Saturday, September 27, 2014

There's Only One New York

We opted to slip away to New York City for my birthday and it's been a wonderful day. Started out at the New-York Historical Society seeing the sampling of objects from Sam Roberts' A History of New York in 101 Objects, which was both compelling and enjoyable, even if they should have done all 101 of them. Then we took in The Two Faces of January, a new film based on a Patricia Highsmith novel hitherto not known to me and here I thought I'd read all of her deliciously weird tales. Viggo Mortenson and Kirsten Dunst were the leads along with Oscar Craig and the locations--all the real ones--in Athens, the Greek islands, and Turkey were well utilized too.  These are mostly antiheros of the Tom Ripley ilk and the picture holds your attention.

High point came with The Country House, a Donald Margolis play put on by Manhattan Theater Club and previewing on Broadway before it opens next week.  Margolis has lots of great lines, much like his Dinner With Friends some years ago. Blythe Danner leads a fine cast of six. The play has much fun with throwaway lines enjoyed by anyone who recalls a tad of theatrical history and the underlying plot holds up through three acts and one intermission. A first for me was four members of the cast coming out on stage after the show to participate in a feedback session run by an assistant director. 

We grabbed dinner at Eataly, a sprawling combination of dining spots, grocery store, and bookstore at 23rd and Fifth, that has you choose to dine in a dining area devoted to fish, vegetables, meat, pasta, or pizza. The idea is good and the place is packed although you can get seated if you arrive early. The fish, which we chose, was good but not great, even if cooked to order.

Then on to the Village where I again returned to hope for a home run from Neil LaBute, who, alas, has come up short ever since reasons to be pretty a few years back, which sadly just missed taking a Tony during its run at the Lyceum. This outing is entitled The Money Shot, about two fading Hollywood stars and their mates as they embark on a foray to get back in the hit column and never really get to discussing whether they will do an all-out sex scene. LaBute seems to have lost his direction because despite a few decent lines, the characters were rarely believable. 

Couldn't quite make it to the Museum of Modern Art for a show of posters and prints by Toulouse-Lautrec, always an enticement for me.  Then I happily recalled that I doubtless saw the same show a while back when it was at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It's likely been travelling the country ever since then.

Had we had a few more seconds to stop for breath, might have walked in Central Park when we left the Historical Society, but we made up for that by walking from 23rd and Fifth--well, actually we started at 28th & Broadway but that's another story--to the Lucille Lortel on Christopher Street. One thing I noticed was that New York still has plenty of non-Starbucks coffee joints and their coffee is just about as good which means it's all right.

It was just a gorgeous day to be in Manhattan and I think we made more than the most of it.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Last Prof Retires

It made me realize how much time has gone by since school days when the last professor I had in law school retired quietly this summer. Next year I might make it to my 45th law school reunion--there are a few of my old friends who now are making an effort to turn up at these occasions--but it will be different knowing that no one on the faculty in my day is still teaching.

Lloyd Weinreb, as with so many of his colleagues, became nationally known--at least in the law school world--as a master of teaching and writing in the field of criminal law and procedure, both of which courses, one required, the other not, I took when a student.  He'd only been teaching for a couple of years then but his casebooks in both courses were already written and in use--in loose-leaf form.  By the time I graduated they were in print and probably used all over the country.

Despite the usual law professor wunderkind background--law review, Supreme Court clerkship, and in his case, practical experience consisting of a couple of years in the U.S. Attorney's office for D.C. and, more exotically, as a staff lawyer on the Warren Commission--he seemed to lack the pretentiousness of so many of the law school faculty.  It was clear from the first day that he actually enjoyed teaching criminal law and procedure.  

He challenged everyone's thinking the way good law school professors should.  When someone was unable to come up with a solid reason for prosecuting a putative defendant, he would push them to supply a good basis or else admit that the prosecution rested on the mere assertion: "because he's a bad man."  He would press the class to define accepted terms meaningfully by re-stating the term--reckless endangerment, for example--and then appending "whatever that is."

While he imparted some of the aspects of criminal practice he learned as a line prosecutor, he drew more shrewdly on the traditional limited-span immersion in the world of practice most law professors have. He would refer to particular instances of decision-making that confronted him or to the decisions every prosecutor, including him, had to make every day as to which cases to proceed with and which to resolve summarily by plea agreement.

It was heartening to read that he was even more of a Renaissance man that most of the law professors seemed to be then and now. He apparently spends his mornings learning ancient Greek and has both taught courses outside his central area of criminal law, such as copyright, with the aim of expanding his horizons, and written some major work on legal theory; no, I haven't read it but I'm more likely to look at something like that because he wrote it, and he probably wrote it just because it seemed like something interesting and worthwhile. 

He's really the only law professor whom I still had plenty of regard for after taking two courses with him. Since he's not that old, I do hope he enjoys many more years of making fine use of his amazing and wide open mind.

Monday, September 1, 2014

The Real Labor Day

I've come to the only sensible conclusion about how Labor Day should be observed: anyone who casually rails against unions, works for an anti-union organization, or supports elected officials who oppose a fair minimum wage and other benefits provided by just about every other country in the world, including some not-so-free ones, should go to work on Labor Day and stay there until they've put in a full eight hours, right, with the lunch hour not counting.

A perfect example of anti-labor vitriol can be found in the endless disputes about what kind of schools we need. Teachers unions are blamed for the idiotic administration by incompetent and politically-wired local school boards or state boards. Charter schools as a whole have not shown themselves to be any more effective at educating children than public schools, but the great and the not-so-good looking to make some quick bucks urge us to expand them without any proof of real success. They seem to be good only at turning over their complement of teachers almost annually instead of developing skilled, experienced teachers.

All the propaganda put out by corporate America has had an impact: people really feel that the market system is how to run anything. In many places, we once had excellent public schools. I went to them. Then when white people fled the inner city and the inner suburbs, the administrators stopped paying attention to the schools. Some of education's problems were brought upon it by reliance on trying to implement one faddish scheme after another with no time allowed for evaluation and assessment.

But the public as a whole has been conditioned to accept the outrageous pay of CEOs--who take it because they can,whether they are successful or not. We of course have a Congress, both parties, totally in thrall to major donors, who want tax breaks so companies can do better by moving overseas. And despite the excellent analysis of Paul Krugman and a few others, the conventional wisdom purveyers want our policymakers to focus more on inflation than employment. All the  deficit-cutting hawks were proven wrong but they still get treated more than respectfully.

People wonder why the middle class has been hit so hard and that the only people who benefit in our society are the rich. They should consider every time they've disparaged the idea of a union and start thinking about how none of the Wall Street scoundrels who brought us economic disaster have gone to jail, or even paid any significant price for their crimes against our society.