Mark Maynard | 2007 | October

doug skinner sings of cults

By Mark | October 28, 2007

I suck. I meant to mention here several weeks ago that my friend Doug Skinner would be performing his show “The Musical Underbelly” every Thursday in October at Dixon Place. I don’t think that a write-up on MM.com would have put a lot of asses in the seats of the experimental New York theater, but it sounded so incredibly good that I wanted to share it. (I know I have at least a few readers in NYC based upon the emails I’ve been getting about the upcoming Pylon show there.) Here’s the description of the show as it ran on the Dixon Place site:

A guided tour of music from cults, secret societies, visionaries, mediums, and cranks: a concert of the damned and the forgotten.

Included in the line-up is Rosemary Brown, who channeled dead composers; a sample of the artificial language Solresol; agricultural plainchant; a tune from the 19th century African-American sex magician Paschal Beverly Randolph; playing card melodies; an Odd Fellows funeral hymn; music by Athanasius Kircher, Rameau’s Nephew, and the Count of Saint-Germain; and much more. Doug Skinner will sing, and play keyboard and fretted instruments; he will be joined by a violist.

Anyway, if that sounds like it would have been up your alley, I apologize. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I suck.

For what it’s worth, however, you can experience Doug online. A pro-ukulele site called Uke Cabaret has just posted some footage of him and his friend Carmen playing some songs… Enjoy.

[If there were a way, I’d have a link to Doug playing something like “Are You Havin’ Any Fun” every time he left a comment on the site… Actually, I should make a rule that no one can comment without first sending video of themselves singing. Wouldn’t that be great if you could just click a button and see every commenter singing? I think that would be incredibly cool.]

Posted in Art and Culture | 1 Comment

The status of the virtual Ypsilanti income tax debate

By Mark | October 28, 2007

I mentioned here a few days ago that Ypsi Votes had submitted a list of questions to people on both sides of the Ypsilanti Income Tax debate. The hope was that we’d have answers from both sides completed by today so that everything could run as a feature in the November 1 issue of the “Courier.” (Contrary to a rumor I heard yesterday, we did have an agreement with the “Courier” to run the questions and answers. If you doubt that, just let me know. I’d be happy to forward you an email exchange that will clear up any doubts you might have.) Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though that’s going to happen now. The pro-tax contingent got their answers in, but the anti-tax side did not. The good news is, I’ve been assured by Councilman Brian Robb that he will personally be answering the questions on the behalf of the opposition, and that we should expect his answers on Tuesday or Wednesday. So, we will have answers from both sides for this virtual debate of ours — they just won’t be available in the “Courier.”

I haven’t run the idea by the other members of Ypsi Votes yet, but I’m thinking that, since we missed the deadline for the “Courier,” we’d try an alternate method of distribution. I’ve spoken with Linette and she’s volunteered to layout the questions and answers once we get them. I guess it depends on how long the responses are, but I’m thinking that, if it can all fit on one 11″ x 17″ page, we’ll print a bunch up, fold them, and start distributing them through churches, neighborhood associations and coffee shops. (If anyone would be willing to contribute the use of a copier or a folder to a good cause, let me know.) As Election Day is Tuesday the 6th, it doesn’t give us a lot of time, but we should be able to get several 100 into circulation… We will also have a PDF of the document available online that we’ll be encouraging people to print and share.

And, just to reiterate, I don’t expect this document when completed will be enough in and of itself for anyone to base their vote on. In order to make an informed decision, you’re going to have to dig a lot deeper. At least, however, we’ll have people on both sides of the debate answering the same questions, side by side, so that we can compare “apples to apples.” It’s not the perfect solution, but we think it should at least clear away some of the rhetoric being used on both sides.

I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but after we have the answers from both the pro-tax and anti-tax groups, we’ll be sharing them with the folks on the other side of the debate, and asking them to submit a concluding rebuttal statement… They won’t be able to go back and change any of the answers that the submitted earlier, but they’ll at least be able, in this closing statement, to address any issues raised by the other side that they hadn’t anticipated.

Speaking of the Income Tax debate, I hear that the pro-tax folks had an op-ed in today’s “Ann Arbor News.” Since I didn’t pick up a copy today, and as I can’t seem to find it online, I was hoping that perhaps one of you might be able to send me a scan, or maybe just call me and read it to me over the phone… All I’ve heard so far is that, in the piece, they suggest the possibility of a “Water Street dedicated millage,” by which, I’m assuming, they mean an increased property tax for the purposes of paying down the Water Street debt.

Posted in Ypsilanti | 79 Comments

evil in ’08

By Mark | October 25, 2007

I was just link-hopping around the internet and happened across a site that had a great, little Cthulhu for President ad. I wasn’t aware of it, but there’s apparently a huge campaign afoot to get the great priest of the Great Old Ones, the ultimate evil, installed in the White House to keep the Bush legacy alive. It makes sense. He’s probably the only entity on earth that could push the conservative agenda any further forward, he’s got a reputation as a straight-shooter who speaks his mind, and kids like him. Who could ask for anything more? He’s the perfect Republican candidate.

Posted in Politics | 8 Comments

“esquire” on iran

By Mark | October 25, 2007

From the new issue of “Esquire“:

…In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm — not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years. That was what people didn’t realize. It was just like Iraq, when the White House was so eager for war it couldn’t wait for the UN inspectors to leave. The steps have been many and steady and all in the same direction. And now things are getting much worse. We are getting closer and closer to the tripline, they say…

This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia’s and China’s geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the Democrats take over American foreign policy. “If you get all those elements coming together, say in the first half of ’08,” says Leverett, “what is this president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider target zone.”

This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran’s resistance to the Great Satan. “As disastrous as Iraq has been,” says Mann, “an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim world”…

We know it’s going to happen, but what do we do? We read blogs and we complain to one another. When will people start leaving their jobs in middle-America and start driving to DC in droves, demanding that all this stop? That’s what I’d like to know. At what point do people start saying, “enough is enough,” drive into DC, park their car in front of the White House, get out, and sit down, blocking traffic? At what point do we as individuals realize that we have the power to shut the system down?

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

the question of race

By Mark | October 25, 2007

I don’t like writing about race. The fact that it’s an issue at all depresses me. It makes me even more pessimistic about the fate of mankind. But, on occasion, I don’t have a choice but to face it.

I knew I was going to have to write something about race last week when a local reader of MM.com wrote to tell me that someone had flyered her neighborhood with racist literature. She was nice enough to give me the two pieces of paper that were on her doorstep. They’ve been sitting here on my desk for the past week… “Non-Whites are turning America into a Third World slum.” That’s what one of them says. The other is a warning for white women not to have sex with black men because they’re likely to have AIDS. Then, today, someone left a comment here on my site in reference to the Orange Taylor trial that I had to remove because it contained what many of us interpreted as hate speech.

Given the economy in Michigan, it isn’t much of a surprise. Economic downturns tend to bring out the worst in people. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s just a few paychecks that stand between us Nazism, but history teaches us that desperation and hopelessness make people look for scapegoats. So, as the number of foreclosures continues to rise in Michigan, and as the American auto industry slips closer to collapse, it’s not much surprise that we’d see things like this cropping up. And it doesn’t hurt that today Orange Taylor, the black man being held for the murder of white EMU student Laura Dickinson last Christmas, was not found guilty, in spite of the fact that his ejaculate was found on her body. (He is still in custody and will be retried in January.)

The Taylor trial ended in a hung jury. It sounds like two jurors felt there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that he was in her dorm room at the time of her death, but, from what I can tell, only one of them is speaking to the press. Her name is Lauretta Codrington, and she, like the accused, is African American. I just did a Google search on her name and found that several hate sites are already suggesting that she kept the jury from finding him guilty out of loyalty to her race and/or hatred of whites. Maybe it’s overreacting on my part, but my hope is that the police keep and eye on her and her family over the coming weeks. We tend to feel somehwat inuslated from such things here in the Ann Arbor area, but you never know.

Maybe I’m reading too much into all of these little pieces, but I get the feeling that things are about to get worse. Maybe it’s the affect of spending the last hour reading through the websites of white supremists, like the organization that did the flyering here in Ypsi a few days ago. I just get the sense that we’re in a very precarious place. I’ve felt that way since David Ware, an unarmed African American man, was shot and killed by police here in Ypsi earlier this year after a drug bust went bad. It just seems that, since then, we’ve been headed toward something. Then, on top of it, we had the murder of Laura Dickinson. I don’t know where it’s all headed, but I hope that someone in the community steps up to address the building tension in a meaningful way soon, before things boil over. I still remmber Vincent Chin, and I don’t want to see that happen here again.

Posted in Observations | 21 Comments