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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Famed Artist and Musician Eric von Schmidt Dies at 75

Eric von Schmidt, a renowned Westport artist and pioneering figure in the folk music explosion of the late 1950s and early 1960s whose works touched the lives of generations of musicians, died Friday at a Fairfield convalescent home. He was 75.

His daughter Caitlin von Schmidt of Westport said her father had been in ill health since suffering a stroke in September. She said a memorial service will be announced later.

Eric von Schmidt, a Westport native and 1949 Staples High School graduate, was the son of the late illustrator Harold von Schmidt whose rustic portraits of the American West appeared on Saturday Evening Post covers and in other magazines.

He perhaps became best known as a folk and blues singer-songwriter of the folk/blues revival of the 1960s, a key part of the East Coast folk scene and crowd that included Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Dylan wrote liner notes for von Schmidt’s 1969 album “Who Knocked the Brains Out of the Sky.”

“He could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire,” Dylan wrote. “He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. The why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean.”

In 2000, von Schmidt developed throat cancer and became unable to sing. A bout with Lyme disease made it difficult to play the guitar.

In recent years, he worked on a series of paintings called “Giants of the Blues.”

Two years ago, the Westport Historical Society held its “Giants of the Blues 1920-1950” exhibit featuring works by von Schmidt.

Last March, the Westport Schools Permanent Art Collection Committee installed several large-scale paintings from the series in the hallway outside the Staples High School auditorium.

In a fine arts coup for the town, the committee received seven of the paintings on “indefinite loan.”

An obituary in today’s New York Times described von Schmidt as “a frisky, bearded figure who combined a successful career as a painter of big pictures of historical subjects with an exuberant musical style he liked to apply to American folk classics.”

It said Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the legendary cowboy singer, lauded his spirited approach to the songs of Leadbelly, the legendary blues artist, and the folk songs of Woody Guthrie.

“Eric’s got that wild spirit, and he doesn’t water the music down for polite society,” Elliott told The Boston Globe in 1996, the Times said.

As a small child, von Schmidt watched his father performing miracles week after week in his studio across the driveway from the family’s main house on Evergreen Avenue.

The young von Schmidt painted beside him, sketched with him and often posed for him.

Von Schmidt’s foundation in music came from his mother, Forest Gilmore.

He had bought his first guitar after hearing Leadbelly sing live on a New York radio station in 1948 when he was 17.

Von Schmidt once said of his first time hearing Leadbelly: “This incredible voice … was honey-smooth but had the bite of a buzz-saw cutting through a cement block. It was Leadbelly ’live’ and it changed my life.”

As a teenager, he was encouraged by his parents to visit the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., where he discovered a body of forgotten archival blues recordings. There his second career was born.

Von Schmidt graduated from Staples High School and went briefly to the Art Students League in New York City before being drafted during the Korean War.

After Korea, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study painting in Italy in 1956-1957.

Upon his return, he moved to Cambridge, Mass., and became a folk and blues singer in the Cambridge coffee house scene and entered the Boston literary field.

His books, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” co-authored with Jim Rooney, won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 1979, and “Notes for American Folk Music” won a Grammy in 1998.

In 2000, he was honored with the ASCAP Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

In addition to Caitlin, von Schmidt, who was twice married and divorced, is survived by another daughter, Megan Richardson of Greenfield, Mass., and three grandsons.

“He’ll be missed by a lot of people, and he had a very full and vital life with no regrets,” Richardson told The Associated Press.

Caitlin von Schmidt added, “He did what a lot of people can’t do, which is pretty much live his life by his own rules. That made it hard on the people involved with him … but he was a very loving and generous man.”

(poster by Arik Roper)

RADICAL LIVING PAPERS
A history of the free, alternative, counter-culture and underground press, 1965-75

Gavin Brown’s enterprise at PASSERBY
436 W. 15th Street,
New York, NY 10011

February 2 – March 7, 2007

Opening reception: Friday, February 2, 2007, 6pm

The Council for the Fortieth Anniversary of The Summer of Love with Gavin Brown’s enterprise opens and invites you to an exhibition of the world’s most radical living papers from a time when the press took risks and voiced opinions.

Celebrating the heyday of alternative magazine publishing in Europe and America, Gavin Brown’s enterprise at Passerby opens an exhibition of more than two hundred original copies, as well as reproductions of these seminal and obscure publications, whose influence reverberates through culture, politics, and society.

Covering politics, revolutions, evolutions of the planets, freak-outs, love-ins, support of green politics, gay liberation, power to the people, the peace parties, protests, the Panthers, peyote, LSD, pot, fiction, music, poetry, prose, prayers and more. Publications include: Actuel, Avatar, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, Black Panther Papers, Digger Papers, Door, East Village Other [EVO], The Fifth Estate, Freep, Grabuge, Hobo-Québec, International Times [it], Los Angeles Free Press, The Oracle, The Organ, Other Scenes, OZ, Rat, The Realist, Re Nudo, Rolling Stone, The Seed, Ann Arbor Sun….more.

Please note: A press conference to the unified, positive forces actively involved in the community will be held at 6pm on Friday, February 2, 2007, with active members of today’s free press.

Curated by Eva Prinz, Dan Donahue, and Thurston Moore

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN’s panel as “resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work” and ask for essays that “thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs”.

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the “overwhelming scientific evidence” on global warming. “It’s a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims,” said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

“The IPCC process is probably the most thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments to take on sound scientific advice,” he said.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

“Right now, the whole debate is polarised,” he said. “One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don’t think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy.”

One American scientist turned down the offer, citing fears that the report could easily be misused for political gain. “You wouldn’t know if some of the other authors might say nothing’s going to happen, that we should ignore it, or that it’s not our fault,” said Steve Schroeder, a professor at Texas A&M university.

The contents of the IPCC report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. It says there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8C this century, depending on emissions.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific institute, said: “The IPCC is the world’s leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue. It is expected to stress, more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to human actions, and that ‘business as usual’ would lead to unacceptable risks, underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. However, yet again, there will be a vocal minority with their own agendas who will try to suggest otherwise.”

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: “The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration’s intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they’ve got left is a suitcase full of cash.”

On Monday, another Exxon-funded organisation based in Canada will launch a review in London which casts doubt on the IPCC report. Among its authors are Tad Murty, a former scientist who believes human activity makes no contribution to global warming. Confirmed VIPs attending include Nigel Lawson and David Bellamy, who believes there is no link between burning fossil fuels and global warming.

Debit cards fuel overdraft outrages – The Red Tape Chronicles

from MSNBC.com

Posted: Tuesday, January 30 at 01:03 am CT by Bob Sullivan

Forty dollars for a Big Mac? That might sound over the top, but it barely tips the outrage meter when you compare it to the 20,000-percent-interest loanU.S. consumers regularly take out to pay for such $40 burgers. How could this be?

Well, bounced checks just aren’t what they used to be.

A new study says that most of the time consumers overdraw their accounts now, bounced checks aren’t the culprit. Instead, debit card purchases are chief cause of overdrafts.

Many people don’t realize that a carefree swipe of their debit card at a point-of-sale terminal to buy a Big Mac could result in “courtesy overdraft” fee of $30 or more. But such fees are becoming increasingly common. When faced with a transaction that would send a consumers’ account into negative territory, banks now regularly approve such transactions, cover the expense, and charge hefty fees.

Financial institutions collected some $10 billion in 2005 through what’s sometimes called automatic overdraft protection, according to the new study conducted by the Center for Responsible Lending. The agency reviewed full transaction histories for 5,000 typical American households to determine the cause of bounced check fees.

In its report, called “Debit Card Danger,” the Center for Responsible Lending said that 38 percent of overdrafts were caused by debit card, point-of-sale transactions, while paper checks triggered an overdraft only 27 percent of the time. Online bill payments accounted for another 27 percent of overdrafts.

Most consumers have no idea
The trend concerns Eric Halpern, who co-authored the report. He believes many consumers still have no idea how expensive that Big Mac can be.

“If you ask people on the street what would happen if they tried to make a debit card purchase and their account was empty, most people assume the bank would deny it,” he said.

Not any more. Beginning several years ago — no one really knows when — banks slowly got into the business of granting short-term, high interest loans to consumers when they attempt to overdraw their accounts. Account holders are automatically enrolled in the programs, which are now standard at nearly all banks.

Why are the programs, which many people have never heard of, so popular? Financial institutions that adopt them can expect a huge spike in overdraft revenue — a spike of 200 to 400 percent, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

It’s clear these loans confuse consumers. When asked, 61 percent said they wished the bank would simply reject the transaction.

Courtesy overdraft can save consumers money in the world of paper checks. The fee is the same as a standard insufficient funds fee, but consumers who would have bounced checks without it won’t face additional fees from merchants.

But the advantage ends in the electronic transaction world. Consumers who are unaware of courtesy overdraft do not know that the price of their Big Mac can jump from $1.99 to $42 in an instant.

It’s true, as bankers like to say, such fees are avoidable. Consumers can keep tabs on their balances, and as long as they do not live near the edge, dangling their balance near zero, they will never see this fee. And in fact, most consumers never pay overdraft fees. Every consumer who spends money they don’t have bears responsibility for that.

But banks shoulder the blame, too, for making it so easy to overdraw — and for muddying the line between “where the consumers’ balance ends and the overdraft protection begins,” said Greg McBride, a senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

Remember the surge of marketing that began a few years ago encouraging consumers to use debit cards instead of credit card for purchases? Debit cards were supposed to be the safer tool, the preferred tool for consumers trying to be responsible about their personal finances. Because debit-card buyers draw instantly from their own money in their checking accounts, they do not run up high-interest, revolving credit card debts. The implication, of course, was that debit cards would not allow you to spend what you don’t have.

Scratch that.

There are other factors that make it easier to fall prey to courtesy overdraft fees. Balancing a checkbook has become a much more complex affair. In an age of Internet banking and multiple automatic payments and deposits, it is easy to lose track of account balances day by day.

Lopsided changes
In addition, the advent of electronic check processing (called Check 21) has meant check deductions are drawn faster from consumers’ accounts — but deposits are still commonly held for three to five days. So consumers need a healthy cushion in their accounts to avoid the near occasion of overdraft sin, and not everyone has such a cushion.

“This hits families who are living paycheck to paycheck,” said Halpern. “It is likely at (any) point in time that the consumer does not know their exact balance. But the bank knows the exact balance.”

Banks could warn consumers that an overdraft is imminent, he said. But instead, they approve the transaction and collect the fee.

“This is a situation where the bank has much more information than the consumer,” he said.

Liz Pulliam-Weston, author of “Deal with Your Debt,” and MSN.com personal finance columnist, says that there are easy ways for consumers to protect themselves from overdraft fees. With a simple phone call or visit to a branch, consumers typically can link their checking accounts to their savings account or credit card. Then, if an overdraft occurs, the money to cover the purchase will be drawn from their other accounts. A small fee will apply, but it will generally be a tiny fraction of the potential courtesy overdraft charge. Consumers can also apply for a bank line of credit and link that to their checking account, Weston said.

Many consumers may be confused by the various names for overdraft protection – bounce protection is costly, courtesy overdraft is costly, traditional overdraft protection is not.

But Weston offers a simple rule of thumb. If you are using your own money to cover an overdraft, that’s inexpensive. “But, if you are borrowing the bank’s money, that’s expensive,” she said. “Everyone should have true overdraft protection.”

Online banking can help also, she said. While bank Web sites don’t always provide an exact,up-to-the-moment balance because transactions may not post immediately, the sites are useful for monitoring balances.

There’s one more warning consumers should have, Weston said. Not only can they unknowingly overdraw by making debit card purchases, but they can overdraw while getting cash from ATMs, too. That might not sound possible — after all, once upon a time, ATMs would simply deny withdrawals that exceed balances.

Scratch that, too.

Banks ignore customer data
Many banks now allow consumers to withdraw money from the kitty included in the automatic overdraft protection. Bank customers hate this idea – only 2 percent said they wanted banks to permit such withdrawals and tack on their overdraft fees. Most said they’d rather the withdrawal was rejected.

Instead, banks seem to be encouraging the use of these short-term loans to get cash, perhaps as a way of competing with the tide-you-over short-term loans offered by various paycheck advance loan retail stores. There are reports that banks even pad the “available balance” displayed on ATMs with amounts from the courtesy overdraft kitty. In other words, a consumer might only have $50 in their account, but an ATM might indicate a $250 “available balance.” Then a $100 withdrawal would incur that $39 overdraft fee.

It’s not clear how common the practice is — the matter is being examined now by a federal agency in a major overdraft fee study that’s due late this year. But McBride said it is indeed happening.

“It’s elusive to pinpoint how prevalent this is … but I know anecdotally that it’s happening,” he said.

The problem doesn’t appear to be extensive. In the Center for Responsible Lending study, only 2 percent said they’d been forced into overdraft protection by an ATM withdrawal.

Still, the only real defense against an ATM that might lie to you about your balance is to keep your own cushion in the account.