NEW YORK TIMES: An oil sheen one mile long was spotted on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico hours after an offshore oil platform exploded there on Thursday morning, the United States Coast Guard said. It was unclear how much oil was leaking, and whether it was spilling from the damaged platform or welling up from beneath the surface of the Gulf. But the prospect of a second oil leak was unnerving for a region still recovering from the environmental and financial toll of the months-long spill at a BP well earlier this year. Coast Guard officials said the sheen measured one mile long by 100 feet wide. But Petty Officer Elizabeth Bordelon of the Coast Guard’s Eighth District that the Coast Guard had been told by Mariner Energy, the platform’s operator, that the platform was not producing and gas at the time of the fire. The reports of a sheen contradicted earlier statements by Mariner that there had been no sightings of a spill after an early survey of the scene. MORE

UPDATE: By early evening, the workers had been rescued with no serious injuries reported and the fire had been put out. Coast Guard officials said that no oil could be seen on the water near the platform, contradicting an earlier report. MORE

ROGER EBERT: I am but a naive outsider. I don’t fully understand the working of the “derivatives” and “credit swaps” that we have heard so much about in recent months. I’m not alone. But I’m learning. I gather that these are ingenious computer-driven trading schemes in which good money can be earned from bad debt, and Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe pocket untold millions at the same time they bankrupt their investors and their own companies. This process is explained in a shocking documentary named “Inside Job,” which was just named the best single film at Cannes 2010. It wasn’t in competition. The voters in the poll were a group of 19 movie critics polled by IndieWire. (I wasn’t one of them.) It was the only film to earn an A average. It is a very angry, very carefully argued, brutally clear documentary about how the American financial industry set out deliberately to defraud the ordinary American investor. It was directed by Charles Ferguson (below), whose academic, business and government backgrounds make him unusually well-qualified for this subject. The remorseless narration is by Matt Damon. Here is the argument of the film, in four sentences. From Roosevelt until Reagan, the American economy enjoyed 40 years of stability, prosperity and growth. Beginning with Reagan’s moves against financial regulation, that sound base has been progressively eroded. The crucial federal error (in administrations of both parties) was to allow financial institutions to trade on their own behalf. Today many large trading banks are betting against their own customers. MORE

BY LINDSAY HARRIS-FRIEL FRINGE CORRESPONDENT It’s the most wonderful time of the year again, when every night of the first half of September is your opportunity to break up with monotony. The 2010 Philadelphia Live Arts/Philly Fringe festival is back, and as usual, the selection is overwhelming. This year the Festival puts more emphasis on film and visual art than usual, widening the focus of entertainment choices, and has brought the Festival Bar further south again, tightening the geographic intensity. So, please, go out every single day and night and make sure that you view every single show. Make sure you wear comfortable shoes, carry cash, arrive for your chosen performances on time, and utilize public transportation and/or a bicycle whenever possible. You’ll be improving the lives of people who have toiled for months to create entertainment just for you, turning the wheel of artistic creation and enjoyment to further the cultural life of this city. Thank you.

Or, maybe you’re one of these mere mortals whose body requires things like rest and adequate nutrition. Perhaps you have a job that precludes you from spending 50 hours a week at the theatre.  I suppose you’ll have to make some awfully difficult choices, then. In that case, here are a few recommendations to get you started.

Plays & Players, the nearly hundred-year-old grande dame of Philadelphia’s theater community, has no fear of death. Rather, she’s embraced it, and holds up dripping hearts with a beat you can dance to. Their past productions of William Shakespeare’s Land of the Dead and Zombie! The Musical are being followed by the enfant terrible of Shakespeare’s canon, Titus Andronicus. Before you worry that this classic might be too stuffy for your tastes, think again. Director Liam Castellan takes this tale of ancient war (which Billy apparently wrote while in his 20s) and family indecency and places it in an apocalyptic landscape, starkly defining the old ultraviolence. After seeing this, your family holiday dinners will seem tame this winter, unless you really like pie.

Why didn’t Tiger Woods delete all of his old text messages from his femme fatales? Maybe each one was a unique, delicate, snowflake. Tongue & Groove’s artistic director, Bobbi Block, hedges a bet that if there are a million smartphones in this city, there are a million secret gems of poetry hiding in pockets and purses. Bring your cell phone or PDA to Tongue and Groove’s Unspoken. They’ll be making this more real than any reality show and streaming faster than any IM with live harmonica music created in the performance. These veterans of serio-comic spontaneously created performance will benefit from the little messages we can’t bring ourselves to say out loud. No two performances will be alike, so if it’s too emotionally arresting for you, take a deep breath: it’s just live art.

Continuing the theme of secrets and slaughter, Tribe of Fools follows up last year’s peerless Armageddon At The Mushroom Village with their interpretation of Dracula. You will be asked to sign a waiver upon entering the theatre, as this production is scientifically designed to elicit the most fear possible in a live performance. The Tribe’s production concentrates on Stoker’s emphasis on brain fever, madness and illness from his original novel. If you want to see the version of this classic tale that is the least traditionally batty, this could be your new blood.

When all this intrigue and murder has tired you out, the Fringe has plenty of comedy to get your blood pressure back down. Josh McIlvain’s 15 funniest short comedies are all together in one sleazy, edgy and outrageous package when you go to see Boat Hole. The Waitstaff is serving what you crave with The Real Housewives of South Philly, and Secret Room Theatre will clean you out with five seam-splitting short comedies in Dirty Laundry. In serious emergencies, you may want Saves The Day Productions’ Super Heroes Who Are Super, insanely delicious dramatic readings of classic comic books.

Finally, when you need to explain to your next of kin what exactly it is you’ve been doing for the last two weeks, there are some shows appropriate for audiences of all ages for them. The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (there’s no shame in calling them The IRC) sets up a battle between bohemians and oil barons in “a luscious tea party in the Twilight Zone” with the French 1920’s classic, The Madwoman of Chaillot. 15 actors play 25 characters, so be careful not to blink too much with this high-speed chase. The Hear Again Radio Project takes everything you remember about vintage radio and removes the static. Between the dramas, the commercials, the costumes, and the live Foley sound effects, there’s something for everyone to enjoy. Their performances vary between “Fat Man,” “Superman,” “Flash Gordon” and “The Adventures of Philip Marlowe,” so you may want to see this more than once. Finally, no Philadelphia Live Arts Festival could exist without Pig Iron Theatre Company. They add puppetry to their entertainment arsenal with Cankerblossom, “a dark fairy tale for kids aged 9 to 90,” about identity, loss and family.

Still looking for the best fit? Go to http://www.livearts-fringe.org and click on “Shows,”  then narrow your search by date, neighborhood, or arts discipline. Narrow the field even further by taking The Live Arts Matchmaker Survey, which will pick three shows according to your tastes. Most importantly, remember, if you see a show and you don’t like it, the best remedy for that is to go see a different live show. Maybe two.

ON THE COVER

PW: If baseball is our nation’s pastime, then surely bitching about SEPTA must be this city’s. (Sorry, Phillies.) Randy LoBasso’s cover on SEPTA making a mish-mash out of modernization goes beyond bitching, though, delving into the dollars and delusion behind the big plans for mass transit, starting with I-80 toll road mess and Fast Eddie hanging the city out to dry.

SEPTA, which relies primarily on state funds for its operations, has a habit of saying one thing, doing another and making promises it can’t keep. A look at the authority’s never-ending delays in plan funding and contracts and how it spends what little money it has, gives us no indication that this shift into modernity is coming any time soon. And though the authority’s decisions are often clouded in secrecy, it’s probably a lot further away than SEPTA cares to admit.

Back in November 2008, a year after SEPTA’s initial announcement to go tokenless, the authority finally seemed destined for greatness. It put out a public call for proposals for its Smart Card system. A contract to begin a full revamp of SEPTA’s payment methods would be awarded by April 2009, and would likely cost upward of $100 million: Money SEPTA conceivably had in its share of the state budget. But the project hit a wall due to inadequate funding, extensions were made on final proposal awards and SEPTA provided virtually no details as to why. In March 2009, the April deadline was extended to May. On May 5, it was extended to June 23. On June 24, it was reportedly extended to Aug. 18. On Aug. 21, the deadline became Sept. 30. Now it’s 2010 and we’re not getting any younger.

But we did get an answer, finally. On March 12, 2010, SEPTA came clean, announcing its financial situation was worse than originally thought. Act 44 (the Transportation Reform Act), which was passed by the state Legislature in 2007 and established the Pennsylvania Public Transportation Trust Fund—$88.3 billion over a 50-year period for Pennsylvania transportation maintenance—was on the brink of a disaster. Part of Act 44’s funding relied on converting route I-80, which runs through the center of the state, into a toll road. This had yet to be done and if it failed completely, the authority would have to cut $110 million from its budget for fiscal year 2011.

Even with credit where it’s due — the stimulus cash that’s making some Broad Street Line renovations possible, for one — SEPTA comes across a shoestring agency, desperately trying to hold things together between funding sources. A “promise” by SEPTA isn’t a guarantee — there’s nothing in writing holding them to the Smart Card project, for instance. However, in the face of the recession and economic difficulties for the city that predate it, you’d think they’d try harder to tamp down expectations.

CP: Fringe-tastic preview of all the theatrical and terpsichorean (look it up) delights coming at over the next month through the Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festival. I totally dig AD Amorosi’s Q&A with Charlotte Ford — excellent use of the word “jackweed” — and performing “The Tell-Tale Heart” at the Mutter Museum next to preserved organs just seems too perfect. Holly Otterbein’s smart and well-conceived take on theatrical representations of the animal world has the added bonus of a Jane Goodall in drag:

Foster first conceived the show as a researcher for the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. While studying in the same place Goodall worked with chimps in the 1960s, he found a community still at odds with the Institute.

“We’ve been there for 50 years,” says Foster. “But the response from Tanzanians was still, ‘What are you doing here?’ That told me a lot about how the Institute had been operating all this time.”

He also started questioning Goodall’s research on dominance displays, in which chimps allegedly ascend the social totem pole by swaying violently, hurling rocks and essentially scaring the crap out of their more chill brethren. “That theory’s got some imperial themes to it, and when Jane first got to Tanzania she was a British woman in a place that was being colonized by England,” says Foster.

Upon returning home to Philly, he decided there was no better way to “both parody and admire” Goodall than to play her in drag. Though the show contrasts his experiences in Tanzania with the legendary scientist’s, Foster insists he isn’t keen on creating an outright dichotomy between the two. “I’m not saying that Jane was a colonizer and I’m this post-colonial figure,” he says. “That would be troubling. It’s more like I’m trying to figure out how I’ve perpetuated these problems, too.”

Even more mind-bending is Beauvais Lyons, who’s bizarrely knowledgeable on the subject of unicorns and their presence in the Bible. For real. Man, the festival hasn’t even started and my mind’s already blown.

INSIDE THE BOOK

PW: Another easy target: music PR people. Water, water everywhere, but it’ll land you in the clink. Urban tumbleweeds: “soiled newspapers, napkins and discarded food packages blow slowly down the street.”
Well said: “If it takes a village, the Philadelphia School District is the idiot.” Also, ouch.

CP: References I did not see coming: the ‘84 Baltimore Colts. Too soon? 37 years in the box, the hole, or other, presumably non-sexual euphemisms for solitary confinement. Four very exciting words: “enormous, airborne Phillie Phanatic.” Another young journalist, disillusioned. So sad.

WINNER: I don’t usually take cover images into consideration, but PW’s just strikes me as dumb. There’s no fun and games in the article, no sense that SEPTA really gets a laugh out of jerking us around. So, CP takes it, but watch yourselves — another Naked Bike Ride cover, and you’re officially on notice.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: It wasn’t the first time Lee, a homeless former Californian, had targeted Discovery’s headquarters. In February 2008, he was charged with disorderly conduct for staging a “Save the Planet Protest.” In court and online, he had demanded an end to Discovery Communications LLC’s shows such as TLC’s “Kate Plus 8” and “19 Kids and Counting.” Instead, he said, the network should air “programmes encouraging human sterilization and infertility.”

“Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding cultures,” Lee wrote in a bitter manifesto on his website.

Lee, 43, also objected to Discovery’s environmental programming. He wrote in 2008 that a show called “Planet Green” was “about more PRODUCTS to make MONEY, not actual solutions.” Police say the gunman burst into the building about 1 p.m. and took hostages in the lobby on the first floor. A gun wasn’t his only weapon, as an explosive device on his body detonated when police shot him, Mr. Manger said. Police were trying to determine whether two boxes and two backpacks the gunman had also contained explosives and authorities sent in a robot to disarm a device on the gunman’s body. MORE

[Illustration by ALEX FINE]

WILLIAM GIBSON: We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google. Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST: William Gibson Overdrive

FRESH AIR

Willie Nelson brought his guitar to the Fresh Air studios in 1996 for an interview and in-studio performance. During his visit, the country-music icon told host Terry Gross about the genesis of songs like “The Family Bible” and “Crazy” — the song Patsy Cline turned into a country classic — and took his timeworn Martin guitar out for intimate, idiosyncratic performances of several tunes, including a soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Nelson first established himself as a songwriter in the 1960s, with songs like “Hello Walls,” “Crazy” and “Night Life.” In the 1970s, he broke through as a performer as one of the so-called “country outlaws.” His music stripped away the slick surface of commercial country music, while his long hair and blue jeans defied the rhinestone-studded style of other country performer. During his performance, Nelson told Gross that he wrote three of his classics in the span of one week. “Let’s see, in one week I wrote ‘Crazy,’ ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ and ‘Night Life’ … That’s when I decided maybe to go to Nashville,” Nelson said. “So I took off to Nashville in my ‘46 Buick and went immediately to a place called Tutu’s Orchid Lounge, where I had heard was the spot to be if you want to find some songwriters. And, sure enough, it was the great spot to be. … I wish I had known then what [the songs] were going to do. Maybe it’s better that I didn’t. Made enough mistakes as it was. I had no ideas that these songs would be as successful as they have been.” Over the past 50 years, Willie Nelson has recorded 250 albums and appeared in 25 films. This year marks the 25th anniversary of Farm Aid, which Nelson helped organize. His newest album is titled Willie Nelson: Country Music. This interview was originally broadcast on July 16, 1996.

In the mid-1970s, country music star Waylon Jennings made records with a stripped-down production style and a rock rhythm. It was an outlaw movement, and it changed the direction of country music. Jennings, who started his career as a disc jockey, grew up in Littlefield, Texas, and started playing in a band when he was 12. His group made frequent appearances on KDAV, a local country radio station, particularly its “Sunday Party” program. It was there that he met Buddy Holly in 1955. “Local acts got to come in and sing, and Buddy was one of the regulars. I was from another town, about 40 miles away,” Jennings told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 1996. “But that’s where I first got to know him, and we just liked each other. And we both loved music, and that’s the only thing we wanted to talk about and think about.” Jennings became Holly’s bass player and toured the country with him. It was Jennings who gave up his seat to the Big Bopper on the plane that crashed, killing everyone aboard — including Holly. “We had been on a school bus because a couple of days before, it had been about 40 below, and our regular bus froze up,” Jennings said. “Anyway, the Big Bopper had the flu, and he came to me and says, ‘I hear you have a plane tonight. Is there any way I can talk you into letting me have your seat on that plane?’ And I said, ‘If you talk to Buddy and if it’s okay with him, it’s okay with me.’ ” The next day, Jennings’ guitarist told him about the plane crash. “That was my first experience dealing with death with someone that was close to me,” Jennings said. “It took me quite a while to get over it.” Jennings took several years off from the recording industry, but continued working in radio. In 1965, he moved to Nashville, where he met Willie Nelson. A decade later, Nelson and Jennings would team up on their compilation album Wanted: The Outlaws, which became a platinum record. In 1978, Nelson and Jennings released their biggest hit, “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Being an outlaw was a rewarding experience. Jennings had 16 No. 1 singles and several gold and platinum albums. In 1975, he was named the Country Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year and was later elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Jennings joined Gross in 1996 to discuss his autobiography Waylon, his collaborations with Nelson and his career in Nashville. He died in 2002 of complications from diabetes.

RELATED: Waylon Jennings always wore a black hat. He named his kid Shooter. Lonesome, ornery and mean, he walked it like he talked it. He was a rebel to the bitter end. Take this life and shove it, he must have thought, a legend and a ghost, forgotten and alone, exiled in Arizona, the place where people go to die. Fuck Nashville. Fuck Grand Ole Opry. Fuck the Country Music Hall of Fame. Fuck the law. And motherfuck Garth Brooks and the horse he rode in on. That goes double for diabetes, which took his foot before it took his life back in 2002 at age 64. It wasn’t always like this. The luck of the draw was on his side that day the music died in 1959. He played bass for Buddy Holly and at the last minute chose not to take that fateful charter flight that crashed and burned with Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on board. And he would press that luck for the next 21 years, telling the dealer to hit him again and again–scaling mountains of blow, backstroking across rivers of whiskey–until he crapped out. If you played his 60 albums backward, he would in fact get back his wife, his horse and his dog. And despite his mega-selling commercial heyday in the mid-’70s, he will likely be best remembered for singing the theme song to The Dukes of Hazzard. Life is cruel like that. Nobody understood that better than Waylon Jennings. – JONATHAN VALANIA

BY MATTHEW HENGEVELD Count Bass D has been dope since 1995, and in the interim has only become more experimental and more intensely dedicated to his work. Perhaps that’s because his initial “hunger” never subsided— he isn’t ashamed to admit that he hasn’t made much money from his music, or that he’s forced to make music “every weekend” because he has to hold a job on the weekdays. The veteran Tennessee-based producer-rapper has been working alongside ATL-based producer-rapper DJ Pocket for years, but only released his first full-length collaboration with him last December, In The Loop. DJ Pocket brings a signature raw and synth-heavy production style to Count Bass D’s heavy bass and 90s soul samples. The follow-up to In The Loop, Hartsfield JAXson, features a song, “Count’s Diatribe 2,” where Count Bass D promises that 2010 is going to be a year of “activity” for him. But now it’s nine months later… and so far we’ve heard nothing. But Count Bass D and DJ Pocket are top-notch professionals. In other words: I’m prepared for this new shit to change my mother fucking life.

Activity features a slew of rappers from DJ Pocket’s “Serious Knock” imprint and production credits go mostly to DJ Pocket, with Count Bass D credited as the co-producer. Most beats contain Pocket’s signature P-Funk inspired synth work, mixed with Count Bass D’s use of oddball soul samples from the 90s. The album reminds me of the glitz and booming gangster-isms of the late 90s— think Capone n Noreaga— but never so over-the-top as to become annoying. Both producers use an experimental sampling technique: it’s like DJ Premier’s scratching— without scratching— and more cohesion. The duo finds acapella tracks, chopping them up and stitching them back together to create a semi-coherent hook. “Gift With The Grind,” slices up DOOM’s vocals from “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Meat Grinder” from the Madvillainy album. They use the technique again on “Set It Off” and “Y’all Seem To Think (That This is Some Kind of Joke)” with Ghostface Killah and Count Bass D vocals, respectively. Though it’s not a groundbreaking sampling technique… it is innovation— rare these days. Count Bass D always wants to do something experimental with his albums. They shoulda called him Thelonius Funk.

I was taken back by the emceeing on Activity. The whole album is tinged with the type of braggadocio you’d see in a Meth and Redman album. Count’s vocals sound like a mix between GZA and Del The Funky Homosapien — using wordplay while remaining firm and matter-of-factly. “Y’all Seem To Think (That This is Some Kind of Joke)” is Count’s victory lap. He contemplates the fact that he’s the only original rapper left in a league of sell-outs. It’s cliché, but it works. DJ Pocket raps slowly with a gruff voice that sounds strangely akin to Dr. Dre’s. In fact, tracks like “It Ain’t Never Enough” sound more like Dr. Dre than Dr. Dre sounds like Dr. Dre (See Under Pressure ft. Jay-Z… Blech). Count and Pocket trade verses with rapper H2O on “…Guess This” — I was most impressed by H2O’s unique southern drawl and ability to not overshadow the beat. We all know that hip-hop fans love collaborations: Black Star, Nas & Marley, Jaylib, Madvillain, posthumous mash-up tracks of Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur… It’s not often that these collaborations result in innovation or even a half-decent album. Count Bass D and DJ Pocket have a different outlook— hip-hop is not a game. Count Bass D takes his trade seriously.

FLAVORWIRE: Banksy recently installed a new work at Brighton Pier in England entitled Pier Pressure, which is best described as a “reconditioned dolphin ride with crude oil and a tuna net.” While it’s clearly a social commentary on the BP oil spill — the company’s logo clearly displayed — we see children gleefully riding the dolphin while their seemingly oblivious parents snap photos. Watch video of the ride in action, and check out more photos of Banksy’s latest outdoor work after the jump. MORE

WASHINGTON POST: Saying it is “time to turn the page” on one of the most divisive chapters in American history, President Obama declared the U.S. war in Iraq over Tuesday night, telling the nation that he was fulfilling his campaign pledge to stop a war he had opposed from the start. “Tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended,” Obama said in his second prime-time address from the Oval Office. He heralded his belief “that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization.” In his speech, the president sought to unshackle the nation from a military invasion, begun by his predecessor, that was supposed to swiftly depose a dictator, seize hidden weapons of mass destruction and leave behind a democratic government. Instead, it dragged on for more than seven years as U.S. troops battled a growing insurgency. The war became a recruiting tool and training ground for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Obama noted the “huge price” the United States paid during the long, wrenching conflict. Over the course of the war, 1.5 million troops served in Iraq, many of them returning for multiple tours. More than 4,400 died, and 32,000 were wounded. The demands of the war stretched the limits of American military readiness, and its $740 billion cost far outpaced the original estimates. MORE

Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq: $9 billion of US taxpayers’ money and $549.7 milion in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors. Also, per ABC News, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.

Missing: $1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces. (Per CBS News on Dec 6, 2007.)

Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported: $1.4 billion

Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq: $390,000 (Congressional Research Service)

Iraqi Civilians Killed, Estimated: A UN issued report dated Sept 20, 2006 stating that Iraqi civilian casualties have been significantly under-reported. Casualties are reported at 50,000 to over 100,000, but may be much higher. Some informed estimates place Iraqi civilian casualities at over 600,000.

Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity: 10.9 in May 2007

Pre-War Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity: 16 to 24

Number of Iraqi Homes Connected to Sewer Systems: 37%

Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies: 70% (Per CNN.com, July 30, 2007)

BY AARON STELLA About a year and a half ago, I began chronicling my stranger-than-fiction life story here on Phawker. Admittedly, much of it is hard to believe, but let me assure you that everything I have shared thus far really did happen. Since almost all of these events occurred during the presidency of G.W. Bush, I am calling this MY LIFE IN THE GHOST OF BUSH, a play on the David Byrne/Brian Eno album MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS. This is the 13th chapter, and for the benefit of newcomers, here’s a quick recap of the preceding 12 chapters: chapter one, life in a fanatic Christian cult; chapter two, post-cult life and coming to grips with my homosexuality; chapter three, the misadventures of a megalomaniac (and closeted homosexual) father; chapter four, my families exodus to Alabama to weather the expected Y2K apocalypse; chapter five, openly gay life in the Bible Belt and getting expelled from school because of it; chapter six, my 9/11; chapter seven, unwittingly moving in with a family of child abductors; chapter eight, forcibly committed by my family to a psych ward; chapter nine, life in an Alabama psych ward; chapter ten, how I got out of the psych ward; and chapter eleven, yet another disastrous experience with yet another foster family and the return of the child abductors; and chapter 12 kicked out of yet another house. You can read the first 12 chapters from beginning to end after the jump. But for now, I’ll set the way-back machine to the summer of 2003, Hanceville AL, where my mother and I have struck a deal in the dead of night that she would leave me alone for the rest of my life if I granted her a final wish. That wish was that I enroll myself in a Catholic Liberal Arts College, called Magdalen College. After being involuntarily committed to a psyche ward, asked to leave my house to live with friends of the family who turned out to be child abductors wanted in three states for various felonies, and enduring not a lick of tolerance for being homosexual (my family included) I had figured it best that I abandon all family ties for good. But the price for that would be costly—and yet, as it all turned out, strangely fulfilling.

Magdalen College sits high atop a plateau on Mount Kearsarge, NH, about a 20-minute drive up a mountain road from the lower lying town of Warner, NH. After easing off the drive onto the college grounds, the scene that seems to appear out of nowhere is idyllic as New England bucolic gets: aged conifers and spruces mothering over moody green grass; characterless dormitories and like classroom huts resting quietly aside dusty gravel paths; the White Mountains, looming in a perpetual haze on the horizon; then, at the center of campus, a large brick chapel rising skyward from a fanfare of flowering bushes and large smoothed boulders, with its haughty spire, reaching heavenward like a bleak finial atop this pristine, naturalist wedding cake. Striking, but still something felt fake, or forced, as I took in the setting, like the feeling of being cornered in a diorama. It didn’t click until one afternoon early on in my first semester when I was walking around campus with a fellow classmate. All the sudden, one of the faculty members comes trotting up one of the connecting gravel paths to tell us that we need to split up since we had be walking alone together for more than 25 minutes. Apparently, that was prohibited.

The college is a small operation: only 64 students, myself included, were enrolled during my first semester (by my second, 10 students had left). Magdalen didn’t exactly appeal to a wide demographic: their student body consisted almost entirely of homeschoolers, and the brood of a special breed of fanatics I like to call “Taliban Catholics”. But I knew this going in my tenure. A few years back, my mother had tricked me into attending the college’s summer camp program under the ruse of it being a theater and music camp. There, I got a taste of Magdalene’s military-styled curriculum, which spared no charms of micro-managed living: no TV, no telephone, no Internet, no music, no reading newspapers until they’d been edited to ribbons, no dating (hanky-panky of any kind was punishable by solitary confinement. No kidding), no singing non-religiously based songs to oneself or in public, and most of all, no arguing the rationale behind any of the rules, no matter how glaringly draconian or indoctrinating they were.

A day in the life of a Magdalen student wasn’t any cheerier either: out of bed by 6:20 AM, morning chores, closet and drawers inspected for neatness, dress for 7 AM Mass (men wore suits and ties while the women wore ankle-length dresses and equally prudish blouses), breakfast, morning classes, lunch, afternoon classes, free time (20 minutes), choir practice for an hour (sometimes longer), sports (rarely co-ed), dinner, fun songs (singing censored bar and summer camp songs like you did in kindergarten), social activity if it was the weekend, study hall (nodding off was punishable by standing for the rest of study hall, which lasted about 2 hours) saying the rosary on your knees, then finally, bed by 11:30 PM. Rinse, wash, repeat every day for the whole year. At times, the faculty would rearrange the schedule to accommodate various events during Liturgical calendar, such as Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, along with other school wide events, such as trips, and St. John the Baptist Week—the school’s version of Spring Break—where the students would put on variety shows, hold a Sadie Hawkins-style dance with a live jazz band, and engage in other such thrill-inducing yet conservatively begotten shenanigans to relive us of the daily grind.

Speaking of the grind, the education style at Magdalen was quite unique. Almost all of the classes were taught using the Socratic method, meaning that instead of having professors profess to you the facts about various topics, students were encouraged to engage in dialogue with the class at large, ask questions, and come to understand their own truths (as long that those truths didn’t conflict with Catholic doctrine). Your “professors”, in this case, weren’t called professors, but “tutors” so that students would look upon their senior class sitters as peers in a forum rather than experts on the subjects. As it turned out, this method was surprisingly effective, and granted us a rich education on many great works of literature, as well as the intricacies of Latin, music, math, science and English; and what’s more, is that after digging into several class discussions with the same 20-25 people you spent with most of the day, you started to gain an understanding of each other’s perspectives, which made for fast friendships, all as trusted confidants.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed myself part of the time. Still, in retrospect, I’d never in a million years recommend anyone send their kids there. It’s just difficult to distill Magdalen’s defining elements without appearing to take sides. While the college sought out to reform the person, they also tampered with the reformation process to accommodate their religious mandate. Looking back, that long drive up the mountain road, the separation from the distractions of the modern world, all were part of a greater plan: not to liberate the soul, but to create brainwashed acolytes for the Church’s ranks.

I can’t end our story here. And so, for next time, I’ll delve deeper into the finer points of life at Magdalene, and, with a bit of luck and finesse, recapture the moment I had there, at which, I think I finally became an adult — the moment when I finally woke up.

(more…)

“There’s no one in contemporary popular music who has created a more impressive legacy — or one that spans a wider variety of styles — than Merle Haggard,” music critic Peter Guralnick once said. Haggard, who helped create the famous Bakersfield Sound, has recorded 38 No. 1 hits, including “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” “Mama Tried” and “You Take Me For Granted.” In 1994, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Five years later, he would receive a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for “Mama Tried,” his famous honky-tonk tune about a mother’s suffering after her son is sentenced to life in prison. That song, he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, was about “97 percent” autobiographical. “Some things we fudged on slightly to make it rhyme, but the majority of it’s pretty accurate, I guess,” Haggard says. “I was probably the most incorrigible child you could ever meet. I was already on the way to prison before I realized it, actually. I was really kind of a screw-up. Haggard, who attended three of Johnny Cash’s concerts while locked up at San Quentin, details his years in and out of prison, his musical influences and his many musical successes in an interview that originally aired on April 6, 1995.

ALSO Waylon Jennings once said, “If we could all sound like we wanted to, we’d all sound like George Jones.” Jones, nicknamed “The Possum,” has recorded 14 No. 1 hits and received accolades from the Kennedy Center, the U.S. National Medal of Arts, the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, among others. Jones, who grew up in rural Texas during the Depression, first performed at the age of 9 in Pentecostal churches and revival meetings. After helping to save souls, in his early teens he played to the sinners, playing at rough-and-tumble road houses. He was underage, but worked with an older couple who served as his guardians. Jones says fights would often break out as the bands played. “Back in those late ’40s, when I was appearing in these places, we had to put chicken wire around the bandstand. We had to keep bottles from flying and busting our guitars up,” he says. “It would be brawls [breaking] out every hour or so. But we got through it. It was part of the training, I guess.” Here, Jones joins Terry Gross for a conversation about his autobiography, I Lived to Tell It All, which describes the many years he was addicted to alcohol and cocaine — as well as his perspective on his celebrated but troubled marriage to Tammy Wynette.This interview was originally broadcast on May 8, 1996.