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projo: Today in history: Robbers grab $2 million in Providence http://bit.ly/dCE3V9

North Providence welcomes new councilors.

North Providence welcomes new councilors.

(Part nine of the Ten Names to Shake Up Rhode Island series).

 

The conventional wisdom in Democratic Party circles is, generally speaking, the differences between thecandidates running for Congress in the First Congressional district are irrelevant for all practical purposes.  Once the winner gets down to Washington, DC they are going to be one of 435 Congressmen and are simple going to toe the Party line; and given our record as a liberal stalwart we, (the royal WE) in the progressive movement are not likely to be disappointed by the voted record of any of the people we send down there.

 

WE are not buying it.

 

The conventional wisdom may in fact be true and the voting record may well match up to the progressive ideals that we advocate for here on the digitized columns of RIFUTURE but politics should be about much more than votes taken and votes recorded. It should be about advocacy and leadership.  For us, there is only one candidate in the race who has demonstrated time and again who will not just be a steady vote, but an advocate for the people of Rhode Island that we can all be proud of:

 

RIFUTURE endorses David Segal for Congress.

 

This was, in fact, a difficult decision.  Segal is not without his flaws and is not immune to criticism.  However, his body of work as a legislative leader has earned him a promotion to Congress. This short video from his time as a City Councilman in Providence shows his ability to bring communities together:

 

 

 

And as we showed here on RIFTURE back in May, here is David “showing us what Democracy looks like”

 

[video:http://vimeo.com/11715912]

 

For all these reasons, RIFUTURE endorses David Segal for Congress in the First Congressional District.

Watch video

Newly elected council members take oath of office in North Providence

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projo: Red Sox crushed by Rays, 14-5 http://bit.ly/c2xCCA

Now that its official, Congressional Candidate David Cicilline's ad was made in Washington D.C., one local filmmaker is calling on Cicilline to pull his "Made In Rhode Island" ad.  This comes after his Jobs Now ad was called on to be pulled, after being proven to be another distortion of the facts.

"I feel like work that should be going to us is being outsourced," I stated to myself.  "Its just another example of this guy talking out both sides of his mouth.  When Hollywood makes a movie in another location, the film studio pays California taxes.  The cast and crew pay taxes where they live.  Any local unpaid extras don't help anybody's economy anywhere."

As a winner of several small time awards, I'm not the most high profile filmmaker in Rhode Island.  But if Cicilline were to give me $75,000 (what some unnamed sources say the ads cost to create) I could have spread that out amongst several make up artists, hair stylists, lighting grips, sound techs, and directors of photography.  That is about four months pay for a 10 person crew. 

It is no wonder so many people in Mayor Cicilline's city are unemployed or underemployed.  We can't even get loyalty out of our CEO.  He would prefer to hire PR people who learned their trade through the World Bank and Lehman Brothers... forces of freedom and happiness that they have proven to be.

Norse code
Why would Per Petterson — the bestselling Scandinavian writer whose books don't feature an invincible crimefighting heroine — curse the river of time when he is so adept at navigating it?

TIME BENDER: Petterson’s chronology can become unwieldy, but his masterful prose keeps the story afloat.

Why would Per Petterson — the bestselling Scandinavian writer whose books don't feature an invincible crimefighting heroine — curse the river of time when he is so adept at navigating it? Dip into the stream of consciousness in almost any of the brooding Norwegian's novels and past and present will overlap and dissolve and reconfigure in patterns with little regard for chronological narrative.

I Curse the River of Time| by Per Petterson | Translated by Charlotte Barslund, with the author | Graywolf Press | 246 pages | $23 In this, his newest novel, which is part of an ongoing, semi-autobiographical saga spun out in his previous works, the river runs on many levels, eddies of past experience that flow simultaneously in the mind of Arvid, the sad-sack first-person narrator. It's kind of like the film Inception, except that the medium is memory and not dreams, the architecture is stable if a bit banal, and there are no shootouts.

Arvid, a lapsed Communist (the title, it turns out, is a quote from a poem by Mao Zedong — who knew the crotchety old mass murderer had a soft spot for verse?), begins his tale by announcing, "All this happened quite a few years ago." He's referring in part to events in 1989, when, lamenting his impending divorce and the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, he takes a ferry from Oslo to northern Denmark to visit his cancer-stricken mother, whom we saw as a feisty teenager in Petterson's 1996 novel To Siberia. While engaged in this sentimental journey, Arvid reflects on his youth in the '70s, when he enraged his mother by quitting school, joining the party, and taking a job at a factory. During this time, he also connects with a younger fellow traveler, a beautiful unnamed girl who appears to be the love of his life — and the woman he is about to divorce in 1989.

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Interesting night at the WBNA Candidates Forum tonight.  Amongst the state legislature races, nearly all the crowd questions were directed to the District 9 race between incumbent Anastasia Williams and newcomer Wynnel Wilson.  Anastasia faced two pointed questions regarding her role working for Mayor Cicilline's administration on the First Source hiring ordinance.

Half a million dollars and 10 years later, Rep. Anastasia Williams (D-9 Providence) claims,

"As the Coordinator of First Source, the reason I accepted the offer of taking on that position is because I felt that I could ensure the employment of many individuals on the STATE LEVEL as a state representative because many of those civil services jobs come to me.  And as working for the city, I had the option of utilizing both those positions making sure of employment.  Unfortunately, I AM NOT THE ENFORCER of First Source.  I consider myself window dressing to many of your accusations as far as First Source is concerned.  Thom Deller and Gary Bliss are the ones who in fact make the decisions as to whether who should get what.  As far as the Renaissance Hotel, I have to give credit where credit is due.  I must always tell the truth.  They have been one of our biggest employers."

Williams claims to be a leader in the city of Providence, and looking out for her district's 13,000 residents with her other $14,000 job as State Rep.  In 10 years as Coordinator, First Source has hired in the neighborhood of 500 jobs.  This is about one per week.  Such statistics may be good for a job placement coordinator at a low budget non-profit, but not exactly worthy of the only mechanism to hold corporations accountable for their tax breaks.

A lawsuit created Rep. Williams' job with the City, as Mayor Cicilline opposed implementation and even tried to appeal the ruling.  Perhaps a leader in the community who sees mismanagement by Cicilline's appointees Deller and Bliss would do something about it.  Especially anyone who wishes to honor the hard work of community activists and city councilors and a volunteer lawyer who got over that first hurdle.   Naturally, it is understandable to not say anything, to hold onto one's job.  Yet we see regular people every day step up and try to correct wrongs in their workforce, sometimes to great opposition and repercussions.  Anastasia claims to be a leader, but is "go along to get along" a leadership quality?

Later in the evening I called her out on the Seat Belt issue, where last session she took the odd position of supporting the police pulling us over whenever they see us unbuckled (odd for an urban legislator, but there were millions of federal dollars at stake).  She dodged the Racial Profiling issue by talking about safety, and supporting the state forcing us to pay money if we don't fasten our seatbelts.  

When she accused constituents (meaning me) of not reaching out to contact her, the whole crowd caught my miming of calling and emailing.  Like a girl who gives me her number... after three unreturned phone calls and a handful or unresponded to emails, I gotta just let her go!

And she never did answer the question:  How do you stand up to a company, although willing to take our money, is not willing to live up to their end of the bargain?

Such dodginess cannot be rewarded with another term.  Vote Wynnel Wilson.

Watch video

I don’t know what this is but I intend to find out. Pictures from the Hay: Celebrating the John Hay Library at 100 — the new exhibit at the David Winton Bell Gallery — is a celebration of the Hay Library Centennial.

Pictures from the Hay is organized around subject areas that reflect some of the many strengths of the collection, such as the history of sciences, the military, and book arts. Among the works related to Abraham Lincoln are the graphic novel, Time Beavers, and Abraham Africanus I, a rare political pamphlet from 1864 that satirically depicts Abraham Lincoln as an African American, making a pact with the Devil to become the monarchical ruler of the United States.

Time Beavers? On view in the main gallery are 100 rare visual materials from the library. In the lobby is a site-specific installation by Alison Owen.

Through October 31, Bell Gallery, 64 College Street, 863.2932

This September, Edward Albee’s masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? comes to Perishable Theatre at 95 Empire Street. Originally produced in 1962, and now a staple of American literature, the most widely known of Albee’s plays examines everything from love, marriage, our illusions of happiness and the seemingly inevitable deterioration of the American dream.

Independently produced by Josh Short and director Jimmy Calitri, the cast features well-known local actors Jim O’Brien and Rae Mancini in the roles of the warring couple George and Martha (made famous in the Oscar winning 1962 movie of the same name by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor), with Josh Short and Bonnie Griffin as upstart Professor Nick and his naïve wife, Honey.

Virginia Woolf garnered an impressive collection of awards, including the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Foreign Press Association Award, two Antoinette Perry (”Tony”) Awards, the Variety Drama Critics’ Poll Award, and the Evening Standard Award. Through September 12th, Thursday thru Sunday at 7pm, Sundays at 2pm. $20/general, $15/student/seniors, Sunday Matinees are Pay-What-You-Can.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire Street, tickets available at the door. For reservations or more info, email woolfatperishable@gmail.com.

Play Synopsis

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee’s first full-length play and his first to appear on Broadway, is considered by many to be his greatest dramatic achievement, as well as a central work in the contemporary American theatre. The play focuses on an embittered academic couple who gradually draw a younger couple, freshly arrived from the Midwest, into their vicious games of marital love-hatred.

*This production is using the space at 95 Empire, home of Perishable Theatre, through the Perishable Enriches Artists (PEA) program, offering below-market rehearsal and performance space to new, emerging, and established artists. Our spaces include a dance studio, classroom and black-box theatre space. More information about space at www.perishable.org/rental.htm . Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is not a Perishable production.

Battle royal
It all began, as most of our ideas do, with a silly argument at the Phoenix office.

Dystopia now
Onionskin jeans are transparent, cost a fortune, and send your fuckability rating off the charts.

Onionskin jeans are transparent, cost a fortune, and send your fuckability rating off the charts. They are but one of the creepy features of the dystopia Gary Shteyngart depicts in Super Sad True Love Story (Random House), the Leningrad-born American author's third novel and first New York Times bestseller. I called a tuckered Shteyngart at home in New York after he'd toured the West Coast.

I heard you onFresh Air. You sounded very worried.
You can't be as funny as on other shows.

You've been doing a lot of radio stuff lately.
I'm an NPR fixture now. I have to.

This novel has a moral urgency that's absent from your other work. It felt so much more pressing.
It's about America. I think people here can perceive it as being much closer to home. The first two novels are novels of identity. This one goes beyond that — it takes on our society as a whole.

When and how did you become interested in the pornographication of American culture?
Living in New York and walking around. There's a kind of desperate sexuality that I feel is now part of our lives. I think there's nothing wrong with pornography as such, but when it becomes one of the prevalent modes of communication, we have some problems.

Is there a correlative of onionskin jeans in real life?
I can't wait for those to come out. It's one of the few things [in the novel] I actually hope will come true.

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Just when you think you're in, Mafia II pushes you back out
Thanks to Goodfellas , The Sopranos , and, oh yeah, The Godfather , the life of a wiseguy has been pretty well deromanticized in popular culture. Credit Mafia II , then, with the difficult task of deconstructing the genre even farther.

 

Thanks to Goodfellas, The Sopranos, and, oh yeah, The Godfather, the life of a wiseguy has been pretty well deromanticized in popular culture. Credit Mafia II, then, with the difficult task of deconstructing the genre even farther. Not only is being a low-level Mafia hood not all glitz and glamour, in this game, it's got all the drudgery of your usual nine-to-five, without the health insurance.

Mafia II | for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC | Rated M for Mature | Developed by 2K Czech | Published by 2K Games The hardscrabble life of the protagonists — a life punctuated only rarely by victorious montages of money, cars, and women — makes Mafia II anything but a power fantasy. In the first chapter, the main character, Vito Scaletta, struggles through a firefight in WW2 Sicily before being bailed out by a local don. Later, Vito will spend time in prison, and that leads to a playable scene in which he fights off rapists in the shower room. None of this is played for laughs. The matter-of-fact way in which the game tells a reasonably mature story is one of its strengths.

Another strength is the deliberate pace. Although the big-picture gameplay is standard open-world fare that allows you to walk and drive through a massive, bustling city based on New York, transgressions against everyday laws are punished severely. The police will come after you just for breaking the speed limit. For players accustomed to the mayhem of Grand Theft Auto, this will take some getting used to, but it's a brave choice that helps to ground you in the fiction. My favorite moment came when I was driving across town with a machine gun in the trunk and a police cruiser pulled out of a side street in front of me. For several minutes, I followed at a respectful distance, afraid to pass him.

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projo: Red Sox recall Bowden http://bit.ly/diqxPH

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