Happy Bruce Day

It's a happy day when a new Bruce Springsteen record comes out. There were a few other hard-core dorks at Tower Records with me this morning at 9 AM. It's a beautiful tradition, rushing out to buy a new release from a favorite artist - something that is increasingly rare, I have to admit. But getting whipped into a frenzy for Bruce is always worth it. I am looking forward to coming home tonight, curling up with Mike and the cat, and giving it a good close listen.

While the promotional whirl-wind hasn't been quite as frenzied as it was for "The Rising," we have still gotten a pretty decent sneak peek at the material. More thoughts will follow once I've given it a few good listens.

Here are some thoughts from the good folks at The Washington Post.

NPR has some goodies, too.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame...

...just please don't make me watch what is happening on the field!! Mike and I are something like a combined 0-12 watching our beloved, beleaguered Phillies in the confines of their beautiful new ballpark. Last night, our first game of the season, we arrived at the park early and enjoyed a surprisingly tasty dinner under the left field scoreboard before the game, at Harry the K's, and basked in the early-evening warmth. It was delightful. What can I say? We love baseball.

Let's just say that once the game started, things went horribly, terribly wrong. But at least I got to see my favorite Phillie, David Bell, hit a two-run shot. It's the little things on a night like that.

I can't write very poetically about baseball, and why I love it so much. I'll leave that to Roger Angell.

But if nothing else, last night's adventure gave rise to a hilarious cab-ride home from South Philly (we couldn't even wait for the subway, we were that desperate to escape.) Our driver asked if the game was over. We said, "No, but it was 16-4 Mets in the seventh inning, so we decided to leave."

"Sixteen to WHAT???," he shrieked in disbelief. "Sixteen to WHAT??"

Exactly.

That Pesky Minimum Wage, and Other Evils of the Welfare State

If you are worried about the dawn of the Scalia Court, be advised that there is an entirely different - and perhaps even scarier - prospect out there for the future of our judicial system. This school of thought has Clarence Thomas and his lower court clones leading the charge, hoping to dismantle the "welfare state" and turn back the clocks to a pre-New Deal, unregulated free-market utopia. Pucker up and get ready to kiss minimum wage laws, environmental regulations, and other immoral, government-sponsored nuisances good-bye.

In Dreams

Do you ever wake up from a dream feeling transformed, as if you've actually been through a real experience, and not just something in your imagination? I had a couple of doozies last night. They are related to my favorite band. Feel free to check them out. It was the first time in a long time that I felt like I had to put a dream down in writing.

Thanks, Glenn

There really is nothing like the power of live music. In the past six weeks, I have seen two of my favorite artists up close and personal, in wonderfully intimate settings. Last night was Glenn Tilbrook's turn. What you need to know is that Glenn is a consummate professional who plays his heart out each time he steps on stage, and probably has more fun than anyone else while doing it. Last night his voice was not in top shape, but he handled his vocal challenges with characteristic self-effacing good humor, and still put on a totally cookin' show. My husband, master of all things stringed, offered as how Glenn measures up as one of the best guitar players he has ever seen - even mentioning him in the same breath as Mark Knopfler and Stevie Ray Vaughn. "Glenn shreds!," he proclaimed with glee.

On top of all this, Glenn writes the most heart-felt, observant and downright funny songs about the minutiae of human relationships that you will ever hear.

Check him out if you get the chance. He delivers every time.

Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

Seems like the winds of hypocrisy have been gusting rather strongly through the US in recent days and weeks. A favorite theme in the Beckarantz household has been the so-called "culture of life" being promoted by those colorful right-wing nut-jobs (Hannity and Co., etc.) What exactly does that mean? And "whose life is it, anyway?," as Richard Dreyfuss once asked. There is a local columnist named John Grogan who had a nice column in the Inquirer last week, asking us to value the lives of the living, for a change. A potent and simple idea, and something that I think about a lot, given the way the lives of many of my clients are assumed to be disposable, or "worth less" than the lives of the more advantaged.

And just to make sure that there is no room for a whiff of hyopcrisy in HIS culture of life, leave it to good ol' Tricky Rick Santorum to start blabbing about his new, "more nuanced" view on the death penalty. (Think anyone will call HIM a flip-flopper?) Doesn't this smack a bit of opportunism, in the wake of the Pope's death? You could say that he is trying to swing toward the middle in preparation for the '06 race, but do people really vote on the death penalty, and is Santorum really capable of swinging in any direction other than to the right of Ghengis Khan? Pennsyl-tucky is a strange state. Will it all come down to "God, guns and gays?"

Frank Rich, who I loved as a theatre critic for the New York Times, has become a wonderful cultural commentator, and in yesterday's paper, he had an especially insightful piece on the real flip-side of this so-called Culture of Life. His observations send chills up my spine, but they are astute.

And coming soon to a 24-hour news channel near you: "Radical secularism!" It's apparently sweeping the nation, according to the radical right (as reported to me by my husband, who is always a few steps ahead of me on this stuff.) Prizes will be awarded for the five cleverest definitions of this extremely baffling concept.

Court and Spark

I know it seems like the Democrats have been busy chasing their tails while the GOP gears up to do away with filibusters and other democracy-protecting nuisances. But please take a minute and add your name to this petition, which John Kerry is planning to run in tomorrow's USA today - a publication we can only hope was chosen for its breadth of circulation, and not the depth of its coverage.

If you think the courts are scary now, wait and see what happens when the Republicans get their way.

Best Nephew EVER

So tasty

I can't believe I let a whole week go by without giving a proper shout-out to little Oscar, who really isn't so little any more. Here he is on our latest outing, Easter in NYC. He spent most of the weekend stuffing things in his mouth. Sarah and Wojtek have been very generously sharing their beautiful son with us, for which I am endlessly grateful. What else can I say? He's the best.

On Violence

A strange thing happened in court yesterday. The case of two children - ages 3 and 9 - came before the Judge. DHS, as often happens, was contacted by the police, who had been at a home that was in deplorable, uninhabitable condition. Mom and Dad are both active substance abusers - heroin, primarily. The home was littered with drug paraphernalia, there were shards of glass from a broken aquarium strewn about on the floor and bags of pills within easy reach of the children. The place was malodorous. A dying cat was also found in the home.

I hear stories like this all the time. Many of my clients come from homes in similar or worse condition. The children in this scenario were miraculously - at least at first blush - unharmed by their environment, and they were safely transferred to foster care. Time will tell what the long-term damage may be, but there were no injuries, broken bones or other signs of abuse.

I guess I am a little embarrassed to say that I had a distinct, passing reaction to the mention of the cat, when I heard the DHS worker report to the Judge on the condition of the home. I winced, I felt this weird pang. There is a certain numb neutrality that sometimes sets in when one works in child welfare. Our clients suffer so much, there is so much horror visited upon children, that you have to become numb sometimes.

So why did I react so strongly to the suffering of some anonymous cat? I can't really say. I have a cat, and I don't have a child of my own yet. I guess in some way it's a kind of violence and inhumanity that I can imagine a little bit more. I doubt that makes sense.

But it does seem related in some odd way to a conversation that Mike and I had while walking to work yesterday. We were talking about going to the movies this weekend. He mentioned that he wanted to see "Sin City." "NO WAY," I immediately proclaimed. I had read a review which mentioned the film's relentless violence - castration, decapitation, God knows what else.

"How about 'Gunner's Palace?,'" I suggested instead, referring to the documentary about US soldiers in Iraq.

Mike was perplexed. He couldn't understand why I would rather see a movie about REAL violence, rather than one in which the violence is make-believe, and highly stylized.

I can't quite say why one brand of violence disturbs me more than another, or why my reactions to different forms of violence are inconsistent. It does seem difficult though, to really grasp the cruelty of the world, the things that people do to each other, to children - and apparently to animals, too. Maybe if I am exposed to something that has the hard smack of "reality," I think it might help me understand a little bit more about how to make things different.

In any case, it has been raining torrentially all day long, and these are the kinds of things that come to mind.