Who has the right cards to deal with it? Among Republicans, Mitt Romney proves his business savvy every time he dips into the pile of cash he made in the corporate world. He had a golden touch (but less so as governor of Massachusetts, where growth numbers were not impressive). As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee produced good figures in a poor, rural state, but his advocacy of a national sales tax is problematic—probably the wrong idea at a time when consumer confidence is so low. John McCain can argue that he opposed some of President Bush’s tax cuts, but might not be eager to do so when many think that putting more money in the hands of consumers is the priority.
On the Democratic side, if life (and campaigns) were fair, the political beneficiary would be former senator John Edwards. From the beginning, he has had the tightest focus on those struggling to make ends meet and offered the earliest and most sweeping plan to meet the home-mortgage crisis: a seven-year moratorium on rate increases and a new, court-enforceable mandate that lenders make a “good-faith effort” to redo onerous loans. But being first in politics rarely pays off. Having failed to win in must-win Iowa, he’s struggled for attention.
Another “It’s the economy, stupid” election would seem to benefit Hillary Clinton more than Barack Obama. He certainly knows how the other half lives; he was a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. He has unveiled an economic-rescue plan that focuses on pumping cash into the economy through a tax rebate and a government fund to help mortgage borrowers. But his claim to the presidency isn’t based on economic know-how; it’s based on his prescience in opposing the war in Iraq and a bring-us-together tone of reconciliation. Iraq is less visible now, and Democratic voters may be eager to hear more accusatory rhetoric about banks, hedge funds and Republican regulators.
Hillary has copied much of the Edwards plan, shortening the rate freeze from seven years to five. More important, she can claim to have absorbed a feel for how to deal with tough economic times by watching how her husband worked out of a recession and into the Long Boom of the ’90s. But she’s leery of relying on nostalgia, realizing that elections are always about the future. “You’re not going to see TV ads about the 1990s,” says one of her top aides, who didn’t want to be named discussing strategy. To do so would require bringing Bill back to center stage. That’s a gamble that Hillary isn’t willing to take.
title: “Homeward Bound” ShowToc: true date: “2023-02-01” author: “Yan Crosten”
Simon and friends were revving up for “The Concert Event of a Lifetime,” which opened last Friday. The title may sound like something peddled on pay-per-view, but his 21-night stand at the Paramount in New York is serving a higher purpose: to celebrate the release of a three-disc retrospective, “Paul Simon, 1964/1993.” Boxed sets tend to be mausoleums housing the remains of performers who’ve either died or outlived their usefulness. But this set follows the arc of a career with no intention of turning south. The irony is that 20 years ago, Simon, now 51, wondered what would become of him once he “killed the goose that laid the golden egg” and went solo: “I thought, if Simon and Garfunkel is all about the voices and not the songs, so much for my career,” he told NEWSWEEK. “But if it’s about the songs as well as the voices, then I was going to be fine.”
To say the least. in the documentary “Born at the Right Time,” Garfunkel says, “In the years of Simon and Garfunkel, Paul was very busy suffering.” By 1989, in “The Cool, Cool River,” Simon was singing, “I believe in the future, we shall suffer no more.” Today he seems quite happy: married to pop singer Edie Brickell, 27, he has an 8-month-old son, Adrian. You can ask the articulate Simon anything, but all he really wants to talk about is music -how a song begins its life as a time signature (say 6/8), then finds a key (E-flat); how percussion can inspire a lyric or how a lyric can inspire an entire album.
Asked how his career stacks up against McCartney’s or Jagger’s (OK, it’s a loaded question), he flails around for a gracious answer. “It’s comparable,” he says, then flails some more: “I don’t think anyone can make a real assessment.” But the boxed set gives the answer. Listen to the exuberant “Graceland” tracks and the poetic tunes from “The Rhythm of the Saints.” Simon is the only songwriter of his generation still curious, bent on change and utterly awake.
It’s the singer’s with far-flung musical cultures that’s kept his blood coursing over the years. Yes, there’s “El Condor Pasa,” but there’s also the reggae slant to “Mother and Child Reunion,” the Brazilian talking drum on “Me and Julio, " the ebullient, mariachi-style horn break on “Late in the Evening.” By the time Simon went to Brazil to make “Rhythm” in the late ’80s. the inward, New York-bred folkie had stumbled on the songwriting equivalent of deep cover. “I didn’t get to be an artist until long after they began calling me one,” says Simon. “It started in the ’70s with an attempt to grow and search. The things I did before were unaware. I thought the way my generation thought. I saw myself as part of a group. For a long time now, I’ve known that there is no group.”
So, if Paul Simon is suffering no more, if his songwriting is more evocative than ever, what’s he doing singing ancient Simon and Garfunkel tunes? The duo’s reunions have been riddled with acrimony. At times, Simon treated Garfunkel like a collapsible chair, something to be trotted out on occasion (“The Concert in Central Park,” in 1981) then stowed away. But Garfunkel is keeping busy: he’s got an album out soon, he appears in the movie “Boxing Helena” and has a solo gig at Carnegie Hall on Valentine’s Day. And on the boxed set, when Simon juxtaposes his original, low-rent “Bridge Over Troubled Water” demo with the grand studio version, he pays Garfunkel homage: it was his grade-school buddy’s astonishingly delicate vocal that lifted that song up.
Simon and Garfunkel sets are bracketing the shows at the Paramount. Are they getting along? “There’s a lot of baggage, but it has to be dropped,” says Simon. “The more time we spend talking about careers and what happened, the more mess we’re going to make for ourselves.” The reunion, part of him seems to feel, is a necessary evil of a retrospective. “While I’m not encouraging nostalgia,” he says, “I’m not discouraging it, because a lot of people get pleasure from it. If they associate a song with their high-school dance, well, great.” And every so often, something like nostalgia creeps into his voice: “Yesterday, we were rehearsing ‘El Condor Pasa with just two South American musicians. I was playing guitar, and Artie and I were singing very easily, and the blend was just great. I’ve been rehearsing for weeks with all kinds of musical forms, but none of them have been this simple: two voices and a blend.”
After the Paramount engagement the Simon tour will go to Toronto, Japan and Singapore. Then Simon will be back at work writing a musical with Nobel Prizewinning poet Derek Walcott. To lift a song title and a lyric, the songwriter has farther to fly. The open palm of desire wants everything/It wants everything. “All you can be is of your time,” says Simon. He has been “of his time” for 30 years now. We have reason to believe that he will be received in Graceland.
FOR A WHILE IT LOOKED like “The Concert Event of a Lifetime” would turn into a celebration of the art of Art Garfunkel. Never mind that the evening at the Paramount in New York (with 20 concerts to follow) was designed to honor Garfunkel’s former partner, Paul Simon. When the two men came onstage last Friday night, Simon stepped back, allowing Garfunkel to bask in an ovation. After the pair made it through a tentative version of “The Boxer” and stronger stabs at “America” and “Homeward Bound,” Garfunkel slyly pointed toward Simon, to deflect the applause toward his upstaged host. just whose lifetime was this, anyway?
But Simon, the pop polyglot, has been so successful in his multimusical lives that he can afford to share the wealth. Garfunkel left after 40 minutes he came back for an encore but Simon still didn’t let it become a one-man show. Phoebe Snow, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and two dozen other musicians set the stage for, and occasionally hogged it from, Simon’s rousing performance. Comedian Steve Martin made a hilarious cameo, interrupting “Feelin’ Groovy” to light a (presumably phony) joint, explaining he always “gets stoned” when he hears the song. Other highlights: an off-tempo, horn-stuffed “She Moves On” and a bongo-tinged “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” But the biggest thrills came where you’d expect from Tom & Jerry (as the duo called themselves in high school) playing cat and mouse up the vocal scale. Simon and Garfunkel’s voices may not always mesh as miraculously as they once did. Yet after one verse of “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme,” it’s easy to see why we’re still crazy about them, after all these years.
title: “Homeward Bound” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Dolores Dearman”
title: “Homeward Bound” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-27” author: “Jean Robinson”
But none of that matters to the hundreds of Union and Confederate re-enactors encamped in Florida, polishing their brass buttons for a service Saturday that’s been nearly a century and a half in the making.
With all the ceremonial trappings of a 19th-century military funeral, Lt. Edward Johnston, the last known Confederate soldier buried in New England, will be honored at a Florida gravesite, which has been waiting since the Civil War ended. Those involved with bringing the remains of the Navy man home say the event has meaning beyond Johnston and beyond Civil War-era soldiers. “This is about veterans and the efforts we take to remember them,” says Bob Hall of Massachusetts Veterans Services, who helped plan the homecoming.
Buried and moved around New England three different times after his death, Johnston’s remains were unclaimed by his Florida family, who never received word of his death. By the time relatives tracked down his gravesite outside Boston, the location seemed permanent and the thought of bringing him south was barely considered, according Ben Korbly, Johnston’s great-great-grandson.
With the Massachusetts cemetery recently scheduled to close, veterans groups on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line seized the moment to bring Johnston home. On Saturday they’ll do so in rare fashion. An estimated 1,500 Civil War re-enactors camped near the oak-lined Bosque Bello cemetery in Fernandina Beach, Fla., 35 miles north of Jacksonville, will harness cannon and cavalry in a final tribute to Johnston. To culminate his 1,500 mile journey south, Johnston’s casket will be placed on a replica Civil War ship, sailed up the Amelia River near his home and then taken by honor guard and horse-drawn procession to the Bosque Bello cemetery. “This is unlike any memorial or reenactment that has ever been held,” says Dana Chapman, the event’s mistress of ceremonies.
The elaborate formality of the event may not seem to fit with the rather uncelebrated sailor who’ll be honored tomorrow. Still, there’s something about the Irish-born Johnston and his 139-year journey from Civil War battle to Union prison to a tree-shaded gravesite in northern Florida–something that makes historians shake their heads and Civil War enthusiasts bat tears from their eyes.
“I’m absolutely in the clouds over this,” Chapman says. “This is a service for a sailor, but also a celebration of American heritage.”
Even if he hadn’t become the subject of such concern in death, Edward Johnston was, by all accounts, memorable in life. So memorable in fact that when he succumbed to pneumonia in October 1863, his imprisoned shipmates banded together with their Union captors to raise $75 to pay a Boston stone-cutter to carve a 1,000-pound granite slab into a grave marker for the well-loved seaman. Chapman says it’s the only known instance in which prison guards and captives from either side of the war purchased such a sendoff–and for her, the five-inch-thick marker proves just how unique Johnston must have been.
Still, news of Johnston’s death never reached his family in Florida–probably because naval records said he was from Georgia. His wife never remarried and when she died the empty plot at the foot of her grave was left empty for a husband she hadn’t seen in more than 50 years.
While his family lived on in confusion over what happened to Johnston, the circumstances that planted the 35-year-old father of five on a Confederate ship and then in a Union prison were never in dispute. Johnston, a sea-loving sailor by trade, left his coastal Fernandina Beach in 1861 to join the Confederate Navy in Georgia. He was stationed aboard the CSS Atlanta as the ship’s assistant engineer; third in command when the ironclad steamer failed in its attempt to break a Union blockade and join the Rebel fleet in the waters off Georgia. The ill-fated mission ended when Johnston and his crew were run aground and promptly captured in June 1863. Four months and two Union prisons later, Johnston died of pneumonia while imprisoned in an island fort in Boston Harbor.
Tomorrow, next to the graves of his wife and children and 139 years late, he’ll get the memorial he never received. As for Hall, who’ll dress in full Confederate regalia, the ceremony for the unheralded sailor will be bursting with meaning. “We were charged with bringing that boy home and that’s what we’ve done,” Hall says. “It just took a little while.”
