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June 26, 2006

PORTABLE GREEN ZONE

It's not just a fortress in Baghdad: The Green Zone is a metaphor for America itself. Our Bullshitter-in-Chief takes it with him wherever he goes. So do the rest of his thugs, from Mr. Fat Backside on down. We needed no reminding. You probably don't either. But Tom Engelhardt's "Green Zoning It All the Way" does a good job of that. (Thanks to the indefatiguable Doug Ireland for pointing the way to it on his necessary blog.)

We're seriously considering a new moniker for the Bullshitter: Mr. Green Zone.

Postscript: New necessary reading, "The Hidden Power" by Jane Mayer, appears in this week's New Yorker. It's a profile of David Addington, "a secret architect of the war on terror," but it's not online. A Q&A with Mayer, "Cheney's Cheney," is.

Posted by jherman at 9:31 AM

June 23, 2006

WISH I WROTE IT

Flagged by the staff wiseass:

Are you a true believer? Do you just know deep down in your black Wal-Mart socks that every word of the Bible is the absolute literal truth and nothing dare be doubted and anyone who thinks that God is merely an ambisexual omniblissful bloom of moist divine nondenominational honeydew melon should be strung up by their small intestine and beaten with sticks sharpened by Mel Gibson's teeth?

And I thought there was nothing much to read in San Franciso's major daily:

Do you feel, furthermore, that human cretins like, say, gays and Jews and Wiccans and all those hippie weirdos with their iPods and low-cut jeans and easy laughter are a plague upon this fine and holy land?

Check out the whole thing. You won't be sorry. It's called "Jesus Loves A Machine Gun."

Posted by jherman at 1:32 PM

June 20, 2006

ALL RISE

In the matter of Jason Leopold, there's this from Joe Lauria in The Washington Post. In the matter of the Karl Rove non-indictment, there's this from the editors of truthout. They'll get to the matter of Jason Leopold tomorrow (at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time).

Postscript: June 21 -- Here's truthout's promised follow-up about Leopold. (Not satisfactory, in my opinion.) But for truthout's editors this is the heart of the matter.

Marc Ash, executive director of truthout, writes:

On Tuesday, June 13, when the mainstream media broke their stories that Karl Rove had been exonerated, there were frank discussions amongst our senior editors about retracting our stories outright. The problem we wrestled with was what exactly do we retract? Should we say that Rove had not in fact been indicted? Should we say that our sources provided us with false or misleading information? Had Truthout been used? Without a public statement from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald we felt that it was premature to retract our report.

After spending the past month retracing our steps and confirming facts, we've come full circle. Our sources continue to maintain that a grand jury has in fact returned an indictment. Our sources said that parts of the indictment were read to Karl Rove and his attorney on Friday, May 12, 2006. Last week, we pointed to a sealed federal indictment, case number "06 cr 128," which is still sealed and we are still pointing to it. During lengthy conversations with our sources over the past month, they reiterated that the substance of our report on May 13, 2006, was correct, and immediately following our report, Karl Rove's status in the CIA leak probe changed. In summary, as we press our investigation we find indicators that more of our key facts are correct, not less.

That leaves the most important question: If our sources maintain that a grand jury has returned an indictment -- and we have pointed to a criminal case number that we are told corresponds to it -- then how is it possible that Patrick Fitzgerald is reported to have said that 'he does not anticipate seeking charges against Rove at this time?' That is a very troubling question, and the truth is, we do not yet have a definitive answer. We also continue to be very troubled that no one has seen the reported communication from Fitzgerald to Rove's attorney Robert Luskin, and more importantly, how so much public judgment could be based on a communication that Luskin will not put on the table. Before we can assess the glaring contradiction between what our sources say and what Luskin says Fitzgerald faxed to him, we need to be able to consider what was faxed -- and in its entirety.

Which makes eminent sense to me.

June 22: As to truthout's "not satisfactory" posting about Leopold -- subsequently updated, when others questioned it as well, to say that "Jason Leopold categorically denies identifying himself as Joe Lauria" -- it's still a problem. Sad to say, given Leopold's past practices, his denial can't be categorically trusted.

Posted by jherman at 9:56 AM

June 19, 2006

RAJ REDUX

Mr. Big Fat Backside, a k a Karl Rove, and the Bullshitter-in-Chief are still shitting us. But of course you'd never know that from this morning's lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal. It rails against Congressman Jack Murtha, who wants an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The editorial also claims, "President Bush's surprise visit to Baghdad did a lot to assure Iraqis about U.S. resolve." And it concludes, "The U.S. has sacrificed too much already in Iraq to withdraw just when victory once again looks possible."

WSJ editorial writers apparently don't read their own paper. They must've missed Greg Jaffe's front-paged disaster report, "A Camp Divided," which ran on Saturday. It explains a lot of things, including why the Bullshitter and Mr. Big Fat Backside are spinning pipedreams. Jaffe's lede was a grabber:

Camp Taji, Iraq

This sprawling military base is divided down the middle by massive concrete barriers, a snaking fence and rifle-toting guards. On one side, about 10,000 U.S. Army soldiers live in air-conditioned trailers. There's a movie theater, a swimming pool, a Taco Bell, and a post exchange the size of a Wal-Mart, stocked with everything from deodorant to DVD players.

On the other side are a similar number of Iraqi soldiers whose success will determine when U.S. troops can go home. The Iraqi troops live in fetid barracks built by the British in the 1920s, ration the fuel they use to run their lights and sometimes eat spoiled food that makes them sick.

"The only soldiers who pass regularly between the two worlds are about 130 U.S. Army advisers, who live, train and work with the Iraqis," Jaffe writes. Then comes his nut graf:

For many of these advisers, the past six months have been a disorienting experience, putting them at odds with their fellow U.S. soldiers and eroding their confidence in the U.S. government's ability to build an Iraqi force that can stabilize this increasingly violent country.

This is followed by Lt. Col. Charles Payne's flat-out claim that U.S. troops on the American side of the base "treat the Iraqis with utter scorn and contempt. The Iraqis may not be sophisticated, but they aren't stupid. They see it."

Payne, a 25-year Army veteran, commanded about 50 advisers until last month when he was dismissed from his job, Jaffe reports, for getting in the base commander's way. Payne's take, in the commander's opinion, is "totally ridiculous." How so? Well, Payne and the advisers have "gone native."

Gone native. Where have we heard that before? Ah yes. Famous last words of the British raj.

"Though the divide here at Camp Taji is extreme, it reflects a growing friction throughout this war-torn country," Jaffe notes. His devastating report is posted behind a subscripton wall. But thanks to my staff of thousands, you can read it online when you click this link or the map. It will be available -- free -- for the next few days, even for WSJ editorial writers.

Posted by jherman at 8:41 AM

June 17, 2006

WHAT'S WRONG WITH CRITICS?

Try this: "Guy [the main character in a new Neil LaBute play] cauterizes himself against pain, in large part through language, a sort of semantic jujitsu that obfuscates his emotional reality and keeps him firmly within the parameters of his own narrative." (Italics added.)

I prefer critics who write in plain English, especially when they're published in The New Yorker -- don't you?

Posted by jherman at 10:35 AM

June 15, 2006

ASYMMETRIC BOOKFARE

For all you bibliophiles, a few granular thoughts about Brion Gysin and Wyndham Lewis, written so long ago they qualify as pre-historic: "Roundup at the O.P. Corral." Topic: "To Master, A Long Goodnight" vs. "America and Cosmic Man."

And for all you pervs out there, here's the opening of a literary monograph by Supervert, Necrophilia Variations":

Inevitably there came a point at which I had to pause and ask myself: How would you like it? How would you like to be lying there on the autopsy table having the coroner slice you up into a variety of sexual aids? The femur bone makes a fine dildo. Intestines are natural prophylactics. The heart, that organ of romance, can be used as a four-chambered pocket pussy. Whatever remains of your body afterward can be filled with KY instead of embalming fluid -- or vice versa, perhaps a horny little necro nymph will come along and leech the embalming fluid from your body to use as a "personal lubricant." Who knows? The possibilities are endless. Do you prefer your corpse to be a waste produce or a sex object?

Mikey Houellebecq would be jealous ... heh?

Postscript: And from my earlier life:

Jed Birmingham surveys the avant-garde publications of Jan Herman: the Nova Broadcasts, the San Francisco Earthquake, and his collaborations with William S. Burroughs.

Posted by jherman at 8:39 AM

June 13, 2006

END OF SUSPENSE

Ouch! "Karl Rove Won't Be Charged in CIA Leak Case." So says a WashPost headline. And here's the same headline, word for word, in The NY Times. (Well, it was a verbatim duplicate until moments ago.)

So will Jason Leopold be chastened? I don't think so. (He's the freelance who reported that Rove would be indicted, touching off a wave -- make that a tsunami -- of Internet and press speculation.) But then I'm no one to talk, having written here, "I wouldn't bet against him on the Rove indictment," despite my doubts about his work. Methinks the "rampaging egomania," which I objected to in Leopold's memoir ("On the Record," since retitled "News Junkie"), keeps getting in his way. Wish it didn't.

Postscript: A friend comments (with photo evidence of White House thugs): "SMUG -- trim, neat, akin to G. schmuck, 1. orig., neat, spruce, trim, etc. 2. narrowly contented with one's own accomplishments, beliefs, morality, etc; self-satisfied to an annoying degree; complacent. (Webster's New World Dictionary)"

Posted by jherman at 8:11 AM

June 8, 2006

HELLO!

Is my boat comin' in? Have a look at Kyle Gann's post. I had no idea. And of course, I'm terribly unhappy about it. (That's how my staff of thousands spells thrilled.)

What I really love -- besides the pleasure he got from my Wyler biography -- is how he compares an issue in one field to another, in this case auteurism in film and stylistic identity in music. It's not an exact comparison by any means, and he makes no claim that it is. But it's the sort of transposition of ideas -- offbeat and unexpected -- that comes naturally to him from what I've read on his blog and in his latest book, "Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice." When he insists "art is about appearances, not reality," I'm convinced.

What impresses me most about Kyle Gann's writing in general, apart from the consistent clarity and the ease of expression, is its personal touch. And no, his mother didn't pay me to say this. But yes, I realize gratitude like this is unseemly.

Postscript: Looks like my rowboat is really comin' in. Although it just got bigger, mebbe to a motorboat. The New Yorker has a Hilton Als profile of cinematographer Gregg Toland coming next week that refers to and quotes from my Wyler bio, which will likely move the book up from #396,483 to #396,481 on Amazon. Row, row, row, etc. And now this, from an earlier life:

Jed Birmingham surveys the avant-garde publications of Jan Herman: the Nova Broadcasts, the San Francisco Earthquake, and his collaborations with William S. Burroughs.

PPS: Still rowing my boat this ayem -- Monday, June 12 -- per Als's New Yorker piece, which is not online, goddammit. So I've scanned in the front page of the article, left, not that you can read it. If you take a look at the magazine's table of contents, which is online, here's what you see minus a link:

ANNALS OF HOLLYWOOD
The Cameraman
America's first great cinematographer

Looks like a great issue, by the way, with two other non-fiction pieces by writers I admire, William Finnegan and Oliver Sacks. Their stuff is not online, either. Will somebody tell David Remnick to get over it? Stop with the tease, please.

Posted by jherman at 1:12 PM

June 7, 2006

PASSION AND PERPS

If blogs are the leading edge, how come my staff of thousands (yeah, them again) took so long to discover Reality Studio? (Don't answer that.) The site is dedicated to Burroughs scholarship, and so rich in related material it's dangerous. You can end up doing nothing all day but read it. For instance, have a look at this interview with John Geiger, who wrote the biography of Brion Gysin "Everything Is Permitted -- Nothing Is True."

Which brings to mind this question: What would the millions of mainstream meanstream perp watchers who tune in to the perv-nabber specials on NBC's "Dateline" make of the Supervert site? It's a self-described "sort of deviant Bauhaus [that] strives to create new experiences through the synthesis of art, technology, pornography, and philosophy."

Supervert is an alias -- a nom de plume -- a moniker for an individual -- a company -- a corporation -- better yet, a brand name. Yes, that's it. Don't get hung up on what's behind Supervert. Just get off on what Supervert offers you, a unique combination of intellect and deviance. Perversity for your brain. Vanguard aesthetics, novel pathologies.

Only a few days ago Supervert launched a spinoff, PervScan.tv, featuring "videos of sexual perversity in the news." Why let NBC corner the perp-watchers market?

Posted by jherman at 1:42 PM

June 6, 2006

THE SECOND NUCLEAR AGE

If you weren't paying attention, you missed it. OK, you didn't miss it, my staff of thousands did. "It" is the little documentary "Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?" that aired in April on cable TV (Discovery Times) in the U.S. and on the CBC-TV network in Canada. Last night it came to the Council on Foreign Relations for a "special screening." (Better late than never.)

To judge from what the documentary implies without saying it outright, a more accurate title might be "Nuclear Jihad: When Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?" Because the alarming answer to the question is: "Soon." If they don't have it already.

For that you can thank A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's A-bomb, who set up a global rogue network that effectively privatized nuke weapons production. And don't forget to thank the U.S. government, which abetted Khan, particularly the CIA early on and, later, the Bullshitter-in-Chief's regime, which looked the other way precisely when it shouldn't have.

Because of Khan -- a k a The Merchant of Menace, per Time magazine -- the policy of "mutual deterrence," which worked during the Cold War, is out the window.

Director-producer Julian Sher, who wrote the documentary (with reporting help from David Sanger and William Broad of The New York Times), says Khan "changed the rules of the nuclear game forever." When he outsmarted his watchers and outsourced the bomb, he created what some observers call "a second nuclear age."

You knew all this already, but ...

Here's a taste of the bad news from the documentary:

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad: I'm very puzzled why the United States and the CIA took so long to stop A.Q. Khan because they knew very well what he was up to, there were deals with North Korea with Iran, with Libya and so forth. He was openly advertising his wares you had his website you had newspaper advertisements, you had conferences and so forth. Yet I guess the CIA just wanted to watch.

Matthew Bunn, Managing the Atom Project, Harvard: The obvious question is how much damage was done during that period when we were watching and not yet acting. I think frankly that we should have acted sooner and that what we saw in Libya in particular was more advanced than what we might have thought. It appears that some of North Korea's shopping occurred during this period when we were just watching.

David Sanger, NYT: After 9/11 you'll remember that the phrase about American intelligence was a failure to connect the dots. You can say the same about the early investigations of the A.Q. Khan network. The CIA knew about Khan from the mid 70's. We had two senior officials say to us -- [they were] non-American officials -- that when the Dutch were ready to pick up Khan the CIA and others in the American intelligence went to the Dutch and said no don't touch him we want to follow him. Well they followed him but they lost him. And the result was that they knew he was involved in nuclear exporting, they knew that North Korea and Iran were seeking the bomb. They knew that Libya was interested in nuclear structure but they never sewed it all up together.

Art Brown, Former CIA Operations Director, Asia: In conclusion we certainly let Khan play out too much of his string. Had we stopped him, had we stopped him before 1993 for example we might be looking at a different situation in North Korea. We might be looking, might be looking at a situation where the primary threat was from the plutonium programs and the plutonium programs are checkable. The uranium programs are not checkable. So by letting Khan or not moving quickly enough on Khan it certainly allowed the North Koreans to acquire something that is now going to be very, very difficult to dig out of their nest.

Sanger: For an American intelligence agency that had been beaten up for failures in Iraq in predicting the collapse, failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the great tales they can tell is how they got into the Khan network in Malaysia. They clearly had key elements of the network penetrated. So penetrated that when they raided the BBC China, which was the cargo ship that was carrying giant equipment from Malaysia to Libya, they knew that the ship also had lots of other things completely unrelated to nuclear material. When they pulled the ship in they didn't unload every single cargo container, they asked for specific numbers, so they were watching it being loaded in Malaysia and they knew what they wanted to get at the other end.

Video clips of these and other excerpts may be seen here.

What's in the documentary, though not in the clips, is the Chinese connection. In a Q&A session after the screening Sanger said the most surprising thing he learned from his reporting was that Khan had delivered Chinese blueprints for an atomic bomb to Libya along with the manufacturing equipment. Those blueprints are now in the possession of the U.S. Department of Energy, Sanger said, residing in a vault under the National Mall in Washington. For all anybody knows, however, Khan may have sold copies of the blueprints to others.

Posted by jherman at 10:22 AM

June 4, 2006

PICTURE IT

From the "one picture is worth a thousands words" department, this one of a chained slave in post-Revolutionary America appeared with Stanley Weintraub's review of two books, "Rough Crossings" and "The Forgotten Fifth," in this morning's Washington Post. The review itself is routine, less interesting than the critique by Brent Staples in The New York Times Book Review.

The Staples piece, focusing solely on "Rough Crossings," is more specific and literary (recalling, for instance, "the contradiction cited by Samuel Johnson, who inquired ... of the Americans in 1775: 'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?'"), and it has a striking illustration, too, perfectly suited to the review: George Washington ensnared in a bullwhip, but it's not nearly as affecting as that photo.

And from the "while I'm at it" department, my favorite literary critic, Clive James, has a nice long must-read review, also in this morning's NYTBR, about a new anthology, "American Movie Critics." James has little use for auteurist hype, which I happen to agree with (especially when it comes to the usual polishing of the Ford oeuvre), but it's the entertaining pleasure of the writing that makes the piece a must.

Posted by jherman at 11:24 AM

June 1, 2006

COPYCATTING, ONE MORE TIME

When the newspaper of record frontpages a story headlined "Copycats, or Inspired by Nature? Glass Artists Face Off in Court," I'm reminded once again of Norman O. Mustill, the "original cat" whose art was copycatted with impunity in the pages of the very same newspaper, as detailed in THE COPYCAT AND THE ORIGINAL CAT.

The New York Times story, which appears on the NYT Web site with the partial headline "Glass Artists Face Off in Court," quotes Dale Chihuly, who is suing two glass blowers, as saying, "Look, all I'm trying to do is to prevent somebody from copying me directly."

That's pretty much what Mustill said when he objected to having "my work morphed, reinterpreted, redeployed, and included (anonymously) among the famous" by an artworld darling who has boasted in print, "Copying has been an extensive part of my work as an artist ..."

Chihuly's complaint and Mustill's sound comparable to me in broad outline, even if the artists themselves and the particulars of the issue are not. Chihuly has made millions of dollars from his work. He is "perhaps the world's most successful glass artist," The Times reports. He employs a factory of craftsmen to make his pieces, and his natural forms are "inspired by the sea."

I don't know how much Mustill has earned from his work, but I don't think he's become a millionaire. He is known only among the cognoscenti of what was once regarded as the avant-garde. Everything he creates is made with his own hands. And his forms, natural and unnatural, are inspired by nothing more than his own eye and a mind cognizant of reality and art, history and politics.

With the money and resources and the determination to sue, Chihuly rates the front page. Without those, Mustill can't even get a letter stating his objection into The Times.

Equally peculiar if not more so, the public editor of The Times, Byron Calame, has chosen to ignore the matter. As posted previously:

I messaged Calame on March 13, alerting him to the [Copycat] item and expressing my dismay at "three months of stonewalling in this matter" before finally receiving an unsatisfactory reply from a Times Style Magazine editor. I got back Calame's standard automated response that my message was received: "Everything sent to this mailbox is read by either me or my associate, Joseph Plambeck. If a further reply is appropriate, you will be hearing from us shortly."

I've heard nothing from him shortly or longly.

I'm still waiting.

Postscript: Gee, Virginia. Do ya think there's any connection? The Times has a full-page ad today (Friday, June 2) for a Dale Chihuly show on page 7 in the main news section of the print edition. The ad is too big for my scanner. So here's the top third of it. Ya think Barney (Byron to you, Virginia) will notice?

Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM