Colin McEnroe

The Week Ahead on the CMS

cmcenroe — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:35:48 +0000

MONDAY: Are you REALLY better off in Texas? Gov. Rick Perry is blasting through Connecticut and New York, trailing a comet-like plume of TV advertisements promising employers a better life in the tax-free, unregulated Promised Land of Texas. Is it really that much better? Don’t they have water shortages? We’ll tak to Texas journalists and transplants to and from Connecticut and Texas. And Gail Collins, author of “As Texas Goes — How the Lone State State Hijacked the American Agenda.”

TUESDAY: Shakespeare performed with giant puppets by the creators of War Horse. A comic-rap-scrap-metal-music-theatre work that follows a Chinese deliveryman’s increasingly fantastic attempts to escape a 4? by 6? by 8? metal box when he spends 81 hours stuck in an elevator. We’re live from the Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven. Come join us in the lobby of The Study, a hotel on Chapel Street.. In a year that featured a funny Hamlet, a melancholy Twelfth Night and a black and white Much Ado About Buffy set in director Joss Whedon’s L.A. home, we’re going to talk about everything theater can and should be.

WEDNESDAY: This is a show about graffiti, but I don’t do anything about it.

THURSDAY:OUR SALUTE TO HOUSEWORK! Hints from Heloise started in 1959. It is currently authored by Poncé Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans, daughter of the first Heloise, who never had to advise us on getting pet hair out of an mp3 player. She, along with scholars studying the history of housework, will discuss what it is, who does it, and why.

FRIDAY: The Nose: Rand Cooper leads a panel revving on the tarmac to jet through the week in culture.

The Rains of Castamere

cmcenroe — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:55:59 +0000

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the fan reactions to this season’s “Game of Thrones,” especially its penultimate episode, the so-called Red Wedding.

Three sympathetic characters were unexpectedly murdered. I jumped on Twitter minutes after the initial airing. People were nuts.

It was unusual. And I wondered: Are people getting really soft? Do they lack the fortitude for tragedy?

Part of it is the modern transition of cinematic writing to television. Movie theaters are strange places. We know that terrible things can happen there. The guys in “Easy Rider” die. So do Butch and Sundance. Sonny and Fredo. And poor Private Mellish in that knife fight. (That bothered me more than any movie death I can remember.) Good people die in movies. But television comes into our homes and aligns itself with our domestic lives. And for most of television history, people didn’t die, not much. Not unless the actor died or wanted to leave the series. Colonel Blake. Chuckles. I’m probably missing a few. Mostly, on television, the nice people come back every week, because that’s the way the medium works.

Cable television changed the rules. Adriana. D’Angelo. Lane. Half the people on “Walking Dead.” And it’s more of a violation for having been beamed into the home on a domestic appliance. You pay the bill for that murder or suicide right alongside the light bill and the water bill.

The Red Wedding bothered people even more than those other cable deaths. It was ugly. It was brutal.

But the other subtext of “Game of Thrones” is the broken system which very few people are interested in fixing. And twice now, George R.R Martin has killed off characters who were dangling a vague promise of moral action.

I think that’s hard to swallow, especially when our real world leaders are so disappointing.

Are You Better Off In Texas?

cmcenroe — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:24:46 +0000

And if so, how?

Gov. Rick Perry is coming to Connecticut and New York on a naked job-poaching bootleg.

I’m guessing he won’t be talking about water shortages. (Hey, Texans! Want water? Boy, do we have some.)

We decided to scrap a show plan for Monday and do an episode about whether Texas is really a better place to be. We invited Perry. We’ll see if he accepts. I honestly don’t know whether it’s better in Texas, but this report would make me worry about pollution, health and education. We’ll be talking to journalists, politicians, folks who moved from Connecticut to Texas, and vice-versa.

And it’s not by Jon Secada

cmcenroe — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:13:02 +0000

What Rick Perry Should Sing When He Gits Here

cmcenroe — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:25:24 +0000

(As always, listen to the Large Band’s whole jam.)

Keno: The Conversation That Never Happened

cmcenroe — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:36:30 +0000

David Collins, photographed by Chion Wolf

Mary Drexler is executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. When Connecticut considers a big move like adding keno to the gambling menu, it’s her job to attend all the public hearings and committee meetings at which the change is discussed.

It’s her job to offer testimony on the bill and to recruit other experts who can offer opinion on the impact of increased gaming.

This time, she didn’t do any of that.

She couldn’t, because there were no public hearings or committee meetings. State-sponsored Keno was legalized in Connecticut by, essentially, a back room deal.

“I found out about it the Friday before the vote on Monday. The legislators who told me about it said it came up as an idea on that Thursday or Friday before the Monday vote,” she said on The Colin McEnroe Show this week.

Why was keno added?

To close a hole in the budget created by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s promise of no new taxes, his deputy budget chief Karen Buffkin said on the same show. The budget passed by the legislature shows keno coughing up $30 milllion in fiscal year 2015, the second year of the two-year budget.

I asked Buffkin how many keno machines there would be and how many sites would host keno games and what kinds of establishments would be allowed to offer keno.

She said all those things were “as yet to be determined.” Of course. How could any of that be figured out during a process in which 72 hours elapsed between the first glimmering of the idea and its passage within the overall budget? To figure those things out you’d have to have …public hearings and committee meetings.

But wait a sec. If they don’t know how many machines or locations they’ll have — and whether they’ll be located in Chuck E. Cheese or the Sidetrack Tap — how do they know they’ll get $30 million in revenue?

Buffkin said she’s not the one who came up with that number, but “I think it’s based on the experience in terms of the states that surround us and a number of factors including and what we’ve accrued when we’ve introduced a new lottery game.”

Hmmmm.

New London Day columnist David Collins is not buying the idea that keno just popped into somebody’s mind on the Thursday before the Monday budget vote. In fact, the two Native American tribes running gaming operations in the state had to sign off on the deal. For that to happen, the state had to promise them a cut — which turns out to be 12.5 percent percent. That’s not a short conversation. . This is from his column:

The fact that the state has been secretly negotiating a keno deal with the tribes, cutting them in for a generous 12.5 percent take of the winnings, was obvious from the reactions from both tribes to the keno news, which took most others completely by surprise.

Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Chairman Rodney Butler compared the new keno pact to the existing gaming compact with the tribe.

“Because of this successful partnership with the State and the collaborative relationship with Governor Malloy’s administration, we felt it was in the best interest of all to pursue a similar agreement with Keno,” he said.

So there you have it. The governor negotiated a keno deal with the tribes but never told the public he was planning to expand gambling and cut the tribes in.

So there was time to talk it over with the tribes, but no time to inform anyone else.

Drexler said she has been been in conversations with the governor’s office about keno since 2010.

“We had been following the [budget] bill all session long and there was nothing in it about keno,” she said. “I was assured we would be alerted if anything was going to be put back in. I was not alerted.”

In doing the show, we found people — even in some of those neighboring states Buffkin talked about — who have studied the impact of introducing keno. We talked to one researcher, Rachel Volberg, who was hired by the state of New York to study changes in keno customers during the first few years of the game. Volberg said her team found white non-urban males were the predominant players when the game was introduced, but within three years, young, Latino women in cities had emerged as the heaviest keno players.

We also talked to a therapist who specialized in gambling addition in Montana and a recovering Montana keno addict, both of whom described specific ways in which keno lures previous non-gamers into the world of betting and losing.

Our show was only 49 minutes long, but that makes it 49 minutes longer than the public debate the legislature had about legalizing keno.

The Implementer!

cmcenroe — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:36:22 +0000

This week’s column. [Mark Mirko photo]

Our shows next week

cmcenroe — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:27:08 +0000

MONDAY: Keno – This highly addictive, low-payout game was passed very quietly in the CT state legislature, without public debate and with agreed-upon cuts of the profits (tribes will get 12.5% of revenue – how and why that number was achieved is unknown). What exactly is Keno, how did it get passed, and what does this mean for gamblers in the state?

TUESDAY: Netiquette – For generations, manners were passed down from parents to children as a guide to navigating a world of face-to-face relations where respect, civility, and formality were valued. Today, while the values remain the same, there are pitfalls for the well-mannered at every turn in a digital world where users are torn between honoring established niceties seen by many as a waste of time in a world that never sleeps.

Wednesday – Sounds of the Wild – Bryan Pijanowski is one of the founders of a new field of study called “soundscape ecology.” He studies the acoustic health of ecosystems by recording swaths of continuous audio from all around the world and asking a fundamental question: “What did nature sound like before humans started making so much noise?” Later in the show, John Cooley talks about Connecticut’s noisy cicada invasion and composer Emily Doolittle describes “zoomusicology” and how nature inspires her art..

[A pastiche created by combining elements of two PD-art files, in Photoshop, in order to illustrate the term "pastiche" via Wikimedia Commons.]
THURSDAY: Forgery – Forgeries have often been derided, but Jonathon Keats says maybe we should appreciate counterfeits in their own right as high art. His new book, Forged, explores art forgery from ancient times to the present. We’ll also walk you through the fundamentals of forging a masterpiece. Think you could do it?

FRIDAY: Newtown: Six Months Later – On the six-month anniversary of the Newtown shootings, The Colin McEnroe Show and Where We Live will broadcast live from the offices of the Newtown Bee. Our guests in the afternoon with include First Selectwoman Pat Llodra and members of the town’s arts community. How does one rebuild the soul of a wounded town so that it both remembers tragedy and accommodates laughter and hope?

Infected Noses and Their Erotic Fantasies

cmcenroe — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:36:52 +0000

On Friday mornings, I try to map out a plan for The Nose, our weekly culture roundtable. This has usually been preceded by a day or two of emails circulated among the panelists (who, on this day, are James Hanley, Tracy Wu-Fastenberg and Patty McQueen.

[Chion Wolf photos]

Ordinarily, we don’t dive right into hard news, but it’s hard to ignore the disclosures from the last few days about FISA, phones, PRISM and government access to internet servers. Amusingly (in a dark way), Obama is meeting with the President of China today about cybersecurity, a conversation that is bound to be less one-sided now. It does somehow seem to fit with all the grapeshot fired at FOIA here in Connecticut this year.

So even though we’re not a news roundtable, we’ll dip our toe in this one, because privacy is cultural too.

As we wander further afield, I want to bring up the storm of tears, anger and outright rejection that followed last week’s Game of Thrones episode in which three sympathetic characters were brutally murdered. Read the tweets in the slideshow here. They are pretty typical of what I saw on Twitter that night. It’s one thing to be shocked and troubled. It’s another to throw a tantrum at the author, as if he had no right to kill off people he made up. (Did Dickens have to deal with that?) It seems extreme somehow, and I have to think it has do with the way big dramas have moved to TV, which used to be a safer, more reassuring place. But one of or panelists suggested it has something to do with the way people are more comfortable expressing emotion and even weakness in connection with TV characters than with the people in their real lives.

That also guided us toward Deval Patrick, who offered the rather frank disclosure that he went out by himself and got drunk after the bomber manhunt. Having just spent some time in the Berkshires, I’m wondering what restaurant it was. The duck confit at John Andrews is remarkable. So is Patrick’s concession to being human, atypical for a politician.

What other politician has done something atypically human?

Vladimir Putin is divorcing his wife — he told her wants to start intimidating other people — and one Russian observer said: ”The divorce of Putin is a step toward democracy. He could hide as much as he wanted, but he chose to reveal that he is human, he can have bad luck. He chose transparency.”

But he’s still a bully, right? Putin tends to bristle however, at people nosing around in his relationship with his much-younger gymnast girlfriend: “I have always disliked those who, with their infected noses and erotic fantasies, break into other people’s private affairs.”

How can we turn down an infected nose topic? (Pictured: the good old days!) I’m not sure we’ll get to the interrcial Cheerios blacklash even though, earlier in the week, it seemed like a natural Nose winner.

A Modest Proposal on Crime Scene Photos

cmcenroe — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:30:50 +0000

I don’t think we’re there yet.

I don’t think this is the right compromise.

And I agree with Peter Tercyak that if this had been aired out in public hearings, we might have the right compromise.

Here’s my suggestion. It’s so obvious that I’m sort of worried that I’m missing some huge constitutional point or procedural reality.

Inspect but don’t reproduce.

My suggestion is that any citizen can make a request and then physically present him(or her)self at the relevant police station and inspect homicide crime scene photos but not for the purpose of reproducing them elsewhere. Presumably, the vast ruck of police photos would be available as they are now to the press and public. The new compromise envisions the creation of a special class of photos deserving of some segregation. I’m a little nervous about letting the police make that judgment call, but fine. But let any interested person inspect them under supervision with no opportunity to reproduce or distribute them.

There should also probably be a petition process by which certain of these photos could be moved out of the protected class, either through the FOI Commission or the courts.

Why bother?

Meyer, one of the two senators who opposed the bill, said: “As a father of six and a grandfather of 13, I identify so much with the horrific crimes of Dec, 14 and the immense sadness that those events bring to the Newtown families,” Meyer said. But, he added, “There is a bigger issue here that must be addressed. Criminal conduct occurred which is subject to Connecticut’s criminal law, perhaps the most public of our laws. The Newtown crimes were committed on public property. The photos and recordings were taken or obtained by police officers. The suppression of horrific crimes committed on public property and recorded by public officials is not consistent with a free and open society.

“The more we understand about our ugliness, the better chance we have to overcome that ugliness. Suppression of horrific conduct, as this bill dictates, invites history to repeat itself. … With sadness, I say that history will show that this well-intentioned bill is a large mistake.”

Meyer made his comments in a printed statement, to which he attached famous journalism photographs depicting: Vietnamese girl running in terror after her clothes were burned off her by napalm; the killings at Kent State University; the police abuse of Rodney King; and recent injuries after the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

But there’s another reason. One of the prime drivers of this impulse to sequester crime scene photos is the experience we all had with Newtown conspiracy creeps and wackos. Do Malloy and the legislature not understand that what they’re proposing actually energizes those wackos? Allow me to share one of the emails I got this week:

Dear Colin, for once I actually agree with some of what you said in your June 2nd article in the Courant. But not entirely. I am one who does care and have written to representatives in Newtown to ask why they would even think about not allowing death certificates to remain public. I do not think a town clerk who is annoyed with the requests should be allowed to dictate policy. Plenty of other people have died in CT, including children, and no one seemed to care about their families’ sensibilities. My issue with what you said, however, is that you didn’t take your indignation further and ask why the legislature inserted inself so quickly into a police investigation and why they are making laws to keep the public uninformed. It’s because Newtown did not happen as reported; it was staged to further gun control legislation and probably by Eric Holder (and heaven forbid, maybe Obama) who visited Malloy in late November and again right after Newtown. Gun control is something the Courant endorses so it is not surprising that they have done little to no investigative reporting. The end justifies the means. You don’t find it unusual that victims’ families were escorted on Air Force One, that no one saw the bodies of their children, that Lt. Vance threatened anyone who strays from the official story, that Dr. Carver said bizarre things about what good photographers he had and he hoped this wouldn’t come back to bite Newtown? I wish you would do what you did to Rowland with this whole issue. You could be famous. I’m sure you voted for Malloy but maybe don’t again or for any legislator voting to keep secrets. I’m not saying these children are not dead but they may not be. A parent on FB said she saw a picture of her alive-and-well child among the pictures of the dead. How would that happen? If they are, why hide the death certificates? Maybe because no one wants to forge so many. A sign behind Gene Rosen, said “Everyone Must Check In” and porta potties lined the street. I lived in CT for 65 years but am presenty in RI where the top story today in the Providence Journal is the Attorney General ruled a woman is not entitled to the police report on her brother who died in custody. So it goes. You said this should be nonpartisan; I agree and hope you stick to that. You’ve certainly been known to follow a certain ideology. The bums need to be thrown out, regardless of their party. One more thing, if this were a Republican administration, there would be far more scrutiny and far less acceptance of the official story.

Yikes.

I share this only to suggest that the crime photo sequester will have many unintended consequences.