The Oppenheimer Report - 4/30/07

A few weeks ago, I decided to renew my U.S. passport. Though it was several months away from expiration, I was advised by a customs & immigration officer that it would be a good idea to renew as much as three months ahead of time. I went to the photo shop next door and paid a ridiculous sum of money for the predictably poor 2”x 2” required photos. Though I had briefly considered renewing my passport by mail, when I read up on the procedure, I realized that I would have been required to surrender my old passport. Under no circumstances could I see myself handing my passport over to Canada Post, who it seems raise their postal rates monthly, and in inverse proportion to the service they provide. With so much talk in the news about identity theft, I didn’t feel right about surrendering my valid passport to any postal system, be it registered mail, overnight delivery, or pony express. Therefore, bright and early one frigid Tuesday morning, I rode my bicycle down to the U.S. Consulate to renew in person, existing passport and overpriced photos in hand. Oblivious as I am to the post-9-11 era of security – keep in mind that neither Shauna nor I have been on a plane in over ten years – it never occurred to me that there might be heightened security involved in this venture.

The first problem I encountered occurred before I even entered the front door of the consulate. A very serious looking security officer told me that no cell phones or electronic devices of any kind were permitted in the building. As I had on my person my electronic organizer and my cell phone, with no car in which to lock them up, I stuck them in my gloves and hid those in my bicycle helmet, which I then locked to the bike. I suppose someone could have stolen them, but at least the items were out of plain sight, and both devices are password protected. Relieved of my electronic devices, I was permitted to enter the building, where I immediately underwent an X-ray, and a rather comprehensive body scan. No cavity search? Piece of cake! Next, I was told to go down the hall and take the elevator to the third floor. That sounded simple enough, but when I walked down the hall, I saw a line of at least one hundred foreign-looking people waiting anxiously. Thankfully, that was the line for political refugees and other wannabe North Americans. I did not need to wait in that line. I then came to another security checkpoint, and they led me through another locked door and into a room with even more people waiting to be seen. Next, I was ushered through yet another locked door (I was by now beginning to feel like I was living out one of my numerous frustration dreams), through another checkpoint, and finally to a little room with an elevator. It was very odd to be waiting in a small, secured room, simply to take an elevator. After I got off the elevator on the third floor, I was greeted by yet another security officer who let me though yet another locked door, and finally, into the passport room. I waited in line for a few minutes to be informed by the expressionless lady to “Take a number, go over there, pick up a renewal form , fill it out, then wait for your number to be called.” No “have a nice day” or nothin’. When I followed her instructions, I noticed that I was now in another room filled with applicants. There were two seemingly identical forms on a table and, of course, I filled out the wrong one. Neither form had the word “Renewal” on it, and there were no clear instructions (and no one to ask without waiting in line again) directing me to use one form or the other. Was this a test … had I already failed?



In fact, the form I did fill out seemed to address renewals in some vague and ambiguous way. I found out my mistake when my number was called and the expressionless lady with no personality berated me for my stupidity. She didn’t actually use the word “stupid”, but her actions strongly implied that she thought I was a cretin.

The rest of the experience was textbook bureaucratic foolishness – go to this booth, then go to that booth, no the other “that” booth dummy … now jump through a hoop of fire while yapping like a Yorkshire Terrier … you know, the usual government nonsense. I was reminded of the “Bring me a shrubbery” sketch from Monty Python’s “The Holy Grail”. Finally, I ended up back with the expressionless lady, who punched a bunch of holes in my perfectly good passport, stamped it “cancelled” and told me she was done with me. Thankfully, exiting was much easier than entering. When I got back to my bicycle, my organizer and phone were still there. Cynic that I am, it briefly occurred to me that, if they are so concerned about security, perhaps no vehicles should be allowed to park next to a consulate.

Given all the red tape I went through to renew in person, I might have been better off just mailing it in. After all my efforts to protect my identity, I realized that the new passport would be arriving by mail anyhow. The good news is that, about four days after I made the renewal application, my new passport arrived by Fed-Ex. With its watermarks and holograms, and special paper, the new passport looks as if it would be difficult to forge. I’ll bet that when I next renew in ten years, passports will be entirely different. Perhaps by then, technology will render paper passports obsolete, and citizenship will be determined by retinal scans, fingerprint identification, or perhaps even DNA testing. As with all technology, someone will then figure out a way to undermine it and to do something evil with it. Then again, perhaps evil will be rendered obsolete.

One final observation related to the above-mentioned exercise: I think it’s time America changed her national anthem. Even if one CAN sing, which, judging from the last hockey game I attended, clearly most of us cannot, the American National Anthem is a horrible tune, which is difficult to sing, and includes too many references to violence. While I understand that freedom comes at a cost, and that brave men and women have lost their lives to protect my freedom, I think it’s time to downplay references to “the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air”, in favor of more emphasis on our love of freedom. I wonder if anybody is working on the Iraqi national anthem yet. Perhaps that is a bit premature. This passport exercise reminded me of how lucky I am to live in a (relatively) free country, and that I must never take that freedom for granted.

-Written by Jamie Openheimer c 2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report - 4/16/07 Demolition!!

This is a momentous week for Shauna and me because, after three years of planning, several false starts, and a lot of plodding through the labyrinth of town regulations and government bureaucracies, our site plan was finally approved. Last week, our builder obtained a demolition permit, and our little cottage was knocked down. We were not able to make it up for the demolition – probably for the best – but the builder e-mailed us almost 70 photographs documenting the process, from beginning to end. Looking at those pictures was harder for Shauna than it was for me and, of course, there were tears. Shauna had been going up to that cottage every summer since she was a little girl and, like so many other people, she equated the physical structure with the memories that it embodied. I had mixed emotions, because I’d spent a lot of time fixing the place up. In the past ten years, I’d painted the entire cottage twice, veneered the fireplace mantel, rebuilt the concrete and tile floor around the fireplace, patched other sections of concrete floor, stripped and refinished transom windows, rebuilt screen doors, re-pointed the stone chimney (which we will thankfully reclaim for the new place), rebuilt two of the three beds, replaced screens and window glass, etc. As any cottager will tell you, every dwelling has its idiosyncrasies. Dr. Taylor had mentored me well on how to cope with all the eccentricities of this cottage … things like how to jury-rig the finicky old water pump, how to ream out the pipes in the bathroom when they became clogged with silt, and how to deal with all the quirky electrical problems, etc. There was always something that needed fixing up there. Near the end, I began to feel a little like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. That crazy poltergeist/electrical problem to which I referred in one of my recent reports, was the final straw. Still, it was strange to see the demolition photos. To console Shauna, I reminded her that many people who experience a fire or a natural disaster do not have the luxury of controlling the change to their living situation. We were able to salvage much of what we wanted to save from the old place, before it was knocked down, and we have all the furniture and mementoes safely stored away to put in the new place. In our hearts we know that this change will be a good thing, but we embark on this journey with just a hint of apprehension.

It is somewhat traumatic to see the vacant lot … an empty canvas, if you will. We’ve spent well over 18 months designing the new home and, with the aid of the log home company and our builder, I think we’ve created (on paper, at least) an amazing new home, custom designed to meet our special needs. That said, in so many ways our design is unlike any other log home, and we won’t really know if we got it right until it is up. While we have seen elevation drawings, we really don’t have a clear picture of what it will look like in 3D. It’s much bigger than the cottage it will replace. Eventually, we intend to spend most of our time living up there, so we feel considerable pressure to create exactly what we want. There will be no one else to blame but ourselves if we don’t get it right. Log home design is very unforgiving; get it wrong and it cannot be modified once the logs are cut. It has been almost a year of designing, researching and interviewing door manufacturers, window companies, hardwood floor providers, lighting specialists, HVAC options, stain companies, etc..


There have been countless hours on the phone with our guardian angel, Dave Schemenauer, our representative from Neville Log Homes out in British Columbia. With Dave and our fantastic builders, The Thornton Group, we’ve spent hours in meetings and on the phone, hashing out such issues as window placement, log size, roof profile, placement of decorative stone, and what turned out to be the extremely challenging task of determining where to place the stairs.

Our builder predicts that this project will take about 8 months to complete, if everything goes as planned. Of course, that never happens, and I’m sure there will be plenty of obstacles along the way. As soon as our builder began to dig out the basement he came upon two huge boulders which were too big to move with an excavator. Their removal will likely be the subject of another report, and I’m sure that future reports this summer will be filled with references to this building project. To quote an oft-repeated redundancy, this is our “new beginning.” It’s been a long time coming, but our new log home is finally underway. Yahoo!

Author Kurt Vonnegut died last week at the age of 84. Most people know him for his most famous book “Slaughterhouse 5” but did you know he penned the lyrics to that Ambrosia hit “Nice, Nice, Very Nice”? Shock jock Don Imus can kiss his broadcasting career goodbye after his disparaging and racist remarks about the championship-winning Rutgers University women’s basketball team landed him in hot water with just about everyone in America but the KKK. I find it somewhat ironic to see and hear some of the media hyenas passing judgment on his blunder. And I know I have said this before … we know we’re in trouble when Al Sharpton is deemed to be the voice of reason. Clearly what Imus said was wrong and inexcusable, but anybody who has listened to the guy over the years (I’ve caught a few minutes here and there), will see that he is overtly offensive on a regular basis, and he is an equal opportunity offender. I am somewhat encouraged about any controversy which can spark a debate about racism in America, but let he (or she) who is without sin cast the first stone… I won’t be casting any stones. This latest controversy brings to mind that Tom Wolf novel “Bonfire of the Vanities”, and I think there is a character to mimic Reverend Sharpton in there somewhere. After the recent racial slurs spewed by comedian Michael Richards (a.k.a. Kramer from Seinfeld), it is clear that some of us have rage and hatred in our hearts. The good thing about the Imus and Richards controversies is that they out that rage, and their words have caused me to look within myself to review and assess my own prejudices.

“We have seen the enemy and he is us.”

- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 4/9/07 - New Demo

First of all, a belated Happy Easter to those of my readers who celebrate. Though I am a member of “the tribe”, I participated in my share of Easter egg hunts in my youth. I have a fuzzy memory of one Easter, a long time ago, when my mother hid a dozen boiled eggs in our house. After the hunt, my sister and I had found only eleven eggs. Somehow, that twelfth egg remained undiscovered for several months, until someone turned on a seldom-used lamp, and it began to stink like nothing we’d ever smelled before.

In the “enough-about-me-what-do-YOU-think-of-me” department, I recently had one of the most rewarding experiences of my songwriting career. Anybody who has heard one of my songs knows that they seriously lack proper production. All too often, when I have recorded a song I wrote, the comments from my friends have had a familiar theme: “Well, Jamie, that MIGHT be a good song, but it’s hard to tell, because you so hopelessly suck as a performer.” I think several of my songs are pretty good, but writing a good song and performing it are often two very different things. Dylan is a gifted writer, but his voice sounds like a dying moose. He can get away with that, but I need all the help I can get.

In the past, I’ve had some unsatisfactory experiences having demos produced. A demo should be a fair representation of how you want your songs to sound, but demo guys don’t always share your vision. I think that happens a lot in the arts … an artist creates something - a song, or a book, or a painting - and then some so-called expert tells him or her how to make money by changing it. Some of those experts are effective, but as often as not, they simply ruin what was once very good. One of my biggest problems with pop music today is that it represents the antithesis of creativity. It seems to me as if everything has been passed through some kind of song homogenizer … the same insipid lyrics, the same forgettable melody lines, the same synthesized drum beat, the same Mariah Carey trill-laden voices. Even rap has become pop-sanitized. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d hear some English drum machine band from the Eighties (music I used to hate) and think to myself, “Gee that didn’t sound half bad … maybe I should give Flock of Seagulls another chance!”. Whatever happened to pop anthems like Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” or Deep Purple’s “Hush” or Spirit’s “I Got a Line on You”?

Recently, I had a small hand in producing the first demo of which I am truly proud. For the first time ever, I’ve heard one of my songs played the way I’d hoped it would be performed. The best part was that I was able to watch the process from beginning to end, and to be a creative part of it. You may have heard me praise my singer/songwriter friend Bobby Cameron. He’s one of a handful of unique Canadian musician/songwriters who have so far fallen through the cracks of a myopic and fickle music industry. Luckily, with the advent of digital music and the internet, the listening public can decide for themselves. Bobby’s getting a lot of hits on his website www.bobbycameron.com and on his www.myspace.com/bobbycameron site, and I think his “buzz” may finally be building. Click on either of these sites to learn more about Bobby and to hear samples of his music. I was extremely excited when he agreed to produce a demo of several of my songs, and a few weeks ago, we just about finished the first song, entitled “Strange Holiday”. Though this is merely a demo, without all the bells and whistles of elaborate production, Bobby nailed that song, and he made me proud to have written it. It’s odd, because out of the 120+ songs I’ve written to date, “Strange Holiday” was one of the last songs I would have chosen to demo. I wrote it fifteen years ago, and I never dreamed it would come alive the way it has with Bobby’s creative influence. While recognition and compensation are generally considered to be the benchmarks of success in songwriting, I can honestly say that nothing so far in this creative process has been as satisfying as hearing a song I wrote professionally performed.

Final comments about the changing trends in the music industry: In the past month or so, Shauna and I have been exposed to some unbelievably talented artists through the Internet. With the advent of sites like MySpace.com, and YouTube, free, world-wide forums for anybody to broadcast their “story” (bio, music, writing, etc.), there are finally places on the Internet where the public can pick and choose. I hope that the enormous sums of money now being spent to promote mediocrity in pop music will eventually be diverted to promote more worthy artists, or in some way provide a suitable venue for those artists. A few months ago, I’d never heard of an Aussie guitarist named John Butler, now the John Butler Trio is one of my favorite bands, and their popularity is quickly building in the States. Their new-found fame is in large part due to Internet exposure, not to mention a brilliant live act. I think this massive cyberspace forum for alternatives to the Timberlake’s and the Puff Diddley’s will eventually level the playing field. A talented band with good songs and a good live act might now have a better chance to break the chains of anonymity. Perhaps we can even wrest the music industry market from the undeveloped hands of twelve year-olds and return it to the adults.

I hope you will give Bobby Cameron a listen; I expect to get an MP3 of “Strange Holiday” up on a site soon for any and all to hear. Long live the Internet!

Happy Easter … and remember, find all of those eggs, or you’ll be sorry!

–Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED