Archive for August 29th, 2010

August 29th, 2010

Billerica Democrats hold Family Outing

by DickH

The Billerica Democratic Town Committee held its third annual family outing today at the Billerica Lodge of Elks. The well-attended event featured live music, a barbecue, and games for the kids. Many candidates were in attendance and were given the opportunity to speak including Secretary of State Bill Galvin and State Auditor Candidates Suzanne Bump, Guy Glodis and Mike Lake. Also in attendance were Sheriff Jim DiPaola, State Senator Ken Donnelly, State Representative candidate Kevin Conway, and Governor’s Council candidate Terrence Kennedy. John Walsh, the director of the state Democratic Committee was also present.

So congratulations to the Democrats of Billerica. They had a great turnout today and showed a lot of enthusiasm for the upcoming election.

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August 29th, 2010

“Lowell Spinners fun” by Nancye Tuttle

by DickH

Nancye Tuttle visited LeLacheur Park today and made the following observations on her website, Nancye’s World:

It was hot and muggy, but worth it this afternoon when I enjoyed the Lowell Spinners with my daughter and grandkids at LaLacheur Park.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s been awhile since I’ve been to the Spinners. My beats at the Sun took me to darkened theaters and art galleries, not ball parks.

But attending the game reminded me again what a treasure the team and park are to the city of Lowell – and all the towns around. We sat with a whole crew from Acton, who’d gotten tickets through the Recreation Department there and a raffle at the McCarthy-Towne School, where my daughter teaches.

The kids and adults had a blast. We enjoyed all the fun stuff a Spinners game involves – the Frisbee dog, doing the Chicken Dance and Macarena with the Canalagator, free T-shirts and balloon sculptures, lots of sinful treats (I admit I gorged on pink cotton candy, don’t tell my dentist) – and the tickets were only $5 each. Kids under 4 are free and no one minds when you bring in a stroller. The bathrooms are clean and neat, even at the end of the game. And everyone exudes friendliness and warmth, a perfect family outing.

The guys looked good, too, and won 7-6, so that was a plus.

Thanks to the Spinners and the entire organization, from Drew Webber on down, for a great experience for families throughout the Merrimack Valley.

The final game is Thursday and includes fireworks.

And now that I am semi-retired, I promise getting to games will be on my must-do list next year, no kidding.

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August 29th, 2010

Charlie Chan and Jack Kerouac

by PaulM

“Swedish actor Warner Oland poses as Charlie Chan in 1937″ (web photo courtesy of time.com)

No week goes by without a mention of Lowell’s Jack Kerouac in the major media outlets. Yesterday, the new Time magazine arrived in the mail. On page 65, there’s a review of scholar Yunte Huang’s book about Charlie Chan, the Chinese detective invented by author Earl D. Biggers whose adventures in Hawaii played out  in books, films, and comics. The reviewer raves about the book, titled “Charlie Chan,” hailing it as “irrepressively spirited and entertaining” and  calling the author “a virtuoso of curiosity.” Here’s the Lowell link. In the middle of the full-page review is a large quote in bold black type pulled out of the body of the review. It reads,

For Huang, Charlie Chan is ‘as American as Jack Kerouac’ precisely because of his theatrical implausibility and his mixed-up origins.

I think Kerouac would have enjoyed the comparison. He was a big fan of pop culture and mass media, from radio serials and comic strips to the sports pages of newspapers and Hollywood movies. It’s telling that Yunte Huang, an immigrant from China who teaches college English in Santa Barbara, Calif., chose Kerouac to provide American cultural context for the Charlie Chan character—Kerouac, whose parents were born in Quebec, but who has become a quintessential national icon because of his vast, exuberant literary explorations of the American land and spiritual interior and deep mining of his own mixed identity.

Read Pico Iyer’s review here, and consider buying TIME if you appreciate the writing.

Jack Kerouac (web photo courtesty of St. Petersburg Times, sp.com)

CategoryCulture, History, Lowell | Comment2 Comments »

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August 29th, 2010

Housing woes continue

by DickH

More and more “For Sale” signs are popping up in my neighborhood. I expect that they’ll be there for a while. A real estate recovery seems elusive and the market continues to stagnate at best. The statistics suggest that the market could be eroding. As I wrote in this month’s issue of the Merrimack Valley Housing Report, for the first seven months of 2010, the number of mortgages recorded at the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds was down 32% when compared to the same time in 2009 while the number of foreclosure deeds were up 78%.

For this to be occurring at a time when mortgage rates are at historic lows is further evidence of how bad things are. Business columnist Joe Nocera wrote a piece in yesterday’s New York Times describing the “perfect storm” of factors now influencing the real estate market. Nocera more eloquently cites some of the factors I’ve been pointing to: With the economy and unemployment still in precarious shape, few are ready to take on the long-term financial commitment of buying a home, especially when no one is sure if the market has hit bottom. Why would you pay $250,000 for a home that by Memorial Day might be worth only $220,000? Sellers routinely overprice the properties they put on the market, not because they’re being unrealistic about prices, but because they have no choice. If you owe $250,000 on your mortgage, you can’t sell your house for $220,000 unless you’re able to come up with the extra $30,000 in cash to pay off the balance of your loan. And creditors have gone from loaning money to anyone who would take it to a hyper-cautious “loan only to those who don’t need it” approach.

The solution? I don’t see one that would work quickly or easily. There are tremendous opportunities to implement long-term change in energy, housing, health care and education but I see little evidence that we as a society are open to the kind of transformative change and so the best we can hope for is to just muddle through.

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August 29th, 2010

“The Wild Bunch”

by DickH

We’ve had a Netflix subscription for several years and use it mostly to compress a season of “Mad Men” or “Friday Night Lights” into a week rather than several months. But once in a while a movie will come to my attention and I’ll stick it in the queue. Eventually it arrives in the mail. And so it was with “The Wild Bunch”, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western that starred William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson and many others. I had only seen bits and pieces of the film on TV but I always remember a teacher talking about the movie back in the early 1970s in an almost mystical way.

Here’s what movie critic Leonard Maltin wrote about “The Wild Bunch” in his 2008 Movie Guide:

Peckinpah’s best film, won instant notoriety for its “beautiful” bloodletting, but seems almost restrained alongside today’s films. Aging outlaws with their own code of ethics find themselves passe in 1913 and decide to retire after one final haul. Acting, dialogue, direction, score, photography and especially editing are world class; an authentic American classic.

Like “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) the gun battles in “The Wild Bunch” were filmed close-up, sometimes in slow motion, and always with ample blood flying. In the late 1960s, such scenes were novel and shocking but as Maltin points out, they actually seem somewhat tame compared to what we’ve grown used to more recently. Because the violence of these films is not as startling today as when they were first released, it’s a good time to go back and see them again. “The Wild Bunch” shows America at a transitional moment as new technology in the form of the automobile, the machine gun, and other new inventions were bringing change at a faster pace than society might have been prepared for.

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