The Interrupters

[Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, Eddie Bocanegra.]

The Interrupters (dir. Steve James, 2011) spans a year in the work of the men and women of CeaseFire, a Chicago-based organization that intervenes to de-escalate conflicts that threaten to turn violent. CeaseFire’s Violence Interrupters, all of whom bring a criminal history to their work, keep tabs on the doings in their Chicago neighborhoods, tracking the petty and not so petty disputes and grudges that so often precipitate violence.

The film focuses on the work of three Violence Interrupters — Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra. We see them speaking to the camera about their lives and speaking to others in an effort to avert violence by the power of persuasion: cajoling, challenging, empathizing, flattering, reasoning, shaming. The film is at once a cause for despair and a cause for hope. The fatalism of so many of the film’s young people, captured in the words “I am next,” written on a wall of the dead, seems straight from the Iliad: “I know I will not make old bones,” as Achilles says. Yet the Violence Interrupters themselves have learned to live beyond criminality and violence, and we see them, armed only with words, convincing others to do the same. Perhaps the most powerful scene: Williams accompanying Lil’ Mikey as he apologizes to the beauty-shop owner he robbed two years before.

The Interrupters is available on DVD. Or watch online at PBS’s Frontline.

During this past weekend, ten people were killed and thirty-nine more wounded in Chicago. One of the dead was a six-year-old girl.

[“I know I will not make old bones”: from Christopher Logue’s War Music, a reimagining of the Iliad (1997). Images from the film’s Facebook page and press materials.]

David Allen in the New York Times

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done , writing in the New York Times :

How do you think most workers would respond if you asked them, “Do you feel more productive now than you did several years ago?” I doubt that the answer would be a resounding yes. In fact, even as workplace technology and processes steadily improve, many professionals feel less productive than ever.

It may seem a paradox, but these very tools are undermining our ability to get work done. They are causing us to become paralyzed by the dizzying number of options that they spawn.

Is there a way out of this quandary?

Short answer: yes. Allen’s article is a crash course in the practices described at greater length in Getting Things Done .

[I don’t have forty-three folders, and my label-maker has gathered dust for years, but Getting Things Done has helped me greatly in getting stuff done.]

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

What Irish capitol city (a dea o dea!) of two syllables and six letters, with a deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust oh dust!) can boost of having a) the most extensive public park in the world, b) the most expensive brewing industry in the world, c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the world, d) the most phillohippuc theobibbous paùpulation in the word: and harmonise your abecedeed responses?

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939).

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day. I’m half Irish. Represent! Partly!

[Answers: a) Delfas, b) Dorhqk, c) Nublid, d) Dalway.]

“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”

This American Life has retracted its story “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The short explanation: “many of Mike Daisey’s experiences in China were fabricated.” Or in the active voice: he lied.

CAUTION: BREAKDANCE ZONE

If I were Mitt Romney

If I were Mitt Romney, I’d announce a listening tour:

“You know, everyone’s talking as if these primaries and caucuses are about me, and Rick, and Newt, and Ron. But they’re not about any of us. They’re about you, about your hopes and dreams. And I want to prove that to you, not by getting up here and talking, not by making speeches, but by listening to what you have to say,” &c.

What might follow: Romney in conversation with so-called ordinary people, listening, commiserating, explaining how his policies would make things different. He could use Phil Dunphy’s line (from Modern Family): “I know, that’s so frustrating.”

Would it work? The picture of the rich man humbling himself in the company of the common folk might move some voters in Romney’s direction. But he’d have to stay on task (“I know, that’s so frustrating”) and not remind voters that he too is unemployed.

Other Mitt Romney posts
Mitt Romney and Mark Trail
Mitt Romney at Bain
Mitt Romney: the soul of a poet

[“As if these primaries and caucuses are”: my script avoids the subjunctive, which is not for red-blooded Americans. “Listening tour” for me means Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, but the term seems to be everywhere: Google returns over a million results. I corrected Phil Dunphy’s line after checking the episode “Two Monkeys and a Panda.”]

Domestic comedy

Waiting in line at our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer, we wondered about the doings in the nail salon beyond the registers:

“Do they wash them first?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never set foot in one of those places.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts

Avoiding CAPTCHA

Blogger’s updated, more difficult word-verification gizmos (aka CAPTCHAs) are tedious at best. At worst, they’re unreadable. As The Real Blogger Status points out, enlarging with Command-+ or Control-+ can make the CAPTCHAs more readable. But a Blogger user might do the reader a greater courtesy by turning off word-verification. That’s now possible only from the old Blogger interface: go to Dashboard, Settings, Comments, and scroll down to “Show word verification for comments?”

Just saying no might lead to an influx of automated spam comments. I turned off word-verification yesterday and have seen more spam comments in a day than in the past two or three years. But I moderate comments, so the spam never makes it to my posts. If deleting the junk saves a reader from having to work out something like the enigma below, I’m happy to do it. If the spam becomes unmanageable, I’ll no longer be able to avoid CAPTCHA.

[Say what‽]

‽

The interrobang turns fifty.

A Kerouac notebook page

[Click for a larger view.]

I was startled yesterday to see the name of our friend Seymour Barab in a post at Ordinary Finds for Jack Kerouac’s ninetieth birthday. My transcription of this 1953 (?) Kerouac notebook page, which analyzes Allen Ginsberg:

Ginsberg — intelligent enuf, interested in the outward appearance & pose of great things, intelligent enuf to know where to find them, but once there he acts like Jerry Newman, the photographer anxious to be photographed photographing —— Ginsberg wants to run his hand up the backs of people, for this he gives and seldom takes — He is also a mental screwball

*(Tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded tape recording) (like Seymour Barab anxious to have his name in larger letters than Robert Louis Stevenson, like Steinberg & Verlaine Rimbaud Baudelaire

I think I’ve put together the connections:

1. Jerry Newman was a friend of Kerouac’s, a Columbia University student and recording engineer. (“The photographer anxious to be photographed” seems to be a metaphor, followed by the more appropriate metonymy, “tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded.”) I recognized Newman’s name because of his recordings of jazz in Harlem clubs: Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Art Tatum, among other musicians. Newman recorded Kerouac too.

2. Newman founded two record labels, Esoteric and Counterpoint. Russell Oberlin’s recording of Seymour Barab’s settings of poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses was released on Counterpoint in 1953. (It’s still available from Essential Media Group.)

3. Kerouac seems not to have understood that a composer often gets the more prominent credit when setting texts to music.

4. I can make nothing of “Steinberg & Verlaine Rimbaud Baudelaire.” Did Saul Steinberg do a cover for a collection of their work? If so, I haven’t found it. [6:39 p.m.: Bent from Ordinary Finds offers the likely explanation in the comments: Steinberg’s drawings of pages from Rimbaud’s lost diary.]

5. Speaking of artists: the cover for A Child’s Garden of Verses is the work of William Steig. He and Seymour were friends and neighbors.

Elaine and I have learned so much from Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab. As Elaine puts it, Seymour and Margie are our “favorite inhabitants of the Upper East Side.” How fortunate we are to have their friendship. Seymour by the way never met Kerouac or Ginsberg, and he recalls no discussion of the billing on the album cover.

A related post
Jack Kerouac’s last typewriter

[I mark very few birthdays on Orange Crate Art: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King Jr., Van Dyke Parks, Marcel Proust — that’s all. Elaine took note of Seymour’s ninety-first birthday earlier this year.]