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September 27, 2006

TAKE TWO: BILL BURROUGHS & TONY BALCH

Here's one homemade video you won't find on YouTube. RealityStudio just posted it. William S. Burroughs, filmmaker Antony Balch and I made it 35 years ago in Burroughs's London flat. It was an experiment, primitive yet precise, in a particular shape-shifting technique.

Coincidentally, RealityStudio has also posted an overview of an international symposium, William S. Burroughs Revisited, recently held in Mexico City. Jorge Cuevas Cid reports that one of the scholars, Katharine Streip, offered "a really helpful paper" (entitled "Cut-Ups and Sampling") about Burroughs's "cut-up experiments with tape recorders" and his use of "radical fragmentation which, like many other avant-garde experiments, is often labelled as 'unreadable'" on the page.

"Among other things," Cid writes, "she remarked [on] Burroughs's awareness that reproduction technologies could make sense of what in a piece of paper was seemingly senseless. She also stressed the function of cut-ups to destabilize identity, as contemporary media have shown us."

Exactly. Back in 1971, I was using an Akai video camera and portable recorder with 1/4" black-and-white tape (a medium now so obsolete it's not even remembered, let alone contemporary). I don't know how the video will look to others, especially given the magnetic degradation of the tape after so many years in storage.

But as I've written in an explanatory note for RealityStudio, it still "gives the fantastic impression of a ventriloquist dummy coming to life or an ancient Egyptian mummy being revived to cheer the river gods. I think Bill got a kick out of that and the demonstration of how easy it was, even with primitive means, to create a televised witch's brew" for propaganda and disinformation.

Posted by jherman at 9:47 AM

September 25, 2006

TEARS OF BULLSHIT

It's straight out of soap opera: "Tears welled up. ... He hugged her, held her face, kissed her cheek." In fact, it's a description of the Bullshitter-in-Chief expressing his war anguish in private, as the Washington Post headline says.

Not so private that a reporter didn't report the scene. Not so private that it didn't make The Post's front page. Not so private that it didn't appear just in time for the election campaign.

The warm bath of sentimentality for a president who "has presided over more U.S. military casualties than any since Richard M. Nixon" -- portrayed as though he is the victim rather than the cause of so much pain -- is enough to turn your stomach. Mine, anyway.

Besides, I remember Nixon:

Posted by jherman at 2:03 PM

September 22, 2006

NOT JUST 'OURSELVES ALONE'

Words of wisdom: "The older I get the less I believe in fundamentalism of any kind." -- Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, speaking yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations. Here's what he also said.

PS: Let's round off the week with a singalong. Here tiz from one of the staff: "Clinton got a blow job."

Posted by jherman at 9:04 AM

September 19, 2006

SLAM BAM THANK YOU GLAM

A writer friend with a nose for cultural perversity wonders whether Vogue Italia had caught our attention, apropos yesterday's item. "The latest issue threads the needle of glam and violence quite nicely," he says. "Check out Steven Meisel's photo shoot mixing supermodels and terrorists."

So we did, and this is what else we saw:

"Personally, I dig it," our friend adds. "Then again, I wrote a text predicting that in the future terrorists may well have groupies -- so you know where I'm coming from." And if you don't know, you might try "Terror Groupies" in Necrophilia Variations.

Posted by jherman at 10:28 AM

MoMA'S KID-GLOVE TREATMENT

A friend writes:

No feelings were hurt in this week's kid-gloves New Yorker story by Calvin Tomkins on the Museum of Modern Art, which opens its education center next month, two years after its was supposed to be finished as part of the museum's half-billion dollar corporate-style expansion on 53rd Street.

There was no dissection of MoMA's much-disputed recent claim (shot down by two economists in The Wall Street Journal) that it accounts for $2 billion of economic activity annually in New York City. In gentlemanly deference, the New Yorker also made no mention of MoMA's nine-year battle with the U.S. government and a Jewish family over a painting once owned by that family that was looted by the Nazis in 1939 and loaned to MoMA by an Austrian collector. When the family spotted the painting on the wall of MoMA (on loan) in late 1997, MoMA sought to return it to Austria, rather than keep the stolen work in the US for investigation and eventual return. The case is now in federal court.

OK, we have not identified our friend. Guilty as charged. But moving right along:

David D'Arcy, who was ousted by NPR for reporting that Holocaust art-looting story after MoMA complained to NPR execs in early 2005, gives a candid assessment of MoMA's treatment of the press in a sworn affidavit in his current lawsuit against MoMA for slander. 

D'Arcy states that MoMA expunged him from its press list after receiving unfavorable coverage back in 1998, and that it refused to cooperate with the Tate Magazine in Britain once it heard that D'Arcy would be writing the story. (A former Tate editor confirms D'Arcy's statement.)

In an accompanying affidavit, Morley Safer testifies that he and a crew were shut out of MoMA in 1998, when they tried to cover the Jackson Pollock retrospective for CBS Sunday Morning. At the time, museum's ambitious, notoriously vindictive director, Glenn Lowry, said he preferred to have another journalist do the story instead of Safer.

In the meantime, MoMA's ties with NPR are stronger than ever. A paid  "underwriting" spot on NPR cites "the new Museum of Modern Art," and Lowry seems to have no scars from fighting either with aggrieved Jewish families or with the press.

If Tomkins's tale were online, we'd link it. And if The New Yorker put Seymour Hersh on the MoMA story, the museum's former board chairman Ronald Lauder really would need cosmetics.

Posted by jherman at 10:00 AM

September 18, 2006

OBJECTION NOTED

Mocking the Victims -- which questioned the judgment of the most attractive, most luxurious, most upscale Sunday magazine of the nation's most important, most accomplished, most informative newspaper -- brought this reply from the folks at EILEEN FISHER, Inc., a most loyal, most fashionable, most successful advertiser:

Dear Mr. Herman

We read your comments regarding the placement of our ad in The New York Times Magazine on August 27, 2006 and would like to respond.

In a news medium, advertisers are not notified of editorial content in advance.  This practice of separating advertising from editorial ensures that we as citizens are granted a free and unbiased press.  Without such publications as The New York Times who consistently cover difficult and sometimes tragic stories, our country would be, in our view, at a loss.

EILEEN FISHER has supported the outstanding journalism in The Times for ten years.  The integrity of the paper and its magazine is something we deeply value.  We are proud to support it through our advertising dollars.

As a socially conscious company, EILEEN FISHER is dedicated to supporting women through social initiatives that address their well-being and to practicing business responsibly with absolute regard for human rights.  While we focus on women's issues, we also support disaster relief.  As a company EILEEN FISHER gave $50,000 to the Red Cross and matched $17,090 in employee gifts to support the efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  In addition, more than 30 boxes of clothing and office supplies were sent to those affected by this horrible disaster.

We would have appreciated a request for clarification prior to the publication of your thoughts.  If you have any further questions, please contact me.

Best regards,
Hilary Old
Vice President of Communication
EILEEN FISHER, Inc.

Ms. Old has a point. In fact, the company even has a Director of Social Consciousness. But I'm not sure how she squares these two statements: "In a news medium, advertisers are not notified of editorial content in advance" and "We would have appreciated a request for clarification prior to the publication of your thoughts." Nor am I sure of what she or the Director of Social Consciousness think about this particular case of lousy judgment now that they've seen it, since they haven't said. Neither has The Times or its ombudsman.

By the way, I wasn't the only one jarred by the placement of four luxurious ad pages for Eileen Fisher "Alive in the World" clothing smack in the middle of an essay and photo spread on children orphaned by Hurricane Katrina. One former creative director of a top worldwide ad agency messaged in response to the item that he, too, "noticed the same disconcerting juxtaposition."

For the record, though nobody asked: EILEEN FISHER, Inc., which reportedly began on $350, had "over $195 million in 2005 sales," according to the Simmons School of Management, in Boston, Mass., and was picked no less than three times by HR Magazine (published by the Society for Human Resource Management) as one of the "Best 25 Medium Sized Companies to Work for in America."

P.S: A reader writes:

When I read the original post, it struck me as a little unfair to isolate this one case without pointing out that this happens all the time. It's uncouth on the part of the NYT's art directors, and this may be an egregious example, but you see it almost every time you pick up the paper.

I'll never forget once seeing an ad -- years ago -- for women's lingerie alongside the story of some Indian fakir who burned himself alive in protest of something or other. (Perhaps he was protesting the world takeover by Victoria's Secret?) Also, it makes me think of how Benetton Colors used to use this exact same sort of juxtaposition -- only deliberately, in a conscious effort to shock.

Posted by jherman at 9:39 AM

September 14, 2006

MOONED IN THE OVAL OFFICE

I've never been in a room with the Bullshitter-in-Chief. So it's difficult to say what he's like in person. Difficult but not impossible. Here's a description I'd agree with:

There was something about [him] that was hard to abide, a prototypical personality any southerner recognizes -- one characterized by a combination of self-satisfaction, stupidity, and a suggestion of imminent violence, all of it glossed over with a veneer of moral and patriotic respectabiity.

That's former Texas-Ranger-turned-Montana-defense-lawyer Billy Bob Holland talking about a shit heel U.S. senator in "In the Moon of the Red Ponies," a non-Proustian novel by James Lee Burke, left, who was born in Texas, not incidentally, and is wise in the ways of shit heels.

David Brooks, below, has been in a room with the bullshitter. His NYT op-ed column today describes a 90-minute interview, sort of a group grope with several journalists, in the Oval Office. It begins this way:

A leader's first job is to project authority, and George Bush certainly does that. ... Bush swallowed up the room, crouching forward to energetically make a point or spreading his arms wide to illustrate the scope of his ideas -- always projecting confidence and intensity.

It's hard to go further downhill from there, but Brooks manages:

I interview politicians for a living, and every time I brush against Bush I'm reminded that this guy is different. There's none of that hunger for approval that is common to the breed. This is the most inner-directed man on the globe.

Swallowed up the room? (Not on my TV.) Scope of ideas? (A gunscope maybe.) Inner-directed? (How about Cheney-directed or Rove-directed.)

The other striking feature of his conversation is that he possesses an unusual perception of time. Washington, and modern life in general, encourages people to think in the short term. But Bush, who stands aloof, thinks in long durations.

Huh? The "long durations" I've noticed are the empty sighs between words, the confused mumbling, the vacant expressions. On my TV he's lost without his teleprompter. As for Brooks, he's proved again he's the goofiest columnist going: a pundit who'd rather write Proustian fiction.

And btw, a leader's first job is to project authority? (Say hello to Kim Jong Il.)

Posted by jherman at 3:27 PM

September 12, 2006

POST MORTEM

A friend writes:

I tried to avoid most of the media coverage of 9/11's fifth anniversary. I found it too maudlin. When JFK was assassinated, there was -- in addition to commentary, flashbacks and on-the- spot reporting -- an extraordinary amount of serious classical music programming, including majestic masses and Te Deums by Mozart and Beethoven, played live by major orchestras on the following Sunday. I marvelled and felt grateful for those moments of reflection and consolation aired by our mass media. Can you imagine this happening nowadays?

A friend of a friend writes:

Looking at [the Bullshitter-in-Chief], I have just thrown my shoe through my NEW plasma TV. I must find a cheaper form of expression.

Posted by jherman at 10:42 AM

September 11, 2006

BEST 9/11 MEMORIAL

It's up again tonight.

And it looks just like this, clouds included.

Posted by jherman at 8:23 PM

9/11: THE DAY OF, THE DAY AFTER, THE WEEK AFTER

Starting when the news broke, my report grew longer by the minute. It ran, updated in real time, as MSNBC.com's cover story. I cobbled together eye-witness accounts -- my own, those of others from MSNBC and the Associated Press -- writing and rewriting as the catastrophe mounted.

NEW YORK, Sept. 11 -- It was the scene of a nightmare: people on fire jumping in terror from the two World Trade Center towers just before the buildings collapsed, splinters of debris falling from the sky like surreal confetti, deadly smoke blackening the air and, in the aftermath of the devastation, an exodus of thousands of New Yorkers coated in white ash streaming on foot for hours across the city's bridges.

The lede kept changing throughout the day. That graf is what it finally morphed into by the time I quit writing. The story ran here, but for some reason the text was not preserved except for the headline, "Nightmare scene in New York City," and the photo, above.

The entire story is too long to reproduce, so here's an excerpt. (Besides, I'd rather not reprise all the horrors.)

For some downtown workers, this was a day of work that never began. "I just saw the building I work in come down," said businessman Gabriel Ioan, in shock outside City Hall, a cloud of smoke and ash from the World Trade Center behind him. "I just saw the top of Trade Two come down."

MSNBC.com producer Steve Johnson, standing about six blocks from the towers in lower Manhattan, was also an eyewitness to the collapse. "About five minutes before the tower fell, you could see people jumping from the upper floors. I watched six either fall or jump.... The police rolled up [in] vans. Suddenly the top of [the tower] just shattered into tens of thousands of pieces. You could see the walls peel away. The whole thing just disappeared. Then the smoke came up. The cops started yelling, 'Get back! Run! Get away!' I ran inside a hotel, and it went black outside because of the dust."

And here's an excerpt toward the end of the story:

In Brooklyn, across the East River from Manhattan, "the situation is chaos," MSNBC.com producer Michelle Preli reported earlier in the day. "The Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge are just full of people covered in white ash. There's a huge smell of char in the air. People are walking with masks, with their shirts off. People are trying to get out [of the area] any way. People are crying, watching in disbelief. [It's] total shock. It seems all the medical units, ambulances, fire services from Brooklyn [have been called in]."

Although the city itself was in shock, it hadn't really reached uptown Manhattan. On the Upper West Side, where you could see police helicopters standing in the sky like sentinels along the Hudson River, it was all eerily calm.
 
"There are people eating in the restaurants," said Andras Szanto, a staff member at Columbia University. "It is a glorious sunny day -- after a rainstorm of biblical proportions last night -- and this perfect fall day makes it even more surreal.

"At first sight everything seems normal," Szanto continued. "Then you notice strangers huddled around radios, students gazing at TVs in the cafes, lines at the bank for cash."
       
A sign on a Starbucks coffee shop said, "Due to the terrorist attack we are closed today."

Finally:

Five hours after the towers collapsed, people were still streaming on foot across all levels of the Manhattan Bridge as they left the disaster area.

The day after 9/11 I reported from midtown Manhattan.

Here's the lede:

NEW YORK, Sept. 12, 2001 -- Times Square, the fabled crossroads of the world, was nearly deserted Wednesday. Normally packed with pedestrians and jammed with traffic, this symbol of the city's hustle was a sleepy plaza at noon time, a day after the catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center. If you listened closely, you could hear the stop lights blink: The hush was that quiet.

Giant-sized video screens in Times Square usually play to streets filled with shutterbug tourists gawking at the neon wilderness. Not today. "They say this city never sleeps," said Victor Tahiri, 31, standing in his Mr. Softee ice cream van. "It sleeps. Look at this. Nobody."

MSNBC has archived the entire story here.

The week after 9/11 the stock market re-opened on Wall Street, a few blocks from Ground Zero. I reported that, too. Here's the lede:

NEW YORK, Sept. 17 -- This city's psychological resilience, not just its commercial might, was evident Monday in the streets of Lower Manhattan as thousands of downtown workers poured into the financial district amid police cordons and military checkpoints. "It's not about the money," said Paul Orentlicher, a Wall Street architect who lost his best friend when terrorists leveled the World Trade Center towers last Tuesday. "I'm here to reclaim my life and to try to deal with what happened."

MSNBC has archived the entire story here.

Had enough 9/11? I have.

Posted by jherman at 8:39 AM

September 9, 2006

NO PARKING FOR 9/11'S FIFTH

Five years later his nose is out of joint, but he's still the Bullshitter-in-Chief. No, it is not a doctored photo. The AP's Gerald Herbert took the shot. It appeared Thursday, bannered across the bottom of the front page of Metro (scroll down), one of the free daily tabs in New York.

The photo could have served as a poster for "Making New York Safer," a symposium held Friday by the Council on Foreign Relations on the eve of 9/11's fifth anniversary. Though useful as a recap of the latest trends in thinking about terrorism and the so-called "war on terror," the discussions pretty much reiterated what has already appeared in print even in magazines intended for general readers (such as Lawrence Wright's "The Master Plan: What will the next stage of jihad be?" in the most recent issue of The New Yorker).

Still, it was worth being reminded by analysts like R. P. Eddy, a counterterrorism expert, that "the terrorists of the next five to 10 years are a lot closer to the Columbine kids" than to "al-Qaeda central" (Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri et al.) and that the coming wave of "self-radicalized individuals" ought to be regarded as a homegrown police problem -- not a military one in Iraq -- contrary to Cheney doctrine.

Meantime, the funniest remark of the symposium came from an exchange among Steven Simon (co-author of "The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right"), Richard K. Betts (author of "Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning" and professor of political science who also directs the Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University) and Brian Ross (chief investigative correspondent for ABC News).

SIMON: I'm intrigued by why there have not been [any] car bombs in New York .... Terrorism has turned into urban warfare, and car bombs are the urban warfare weapon par excellence.
ROSS (turning to BETTS): Why not?
BETTS: They probably can't find a parking place.

Finally, it was also worth hearing Stephen E. Flynn (author of "America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect us from Terrorism") complain about the $300 billion being misspent on the war in Iraq -- "That's a burn rate of $250 million a day!" -- as he lamented the abysmal underfunding of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Posted by jherman at 1:02 PM

September 4, 2006

NAKED

This week in Mexico City:

¿Quién es?: William S. Burroughs Revisited
September 4-8, 2006, UNAM, Facultad de filosofía y letras, aula de Consejo Técnico

Monday 9/4

Session 1. William S. Burroughs in the Context of American Literature Round Table guided by Allen Hibbard

Tuesday 9/5

Session 2. William S. Burroughs and the Beat Generation Philip Walsh: "Burroughs, Psychopolitics and American Counterculture"

Session 3. William S. Burroughs in Mexico
Rob Johnson: "Cruzar el río: William S. Burroughs Jumps the Puddle from Texas to Mexico"
Oliver Harris: "Burroughs' Mexican Triptych: Junky, Queer, and Yage"

Wednesday 9/6

Session 4. Overcoming the Beat: William S. Burroughs Beyond the Beat Generation Katharine Streip: "Cut-Ups and Sampling"

Session 5. Virus B23: Images and Reproduction in Global Arts
Davis Schneiderman: "Pack Up Your Ermines!: Extra-illustration and Plagiary in the Burroughs Legacy"

Thursday 9/7

Session 6. Cutting Up Knowledge: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of William S. Burroughs. Oliver Harris: "Cut Up or Shut Up"

Session 7. He is a writer
Allen Hibbard: "William S. Burroughs a literary saboteur"
Jeffrey Miller: "Freedom of Speech & Press, A Case Study: Early Routines and the Great Naropa Poetry Wars at Cadmus Editions"

Posted by jherman at 11:50 AM