pt at large

New Age Camp Followers

In bygone days, one breed of camp followers trafficked in death. These civilians scoured blood soaked battlefields after a fight and scavenged what they could from the dead - boots, coats, belts - whatever they thought they could sell.

Photo from AP news file

Today, our polar ice cap is dying. Modern day camp followers, nations seeking oil, fish, diamonds, and time saving shipping routes, stalk the Arctic to claim land becoming uncovered as the melt proceeds.

The entire ecosystem from polar bears to the native Inuit people will suffer as the global warning spreads. But business interests, I don’t think so.  According to a recent AP story, the US Geological Survey estimates the Arctic has up to 25% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves.

Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the United States seek to profit, ironically in the hunt to produce more of the substances that are killing the planet.

Twenty years ago, Norway’s Hand Island was a little-known speck of rock in the middle of nowhere.

Today, Canada and Denmark circle it with warships. Who will win control of the island isn’t important in the long run. What difference will it make in a hundred years when we’re all sprouting water wings?

In bygone days, one breed of camp followers trafficked in death. These civilians scoured blood soaked battlefields after a fight and scavenged what they could from the dead - boots, coats, belts - whatever they thought they could sell.

Photo from AP news file

Today, our polar ice cap is dying. Modern day camp followers, nations seeking oil, fish, diamonds, and time saving shipping routes, stalk the Arctic to claim land becoming uncovered as the melt proceeds.

The entire ecosystem from polar bears to the native Inuit people will suffer as the global warning spreads. But business interests, I don’t think so.  According to a recent AP story, the US Geological Survey estimates the Arctic has up to 25% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves.

Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the United States seek to profit, ironically in the hunt to produce more of the substances that are killing the planet.

Twenty years ago, Norway’s Hand Island was a little-known speck of rock in the middle of nowhere.

Today, Canada and Denmark circle it with warships. Who will win control of the island isn’t important in the long run. What difference will it make in a hundred years when we’re all sprouting water wings?

"Fat Pig":Neil LaBute serves up theatrical mixed grill

“Fat Pig”, a play in one act by Neil LaBute
Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company
Roberts Studio Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts through April 7, 2007.
Running time 100 minutes, no intermission
For tickets and information, go to www.speakeasystage.com

If your view is that the world is a pretty cruel place, watching a Neil LaBute play is not likely to change your mind. His plays have a way of cracking the codes of dysfunctional or damaged people and inflicting them upon the hapless within their range. In “Fat Pig”, playing at the Calderwood Pavilion he lobs another one into our midst.

“Fat Pig” has a couple of powerful actors, grossly funny humor, and moments of poignancy. It illuminates the brutal effects of peer pressure then leaves us with the message that love is not enough to overcome it. This has the potential to be a theatrically rewarding experience if the two main characters infuse their struggles with nuance and complexity.

Photo from Boston Globe
The play’s first scene, a chance meeting in a cafeteria of tall lean twentysomething Tom with a plus sized -let’s get it out of the way, fat - young librarian is delightfully awkward and tentative. Some self-deprecation on Helen’s part, gauche foot -in-mouth remarks by Tom, lead to an unexpectedly good-natured conversation and a date to meet for dinner.

Both of them have relationship issues. Tom  (James Ryen) wouldn’t be able to identify his feelings in a police line-up. Helen (Liliane Klein) has endured marginalization as a plus-sized woman for her whole life.

You want to root for them to manage to swim against the current. With the right partner, Helen just might have the strength to stay the course. “I’m ok with it (her size), the trick is to get other people to feel the same way,” she says. With someone who loves him unconditionally, Tom might find the courage to withstand the onslaught of derision heaped upon him at the office or the ridicule of others he imagines as they see the couple in public.

The play’s scenes switch between ones in which Tom and Helen fumble around toward intimacy and Tom’s cubicle, which represents the cold, cruel world. Tom’s colleague Carter (Michael Daniel Anderson), preoccupied with Victoria’s Secret body shapes, his need to play seek-and-destroy with his own women, and his (family) connection with obesity, mercilessly belittles Tom’s friendship with Helen.

Tom’s former girlfriend, colleague Jeannie (Laura Latreille) in accounting, represents another kind of woman, one who’s had to put up with her share of loser guys, and can't believe her former beau has dumped her for a “fattie”.

The strident performances of these two supporting actors give the play its edge.

Carter is the play’s venomous Oracle. Time and again, he uses searing humor to expose ugly realities of people’s aversion toward the overweight or otherwise different. The audience’s laugher is spontaneous and often followed by a collective reflex of ‘How could I have laughed at that?’

Jeannie is a complex brew of hurt, rage, and self-loathing for having put up with so many “spineless shits” of men who disappoint and reject her. Her emotional meltdown late in the play is breathtakingly visceral and brought spontaneous applause from a stunned audience. Would that we hear or see such plumbing of depths by Tom or Helen.

“Maybe they don’t deserve it but that’s what they get, gay, fat, old, all of it. We’re all one step away from what we despise,” says Carter. Is he right?

Powerful theater gels complexity and ambiguity with humor, pathos, and humanity. Carter and Jeannie each show us a slice of the vulnerability and hurt that drive them. Helen speaks the words but doesn’t evince the daily ache she must bear at being judged by her appearance. Tom, unable to take a stand on anything but his accounting sheets, plays the same spineless character from beginning to end.

If it were to end badly, as it does, it would have been far more satisfactory to see him go down with a bang, not a whimper.

Close Up: Big photos reveal little

"Close Up", images by Martin Schoeller
February 15 - April 15, 2007

The Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Road
Winchester, MA 01890
781-729-1158
Tuesday - Thursday: 11AM - 5PM
Friday: 11AM - 4PM
Saturday and Sunday: Noon - 4PM
Admission $5 Adults, Seniors $2 Students and Members FREE
Thursday admission FREE

For celebrity junkies and even commoners like ptatlarge, gazing at the faces of the famous is endlessly fascinating. Martin Schoeller’s nineteen head shots of actors, athletes, rockers, and politicians is a visual feast. The exhibit fills walls of the modest gallery inside the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.

The portraits are huge, some as large as 3 feet by 4 feet (Angelina Jolie) and none smaller than 2 feet by 3 feet. They’re brilliantly printed studio "head shots", softly lit, but tightly focused in an extremely narrow focal plane. Schoeller zeroes in on the eyes and anything within that plane - cheeks, lips, mouth. All else - tip of the nose or ears are not in focus. With enlargement on this scale, you’d think we could see a hint of what makes the subject tick or wonder about the curl of a lip, an arch of the brow, a glint in the eye or a concerto involving all three.

Not so. The face of every subject is a deadpan, void of expression. Why? If he wants us to construct our own stories, as he professes, why not make us ask the reason for that smirk, or the furrowed brow, or the frown?

He presents us with masks.

Some with luminous skin, others with faint or deeply etched lines around mouths and eyes, like rings on a tree, suggesting the age of the subject. That’s as close a hint we have as to their humanity. Perhaps that’s what Schoeller wants, to strip them of their trappings of power or success and present only their naked faces, well known but with the same pores and lines as we have on our own.

Unfortunately, we want more. We’re probably more like the pilot fish that attach themselves to our most magnificent mammals, the whales, and let the whales take them places they could never reach by themselves.

Schoeller appears to be similar to his onetime boss Annie Leibovitz. He has strong opinions about his methods and how his photos are presented. “The number and identities of his photos were a mystery to us until the day before we got them,” the Griffin curator said. He insisted on arranging the sequence of the photos and even the height from which they’d be mounted from the floor, she said. An artist is entitled to that.

The scale of the photographs and their extraordinarily saturated color printing are truly impressive. But for all the technical virtuosity, they were all hauntingly similar. Schoeller’s aim is to have us create our own stories for his faces. Sadly, most of us prefer the stories we read in People Magazine.

Subjects:
Angelina  Jolie, Magic Johnson, Frankie Velella, Donald Rumsfeld, Marilyn Manson, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Jack Nicholson, Cindy Sherman, John McEnroe, Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, André Aggaziz, Piwa Ndogo, Thomas, Jackson, Lance Armstrong, Joe Mosner, Tammy Faye Bakker

For more about Martin Schoeller, click
http://mediastorm.org/0002.htm

Griffin Museum of Photography
http://www.griffinmuseum.org

Candidate Mauk: Any new police station should be in north end

Gary Mauk usually sits at the far end of the table for the Retired Old Men Eating Out meetings. Last Thursday, March 8, he was in the spotlight at the head of the table as the speaker at the ROMEO's weekly luncheon.

Running for a contested seat for Board of Selectmen, Mr. Mauk spoke for about 40 minutes about four major talking points then answered questions from his peers.

"I came to Westport in 1975. I'm what's known as a 'wash-ashore,'" he said.

Mr. Mauk is married with four grown children, two of whom have children in Westport public schools. He said he spent most of his career working with industrial equipment, installation, startup, heavy construction, project design, project management, departmental management, and manufacturing facilities.

"One of the highlights of my public career was that I was appointed to the Finance Committee. Being a wash-ashore, not a native, it made me proud. I served three terms and was elected chair of that committee six of the nine years I served."

During his watch on the Finance Committee, Mr. Mauk said his leadership helped get the town through the toughest financial times the town had seen up to that point.

Mr. Mauk said his past experience gives him the knowledge of the responsibilities of the committees, boards and commissions in town. "And most importantly, I know what they are not," he said. "Today some people on committees lose sight of what their responsibilities are. What that results in is very little forward progress. It's the responsibility of the selectmen's office to provide good leadership and direction"

Why did he decide to run? Mr. Mauk said, "If the Finance Committee is right in their projections, this town's about to go through some really bad financial times in the next two or three years."

Mr. Mauk said his past experience of working with a board to achieve a majority and his policy of being a financial conservative will help the town ride out the tough times ahead.

Mr. Mauk's major talking points were town finances, public safety planning, housing and Route 6.

"New growth is down, construction is down, foreclosures are increasing at a phenomenal rate all across the state and here in Westport I've been told by the tax collector that some of these new homes in the $400,000 to $600,000 range have changed hands four times in the past two years," Mr. Mauk said.

Mr. Mauk said raising property taxes would "put people who are in a bind in a further bind."

Mr. Mauk questioned efforts to spend $15.000 on a special election to raise taxes when the result is likely to be negative. "Leadership might be to face the reality and say don't cause another $15,000 expenditure on a special election. Let's use some common sense on this. I think I can bring that to the table," Mr. Mauk said.

Mr. Mauk advocated applying common sense to the public safety buildings issue as well. "Let's do a south end fire station. I didn't say take the police out of this but don't use a documented well-known need for a fire department to push something else that the public's not behind, that's not well documented, and not generally accepted yet," he said.

He recommends doing a good analysis to find the needs of the police department. "If it becomes a fact and well accepted that we need a new police station, we take a look at what can we do with the old building to bring it into compliance and put it where it should be. If that's a doable thing and in the taxpayers best interest we probably should do that," he said.

Mr. Mauk said that if bringing the facility into compliance wasn't achievable and a new police station is needed, then it made sense to site it farther north. "I'm told with a good deal of authority that 80 percent of the calls in this town are north of 177. It doesn't make sense to put a new police station further south than the existing one. It would make sense to put it around Route 177 someplace."

In sum, he said, "The public safety complex, the big look there is that 1,300 people voted no and the longer it goes on and the more they try to force feed that, the more it's aggravating people."

On the subject of property rights, Mr. Mauk said, "Growth can be shaped and molded but its got to be done right. You cannot stop people from using their properties. You can work with them and help them but you're not going to get far when you go in and tell them you can't do this and you can't do that. You've got to work with people."

Mr. Mauk said he agrees that there's going to be an increasing need for water and sewer on Route 6. "We're going to have to come up with ideas on what's to be done and how it's going be done and how much it's going cost and how we're going pay for it because the people of Westport are not going to afford to put $30 or $40 or $50 million into infrastructure in the northern part of town. It will go into a bond and it will never carry," Mr. Mauk said.

When asked by Ted Rich to comment on the situation that's developed with the Conservation Commission and the Board of Selectmen, Mr. Mauk said, "I think to some degree the Conservation Commission has got into an area in some cases that they're not supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be looking at existing laws and apply them but every time you turn around they're trying to legislate something and they're not an elected body to legislate, they're an appointed body to apply."

He said that he didn't see the selectmen providing leadership. "They're not looking at facts. They're doing things based on emotions and listening to their friends. I'll listen to everybody but I'm going to do what I think is right for the town," he said.

Mr. Mauk continued by saying, "When it's on TV and four members have got lawyers and the town's lawyers are involved, we're wasting our time and not facing some real issues. This should all be fixed behind the scenes and if there are some people who are there who are inappropriate then they need to get cleaned out or leave of their own volition."

In response to Jack Baughan's question about the job description of the town administrator, Mr. Mauk said, "I don't think the position should be town administrator. I think it should be administrative assistant to the board of selectmen and the selectmen ought to step up and do the job they're running for."

Bill Fanning asked about the administrative assistant. Mr. Mauk said, "If we're going to have tough financial times we can't start leading ourselves out of the problem by bolstering the selectmen's staff. We have to be lean and mean."

"What is your point of view on the escalating school budget, which of course then escalates our health and pension plan?" Mr. Baughan asked.

"There's not a lot the selectmen can do about the budget. There's very little the members of the school committee can do about the school budget, either."

After describing town demographics, which affect any vote regarding schools, Mr. Mauk said the selectmen "might be able to do something about the benefits package, which is the next biggest budget item but that's going to take several selectmen and its going to take some input from the employees and the unions to come together collaboratively to keep from getting mired deeper into the problem."

ROMEO moderator Ed Towne announced that Paul Menzies, candidate for school committee and presently its chair, would be the guest speaker on Thursday, March 15. Sean Leach, candidate for selectman, is scheduled to be speaker at the Thursday, March 22, meeting.