A Few Base Notes About "The Sopranos."

Unlike perhaps most folks in NJ, I never cared much for Tony Soprano and his pals and family members. Perhaps that's just because, hey, if you're living in this state and feel THAT starved for media attention about this state....

I found the show badly acted, directed and written.  There was very little "Jerseyness" about it.(I never even felt that its makers had ever set foot in such "social and athletic club"-ridden towns as Garfield and East Rutherford and certainly never had a real meal in a genuine Mafiosi feeding trough such as the long-gone Tony Maita's Villa in Union City.)  And it seemed to feature either the most incompetent law enforcers imaginable on the Federal level (while as we know, the Feds thankfully have in truth basically crushed LCN in this state, albeit only to be presented with organized crime in several other formats) or posited a universe in which local and state law enforcers seemed to have vanished from this state entirely.

Mostly, however, I dislike the romanticization of organized crime members. Anyone who actually has ever met actual members of the Italianate subculture in which Tony Soprano and his ilk dwell should certainly acknowledge that these characters are just unregenerate scumbags, drooling slobs and louts in either warm-up wear or curiously shiny suits. Charming they really aren't. Nor are they likable. Unless, maybe, one already keeps lizards as pets.

Anyway, the general defense of "The Sopranos," especially in the Ledger, was often that the show was "really about family." (Which in fact is the usual defense made about "Sons Of Anarchy," which is equally morally dubious viewing.)  This in fact is often the last possible defense fans of either "The Sopranos" or the somewhat more wretched "Sons Of Anarchy" (where did Charley Hunnam, a Brit,dig up that hokey twang he sometimes adopts, for example; it's certainly not what one really hears in the California zones where the show supposedly takes place, and here law enforcement appears even more hapless and often corrupt to boot) can muster. So they fall in behind a truly appalling concept of family. Why they simply cannot admit that either show is merely a guilty (even near-obscene) TV pleasure is beyond me. In the Ledger in particular, its crack critics have gone on and on as if writing graduate school-level papers on both shows.

 (Here's my own similar admission: I used to really, really enjoy Fred "The Hammer" Williamson's blaxploitation movies, although I never saw them as anything other than amusing trash, once even gratefully accepted a t-shirt touting his "Mr. Mean" movie from the hands of the Hammer himself after a 10AM show of the movie on 42nd Street.. Hey, I even sat through and chuckled at Rudy Ray Moore's much cruder "Dolemite" series, and Jim Brown in both "Slaughter" and "Slaughter's Big Rip-Off." But I never believed that such movies reflected the true state of African-American families in these 50 states.)

Anyway...for those who either raise the issue of  familial relationships by way of a weak intellectual defense for a weekly TV wallow or simply dumbly believe that LCN's assault on the public good  at core has nonetheless  always been about family no matter how violently and feloniously the "love" has been applied, I would like to commend the work of the British academic John Dickie.

Dickie's written several fine books, but the one worth focusing on here (it's available in paper) is his "Cosa Nostra - A History Of The Sicilian Mafia." The rare writer about Mafia matters who actually reads and speaks fluently Italian and its dialects, Dickie quickly demolishes the idea that LCN has ever been about family. Even more  devastatingly, however, he also convincingly establishes that, unlike a belief many people have and I seem to recall even Tony Soprano buying into on the show, the Mafia-La Cosa Nostra is truly no more than a late 19th century phenomenon. (Sort of like what we know modern witchcraft, incidentally, despite the claims of its faithful to be the true "ancient religion, and there's even a case to be made that the "roots" of Wicca stem from a book of that time supposedly based on "research" in Italy.)

Worst and best  of all, Dickie shows, from an examination of existing court records what the term "Cosa Nostra" really means, and how LCN's interest in ill-gotten gains stems from efforts by a criminally inclined few to control Sicily's citrus industry, since navies of the time depended on citrus juices as a means to avoid scurvy in its crews. It's a long, sad story, and it of course led to some bad Sicilians, the ones not as successful at crime as the local dons they admired, emigrating to America along with their law-abiding fellow countrymen.

But in no case did the origins of LCN really arise from any sense, even a perverted one, of "family."  (Are you listening, Francis Ford Coppola?) That should be underscored first and foremost. America has suffered enough from Sicilian-style organized crime (as it now suffers from bike clubs, Mexican drug cartels, Russian mobsters, gangbangers, etc.) that we shouldn't also have to live with the myth of "family." (Most Sicilians of course have suffered even more, from Mafia rottenness in the mother country and from the stigma of possible organized crime involvement here, it seems such an automatic assumption of those of Sicilian descent that he or she at the very least always "knows somebody who knows somebody" who can get things done.)

Dickie's website is www.johndickie.net. For those interested in the social structure of Sicily where the modern Mafia-La Cosa Nostra has thrived, one might also read Norman Lewis's "The Honored Society," which explains how the Mafia actually strangles the land of its birth. That both Dickie and Lewis are Brits does American historians and even our pop journalists and filmmakers no credit, by the way. (Are you still listening, Francis Ford Coppola?)

In real life, alas, as opposed to reel life now that "The Sopranos" only carries on in the world of re-runs and DVD sets, Jersey remains full of organized crime scuzzballs. It's just that a lot fewer of them seem to have Italian surnames these days. And far too many of them (save for outlaw bike clubs which have their own special "uniforms") still have terrible taste in track suits and related "workout" clothes. The workouts they dress for, however, generally only amount to mulcting and oppressing the public.

Star-Ledger Death Watch - Peanuts!

On Wednesday, the Ledger, which normally avoids coverage of the Shore region (when's the last time the paper ran any substantive coverage of Atlantic City and gaming-related issues?), ran an item about Barnacle Bill's restaurant in Rumson, a burger bar which like a lot of others offers free peanuts to patrons and expects them to toss the shells into the floor.

The story noted that, in response to complaints by people that they'd both slipped on peanut shells and had concerns about their children having peanut allergies (what, they couldn't just slap the kids' hands away?), Barnacle Bill's would no longer offer free peanuts.

Now, this story was in fact the Ledger's LEAD business story for Wednesday. Really. But it was also covered by Middletown's version of Patch and its somewhat livelier local competitor Red Bank Green. As an item for such sites, the topic of Barnacle Bill's is fine. As occasion for a "business story?" There wasn't even, by way of at least  a half-hearted display of journalistic energy, any mention of whether Barnacle Bill's has in fact ever been sued by patrons who, uh, "slipped."

This exercise in legumed triviality suggests to me, as usual, that the hands on the wheel at the Star-Ledger simply no longer care terribly much, they just go through the motions. Day after slow news day. There are probably rodents  hanging round Barnacle Bill's. There are definitely mice at work in the editorial offices of the Ledger.

The Cost Of Being Bosco

Today's Record has an interesting story on Don Bosco's nationally recognized football success. Its basic thrust, however, reeks more of aggressive boosterism than of sober analysis of Don Bosco's curious (to say the least) status in the world of high school sports on a genuinely national level.

While the story notes, for example, that promoters often pick up most of the costs for Bosco's highly publicized out-of-state trips for games (which sometimes even are nationally  televised via the greedy maws of ESPN's seemingly hungry-for-anything, ESPN2), it never raises the corollary question of whether the word "promoters" should ever even be mentioned within the context of high school (HIGH SCHOOL!) sports.

There are no quotes in the story from actual student-athletes who in fact play football at Bosco. Nary a one, too, from any actual administrators at Bosco. And the latter seems a weird omission even if one accepts the idea that head Bosco coach Toal is uncommonly protective of his players.

Most curiously to me, the story, while it remarks upon Bosco's attraction to college athletic recruiters and the assorted other bottom feeders who populate our current system, never mentions the supposedly most important thing of all about high school, its role as due preparation for either college or the larger world beyond. There isn't even a mention of Bosco's graduation rate for its jocks, the very statistic that generally so fascinates the most vociferous critics of collegiate sports. But then, the world of state-regulated "parochial" sports (to use the old term) is so strangely administered that most Catholic and other private schools don't even commonly play each other until the playoffs (if in fact they make them).

Still, Bosco's program seems to be "working" in a sense. Just a cursory examination of the rosters for such area institutions of higher learning as Fordham, Marist and SUNY Albany over the last few years shows several players (though not so much, I noted, as actual starters.) from Bosco. So there you have it: you may well get a college scholarship for football if you play for Don Bosco. It just may not be to, say, an academic powerhouse like Harvard or Yale  (which I once foolishly believed was the reason one attended a pricey place like Bosco in the first place as opposed to "lesser" NJ Catholic high schools like St. Mary's and Queen of Peace) and it may only result in second or third-string status on your college team. But, by golly, you got there via Don Bosco. I really do await a more detailed investigation by the Record as to whether it's then worth it. However "national" Bosco's football program seems to be.

The football rosters of Ivy League schools, after all, are stuffed full of graduates from assorted small town and regional public high schools, albeit ones without the national reputation of Don Bosco.

Star-Ledger Death Watch: Part 2

Although yesterday I cited sports columnist Jerry Izenberg's retirement from the Ledger (which was clearly not a case of "did he fall or was he pushed" given his subsequent continuance there as "columnist emeritus") as when I first noticed that the Ledger was clearly in terminal decline, I should also mention something which occurred long  before that which gave me pause. Told me that the Ledger was extremely indulgent with its pets even as 'Rome" (aka NJ's cities) burned.

For a few years in the mid-80's, the Ledger ran a weekly series of turgid, somewhat simple-minded essays about what the Ledger referred to as "Gems of New Jersey." (They made your average Izenberg columnar jumble read like "Middlemarch".) And they ran on and on...and then on some more. They were all by then-columnist  Gordon Bishop.

Eventually, the Ledger collected and published them, along with a lot of nice photographs, in a hardcover book via Prentice-Hall. I recall it as going at the time for $39.95, but I could be wrong. At any rate, you can now find a used copy online for a buck.

Just a minor pr move by what was then an advertising-fat, extremely profitable newspaper, you might say. Yes, but also a waste of newsprint. Really, that someone could be purposely detailed to produce such astoundingly smug prose, it baffled me. Showed that in its "fatness" the Ledger had become arrogant and otiose and more than a little pompouse. (That said "gems" did not include either Rutt's Hut or East Rutherford's then-notorious Raven Lounge also offended me no end.)

According to a bio I found of Bishop at the very nicely done online Atlantic Highlands Herald (it's actually even credited as "by Gordon Bishop,"which may explain its length), Bishop's book upon its appearance was declared this state's "first official State book." Whatever the hell that really means. (Maybe it was just a slow legislative day at the statehouse in Trenton?)  But I think said declaration, if in fact it's true, indicates the Ledger's statewide influence at the time was considerable to have such instant sleepytime noted as an "official State book," let alone the first such. Times sure have changed since then.

(I also learned from Bishop's bio that in 1989 he authored something called "Greater Newark - A Microcosm of America." Gee, now did I miss that one? While I thus have no idea if this book is also a collection of Bishop columns, one could certainly have a great deal of cruel fun by comparing the book's 1989 positions and predictions  -  remember former mayor Ken Gibson's widely reported comment that "Wherever America's cities are going, Newark will get there first" or some such? I wonder if anyone who fell for such solely-of-the-time drivel has since realized that, actually, in strictly Jersey-type terms, no, it was actually Camden which got there first, with perhaps Paterson nipping at its heels  -  with today's likely grimmer realities.)

Star-Ledger Death Watch: Part 1 (meaning this one's for as long as its death rattle takes)

There is a paper in Jersey which is the state's largest in terms of circulation and traditionally also the most financially successful. And while it's never been a great newspaper, at times it's been, oh, pretty good. It's certainly always been fairish. Enough so to erase fond memories (in all but the most sentimentally inclined, I'd suggest) of the long-gone Newark Evening News. And still usually better than its closest rival, The Record, no matter that the Record clearly does several things better.

Sometimes, admittedly, the Star-Ledger has been able to successfully rear itself up on its little hind legs and actually display some evidence of both editorial passion and influence,

But those days are almost surely long gone and the Star-Ledger is clearly a dying newspaper. A vapid daily read, too, staffed and produced by hacks. It is never a good sign when it takes longer to read Friday's edition than Sunday's, than to read Monday's, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturday's editions all put together.

Owned as it is by the Newhouse family via its Advance subsidiary, what will finally kill the Star-Ledger is the decision by the Newhouses to, as is happening with both its "signature" paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and with its Post-Standard in Syracuse, NY, drastically cut to a three times weekly publication schedule. This process is well underway in Louisiana, has been announced for Syracuse. Most likely it's also been discussed for the Star-Ledger, though you'd never know it from those grinning nitwits who staff the Star-Ledger's subscription tents at assorted local crafts fairs and food events. Asking them about the Star-Ledger's future always proves useless, and it's only in their partial defense that these mere subscription sellers (who never quite know what to say when I ask if my subscription would somehow be "extended" or the charges for it altered if the paper went to a thrice-weekly frequency) turn out not to actually work for the Star-Ledger itself. They really should be better informed. And their programmed chirpiness about what they insist on terming "New Jersey's greatest newspaper" just makes me want to kick them.

What's actually wrong with the Star-Ledger?

A cynic might instead ask (especially given how little real coverage is given local school sports there these days, which used to be the paper's bread and butter, yet is done so much better by the Record, nowadays), hey, what's right? There simply is no longer any area in which the Star-Ledger can be said to offer superb, anyway wide-ranging and authoritative, coverage.

For me personally, the conviction that the Star-Ledger was in its death throes began, oddly enough, with sports columnist Jerry Izenberg's retirement from the paper some years ago. Now, Izenberg is a very bad, very over-emotional writer, someone whose baldly inappropriate metaphors cannot be so much described as "mixed" (to be kind in the extreme) as they can the verbal equivalent of some execrable 30-ingredient version of soggy coleslaw. But his retirement, after several decades of yeoman service, was prominently treated by his newspaper bosses as if it were the twilight of a truly great era of sports journalism, as the passing of a true giant from off the cheapo bleacher seats.

All well and good, you might say. Surely the paper was entitled to hail and send off in grand fashion one of its obviously most loyal "old sweats." But then, Izenberg never actually "retired" in a complete sense. Instead, the giant wanted to keep hanging around and mangling the English language, and so the Star-Ledger slapped him with the terribly awkward sobriquet of "columnist emeritus"(the Star-Ledger is so lazily shameless that it kept attaching this title to Izenberg for way too many years, only in the last year or so finally dropped this embarassingly awful usage)  and he thus continued to appear on a semi-regular basis. (No, he couldn't just shut up and try writing a memoir.) While this has allowed Izenberg to continue to get paid trips to, among other events, the Super Bowls, it has not represented the sort of sports journalism one looks forward to reading. Which Izenberg has never really been capable of anyway. So his continued writing for the paper may be nice for him, otherwise merely establishes that the Star-Ledger would prefer to drag out one of its most reliable and long-term (albeit supposedly retired) hacks from time to time rather than, say (here's a bright idea!), actually develop some new writing talent for its sports department.

I go on so about Izenberg only because his career at the Star-Ledger seems a reasonable example of the editorial "sloth virus" which has infected the paper for so long. Another proof of this is that the Star-Ledger pays so little apparent attention to copy editing, thus conveys a certain contemptuousness on a daily basis to the grammatical niceties of our mother tongue. There has literally, for example, never been a day during the last 5 years when I haven't noticed multiple misuses of "it's" and "its." (True newspaper vets, wherever they worked, will recall instead days in their own careers when they were made to tremble at the mere approach of a veteran copy editor.) Well, at the dear old Ledger (let's be casual from here on) nobody trembles.

And this has always been demonstrated most clearly to me by the writings and beloved-at-the-Ledger status of Izenberg (in public, that is, I've always wondered how less showy scribes there took to working with the guy), who got away with so much for so long. A lot of the Ledger's unfamiliarity with the proper use of three letter words beginning with "i" and continuing with "t" and "s" seems of course to be centered on its sports section. But hardly all of it. And I will gladly send the munificent sum of $5 to anyone out there who can show me three consecutive issues of the Ledger from anytime over the last ten years where the use of those three letters in a three-letter word was consistently and entirely accurate.

There is so much to note about why and how the Ledger is in rapid, fatal decline that this item can only scratch the surface. So this just-launched series will continue for as long as necessary. This is a newspaper, after all, which apparently retains full-time TV and movie and music columnists, even has begun  a weekly "New Jersey authors" column, all the while clearly slashing to the bone its actual news coverage. There is always room, however, for yet another drearily over-analytic Springsteen concert review or a Boss-related item. (I swear, the Ledger's critics could find deep meaning in Springsteen blowing his nose, they all write like English majors on meth because they face a thesis deadline.) But never any real look at the dire indeed problems of, to cite just one urban horror in this state, of  Camden. Perhaps the Ledger, with its obvious large-scale commitment to its NJ.com web operation, just aspires to constant triviality? I often find so many of those "Jersey voices" on NJ.com to, rather, simply sound like pitifully predictable squeaking.

Anyone who wishes to send me their own complaints or observations about the Ledger, too, feel free. Especially Ledger vets or current employees, whose anonymity is guaranteed.  Surely, as well, some out there have good Ledger-related gossip to share.

A final observation for today

It does seem that the Ledger could not survive without either the revenues from Macy's advertising or from legal notices, which have to be "published" by law and on Mondays and Tuesdays seem to constitute the major printed matter in the paper. But I wonder, couldn't such notices just as easily run on the Web? It is not, after all, as if anyone reads the damn things in the first place for the most part. (They may now, for all the admitted attention I pay.) Is there an assemblyman or state senator out there, one with maybe a grudge against the Ledger, who'd care to investigate this matter more fully?

About the picture, by the way

It's of what is called a "broch," which is a circular, round and double-walled drystone tower. They date  from around 300 B.C. to 500 A.D tops and they're only found in Scotland. Somewhat mysterious, brochs are thought to have been both defensive and dwelling places, though no one seems totally sure. There are several hundred of them around, most, but not all, near the coast (which fits with the concept of them as defensive structures or at least watchtowers, of course.) Most, however, are badly ruined, and only a relative handful  are even easily recognizable as brochs to the casual viewer.

The one pictured is one of three (two in very good shape and but a few hundred feet from each other, a third just down the modern road is a ruin) to be found in the hard to find but definitely worth a visit Scottish village of Glen Elg, from where sails a community-supported in-season ferry to the tourist mecca of the Isle of Skye that's just great fun to take. The Glen Elg Inn is also an uncommonly friendly place in an already wildly charming and remote village. (Yet unlike Brigadoon, Glen Elg is busy day after day, with fishermen, craftspeople, sheep crofters, farmers and still hale retirees, all of whom after a few pints seem to display that shy but attentive curiosity about a stranger's own life that I find so typical of the Scots in general.)  Glen Elg was also the actual place naturalist Gavin Maxwell wrote about in his near-disturbingly icky but best-selling book about his relationship with his pet otter. "Ring Of Bright Water"; it's also where they filmed much of the movie version, which has a great theme song by Shirley Bassey.

I just like brochs because they represent solidity and forthrightness. Would that Jersey politicians were even one-tenth as forthright, you know? And because getting to them always takes some effort. I will also understand if the pugnacious bulk of the pictured broch, Dun Telve, reminds others of Governor Christie. (But far better that than the wimpiness of one of the Glen Elg area's many isolated, slimmer and thousands of years older standing stones, which remind me in their rocky reticence of Jon Corzine's plain refusal when Governor or in his subsequent Wall Street career to ever actually serve effectively and honestly.) 

In The "Middle" Distance

It's just an observation, but our beloved Senator Robert Menendez (surely one of the least prepossessing political figures to ever arise out of the dismal swamp that is Hudson County politics, he's always struck me as a sort of haplessly unbalanced hobbit who desperately needs the guiding boss-like hand of a Gandalf) has a TV ad out in which he attempts to paint himself as an authentic champion for the "middle class."

So when did it suddenly become popular to adopt the mantle of middle classness? I'm of a generation, after all, which remembers when whatever constitutes the "middle class" (and who really knows what it is?) was viewed as a mere agglomeration of losers by those who saw themselves as more socially and sociologically advanced and hence deservedly advantaged. When the phrase "middle-class values" only ever indicated sneering contempt for such a presumed mindset, the sort of thing Gore Vidal and the sort of people who took him seriously (BlueWaveNJ-style "progressives," I do so mean thee) might utter with some regularity. But nobody else. Anyway, NJ liberals now have to at least act nice towards the rest of us. They may all secretly think that our sole real role in life is, to borrow from George Orwell, to keep our aspidistras "flying," but they have to be nice to us in public. Until the day after the upcoming election, anyway.

I certainly suspect this: that there isn't a single "name" Jersey politician out there (and this also includes the all-purpose, preening whatever he is Steve Adubato Jr.), and from either major party, who sincerely, deep in his/her heart, believes himself/herself to be, well, middle class. That, alas, never stops a single blessed one of them from attempting either to "save" or defend (in the oddest fashion - just try to imagine Lautenberg,  who's far feistier than Menendez, especially when he awakes from his nice daily nap on the Senate floor, saying in an interview with a straight face that he himself hails from the middle class and thus "understands" its wants, needs and particular socio-economic status) whomever out there they imagine to be that lesser strain of ignorant humanity.

(But then, neither do we commonly produce authentic voices up from the actual working class in this country. Possibly because claiming to be one entails losing far more than, a la Marx's famous remark, one's "chains."  And it would challenge the typically smug imaginings of successful American politicians at  all levels that the offices they hold somehow magically bestow "class" upon them. As per the Kennedys, who can never either live up to or justify their perennial presumption that being from the family is something special other than, anyway on the male side, a sort of Cardinal-bestowed indulgence with which to practice adultery while otherwise remaining safely tethered to the bosom of American Catholicism. Or as per Bill Clinton, who is revered today by so many despite that he was caught enjoying from an intern a certain sexual practice which back in the day of dynast "Honey Fitz" Kennedy would probably have been the sort of thing Kennedy males would only have dared  ask for from the family maids.)

Frankly, I miss the days when to be branded as, say, "hopelessly middle class" was to be hit with the worst sort of epithet to some folks' way of thinking.