into a tumultuous era of team rancor and fan mistrust. Like the Black Sox scandal, the Astros scheme threatens the future of the game.

 

 

Farewell, Charles Portis

Charles Portis fulfilled the dream of many newspaper types to leave behind the grind of daily journalism and write books.

Portis, who wrote the classic novel "True Grit" after saying farewell to the legendary New York Herald-Tribune in 1964, died at age 86 Monday in a hospice in Little Rock, Ark., according to his New York Times obituary. Poris had battled Alzheimer's disease for several years.

"True Grit," made into two acclaimed movies, is considered an American comic masterpiece, the 20th century's "Huckleberry Finn." Narrated by the elderly Mattie Ross, the book looks back on her journey as a young girl to find her father's murderer. She's aided by the aging lawman Rooster Cogburn.

Set in frontier Arkansas, the book like Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" gave new energy and literary luster to the Western genre. Steeped in the vernacular of rural Arkansas, Ross's voice beguiles the reader like those of Huck, Nick Carraway, Augie March, Holden Caulfield and Scout Finch.

A native of Arkansas, Portis embarked upon a newspaper career after serving with the Marines in the Korean War and receiving his degree from the University of Arkansas. After stints at the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, the Arkansas Gazette and other regional papers, Portis joined the Herald Tribune in its late glory days.

Like fellow Arkansas native Roy Reed, who worked for The New York Times, Portis made his mark covering the civil rights movement in the South. Reed, who died in 2017, wrote Portis' New York Times obituary published Tuesday.

Standing out on a Herald-Tribune staff that included Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron and Jimmy Breslin, Portis was named the newspaper's London correspondent. Along with covering racial turmoil in the South during the civil rights movement, he interviewed Malcolm X and J.D. Salinger. At the height of his newspaper career, he surprised his colleagues by going home to a fishing camp in Arkansas to write novels.

His first book, "Norwood," was made into a movie starring Glen Campbell and Kim Darby. "True Grit," published in 1968 as an outlier among books registering the era's cultural conflict, gave John Wayne his only Academy Award. Wayne played the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, with Darby and Campbell joining him on the book and movie's epic quest, echoing one of literature's oldest themes. 

The Coen brothers remade "True Grit" in 2010, a rawer version truer to the novel, starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster and Hailee Steinfield in Darby's role of Mattie.

While the movies gained widespread popularity, Portis' novel is often cited by other writers for its literary style and memorable characters. If it's not already, the novel should join "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "A Catcher in the Rye" on junior high and high school reading lists.

Portis wrote several others novels, short stories and essays. His journalism, essays and a play are collected in "Escape Velocity, a Charles Portis Miscellany." In his later years, Portis was known as a recluse, although he pointed out that his phone number was listed in the Little Rock phone book.

Like other noted writers, Portis turned an unlettered American vernacular into high literature. He claimed he learned rural Arkansas speech patterns dealing with rural correspondents as a newspaper editor.

Many authors find success exiled from home. Portis proved that a writer can go home again.

  

 

 

Tony Bennett thrills Atlanta fans with masterful performance

Valentine's night, romance in the air, and Tony Bennett on stage.

The audience at Atlanta's Symphony Hall couldn't ask for anything more. Beaming with joy at 93, Bennett transported his adoring fans through a history of American popular songs, much of which he himself lived.

Wearing a stylish suit and flashing his trademark crooked grin, Bennett generated a rare outpouring of love between performer and audience. From couples of Bennett's generation to millennial hipsters, the well-dressed crowd clapped hands, snapped fingers and erupted with frequent applause.

An audio clip of Frank Sinatra praising Bennett began the performance, and Bennett showed that only his old compadre stands with him as an interpreter of the jazz and theatrical standards called "the American songbook."

Bennett like Sinatra explores the interplay between music and lyrics. As Bennett reveled in his tight band's presentation of the famous melodies, he caressed each song's words. While his weathered voice has lost some of its suppleness, Bennett like a great actor found the songs' dramatic depths.

With a range of gestures and a few spontaneous dance steps, Bennett put his stamp on a full repertory of classics from Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer and other songwriters.

Some in the audience might have registered his performance of Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart," one of Bennett's first hits in the early 1950s, showing the crossover appeal of what were then called "hillbilly" songs. Bennett and his quartet sizzled on a jazzy arrangement of the evening's most contemporary song, Stevie Wonder's "For Once in My Life."

In one of the evening's magical moments, Bennett turned Sinatra's melancholy signature "One for My Baby and One More for the Road" into a joyful anthem of resilience. The narrator in his rendering of the Arlen and Mercer classic looks ahead to new adventures rather than looking backward with regret. Bennett also evoked Sinatra with a spirited, if fragmented, performance of Bart Howard's "Fly Me to the Moon,"

While pianist Tim Ray, bassist Marshall Wood and drummer Harold Jones laid down the patterns of a classic jazz trio, guitarist Gray Sargent added a virtuosic dimension. Bennett several times shared the stage with Sargent, whose acoustic guitar solos accented Rice's stylings and Jones and Wood's pulsing rhythms. While Sargent held the spotlight, Jones's brushwork stood out on several numbers.

Bennett's performance of the Gershwins' "Our Love Is Here Today" seemed to move from an expression of personal experience to a universal affirmation of faith and endurance.

After the inevitable finale of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," Bennett basked in his audience's adulation. He returned several times to the stage, saluting in response to the standing ovation,  as his band performed a reprise of "Fly Me to the Moon." Then he left for the last time, and his fans headed into the chilly night with a warm glow.

 

McClatchy bankruptcy another death knell for newspapers

Nicholas Lemann's article in the current New York Review of Books asks Can Journalism Be Saved?

The McClatchy company declaring bankruptcy this week raises the urgency of that question.

McClatchy, which purchased the quality newspaper company Knight-Ridder in 2006, has a reputation for in-depth reporting, especially from its Washington Bureau. It publishes the Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer, two former Knight-Ridder papers that gained national eminence in the heyday of newspapers in the late 20th century.

Now, the company that dates back to the California gold rush will fall into the greedy hands of the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, which will likely strip the assets from the publisher of famous names like the Sacramento Bee and the Kansas City Star. The company also puts out well-regarded regional papers like the Columbia, S.C. State, the Wichita Eagle, the Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The McClatchy family in announcing its filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection said that its 31 newspapers will keep operating as usual, at least for now. But companies like Chatham have decimated newsroom staffs in recent years.

Lemann called for public funding to save local newspapers, with mechanisms to preserve their independence from government. That sounds promising, but Congress failed to give McClatchy relief from its crushing pension debt. While Democrats supported McClatchy, conservative Republicans killed the chain's preservation plan.

Ad-rich newspapers once had hundreds of employees, whose pensions are now coming due as revenue and circulation plummet. Lemann demonstrates how newspapers receive much less revenue from online ads than they did from print advertising.

Saddled  with Knight-Ridder's pension burden, McClatchy spiraled downhill. From 2006 to 2018, ad revenue fell by 80 percent and daily print circulation by 59 percent, according to a court filing.

Lemann gives a sobering analysis of the newspaper industry's decline. The toll on local newspapers has been severe. Unlike The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, small daily papers haven't profited from online subscriptions. Google and Facebook's dominance of online advertising has left scraps for local newspapers, which struggle to survive online.

While Lemann makes a good case for public funding of newspapers, will there be anything left to save?