Sam Low
The current financial crisis reminds me of a discussion I had recently with a conservative friend of mine. We’ll call him Harry. Harry believes that the free market is a serene clean money machine that benefits everyone — unless you mess with it — in which case it coughs and sputters and is likely to give money to the poor and starving and huddling masses, those folks who did not earn it but rather just sat around drinking beer and smoking dope and waiting for welfare to come their way.
T he jeep’s headlights illuminate the rut ted road. The moon does the rest, bathing the dunes all around in a soft glow that gives the place a nostalgic feel. Time seems to move forward and backward in the headlights’ loom. This is part of the romance of moonlight, I think. Is this here and now or perhaps there and then?
Editor’s note: On Dec. 5, Lanny McDowell and Sam Low (aka The Two Cousins) went to Art Basel Miami Beach — the huge art fair that in sheer size trumps everything on the annual art circuit (Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, everything) They filed this report.
“Vineyard Gazette? What’s that?” said someone checking our press credentials at the Art Basel fair in Miami — “some kind of wine magazine?”
Anthropologists call them social nodes — the places where a community’s social cement is stirred, where folks get to know each other during the spontaneous expression of life’s routine. Our churches, libraries and town halls serve this purpose, of course, but so do more informal locations like our parks, walkways, forest trails, beaches and general stores.
Last Saturday at Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard, amidst the swirl of bagpipes and the boom of cannons, Rick and Chrissie Haslet launched their 42-foot ketch Destiny. Joining them were hundreds of Vineyard residents, friends of the couple, Rick’s dad and sister and Chrissie’s father who flew in from New Zealand.
The solution to the problems facing our great ponds is so simple that I can hear the slapping of foreheads as I write this — the Martha’s Vineyard Clam Club. Why not? If we’ve got clubs for folks to chase tiny balls and produce nothing better than figures on a scorecard, can’t you imagine a club where folks scour our ponds to produce a tasty meal? The problem is that clamming doesn’t have panache. Well it does, among a select few, but not the right select few. We need a CCC — a Celebrity Clamming Corps.