Robert Downes

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thoughts: More cultural stuff? Not so fast...
Robert Downes 11/9/09

The big entertainment news in Traverse City this month involves the possibility of East Lansing’s Wharton Center of Performing Arts taking over the management of our City Opera House.
Drawing on the creative power and resources of Michigan State University, the Wharton Center earns rave reviews from theater-goers for bringing Broadway
musicals such as Wicked to East Lansing, along with dozens of musical acts and comedians each year.
It sounds like a slam-dunk good idea when you look at their roster of upcoming performances by the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Jeff
Foxworthy, Wilco and The Lion King. Negotiations are underway to see what Wharton can do for the City Opera House, with a proposal to be presented to the TC City Commission later this month.
Still, the philistine in me says we should think this over, lest we “toss the baby with the bathwater.”

Features Robert Downes Journey to Iraq
Average citizen Bill Murphy reached out to victims of the war

By Robert Downes • Photos by Bill Murphy 11/9/09

Bill Murphy is not a soldier, a missionary or a diplomat; he is, in fact, a specialist in decorative painting who lives in a condo just west of Traverse City. But when he was offered a chance to lend a hand in one of the most devastated regions of Iraq as an ordinary citizen, he leapt at the opportunity.
Last spring, Bill joined members of a relief group called Iraqi Health Now to help transport a 40-foot container of medical supplies and water filters to Basra, a city in the southern part of Iraq that has been ruined by years of warfare.
He accompanied Haider Alsaedy, a native Iraqi who now lives in Kalamazoo. Back in the 1990s, Haider had spent eight years in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, fleeing the wrath of dictator Saddam Hussein. Sixteen years after leaving his home town, Haider returned to find the infrastructure of Basra destroyed, with the streets full of garbage and sewage. The marshes around town had been drained and the local hospitals lacked the most basic supplies -- patients were even sharing syringes. There was little electricity and no clean water anywhere in the region.

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Robert Downes 11/2/09
Untying the Knots of Injustice
We get a lot of requests to investigate stories of the “she said, he said” variety here at the Express. Often, these are a result of a perceived failure of the local courts and the feeling that justice has been denied.
Custody battles, disputes with builders, issues over getting fired, anger over court decisions and claims of harassment by the cops... these are typical of the requests we receive at the Express on a weekly basis. Many requests involve knotty issues that could take days or weeks to unravel, if ever.
Sometimes, people feel they’ve gotten the runaround by the law, or they’ve taken their problem along with an eight-page summary all the way to Michigan’s attorney general, where it is most likely sitting in a file cabinet or a waste basket.
Some people with grievances have taken no legal action at all, but are “planning” to sue a shady builder or the boss who fired them unfairly. These callers often feel that a newspaper article listing all of the injustices against them will somehow fix the problem, or at least offer the satisfaction of sticking it to the person who did them wrong.

Features Robert Downes She’s Biking to Build
Kristine Perria will cycle across the country for Habitat for Humanity

By Robert Downes 11/2/09

Pedaling across the nation to raise funds for affordable housing is the goal of Kristine Perria, a student at the University of Michigan who is combining her love of cycling with an interest in social justice.
“On June 18t I will be setting off from Boston on a cross-country bike trip

Music Robert Downes Barbara Faith Jordan Brings out her Best
By Robert Downes 10/26/09

Barbara Faith Jordan has been a bright light on the Northern Michigan acoustic music scene for nearly a decade, performing thoughtful songs with a message at coffeehouses, folk festivals and concert venues throughout the region.
Next week, friends and fans will hear the latest from Barbara when she releases her new CD, Passages at the City Opera House in Traverse City at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1. Here, Barbara talks about her new CD and musical journey:

NE: Is this your first CD?
Faith Jordan: No, I put my first CD out in 1997. It’s no longer available, but was called “Harvest” and was a collection of original inspirational music.

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Robert Downes 10/26/09
Charter Puts Porn Ahead of Citizenship
“Spank that Booty: Sultry ladies with a lot of junk in their trunk.” That was one show airing on Charter Communications‘ “Juicy” Channel 895 last week. Or you could watch Extreme Euro Kink 3 - “Getting freaky with a frisky foreign fox.”
Fair enough, there’s a demand for that kind of programming and who doesn’t like a “frisky foreign fox”?
But many civic-minded citizens in Traverse City are outraged over Charter’s plan to dump four long-standing public access channels into the digital 990s this December. As it happens, this is just on the other side of Charter‘s porn offerings.
Those public access channels include Up North 2, NMC 13, TCAPS 98, and the local government meetings on Government 99.
These channels are indispensable for people who can‘t make it to government meetings at the Traverse City Commission or the board meetings of Elmwood, Garfield and East Bay townships. They also provide a TV avenue for non-commercial free speech in our community, such as the broadcast of lectures, athletic events and concerts. I myself was honored to appear on Up North 2 recently in a forum on the future of newspapers. Public access “the people‘s“ small slice of the TV media pie.

Music Robert Downes the thump of BUMP

Detroit rockers get a bounce from new CD & film

By Robert Downes 10/19/09

Check out Bump’s stage set-up and you’ll have to agree with their claim of being one of the hardest-working bands in America. In addition to a touring schedule that has covered 600 shows in 35 states, Bump packs enough electronic gear onstage to give a Radio Shack manager the giggles, with a spaghetti tangle of wires and sequencers augmenting their guitar-driven sound.
The current lineup includes Yorg on keys and guitar, Chris Sterr on guitar, Clint Carpenter on drums and sequencing and Bryce Carroll-Coe on bass. All four join in the vocals and the band prides itself on its harmonies, “progressive tones” and art-rock approach.
With a new CD and the thrill of performing in a new film, the band rolls into Northern Michigan this week with a show at the Loading Dock in TC this Friday, Oct. 23. Here’s the latest on the band:

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thoughts: Motor City Shrink Wrap
Robert Downes 10/19/09

Motor City Shrink Wrap
These days, Detroit is the Incredible Shrinking City.
Back in the 1930s, when my grandmother lived there, Detroit was known as the “City of Trees” for its towering elms and forested boulevards. Although those trees were killed off in the ’60s and ’70s by Dutch elm disease, new fields and forests are taking root amid the ruin of the city.
Writing in a recent issue of Newsweek, Bill McGraw of the Detroit Free Press reported that Detroit has lost half its population since the 1950s. And, although its city limits encompass 138 square miles, “experts estimate that about 40 square miles are empty.”
That trend is increasing.

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Robert Downes 10/12/09
Death of a Gym

When a gym fails, it can be like the death of an old friend to its members. Such is the case at the Fitness Center, which closed its doors last week after 23 years on 8th Street in Traverse City.
Gyms have grown in importance over the past generation. They’re a place to socialize and unwind; a place to break up the black ice of stress in your head and get motivated to take on the challenges of the next day. Gyms are about much more than getting in shape -- they’re about getting your life together and staying sane in what sometimes seems to be a crazy world.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thoughts: What‘s Wrong With Us?
Robert Downes 10/5/09
We just passed the first anniversary of the collapse of the stock market and the wreck of the world economy. To refresh your memory, a year ago a gang of suicidal financial terrorists flew a jet full of empty promises into the Twin Towers of home ownership and retirement savings on Wall Street. Result? Millions of Americans lost their homes and their 401k savings.
September 15, 2008 is generally held to be the day everything went kerblooey with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers -- the largest in U.S. history.
Lehman Brothers was a global financial firm that was heavily invested in subprime (“dubious“) mortgages. Unable to pass this junk on to its fleeing investors, or to secure a bailout from the U.S. government, the bankruptcy of Lehman kicked off a global meltdown in the economy.

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Robert Downes 9/28/09

Our Bicycle Revolution

The sun is setting on the cycling season here in Northern Michigan and another year of advancing the most eco-friendly form of transportation on the planet. Most of us have swallowed our last bug, cussed out our last flat, and (finally) tossed those over-ripe bike shorts in the wash.
Some, such as author Jeff Mapes claim that we’re on the brink of a “Pedaling Revolution” in America (the title of his new book), in which cyclists are changing the landscape of cities across the country. That’s certainly true in Northern Michigan and other parts of the state. Even Detroit is establishing a network of bike paths and greenways to fill in urban areas that have been vacated by its dwindling population.
David Byrne, the former frontman of the Talking Heads, whose own book “The Bicycle Diaries” hit the shelves this month, stated in a recent article that a bicycle has been his primary form of transportation around New York City for the past 30 years.

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Robert Downes 9/21/09
Tough Choices for Michigan

We’re very lucky here in Michigan that we still have something of a social safety net to care for the poor and people who are down on their luck. About 450,000 jobless residents are riding out the recession on
unemployment insurance at present, with tens of thousands of others getting by on
disability payments.
By contrast, I recall giving a coin to a leper sitting on a street corner in one of the most prosperous cities in India. The old man didn’t have any fingers on either hand -- just white stubs at the end of his palms -- and he sat all day long on the filthy pavement, begging in the 95-degree sun as thousands brushed past.

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Robert Downes 9/14/09
The Death of ‘Hip‘ (Again)
What’s the hippest show on TV these days?
If you believe the critics, along with millions of viewers, four Golden Globe awards and six Emmys, it’s Mad Men, a drama about the stressed-out, hard-drinkin’, skirt-chasin’, underpaid and overworked ad executives of Madison Avenue.
Cue up the Perry Como records.
Mad Men takes place back in the early ‘60s and reinvents the men in the gray flannel suits as brimming with snappy patter, Old Fashioneds, and a devil-may-care attitude about sleeping with their secretaries. You know, like really “hip.”
The funny thing here is that the “Mad Men” are just the sort of worker drones the beatniks and bohemians rebelled against when they came up with the alternative “hipster” lifestyle in the 1950s.
As every English Lit major knows, to be “hip” was to live outside of the mainstream, with Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg making it up as they went along; hitchhiking down the highways of America in the late-’40s and 1950s, and pushing on to Mexico, Morocco and India. The Beats borrowed ideas from other, more exotic cultures, not to mention the liberal use of marijuana and hallucinogens such as peyote and ayahuasca.
The late author Norman Mailer wrote a famous essay in 1957 called “The White Negro” on what it meant to be hip: basically, you had to slip into the loose loafers of a black jazz musician, fire up a dooby and swing, man, swing...
So the cynics who invented “hip” would surely scoff at Mad Men as being the epitome of hip today. But then, those long-gone beatniks never would have dreamed that the zenith of hipsters these days -- Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake -- would have been the manufactured products of the Mickey Mouse Club (!).

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The inevitability of health care reform
Robert Downes 9/7/09


If you were at a dinner party and the conversation turned to health care reform, could you explain the single-payer plan used by many countries around the world?
This is just a blind guess, but one can only imagine that the vast majority of Americans don’t have a clue. All they know is that “single-payer” has something to do with Canadian health care and it sounds like a
bureaucratic buzz word, so it must be a shady proposition.
Unfortunately, the Obama Administration hasn’t done a very good job of offering a simple explanation of health care alternatives such as the so-called “public option,” much less a single-payer plan. Instead, much of the debate has been ceded to those who are intent on spreading disinformation.

Music Robert Downes Under his Thumb

Tim Callaghan reinvents
the way music & video
are delivered 8/31/09

By Robert Downes

As the frontman for the bands Fairchild and ’74 Marauder, Tim Callaghan is one of the most exciting rock musicians in Northern Michigan, with years of packing full houses at local nightclubs to prove it.
But Callaghan is also something of an inventor. His new thumb drive (TD) goes beyond the CD and DVD to deliver music and video in a format that has already caught the attention of major players on the music scene as well as the big box merchandiser, Best Buy.
Callaghan has just signed an exclusive distribution deal with Best Buy, with his new thumb drive and album to be on the shelves this month. Here’s what’s up with that: