She's a Rebel

On next week’s The Halli Casser-Jayne Show, get ready to put another dime in the jukebox, baby. That’s right: on July 18th at 3 p.m. EST and July 19th at 9 p.m. EST, we’ll be bringing you GIRLS LIKE US…Women Who Have Rocked the Music World. The show is centered around the NY Times Bestseller GIRLS LIKE US, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon by award-winning journalist Sheila Weller. Ms. Weller will talk about her epic work, and the music of her generation.

Also joining the show will be Kathyrn Wat, Chief Curator of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, who’ll talk about their upcoming exhibit on loan from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum:  Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power. The exhibit highlights the flashpoints, the firsts, the best, the celebrated — and sometimes the lesser-known — women who moved rock and roll music and American culture forward.

Next up is Dr. Jeannie Poole, who will be discussing her documentary PEGGY GILBERT AND HER ALL-GIRL BAND. As a performer on saxophones, clarinet, violin, and vibes, as well as a singer, arranger, and contractor for women musicians, Peggy Gilbert had been a one-woman support network and staunch advocate for women since the 1920s. A professional tenor saxophonist for more than 80 years (she recently passed away at 102), she had been an inspiration for several generations of musicians. Dr. Poole herself is a force to be reckoned with:  since 1980, she has organized many conferences and concerts, including International Congresses on Women in Music in New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City. She has produced LP, CD and cassette recordings for Cambria Master Recordings, an independent label in California which specializes in contemporary American music, and serves as an Advisor to the Board of the International Alliance for Women in Music, which she helped to establish. In 1995 she was honored by the National Association of Composers, USA (NACUSA) for her work to promote American composers and music, and served as Chair and Secretary of their National Board of Directors. She currently serves on the Board of the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC).

Finally, we will talk with music legend Darlene Love, whose number one single “He’s A Rebel,” topped the charts in 1962 and is still beloved today. Ms. Love has played with such greats as Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones and Sonny and Cher; she’s also had a long and rich Broadway career, including a stunning portrayal of herself in the Tony Award-nominated jukebox musical Leader of the Pack. It’s going to be a show you won’t want to miss–join us on the 18th at 3 PM ET and find out for yourself!

The Halli Casser-Jayne Show is Talk Radio for Fine Minds.

Mormon Temple

For those of you who asked, here is the  information on where you can learn more about the guests who appeared on Wednesday’s The Halli Casser-Jayne Show: Is Mitt Romney’s Mormonism Fair Game? We tackled the controversial subject of Mormonism, the often besmirched and little known religion. In that context, we asked the question whether Republican presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney’s Mormonism would be a consideration of voters when they make their choice for president. It was an informative and sometimes controversial discussion. I hope that you’ll all tune in. You can listen right here on our website, or download the episode/podcast directly from iTunes. If you do go to iTunes, we ask that you leave a comment there to help us build our presence on iTunes.

Professor Richard Bushman: For more information try the search engines
Richard Packham: http://packham.n4m.org
Adam Christing:  www.amormonpresident.com
David Mason: www.yavanika.org, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/opinion/im-a-mormon-not-a-christian.html

Election 2012: Boring…boring…boring!!!

Maybe it’s because Election 2008 was so extraordinary. Maybe it is because during Election 2008 I was researching what would become my book A YEAR IN MY PAJAMAS WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA, The Politics of Strange Bedfellows. Maybe it’s because the two men vying to win Election 2012 could not be running more lackluster campaigns than Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

From the man who took presidential campaigns to new heights in 2008, the once mercurial Barack Obama now comes across as phlegmatic.  The campaign itself is equally composed.

Boring, boring, boring!

And then there is Mitt Romney and his uninspiring style. Mitt Romney reminds me of the Ken doll. I suppose he might be considered good-looking, if you like the type of man who graces the back pages of cheap newspaper supplements with their arms in that odd waist-high position and their dead facial expressions. Romney is a figure in a wax museum. His voice is as mundane as his looks, and as annoying as his lack of style. He speaks with a nasal tone and always seems breathless to me, his cadence oddly staccato.

Boring…boring…boring!

My description of both candidates must seem oddly superficial. I talk about their style and delivery and not about the content of their campaigns. There is good reason for this: There is no content in either campaign. The candidates attack each other, they attack each others’ party, they attack each others’ politics. Election 2012 is a campaign Against and is nothing about FOR.  Romney is against whatever Obama is for, and Obama is against whatever Romney is for. Or I could say that Romney is for whatever Obama is against, and Obama is for whatever Romney is against. Whichever way you play the sentence, it gets you to the same place. No innovation, nothing inventive, no wealth of ideas. Truth is, they were both for it, whatever it is, before they were against it.

Boring…boring…boring!

So, if you believe, as I do, that our candidates reflect us, than you have a pretty good idea where America is today. America is no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave…it’s just…

Boring…boring…boring!

Well, I just have to share this. Yesterday, in the middle of the July 4th celebration that included a host of parties, fireworks, friends and neighbors and a show on one of my favorite subjects CHOCOLATE! CHOCOLATE! CHOCOLATE!  (as if the day wasn’t a culinary orgy as it was) that included a lively interchange with the best fans a show could have in our chat-room, the day was made even more memorable when I witnessed a rare weather phenomenon: a roll cloud, officially known as an arcus cloud. According to Wikipedia, “they differ from shelf clouds by being completely detached from other cloud features. Roll clouds usually appear to be “rolling” about a horizontal axis. They are a solitary wave called a soliton, which is a wave that has a single crest and moves without changing speed or shape.”  Who knows if I’ll ever see one again in my lifetime. But I recorded this, and now I’m sharing my photo with you. I hope you enjoy! By the way, be sure to listen to the podcast of CHOCOLATE! CHOCOLATE! CHOCOLATE! You know, you can download it from the link above, and also from iTunes. By the way, if you do download it from iTunes, we’d love for you to give us an, of course, great review on the page!

Happy 4th all! Here’s a scene from one of my favorite films, Yankee Doodle Dandy. I might have picked James Cagney singing Yankee Doodle Dandy, but the movie’s final scenes…WOW! Gd Bless America and all of you. ~ Halli
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1rkzUIL8oc&feature=related

Chief Justice Roberts votes to uphold The Affordable Care Act

The Supreme Court, in particular Chief Justice John Roberts, surprised just about everyone today when it upheld President Obama’s signature legislation, The Affordable Care Act. The ruling leads to my thought that the election just might be over. With the ruling, Obama gets to reframe the health care discussion — the Republican cry against him — and fix the biggest blunder of his administration: the failure to properly frame in a positive sense, Obamacare…or is it Romneycare…ah…aren’t they the same?

Kudos to Justice Roberts. Who would a thunk it? Roberts is a mensch,  as my good friend Sheila Weller who will be our guest on The Halli Casser-Jayne Show  July 18th, called him on hearing the news of the decision. Justice Roberts of the right, broke ranks and voted with the left of the court. Will wonders never cease?  Democracy surely will never cease to amaze me. Just when it looked like the Supreme Court was going the way of partisanship like so many institutions in America, Robert’s actually made a judicial decision, not a political one.

We should all be celebrating a fair decision in a difficult political climate, a bipartisan decision that gives this American hope for our future.

The report of my death was an exaggeration…

…but reports of a GIVE-AWAY

Mark Twain in front of his home in Hannibal, Mo.

from The Halli Casser Jayne Show? Those are spot-on. If you want to win the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, VOLUME 1, to read yourself or to give to the brilliant/irreverent/troublemaking genius in YOUR life, you’re in luck! Just pop over to our Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/HalliCasserJayne) before July 8, 2012 and click the “LIKE” button! At the end of the week, one of you will be the big winner, and we’ll ship the book right to you. There is a hitch (there always is. Did Twain say that?) We want at least 100 new “likes” before we issue a prize. So, tell all your friends to join in the fun.

Whether you’re looking for a great gift or just want to know more about the man who taught us that, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society,” you can’t argue with free stuff. See you over there!

It’s an insane Monday here at The Halli Casser-Jayne Show as we prepare for Wednesday’s broadcast. I promise that our show L.A. NOIR: THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF L.A.’S NOTORIOUS MOBSTERS is going to be fascinating. That being said, I just took a break and was checking the news when I came across the following. It’s sometimes nice to get away from the politics of Washington and remember that our politicians are people, too. No doubt this was released to help lend a human quality to President Obama for purely political purposes. Still, the images are of our president and the First Lady and other dignitaries are interesting.  I hope you enjoy.

I begin with this: we don’t have to agree with everyone about everything. But we must be respectful of each other’s point of view. This simple notion, long the tenet of American society, seems to have gone to the dogs. Ruff…ruff…rough.

Rough is what we all seem these days. We’ve, like dogs, separated into packs: staunch Republicans, die-hard liberals, and somewhere in the middle a bunch of stray blue-dogs, if you will, who have wandered.

And then there is Mitt Romney, top dog of the current Republican Party, their candidate to lead the pack that hopes to unseat President Barack Obama. Obama’s somewhat in the doghouse these days due to an uncompromising economy, not helpful to his hope to remain chief dog.

About Mitt Romney, he’s no mutt. He presents himself as a pedigree: well-mannered, well-educated, well-bred, and oh, so successful. No doubt he’s a handsome puppy, which ought to garner him a pack of votes because the animal instinct of most human beings is to be attracted to the best-looking dog.

But there is a character issue that has dogged Romney since the start of his campaign – no, not the one about his flip-flopping – but instead the one about his intolerance to those who don’t share the Romney pedigree and all that it means.

The character issue, one of intolerance, apparently surfaced early in Romney’s privileged life. A recent Washington Post story revealed that senior high school student Mitt Romney didn’t much care for a soft-spoken (code description for gay back in the day) new student at the prestigious Cranbrook School, John Lauber, also deemed a non-conformist. When Lauber returned to school after a vacation with bleached-blonde hair, which seductively draped over one eye, it was too much for the upper-crust, high school senior, the un-MITT-igated bigot Romney.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” a riled Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school pack shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another.

Is it fair to judge the character of the adult Romney by the acts of a high school senior? If you don’t think so, it is worth noting that Team Romney’s reaction to the incident as revealed most definitively fails the character test.

Laughing non-denials and a half-assed “if I hurt anyone” apology in response to charges of violence and violation is the hallmark, not just of a bully, but of the culture that enables them. And laughing off the incident is exactly what Romney and his team attempted to do.

Did Romney also lie? He said he doesn’t remember the incident. WTF? Doesn’t remember the incident? He doesn’t remember leading a pack of assaulting students with sharp implements?

He’s also made the claim that he didn’t think that the soft-spoken, bleached blonde guy he attacked was gay (so he did remember?). What? Did bigotry against sexual orientation just begin today? No. Bullies like Romney were attacking what they called “faggots” long before Romney’s violent attack against a closeted homosexual. Finally, what kind of person isn’t quite sure “if I hurt anyone” by holding down a whimpering young man and chopping off his hair?

Romney makes me want to howl, and so I will now at the latest revelation about Romney and his disdain for the LGBT community.

Hear me. I’m howling. HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWLING!

As reported in the Boston Globe, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s administration in 2006 blocked publication of a state anti-bullying guide for Massachusetts public schools because officials objected to use of the terms “bisexual’’ and “transgender’’ in passages about protecting certain students from harassment, according to state records and interviews with current and former state officials.

Suppressing the guide’s publication was among steps that Romney and his aides took during his last year in office to distance the Republican governor from state programs designed to specifically support gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people. His critics said it was part of an effort to court social conservatives as he prepared for his first campaign for president in 2008.

Pretty lame excuse for not standing up for the LGBT community, as a man of character would. What kind of man wouldn’t?

A hound dog.

For those of you who missed Wednesday’s show:

This week’s Halli Casser-Jayne show is all about answering the question: is feminism in porn an oxymoron? The adult entertainment business has been a male-dominated industry for so long–is it even possible that these two seemingly incompatible realms could (and, if we might say so ourselves, should) work together?

We’re joined on the show first by Ohio University’s Professor Joseph Slade. Dr. Slade is a topic expert and the author of Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, the definitive book on the adult entertainment business. Professor Slade opens by informing–or, perhaps, reminding–us that, “It’s virtually impossible to define obscenity any longer to anyone’s satisfaction.” He goes on to give us a rational, educated definition (and history!) of a topic so many of us are afraid to talk about.

We speak next to Lux Alptraum, the editor of Fleshbot dot com, the web’s foremost blog about sexuality and adult entertainment. She says, “My mission is about promoting positive sex and sexuality, encouraging people to talk about sex and feel comfortable about sex, and in a lot of ways porn is a really direct way of doing that.” We talk about how the internet has changed the industry, broadened the availability, accessibility and appeal of various types of adult entertainment, and how between “feminist” porn and “humanist” porn are really joint concepts.

Leena Sky, a psychology professor, mother of three, and adult film star, is our next guest. Leena has three degrees, including a PhD in education, and says that the adult entertainment industry is something she would have gotten into younger than she did if she’d had the confidence at that time. For Leena, this career represents a sexual and existential liberation she’s long been seeking–she says she’s happier doing this than she was as a professor, a therapist, or a counselor. We discuss the erroneous concepts behind why people get into this industry, and how Leena’s path led her here. “I didn’t set out to be a porn star,” Leena says, “but I’ll be honest, as much as I maybe shouldn’t have wanted it, this role fits me most.”

Next we’re joined by Petra Joy, a celebrated director, producer, author and curator of feminist pornography, and Aurora Snow, an adult film star and writer. Petra’s been producing and directing erotic films since 2004, and says, “I think it’s very important that men and women are represented as as equals in all kinds of film, and especially in porn, because porn is just a mirror to me. Porn is very political, it shows what goes on in the bedroom, it shows what goes on in relationships, and if it just perpetuates the old and dated roles that gender has.…then things can’t improve and change.” Petra’s opinions and insights on this topic are as fascinating as they are invaluable, and her considerable experience (in producing, it must be said, absolutely exquisite films) adds a tenor of permanence and importance to this discussion that is rarely achieved when working with this topic.

Finally, Aurora Snow, an adult film star and writer, talks to us about a recent film experience that was definitely more harrowing than her typical fare! It wouldn’t make sense to spoil you for what is truly a fascinating story, and, of course, this review has hardly done the episode justice. Hear Aurora’s story, and engage in a discussion that’s as necessary as it is rare, by listening to this week’s Halli Casser-Jayne Show for yourself! We promise, it won’t disappoint.