March 24, 2008
Not the Yellow Brick Road
The title -- "Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz" -- tells you it's an unusual novel. But it still doesn't prepare you for the story (or the swastika on the cover). Which is why "Horror Panegyric," published today by Savoy Books, works so handily.
As Keith Seward explains in his introductory essay:
Motherfuckers' principals are Meng and Ecker, twins who had been subject to "scientific" experiments by Josef Mengele. After the war they find themselves in northern England, waiting for Lord Horror the way others wait for Godot. Ecker is rational but violent, Meng is a mutant whose huge cock and tits are nothing compared to the mutations of his mind. Not Holocaust survivors in any sense you've ever seen before, Meng and Ecker have adopted the ways of their captors -- the bloodlusts and hates. However, there is nothing paramilitary about them. They're not neo-Nazis or skinheads. They're more like the ultraviolent droogs of A Clockwork Orange, though it is quite possible that the droogs would not feel any affinity in return. Meng and Ecker are even further out in some post-war delirium. Auschwitz, meet Oz.
"Motherfuckers" is the third in a series of novels by the British writing and publishing team David Britton and Michael Butterworth. The other two are "Lord Horror" (now out of print) and "Baptised in the Blood of Millions." They succeed as "satire via hyperbole and excess," Seward writes, by applying to literature what he calls "the Boschian method":
• "time no longer flows in a straight line"
• "history loses its coordinate points and therefore its constancy
• "cause and effect are sundered"
• "space loses its divisions"
• "motion loses its efficacy"
• "gravity loses its inescapability"
• "life loses its phyla"
• "characters mutate"
• "behaviours lose their norms. Or rather, norms are represented not as injunctions but as worst-case scenarios"
• "art loses its conventions"
"Sure, there are writers who 'push the envelope,'" Seward adds. "But Motherfuckers does not just push the envelope. It beats at it with its fists, kicks, bites, and stabs the envelope. No matter how jaded a reader you are, no matter how much you've read your Henry Miller and Marquis de Sade, this is the book that will leave you feeling bad for the envelope. After Motherfuckers, it will never be the same again."
The police in Manchester, England (where Britton and Butterworth are based), didn't appreciate the idea of "satire via hyperbole and excess." Not long after "Lord Horror" was published, in 1989, the pair paid for their provocations in jail time and other forms of harrassment. Half the print run was confiscated, and a judge declared the book obscene, "less for its sex or violence than for anti-semitic ravings put into the mouths of anti-semitic characters," Seward notes. (The fact that the title character of "Lord Horror" is based on the World War II British fascist William Joyce, popularly known as Lord Haw-Haw, apparently failed to strike the judge as relevant.)
Britton went to prison for four months. Instead of discouraging him, the sentence hardened his resolve. It was in prison that he conceived the story of "Motherfuckers."
Here's a taste of it, taken from "Horror Panegyric," which offers excerpts of all three novels:
Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A fortune awaited the author who could bring 'Mr Auschwitz' to life. To recreate the persona of Auschwitz would be an ordained mission. Auschwitz, the holy end-all of life's futile pattern, slinking through the subconscious of humanity, the one archetypal riff common to all nightmares, fuelled on the anvil of Little Richard.In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well-known globally as Coca Cola, taking all media under its encompassing umbrella. The camps were the obvious ultimate enclosed world, the desired image of world television, beamed by satellite into each city, town and village, ideal for community soap operas (a story of everyday life on the edge of life), of science fiction time travel (travel back through your life and end it in Auschwitz). In this televised scenario thhe dog-boys loomed large as Heathcliff doomed lovers, the spice of sexy bodice-rippers which thrilled millions of women. Guilt would never stand in the way of commerce ...
Seward calls "Motherfuckers" a masterpiece and compares it to the works of the Marquis de Sade and William S. Burroughs. After reading it myself, I'm inclined to agree. But he prefers not to emphasize "the rectitude of these books" for their moral instruction. "You can read them like the Gospel, if you want, and draw out the lessons," he writes. "But that's not really the point. These are not moral books. They're good books."
To read Seward's entire essay, go here.
Posted by jherman at 2:43 PM
March 22, 2008
A View from the Top
Things are going so well in Iraq that, as the headline says, "Pentagon Urges Delay in U.S. Troop Reductions in Iraq." Or as retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey said the other day at the Council on Foreign Relations, "If you look at the totality of our experience in Iraq, it's been a major disaster. There's no two ways about it."
(You've heard that before, of course. There's also McCain's way -- a k a the BananaRepublican way.)
Here's something else McCaffrey said that I'm sure you've heard: Things are going so well that "the Maliki government right now" is "largely dysfunctional. To wit -- if you went to any one of Iraq's provinces and asked, 'Is there a federal government that is dominant in electrical energy, the oil business, health, education, security?' The answer would be, 'No.'" But this, he added, is "not to imply the country is in chaos." After all, things are going so well.
"The change in Iraq is like night and day," McCaffrey said. "The violence is down enormously. It's gone from bordering on the edge of all-out civil war to completely different circumstances." How different? Well, there are six million people in Baghdad, "all of them armed."
Here's another way to say how swell it's going:
There's "still massive unemployment. Our allies are leaving." And "there is a complete lack of political domestic support to continue the war." (I think he meant political support in the U.S., minus McCain and Joe Lieberman et al.)
So Jane Arraf, the former CNN Baghdad Bureau Chief, asked, "What do you think Iraq is going to look like in five years?'
"I don't know," McCaffrey said. "I think it's hard to imagine that anyone thinks an all-out civil war to settle the political struggle is a good outcome. I think there's a fear on the part of the Iraqi leadership that all-out civil war will be a blood bath that'll yield Pol Pot's Cambodia." That's how really well things are going.
"The problem," he added, is whether "the Constitution we issued them [is] appropriate for that people and this time. I think there's a good argument that it isn't. So I'd be unsurprised if two years from now there isn't some hotshot two-star general as head of government in Iraq, and I'm not so sure that wouldn't serve the interests of the Iraqi people and their neighbors as well as some of the alternatives."
Which is to say that things are going really really well.
Consider this: "The Sunnis figured out that we're leaving -- and by the way, we are leaving in the next 36 months," he said. Many have become our paid allies for the moment. There are "80,000 primarily Sunni insurgents that we're paying $300 a month to guard their own village[s], their own neighborhood[s], and that has defused an awful lot of the violent insurgency struggle that we are trying to dominate." This comes to $24 million a month for bribes to the tribes. Nearly $300 mil a year. Chickenfeed.
Some more good news: "Your Air Force -- our principal fighter aircraft, probably a quarter of them are down now -- F-15s -- and will never fly again. And the tanker fleet is broken. If you want to have a global air force, there's no sense in buying one unless you buy the tanker fleet to sustain it. Our airlift assets are being ground down by overuse and no resources. Our C-5A aircraft are busted. They're over." Also, "we now have 124,000 contractors in Iraq. They're doing all our retail [and] wholesale logistics. Damn near. They're doing all of our long-haul communications. ... We've been forced to go to contractors to carry out absolutely what our military functions [are]."
But here's what McCaffrey called the truly "good news": Not only has the current Secretary of Defense Bill Gates "restored sanity to the national security process," but the U.S. commander in Iraq is a superhero straight out of the comics: "David Petraeus, personally, I think may be the most talented person I ever met in my life. ... He looks like a movie star. He can jump over high hedges in a single bound. A doctorate from Princeton. He likes being in the public eye. And our U.S. Ambassador there, Ryan Crocker, is as good as he is."
If that's not proof that things are going really, really, really well in Iraq, then McCaffrey is a monkey's uncle. Meanwhile, the even better good news is that when you look at the worldwide terrorist picture, "the Saudi royal family is no longer funding Al Qaeda."
We do have a leetle problem, though. The threat from Al Qaeda "has morphed," he said. "If you asked me to identify the capital of terrorism, I'd be more likely to say London than Damascus and more likely to say Paris and Hamburg than Teheran." And he predicts, "in the first term of the next administration there will be an attack on the U.S."
Why so? Because it's going so well.
Posted by jherman at 1:58 PM
March 19, 2008
Five Years Later
Words won't do:
Postscript: Now have a look at Bearing Witness. As a friend says, "Won't see thees on CNN or FUX news."
Posted by jherman at 9:37 AM
March 15, 2008
Putting Him Where He Belongs
I couldn't be there for his speech to the financial bigwigs, but Gail Collins was. Her column this morning shows yet again that the President With His Head Up His Ass is well named. She writes:
The president squinched his face and bit his lip and seemed too antsy to stand still. As he searched for the name of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia ("the king, uh, the king of Saudi") and made guy-fun of one of the questioners ("Who picked Gigot?"), you had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.
The column is also charming proof that Collins must be a fan of the 1940 screwball comedy "His Girl Friday" and Walter J. Burns, the editor of The Morning Post, who orders an underling in the newsroom, "Take the President's speech and run it on the funny page."
Burns has plenty of gems like that. Here's another: "Now, listen, Duffy -- I want you to tear out the whole front page... That's what I said -- the whole front page! Never mind the European war! We've got something a whole lot bigger than that."
Posted by jherman at 8:48 AM
March 7, 2008
Take the What Train?
Some folks in Montreal want to name a busy subway station for the late great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in the Montreal nabe where he was born and raised, The Globe and Mail reports.
But zehr eez a leetle problem: The station is already named for Lionel-Adolphe Groulx, a locally famous Quebec priest notable for his xenophobic racism (a k a "nationalistic" beliefs).
Not to worry. A McGill University professor suggests that the station name be shared. He favors "paying homage to both men" (you read that right) with the hyphenated name Station Oscar Peterson-Lionel Groulx.
"Yes, there is a disagreeable underside to the man -- the anti-Semitism, the fascist sympathies," the prof concedes, referring to Groulx of course. But he tells the paper, "I feel uncomfortable about erasing his impact from Quebec history." (If only.) And the prof adds, "We could enjoy the pleasure of an interesting meeting of two important historical figures." (You read that right, too.)
"Yeah," says a friend of mine, a Montreal native who fled the city long ago. "For an allegedly enlightened society, a great number of hardcore fascist bastids is still well entrenched there. I theenk, senor, Kweebek could be considered der Österreich of N. America."
Postscript: Rename the station? Forget it.
Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM
March 6, 2008
Blog Miscellany
A reader from Oregon writes, "Help us, we who check your blog regularly!! Please add something -- ANYTHING!!!! I forget about it being there and then get my special dose of heavy metal speed before I can mute the chaos! -- Your loving fans in the thousands ..."
OK, you asked for it. Here's anything:
A reader from Yurp writes, "Ach!! The Blinding Titties! I'm wearing a string of garlic around my neck now which I clutch feverishly whenever they appear ... and I'm stuffing chunks of garlic in my ears whenever I get hit by the Torture Hit Parade (Actually, I luuuuv it ... Our kraut secretary of the interior, by the way, has "The History of Torture" on his coffee table...) ... Nader: Isn't he, in effect, saying that those of his Florida voters who would have switched to Gore in the case of his abstinence would have given Al a fat lead? However, math is not my forte ... P.S. The Ladykiller rides again...He is now wreaking havoc in Paris ... Sauve qui peut ..."
And another from the Southwest boondocks: "Have you seen this? The mind boggles at possibilities in the hands of neo-quizzers. 'twould make water boarding obsolete, not ta mench human cattle prod ta line 'em up ... Forget da arbeit macht frei signs."
Then yesterday there was David Brooks to the grammar born: "I'm far from the biggest Hillary-lover on the planet, but her resilience and courage is moving." Which brought this reply: "Brooks listens far too much to his hero, the President With His Head Up His Ass. They is fucking stupid."
And finally, shades of James Gilray:
Posted by jherman at 8:49 AM
February 29, 2008
Now for Your Hit Parade
Call it "Pissing Strange." It's not the rock musical "Passing Strange," which just opened on Broadway to crix raves. And it's not with Snooky Lanson, either. Mother Jones magazine calls it "The Torture Playlist" -- a k a the top songs used on detainees in American military prisons "to induce sleep deprivation," to "prolong capture shock," and to "drown out screams."
Listen here or here:
Aiiieeee!! Click the play/pause button to stop the damn sound!
Posted by jherman at 9:59 AM
February 27, 2008
Is Ralph a Spoiler? Or Are We a Banana Republic?
The day after CNN reported that "Nader takes steps towards another White House bid," I had an exchange -- it was a month ago -- with Henry Kisor, an old friend from former years at the Chicago Sun-Times. Citing that report, I said in a comment on one of Henry's blogposts, None of the above, "Go, Ralph, Go!"
The rest of the exchange went like this:
Henry said,
January 31, 2008 at 10:58 am
It's a good thing that Nader admits that he's a minor candidate, the representative of a fringe. But it is appalling that he refuses to admit (maybe even to understand) that a candidacy such as his can result in the election of the worst alternative. He makes his point, but the rest of us have to live with the results.
Jan Herman said,
January 31, 2008 at 12:01 pm
If Nader does run, and if the contest between the two major candidates is close enough for him to actually be a spoiler, then we who have to live with the results will get what we deserve.
Henry said,
January 31, 2008 at 12:05 pm
And we got what we deserved because Ralph ran? I don't see the logic there.
Jan Herman said,
January 31, 2008 at 12:51 pm
That's not what I mean at all. I don't believe Ralph was the spoiler in 2000. Gore should have won going away. It wasn't Ralph that stopped him. There were many other, too many other, factors involved to blame that catastrophe on him. The Supreme Court, for one. What I'm saying is that the upcoming election shouldn't be close enough for him to be a spoiler.(If McCain is the Republican nominee, the electorate ought to reject him overwhelmingly for, among other things, his war-mongering triumphalism. And if it's Romney, it ought to reject him overwhelmingly for, among other things, his democracy-needs-religion crapola. If the Democrats don't win by a landslide against either of them, it will show just how much of a Banana Republic we've become.)
Then, on Feb. 26, Nader announced on "Meet the Press" that he will run, and yesterday NY Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote:
When asked about the possibility of being a spoiler, of tilting the election to John McCain, Mr. Nader replied: "Not a chance. If the Democrats can't landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form."
Herbert, who obviously admires Nader, gently but firmly rebukes him: "He won't countenance the idea that there might be something destructive about his candidacy."
Well, have a look at a video clip of Nader's statement. It's only three minutes long and gives his full reply. See whether Nader makes sense or if he is, as his critics claim, merely an overweaning egotist who can't resist putting himself at the center of public attention.
Prefer to read what Nader said without having to watching an ad on the way to the video? Or because you're deaf and NBC, like all the networks and all the Internet sites for news or entertainment, fails to offer audio captioning? Here's the text of the full reply to Tim Russert, excerpted from a transcript of the program:
MR. RUSSERT: Will you run for president as an independent in 2008?MR. NADER: Let me put it in context, to make it a little more palatable to people who have closed minds. Twenty-four percent of the American people are satisfied with the state of the country, according to Gallup. That's about the lowest ranking ever. Sixty-one percent think both major parties are failing. And, according to Frank Luntz's poll, a Republican, 80 percent would consider voting for a independent this year. Now, you take that framework of people feeling locked out, shut, shut out, marginalized, disrespected and you go from Iraq to Palestine/Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bungling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts, getting a decent energy bill through, and you have to ask yourself, as a citizen, should we elaborate the issues that the two are not talking about? And the--all, all the candidates--McCain, Obama and Clinton--are against single payer health insurance, full Medicare for all. I'm for it, as well as millions of Americans and 59 percent of physicians in a forthcoming poll this April. People don't like Pentagon waste, a bloated military budget, all the reports in the press and in the GAO reports. A wasteful defense is a weak defense. It takes away taxpayer money that can go to the necessities of the American people. That's off the table to Obama and Clinton and McCain.
The issue of labor law reform, repealing the notorious Taft-Hartley Act that keeps workers who are now more defenseless than ever against corporate globalization from organizing to defend their interests. Cracking down on corporate crime. The media--the mainstream media repeatedly indicating how trillions of dollars have been drained and fleeced and looted from millions of workers and investors who don't have many rights these days, and pensioners. You know, when you see the paralysis of the government, when you see Washington, D.C., be corporate-occupied territory, every department agency controlled by overwhelming presence of corporate lobbyists, corporate executives in high government positions, turning the government against its own people, you--one feels an obligation, Tim, to try to open the doorways, to try to get better ballot access, to respect dissent in America in the terms of third parties and, and independent candidates; to recognize historically that great issues have come in our history against slavery and women rights to vote and worker and farmer progressives, through little parties that never ran--won any national election. Dissent is the mother of ascent. And in that context, I have decided to run for president.
Continuing right along from the text transcript, which is on this video clip:
MR. RUSSERT: As you know, Ralph Nader, they'll be Democrats all across the country who are going to find this very disturbing news, and they'll point again to 2000. This was the vote count. Al Gore winning the popular vote, but you've got 2.7 percent, nearly three million votes, in 2000. Then Florida, Florida, Florida. As you remember, George Bush won Florida by 537 votes. You've got 97,488. Democrat after Democrat says to this day, Ralph Nader, if your name had not been on that ballot, Al Gore would've carried Florida. Exit polls show he would've carried Nader voters 2-to-1. Gore would've been president and not George Bush. You, Ralph Nader are responsible for what has happened the last seven years.MR. NADER: Not, not George Bush? Not the Democrats in Congress? Not the voters who voted for George Bush? But there were Democrats in Florida, 250,000 of them. You know, I wish we'd have Al Gore on this program someday Tim and ask him, "Why did you not become president in 2000?" And I think what he's going to tell you is he thought he did win Florida, but it was taken from him before, during and after the election from Tallahassee. Katherine Bush -- you know the secretary of the state...
MR. RUSSERT: Katherine Harris.
MR. NADER: Harris, rather, and Jeb Bush, all the way to that terribly politicized Supreme Court decision. But the, the political bigotry that's involved here is that we shouldn't enter the electoral arena? We, all of us who, who, who think that the country needs an infusion of freedom, democracy, choice, dissent should just sit on the sidelines and watch the two parties own all the voters and turn the government over to big business? What's really important here is, if you want to look at it analytically, is there--Mr. Gore would, would tell you if he won Tennessee, anything else being equal, he would've been president. It's his home state. If he won Arkansas, everything else being equal, he would've been president. The mayor of Miami sabotaged the Democrats because of a grudge, didn't bring thousands of votes out. Quarter of a million Democrats voted for Bush in Florida. There is all kinds of thievery in Florida.
So why do they blame the Greens? Why do they blame the people all over the country who are trying to have a progressive platform, not just the environment. What was their crime? Why, why, why isn't there tolerance for candidates' rights the way there is a building tolerance over the last 50 years for voter rights? Because without voter rights, candidate rights don't mean much. And without candidate rights--more voices and choices -- voter rights don't mean much. I -- I'm amazed at the liberal intelligencia here. They are analytic and they deal with all kinds of variables, but when it comes to 2000 election, it's just one variable.
And I might add that Solon Simmons and other scholars -- he teaches at George Mason -- have shown that by pushing Gore to take more progressive stands, he got more votes than the votes he allegedly -- were withdrawn from for the Green party. Twenty-five percent of my vote, according to a Democratic pollster, exit poll, would've gone to Bush. Thirty-nine percent would've gone to Gore and the rest would've stayed home. Every major -- every third party in Florida got more votes than the 537 vote gap. So let's get over it and try to have a diverse multiple choice, multiple party democracy the way they have in Western Europe and Canada. This bit of, of spoiler is really very astonishing. These are the two parties who've spoiled our electoral system, money, they can't even count the votes, they steal--the Republicans steal the votes, and the Democrats knock third party candidates off the ballot. That's their specialty these days.
And now -- for the sake of completeness -- the text (coming about three minutes into this video clip) cited by Bob Herbert:
MR. RUSSERT: How would you feel, however, if Ralph Nader's presence on the ballot tilted Florida or Ohio to John McCain and McCain became president, and Barack Obama, the first African-American who had been nominated by the Democratic Party -- this is hypothetical -- did not become a president and people turned to you and said, "Nader, you've done it again"?MR. NADER: Not a chance. If the Democrats can't landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form. You think the American people are going to vote for a pro-war John McCain who almost gives an indication that he's the candidate of perpetual war, perpetual intervention overseas? You think they're going to vote for a Republican like McCain, who allies himself with the criminal, recidivistic regime of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the most multipliable impeachable presidency in American history? Many leading members of the bar, including the former head of the American Bar Association, Michael Greco, absolutely dismayed over the violations of the Constitution, our federal laws, the criminal, illegal war in Iraq and the occupation? There's no way. That's why we have to take this opportunity to have a much broader debate on the issues that relate to the American people, as, as, as a fellow in Long Island said recently, Mr. Sloane, he said, "These parties aren't speaking to me. They're not speaking to my problems, to my family's problems."
So, yeah. "Go, Ralph, Go!"
Postscript: "Well. I'd say, 'Go back, Ralph, go back!'" (Henry's riposte. And, he insists, "Waving my arms wildly, too.")
Posted by jherman at 9:29 AM
February 20, 2008
Milton Glaser ♥ Information, Not Persuasion
The 79-year-old graphic designer perhaps most famous for creating the I♥NY logo had a dose of surprising advice last week for the propagandists among us -- the marketers, advertisers, public-relations spinners and, yes, journalists -- along with citizens at large facing an onslaught of political campaigns.
It is "essential for us all to question all the beliefs we cherish," Milton Glaser said in his keynote speech to a daylong 'ganda bash, "Where the Truth Lies," organized by the School of Visual Arts with The Graduate Center, CUNY. "Beliefs must be held lightly because certainty can be the enemy of truth."
Propaganda "substitutes an alien authority for our own perception," he said, adding that "the intersection of fear and persuasion has created the world as we know it" and that we are faced with a "constant and relentless subversion of what is real."
Art is the antidote, Glaser asserted. "Art may be the only truth we can ever know," he said. Through art, "what is real becomes visible." Thus, he takes as his touchstone the words of the poet Horace: "The purpose of art is to inform and delight." Notice, he said, that "Horace did not say persuade and delight."
Furthermore, "art is a survival mechanism for the human species," Glaser noted. "Otherwise it would not have lasted this long." He cited the Lascaux cave paintings of prehistoric times to bolster his point.
In addition to the advice that peppered his speech, Glaser showed slides of some of his work. One, displaying a set of buttons created for The Nation magazine, was called "The Purple Coalition" -- as opposed to red or blue -- and it doesn't seem to have worked yet. It offered the following epigrams, one to a button, and a few more:
Principles not politics
Strength not stubbornness
Justice not junkets
Patriotism not ideology
Cooperation not corruption
Truth not spin
Openness not secrecy
Negotiation not intervention
Jobs not pay-offs
Civility not mudslinging
Voting rights not voter fraud
Security not torture
Civil rights not surveillance
Competence not cronyism
Leadership not devisiveness
Facts not fear
Another slide, titled "Goodbye," displayed four buttons with two characters each -- IM PE AC H! -- and a caption that said: "Help send the president on his way with this new four-button set." Sadly, given the results so far, that too is one of Glaser's less persuasive -- or to use his term, informative -- designs.
Postscript: A reader writes, "Pretty good, save for the fact that Patriotism IS Ideology -- often at its most pernicious." Exactly right. Every time someone raises the banner of patriotism, I cringe.
PPS: On Feb. 22 The Nation magazine posted the text of Glaser's presentation. Go here: "Art and Propaganda".
Posted by jherman at 9:49 AM
February 17, 2008
May We Remind You?
In "The War That Isn't," his latest column in National Journal, William Powers notes, "It's not at all unusual lately to pick up a large metropolitan newspaper and find that there is nothing -- zero -- on the front page about a war in which nearly 4,000 Americans have died." (Let alone the tens of thousands wounded. Or the hundreds of thousands of dead or wounded Iraqis and the millions forced to flee.)
Not to worry. Unless you agree with George C. Wilson, whose article in Army Times and other military publications, "Vietnam Redux," points out, "Now, as then, [the] generals are leading us down the primrose path." But this kind of news, as Powers says, "gets lost in the noise of other news." You know: "Obama and the Clintons. The mortgage crisis. Sports. The Hollywood writers' strike. The Clintons. The weather. Obama. Celebrities in trouble. Obama. Your health."
Postscript: An inherent part of genocide is to deny that people have died. Read "Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy," about "the war's exceptional human costs" and the smear campaign to deny them. It is a devastating indictment of the American press -- and National Journal and The Wall Street Journal in particular -- by John Tirman, the executive director and a principle research scientist at M.I.T.'s Center for International Studies. Tirman commissioned the survey published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006, that concluded that 600,000 Iraqis died during the first 40 months of the war.
Posted by jherman at 9:08 AM
February 13, 2008
'Ganda Bash
Big all-day propaganda conference coming up in midtown Madhattan: "Where the Truth Lies." Keynoter: Milton Glaser. He asks, per the press release, "Is there any difference between good propaganda and bad propaganda?" Put another way, "Where does truth end and 'spin' begin?"
Topics include: How American Presidents Persuade the Public to Go to War. "It is not war that Americans hate, but, rather, unsuccessful wars," says Eugene Secunda, a marketing and media prof at NYU, per the release. He explains why a majority of Americans "are more than willing to buy a war if it is properly packaged and skillfully marketed."
How about this one? Learning from Las Vegas. "Progressives continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them," says Stephen Duncombe, a political activist and NYU prof. He believes they need to adopt a "spectacular vernacular" without adopting Vegas values. (Paul Krassner, anyone?) And this: The Changing Face of Consumer Marketing. "Sam Travis Ewen -- the man behind the LED light boards that prompted officials to shut down Boston last year -- has some answers." (Abbie Hoffman, anyone?)
Here's a cutie: Your Consumer is Revolting. With a serious subtitle: The History of Rumor Control in American Marketing. "American corporations and government entities have long attempted to monitor, control and influence word-of-mouth communication in order to align it with their own interests." The marketing exec who "led all communication research for Procter & Gamble," per the press release, "will survey the development of rumor control, as the process is known, and the marketing industry's recent response to mass adoption of the Internet."
There's plenty more: Why You Can Trust Comment and Opinion More Than News, also Corporations in the Classroom, and an advance screening of clips from a 10-hour PBS documentary, "Carrier," about life on the USS Nimitz during a six-month deployment to the Persian Gulf.
The conference, moderated by David Brancaccio, is being presented by the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in collaboration with the PhD Programs in History and Sociology of the Graduate Center, CUNY. It begins Friday (Feb. 15) at 9 a.m. and runs through 4 p.m. Place: 365 Fifth Ave. (btwn 34th & 35th Streets), in the Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall, GC CUNY. $35 (general admission); $20 (students). Tel: 212.592.2200.
Posted by jherman at 9:50 AM
February 11, 2008
Our Subprime War
Whenever I read or hear about the success of the surge, I substitute the phrase bribes to the tribes. Those four little words make a world of difference, and they go back a long way -- viz. "Protection Payments" made to Tribes in Ottoman Gaza (1519-1582) -- but you don't see them often enough in news accounts of the Iraq war.
Nor do you hear the President With His Head Up His Ass boasting about our bribes to the tribes. He brags instead, as he did the other day, about "the surge of forces." Even a lengthy report that broke the news of the new Army operations manual on counterinsurgency, revised after the "hard-won lessons" of Afghanistan and Iraq, fails to mention bribery. It speaks instead about the importance of street patrols.
Maybe when the revised operations manual is made public later this month, we'll see the inclusion of a new doctrinal tactic to formalize what has already happened: "Bring lotsa cash to buy off the enemy, especially in ten-million-dollar bricks."
(Hmmm, thanks to Fred Kaplan at Slate, I see that the manual has already been posted in a huge pdf file by Secrecy News. Downloading the 314-page manual-- it's 28 MB -- is guaranteed to freeze your browser for a while. But I managed, and a quick glance through the pages indicates that bribing insurgents is not mentioned anywhere.)
A weapons analyst I know can't understand why "the press lays off all this stuff. It scrubs everything clean, sanitizes it, and presents it in the best possible light. If this were a Democratic president overseeing strategy, he would be ripped apart. We have a real scandal. It's not Whitewater. It's something at the highest level of national security."
In fairness, I have to point out that it's not as if bribes to the tribes have gone unnoticed. Not too long ago, the BBC reported, as did others, that the payoffs have made al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri very unhappy. (Scroll way down.) And they were mentioned in passing only yesterday by NYT reporter Alissa J. Rubin. She noted that groups paid by the American military "to fight Islamic extremists" in Iraq's Anbar Province "have mostly seemed to be cooperating," although recently "their behavior has been [um] problematic."
Meaning, of course, that bribes notwithstanding they'd rather put their own interests ahead of ours and others'. Now ain't that a surprise.
Posted by jherman at 10:10 AM
February 8, 2008
Burros Roam Free
Just back from a trip to Arizona, where I met a herd of typical McCain voters wandering through the business district of Oatman, a former mining town that evokes the Old West with the aura if not quite the flair of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. This voter was about to enter the polling booth at a local hotel. (In case you're wondering, the sign says, "Public restrooms are across and down the street.⇒") And here's a closeup of the leaders of the herd:
Posted by jherman at 9:42 AM
January 28, 2008
Blogging During Wartime
The puppet master looks like your friendly uncle with a Cheshire cat grin and rose-colored glasses that drip with what? ... strawberry soda? ... cherry syrup? ... Aw gee, have a closer look, it's blood.
Artist Joshua Brown, who drew the caricature as a diary entry for his visual political blog Life During Wartime, says that before the invasion of Iraq he was fooled into believing "it was going to be a short, ugly, bloody war and that American influence in the Middle East was going to be triumphant."
It's a telling admission, because Brown's main occupation is teaching radical social history. (He is a grad school professor with a long list of scholarly works to his credit.) But candor is typical of him and worth keeping in mind when looking at the exhibition of all 270 diary entries now on view at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in Manhattan.
Brown trained as an artist before getting his Ph.D. in working-class history at Columbia. (Two murals he painted in 1979 for Yoko Ono and John Lennon apparently still decorate her apartment in the Dakota.) These days he heads the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning based at the Grad Center.
Brown began doing his visual blog on the first day of the Iraq war. In a statement for the Life During Wartime exhibition, he writes:
In the beginning I intended to chronicle and comment on the impact of the war on the home front -- and also to convey some critical views about the war and the duplicitous reasons for its prosecution, which at the time, and especially in editorial cartoons, were getting comparatively little public access.
Starting with a rush, he posted a diary entry "every two or three days," Brown says. He then settled down to posting them once a week. "It was the first time I had done art regularly in 30 years," he adds. "I'm not happy with every one by a long shot, but I don't feel lost." Politically, however, he still feels "pissed off, frustrated and ineffective. I must say it doesn't feel cathartic."
Change of subject: Jan. 29 -- The email message from Moveon.org began, "If you're like us, you dread watching the State of the Union. It's depressing: The doublespeak, the distortions, the incessant Republican applause for far-right policies and words that mean nothing."
True, but the message didn't go far enough. It should have continued like this: "It is never more apparent than during the State of the Union that the pols in the Congress on both sides of the aisle are a clubby class apart, all of them wedded under the skin."
Last night there she was, Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the so-called opposition, smiling like the queen of a beauty pageant, applauding the President With His Head Up His Ass -- and applauding and applauding -- long after decorum required, thus setting a deferential tone for his reception. (At least Harry Reid, for whom I have no great love, sat stone-faced.)
And we, the poor schmucks of the electorate, got to watch.
Postscript: Jan. 30 -- Furthermore, is anyone these days writing a funnier, more penetrating column than Mark Morford? If there is, I don't know about it. He even gives great link. Read his latest. It's about the 935 lies.
Posted by jherman at 12:12 PM
January 23, 2008
Essential Reading
A new, huge database created for the first time and posted online by the Center for Public Integrity collects the BananaRepublican lies that took us to war in Iraq. One section highlights Key False Statements.
Researchers Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith write:
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
The center describes itself as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan, non-advocacy, independent journalism organization" designed "to produce original investigative journalism about significant public issues to make institutional power more transparent and accountable."
The New York Times reports this morning in its news story on the database: "There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war."
That is true. But the old info is plenty startling, doncha think? I'd bet Joshua Brown thinks so. Consider his diary entry for Dec. 7, 2005, above, from his blog Life During Wartime. It's two years old, sure, but as startling as ever. And the words -- pace, Miss Piggy -- are pure Condi. Even if they don't turn up in the database quoted precisely that way.
(Not incidentally, an exhibition of four years of Brown's diary entries, from 2003 to 2007, is on view through Feb. 29 at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he teaches history and directs the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning. More on that later.)
Posted by jherman at 8:39 AM
January 20, 2008
Boris Lurie, R.I.P.
The epigraph on "NO!art MAN," a major 2001 documentary about Boris Lurie, who died earlier this month, says it all: "In a time of wars and extermination, aesthetic exercises and decorative patterns are not enough." Those are Lurie's words, and now they might as well serve as his epitaph.
The obit by Colin Moynihan in The New York Times was an excellent if brief summary of the artist's life and historical significance. But it only skimmed the surface.
For a deeper appreciation of Lurie's prolific output, as well as his importance, you have to go to the comprehensive Web site NO!art created and maintained by Dietmar Kirves. It is revelatory. There you will find more than 100 images of Lurie's paintings, assemblages, collages, multiples, etchings, posters, sculptures and mixed media works, along with detailed biographical notes, extensive interviews, a filmography of documentaries about him, and critiques, press reports and essays that appeared over the years.
Although I've known about Lurie since 1973, when I published one of his essays in a Something Else Press anthology (long after he launched the downtown NO!art movement with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher), my interest was reignited by Clayton Patterson, when he included Lurie in a group show, "326 Years of Hip," at his gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2005. (I've posted other items about Lurie -- "Boris Lurie's 'NO!art' and the Holocaust," "Shoah and Pin-Ups" and "Boris on the Bill" -- but it would be an exaggeraton to say they even barely scratch the surface.)
It is obvious from the 1959 "Railroad Collage," above, that the Holocaust dominates Lurie's art. How could it not? He was a survivor.
Lurie clearly had the skills to fit any aesthetic mold if he chose. Have a look at the painterly, figurative craftsmanship in his "Dismembered Woman" series: "Figure and Bathtub," or "Apple Eater," or "Nude stepping," or "Pinup with Flower," below.
But if the Holocaust dominates Lurie's work and is the substrate of the NO!art movement as a whole, other matters were addressed as well.
The Israeli filmmaker Amikam Goldman, who made "NO!art MAN," quotes art critic Sarah Schmerler on the "principle aim of NO!art ... to bring back into art the subjects of real life. It thus stood in opposition to the two most popular movements of the era, abstract expressionism and pop art."
"Lurie's art has the distinction of knowing about both freedom and imprisonment, and it is no wonder his work differed from that of the same generation on these shores," Schmerler wrote in a catalog for the "Bleed Show, 1969," a retrospective exhibit mounted in 1997 at the Janos Gat Gallery in New York. "Most American artists of the '40s were fresh out of art school. Lurie was fresh out of Buchenwald."
Not surprisingly, Lurie was unwilling to curry favor with the dealers, collectors and curators whose tastes were offended by the vulgarity he prized in his work. "The art market is nothing but a racket," he said. "There is an established pyramid. ... Everybody who wants to benefit from it has to participate -- if he is permitted to participate."
Nor should it come as a surprise that unstinting efforts to spread the word about Lurie's work, by Kirves, Patterson and others, have largely proved frustrating, especially in the United States, even though Lurie spent most of his adult life after World War II in New York.
Although the Times obit says "his work is included in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington," Matthias Reichelt, a German critic, curator and editor, begs to differ. "It might be possible that the one or the other collection holds a small print or etching," he says, "but his art is NOT at all part of the permanent collections, neither in Manhattan nor in Washington. It still has to be discovered by the museums for the U.S. public."
This 1959 mixed media painting on canvas, "Lumumba is dead," for example:
Reichelt adds:
Boris Lurie was consciously ignored in the 1960s and '70s and the following decades because of the work's content. The museums did not take care of his art at all. They kept him out while other colleagues of his -- like Allan D'arcangelo, Allan Kaprow and Yaoyi Kusama, among others -- made it into the museums.Besides Clayton Patterson and the gallery owner Gertrude Stein, only a few curators and art historians, like Norman Kleeblatt from the Jewish Museum and the freelance art historian and curator Estera Milman, who organized the two major shows in the U.S. in public institutions -- the University of Iowa, in 1997, and Northwestern University's Block Museum in Chicago, in 2001 -- know about Lurie and his radical art.
Patterson, who is a ubiquitous figure on the Lower East Side -- and an artist, photographer, documentary videographer, editor and archivist, not to mention social critic, neighborhood preservationist and rebel in his own right -- has gotten used to the frustration. He still believes recognition will come. "It has to," he says. "It's much too important not to."
Posted by jherman at 11:35 AM
January 13, 2008
Gee, Ya Think?
Just because the NYT editorial "Unfinished Debate on Iraq" popped up today, lamenting the fact that "the war has receded as a major topic on the campaign trail," it does not mean Straight Up is being channelled. Yes, I know, these two questions appeared here on Friday. But so what? Ditto for the Noah Feldman article "Vanishing Act" in today's NYT magazine.
Postscript: Aw ... here's a leetle zumzeeng CNN put on its cover this afternoon, Analysis: Whatever happened to the war?
Posted by jherman at 9:03 AM
January 10, 2008
Uh, Just Asking
Does it matter to the pols running for prez? Does it matter to the people voting for the pols? Let's see whether the latest estimate of the civilian death toll in Iraq makes the agenda.
Doubtful. Why should it? It's old news. It's all about the first three years of the war. We're well past that. We're going on ... what? ... five years?
Besides, the number of the dead -- 151,000 between 2003 and 2006, according to the World Health Organization -- doesn't even come close to the 655,000 estimated earlier by researchers from Johns Hopkins.
Yes, the numbers are all over the lot, depending on the source and methodology. Here's a count of documented deaths based on actual reports, not on estimates. As of today, it's only 80,419 to 87,834. Ahhh ... whatever.
Postscript: Jan. 13 -- Here's the lede in Noah Feldman's article this morning, "Vanishing Act," in the Sunday NYT magazine:
What if the United States were at war during a presidential election -- and none of the candidates wanted to talk about it? Iraq has become the great disappearing issue of the early primary season, and if nothing fundamental changes on the ground there -- a probable result of current policy -- the war may disappear even more completely in the new year.
I don't agree with Feldman's general posture on Iraq war policy or with his analysis, which strike me as compromised by his establishmentarian point of view. But I like what he's getting at, as shown by the chart that accompanies his article. And while I don't like what the chart shows, I like the fact that it answers some of what I asked.
I also appreciate his reference to the Tommy Lee Jones flick "In the Valley of Elah." I thought it was the best movie of 2007. As Feldman indicates, it was ignored by moviegoers. Worse, in my opinion, it was shunned by the critics. I kept looking for it on their "10 best" lists. Couldn't find it.
It was not among the picks of the National Society of Film Critics, the American Film Institute, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assoc., or the Chicago Film Critics Assoc. It did not make Roger Ebert's list, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman's list, or Newsweek critic David Ansen's list. And it was ignored by all three NY Times critics, failing to make Manohla Dargis's list, A.O. Scott's list, or Stephen Holden's list.
Oh yeah ... it did make Time critic Richard Schickel's list and his colleague Richard Corliss's list. They both ranked it No. 8, which I have to say is like pinning the tail on the donkey.
Posted by jherman at 9:45 AM
January 6, 2008
Mom & Apple Pie
The flag-waving has begun, if it ever stopped:
After so many years of fear and loathing, we had almost forgotten what it's like to feel good about our country. On Thursday night, that long-dormant emotion came rushing back, like an old dream that pops out of the deepest recesses of memory, suddenly as clear as light. "They said this day would never come," said Barack Obama, and yet here, right before us, was indisputable evidence that it had.
That's the red-white-and-blue lede in Frank Rich's column this morning, as though Obamarama-cum-Huckababy could flush the BananaRepublic down the drain with, he adds, a "palpable sense that our history was turning a page whether or not Mr. Obama or his doppelgänger in improbability, Mike Huckabee, end up in the White House."
Please, Frank. Cut the bullshit. The winds of change don't smell all that good. Just read what George McGovern says this morning about impeaching the Bullshitter-in-Chief and Attack Dog, the chief's partner in high crimes and misdemeanors. Or have a look at Norman O. Mustill's collage, above. Maybe it will pop the nightmare instead of the dream "out of the deepest recesses of memory."
For all your shiny prose, dear Frank, and all your anti-establishment chest-thumping about the willful Beltway stupidity of mainstream political journalism -- as though a polished reference to "fear and loathing" could channel Hunter S. Thompson -- your column sounds a helluva lot like that old-time religion.
Postscript: A reader who goes by the moniker "LittleBrother" writes, per the HuffPo posting:
No one appreciates a good rush or buzz more than I, but apparently neither the unwashed masses nor the corporate media appreciate that mass euphoria is just a kinder, gentler form of mass hysteria.Moreover, "media" and "mania" only differ by two letters -- mass media not only gloms on to any form of "mania", but incorporates it into a self-propelling, self-inflating, self-confirming mega-mania.
Thus, in the course of a single week, Mr. Obama becomes the Feel-Good Hit of the new year.
Do the lemming-like hordes enthralled by their lemming-herders not remember what we wound up with after the last "Morning in America"?
Posted by jherman at 1:33 PM
January 2, 2008
Retro: Just Cuz It's 2008
The hungover staff realizes it cited the supreme lowlight of 2007 here, but none of the highlights. So what the hell, in reply to popular demand, a random sample: Best Yummy, Best Dummy, Best Bulletin, Best Nader, Best Collage, three Best Oldies (X), (Y) and (Z), Best Rupe, Next Best Rupe, Best Ghost, Best Bones, Best Beast and Best Pinocchio.
Posted by jherman at 10:21 AM
December 31, 2007
Kristolization? Oy!
When The New York Times announced that William Kristol will be a weekly columnist for its Op-Ed page, the first thing it said about him is that he's "one of the nation's leading conservative writers and a vigorous supporter of the Iraq war."
Which prompted a friend to ask two questions: 1) "Hasn't America suffered enough from the actions of these nut-jobs?" And 2) "Is Kristol the Times' move in anticipation of the Murdochization of The Wall Street Journal, sort of the way CNN moved to the right to counter Fox News?"
Well, 1) Apparently not. And 2) WSJ's news columns are more likely to feel Rupe's impact than the editorial page, which is already so far right it can't move further in that direction. If anything, its vicious brand of conservativism is more likely to be moderated in pragmatic support of Rupe's global business agenda.
(Jan. 16 -- Have a look: "Murdoch to Bury the Leder? Rethinks Journal Strategy")
Meanwhile, the lead editorial in this morning's Times, "Looking at America," offers at least some assurance that, despite losing the zip in its prose with the departure of Gail Collins as editorial page editor, it remains the most outspoken establishment newspaper opposing the BananaRepublic. Except for the tooth-fairy conclusion -- a rose-tinted final sentence about hoping to look in the mirror after the 2008 presidential election to "see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America" -- today's editorial is a serious year-end critique.
Remember these?
Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM
December 26, 2007
Before I Forget
Here's a tale you won't find in "Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History," a new book due out soon. I always meant to write it down but never did. I'm telling it now before I forget all the details, because I don't think it's been recorded anywhere.
It was the winter of 1970, probably in February. I'm not sure of the exact date. It must have been around the time that Tom Hayden and four others of the Chicago Seven were convicted of inciting a riot in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
The place was Jessica Mitford's house in Berkeley, California, where a crowd of Bay Area radicals, politicos, artists, poets, journalists, professors and other high-minded riffraff had gathered. We were there to hear the latest news and to rally the troops, raise money, and generally show our solidarity with the leaders of the antiwar movement.
The house was packed. Rumor had it that Jean Genet would be there, along with the Black Panthers. They were squiring him around the country as part of their campaign to free Bobby Seale, who had been on trial with the Chicago Seven until his case was separated from theirs. (You may recall that he'd been bound, gagged and chained to a chair in the courtroom).
A painter's ladder was set in the middle of the living room as a sort of platform for the speakers. Several speeches had already been made when a huge red convertible with the top down roared up to the front of the house. Genet jumped out, surrounded by Black Panthers with weapons bulging under their leather jackets. Among them was David Hilliard, who had taken over running the party in Seale's absence.
I no longer recall the speakers or their speeches. But I do remember Hayden, clearly the main speaker, being very low-key and looking like a Berkeley grad student in jeans and sneakers. His modesty and reasonableness were apparent. I was impressed. Hilliard was not. As soon as Hayden finished speaking, he challenged him. He wanted to know: Why was Hayden out on the street while Bobby Seale was in a jail cell? (Two of the Chicago Seven had been found innocent of all charges. Hayden must have been out on bail, while his conviction, like that of the others, was being appealed.)
Hilliard's question was an accusation. Calmly and with what seemed to me a sadness in his reply, Hayden refuted the implication that he had betrayed Seale in any way. There was only one reason he was free and Seale was not. It could be summed up in the word racism. "Bobby is black," he said. "I am white." Those words I do recall, perhaps because they were so simple. The reply did not satisfy Hilliard. His aggressiveness seemed menacing.
At this point a friend of Hayden's -- I think it was a UC Berkeley student president or former president who had come with him -- stepped in front of Hayden, as if to protect him. He shouldn't have. Hilliard hadn't done anything physically threatening, and Hayden was as composed as a turtle. Now, however, incited by the sudden move of the self-appointed bodyguard, Hilliard picked up an empty beer pitcher and swung it. It was a roundhouse swing that couldn't miss. He and Hayden were standing no more than an arm's length apart.
Incredibly, Hilliard did miss. Instead of hitting Hayden, who somehow hadn't budged or even flinched, the blow struck a young girl (the poet Michael McClure's daughter) who was sitting on the floor at their feet. Two sounds -- a hollow, leaden bonk! followed by a high-pitched cry of pain -- went off like a siren. This sent the crowd into a panic. People dove out of the way.
Genet went into a boxer's crouch, evidently believing he had to defend himself. He was wearing an army fatigue jacket, his head had white stubble and so did his face, like he hadn't shaved. Ready to take on all comers, he planted his front foot on a coffee table. Pugnacious. I remember thinking he couldn't have understood much of what was said. From the few words he'd spoken, you could tell his English wasn't very good.
Somebody shouted that the police had been called and were on their way. The crowd spilled out the front door onto the street and scattered. The last thing I remember of the pandemonium that day was how blue the sky looked and how puzzled Hayden appeared to be as he walked away unhurried, and it seemed to me, forlorn.
Postscript: Well, it looks like the incident took place sometime in mid- to late March. Here's an excerpt from an inelegant letter I wrote on March 27, 1970, to Carl Weissner, which a librarian at Northwestern University Library, Sigrid Perry, found for me:
The mention of Stew Albert, whom I'd forgotten about, makes me wonder now whether he was the "self-appointed bodyguard" who stepped in front of Hayden. Nanos is Nanos Valaoritis, the noted Greek poet. He had fled from Greece after it was taken over in a 1967 coup by a rightwing military junta known as "the colonels." Nanos was a good friend at the time (a warmer human being is hard to imagine) and was teaching at San Francisco State. We went together to Mitford's house.
Posted by jherman at 8:37 AM
December 24, 2007
A Christmas Tale
Once upon a time I wrote a story called "Christmas on the Bowery." It began like this: "Monsignor John Ahern, the redoubtable Skid Row priest, is expecting 800 guests Sunday for an early Christmas dinner."
Most will arrive from a dozen grandly named flophouses along the Bowery -- the Palace, for instance, or the Sunshine -- where they sleep in windowless $5 rooms enclosed in chicken-coop wire. Some will come from the municipal men's shelters, open dormitories where the beds are free but said to be unsafe at any price. Others will flock in from the city's streets, where home may be a piece of cardboard in a doorway on a frigid corner. Whoever they are and wherever they're from, they will receive a full plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes and as full a measure of human dignity as the Holy Name Center for Homeless Men can bestow.
I haven't been down to the center lately. But I was willing to bet it is now a gentrified condo for Wall Street honkies. Anybody who's been to Manhattan's Lower East Side these days probably wouldn't have taken the bet, either.
The free Christmas dinner, a Holy Name custom for five decades, needs no invitation and is, moreover, emblematic of the center's longtime purpose. Located since 1939 in a mammoth old school building at 18 Bleecker St., the center began caring for the destitute in 1906. ... Ahern, who looks more like a Marine officer in civilian clothing than a 58-year-old Catholic priest, has iron-gray hair and a ramrod bearing that exudes military authority. ... "We offer the men a place to come to every day," he says. "For the old guys, it's a safe place where they won't get mugged. For the young guys, it's a bit of hope."
Well, I just checked. The center, it turns out, is still operating two decades later -- though in a much reduced way -- within spitting distance of the most publicized symbol of Bowery gentrification, The New Museum of Contemporary Art. And wonder of wonders -- amid the boutique hotels, the multimillion-dollar condos, the liveried doormen, the custom-shopping grocers, the expensive cafes, the uptown art galleries for rich collectors now lined up on the Bowery in a "gallery row" -- Monsignor Ahern is still there at age 79, offering what he can. These days "he looks like a bantamweight," says Patrick Wynne, the center's program director. The Christmas dinners, however, are long gone.
With the elimination of the flophouses 10 years ago, Wynne explains, "the old guys have disappeared. They've either died off or were sent to nursing homes."
On a recent morning ... a dozen men were lined up for flu shots being given in the library, a room with a single, waist-high shelf of yellowing books. Across the hall, two regulars played pool on a threadbare table. Despite the institutional look of the place and the overpowering smell of ammonia, the center has the reassuring calm of a men's club. But downstairs at the front door, the harsh reality of the streets is borne in on a tide of weather-beaten men entering the basement for their showers. "You ever see 'Wild Kingdom?'" asks Jose, posted at the door. "That's the way it is out there. The strong feed off the weak. Yesterday they stole a coat from one old guy right out front." Cognizant of that, perhaps, one wary visitor stood at a wash basin and kept his overcoat buttoned to the neck even while slathering his face with shaving cream.
The center still offers free daily showers. But now, Wynne says, it's mostly immigrant day laborers, mainly Mexicans, who come in for them.
Posted by jherman at 12:36 PM
December 22, 2007
The Year in Roadkill
Like every two-bit journalist at this time of year, I grabbed a look over my shoulder to see what was left behind. It was uglier than roadkill. The mush rush of the past 12 months turned my stomach. Here's why that is. Not to mention this shitty reminder. Which is where brave Olaf came in.
Posted by jherman at 10:32 AM
December 16, 2007
Liam O'Gallagher, R.I.P.
Our old friend Liam O'Gallagher, the artist and sound poet, checked out on Dec. 4 in Santa Barbara, Ca. He had a good run, though. 
He turned 90 in October. Coincidentally, the date of his death is almost the same (it's off by a day) as that of Sri Aurobindo, the yogi master whose teachings he greatly admired. (E.g.: "An inch of experience goes farther than a yard of logic." "The example is more powerful than the instruction." "Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change of consciousness, it can only bring a change of mind.") Liam was buried in Santa Barbara. He is survived by Robert Rheem, his partner of 58 years.
"Color signals
paintings on the wall
with its occult eye that a black canvas contains interstellar space
it is our emotions that give shape to invisible worlds and leave abstract imprints on human cells
not limited to electronic information they need not be comprehensible in order to be revelatory
art is a medium wherever and instantly the mind can behave non-locally and in dark matter the
random factor is where the unhinged achieve this orbit and the unspeakable appears in a
biological library to answer questions about the meltdown"
-- Liam O'Gallagher
Here's a full obituary by William Gray Harris:
Liam O'Gallagher, an avant-garde writer, painter, and multi-media artist, who combined a lifelong pursuit of an integral spiritual philosophy with an exceptional gift for teaching and mentoring, died on December 4 at his home in Santa Barbara, California, of natural causes. He was 90.Mr. O'Gallagher was associated with some of the twentieth century's most innovative artists and philosophers. In his published works, The Blue Planet Notebooks, Planet Noise, and Fool Consciousness, he dealt with themes related to the evolution and future of human consciousness. He painted in the Abstract Expressionist style, and at the time of his death was working on a series of paintings that he described as expressing, "the surreal aspects of space science." The critic Richard Kostelanetz called him "one of the finest visual poets in America."
Born William Gallagher in Oakland, California, on October 2, 1917, he adopted the more traditional rendering of his name after visiting relatives in Ireland in 1950.
He moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1945, at a time when the area was known for its resident artists and bohemians. In 1946, he left for Greenwich Village in New York to study painting with the renowned abstract expressionist master Hans Hoffman.After returning to the West Coast in 1948, he met members of the celebrated Ojai Players, including its director Alan Harkness, when they presented "Macbeth" at the Golden Bough Theatre in Carmel, with Ford Rainey in the title role and Iris Tree as Lady Macbeth. An invitation to paint sets for them at the High Valley Theatre in Ojai led to a position teaching art at what was then known as the Happy Valley School. Founded by the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti, and the writer Aldous Huxley, among others, it was a progressive school, and Mr. O'Gallagher's advanced painting and teaching methods fit well into its curriculum and a lifelong association was formed.
In 1954, he commissioned the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi to design a residence for a site overlooking Point Lobos, in Carmel, California. The house was never built, but a model for it is in the collection of the Oakland Museum. Later that year, Mr. O'Gallagher moved to San Francisco's Chinatown, adjacent to North Beach, where an emerging group of writers and poets were forming an artistic movement that became known as the Beat Generation. The hallmark of the Beats was non-conformity, spontaneous creativity, and the influence of Buddhism; all characteristics of Mr. O'Gallagher's own work, and his top floor studio loft above Grant Avenue became a gathering place for some of the group. His concrete poetry and cut-up writings, which heralded a future of artificial intelligence, space migration, and expanding consciousness, began to appear in publications associated with City Lights Bookstore and the Nova Broadcast Press.
The seeds of the Beat Generation evolved into the Haight-Ashbury hippie psychedelic movement of the 1960's, and Mr. O'Gallagher's work reflected the ethos of that era with various so-called happenings. He collaborated with choreographer Ann Halprin on "Ceremony of Us," a dance encounter between the Studio Watts Dance Group and the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop that had its premiere at the opening of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1969. That year, too, KQED-TV broadcast his "Return Trip," an ecological performance piece in which moon rocks were returned to the moon, accompanied by electronic music, and litter that had been left by the NASA crew was collected. The piece was sponsored by the Dilexi Gallery. In 1970, KPFA radio broadcast "Border Dissolve in Audiospace," a taped performance game involving telephone operators on various sides of state and national borders. Another work, "People's Opera," was scored for nine transistor radios, one telephone system, and soloists on tambourine, flute, oboe and French horn, and was broadcast on KQED-FM, also in 1970. In 1972, a compilation of his writing, visual poetry and performance scores of the previous decade was published, entitled The Blue Planet Notebooks.
From meetings with Robert Theobald, the futurist, Mr. O'Gallagher formed a partnership with Germaine Duncan to start a retreat center in the mountains outside of Helena, Montana, in 1972. Taking the name Feathered Pipe Ranch, it continues to this day. He returned to Ojai Valley in 1973, and converted the High Valley Theatre into a unique residence. He served as an advisor to the Happy Valley Foundation, and in 1976 was instrumental in founding the West Coast branch of the Human Dimensions Institute, now known as the Ojai Foundation at Happy Valley.
In 1983 he moved to San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, but ultimately settled in Santa Barbara, where he continued to write and paint. In recent years, exhibitions of his paintings were held at the Helen Pollack Gallery in Santa Barbara and at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai, the former home of one of his closest friends.
Mr. O'Gallagher is survived by his companion of 58 years, Robert S. Rheem, of Santa Barbara; a brother, Ted Gallagher of Walnut Creek; and numerous nieces and nephews.
Postscript: Jan. 5, 2008 -- Today The New York Times published an excellent obituary by Randy Kennedy. It noted that Liam's death "was not widely reported at the time," which is correct. I've added the NYT obit (above), scanned from today's print edition. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the obit at the NYT Web site. You can read it there. It also has the added virtue of a color illustration of Liam's 1960 "Chinatown" painting, which appeared in the print edition in black and white. Awww, what the hell, here's "Chinatown" in color. It's too good not to see pronto. Besides, when the NYT obit eventually goes into the Times' Web archive, the illustration will be dropped.
Posted by jherman at 10:37 AM
December 12, 2007
Rupe Says 'Nope'
Now that Rupert Murdoch has moved his top guys into place to remake the Wall Street Journal, veterans at the paper who are familiar with the dithering of their previous corporate bosses can't help marveling at his speed, decisiveness and personal involvement. "We know that's his M.O., but it's amazing to see," one Dow Jones exec is quoted as saying in today's New York Times. Meanwhile, nervous WSJ reporters and editors were heartened by the wisdom of Rupe's one-word decision to reject at least one plan to remake the paper. It circulated in the newsroom as Design Proposal No. 4.
(Just kidding, of course. The graphic is part of a 2002 ad campaign that introduced a WSJ redesign when color was added to Page One. To build suspense -- and to reassure readers that the Journal wasn't going to change character -- fake mockups appeared in advertisements showing rejected designs.)
Posted by jherman at 8:32 AM
December 10, 2007
Your Pen vs. Their Sword
If this video doesn't illustrate the power of a signature, nothing does:
Today, as noted last week, is Human Rights Day and the culmination of Amnesty International's Global Write-a-Thon, an annual letter-writing campaign to help "human rights defenders, prisoners of conscience, and other victims of human rights abuses." Does letter writing work? Amnesty International says, "It absolutely does." See the Q&A.
Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM
December 9, 2007
Our Man of the Year
"aieeeeee," sez un buen amigo, "el keith es un hombre con cojones gigantescos!" Yes, Keith Olbermann still sizzles. His latest special commentary, an exemplary piece of trash-tawkin' disapproval, hews to the same high standard he set for himself here and here. It's not just that he's so good at delivering his epithets for the BananaRepublican-in-charge. Or that he's doing it on mainstream TV, no less. But that all his epithets ("a pathological presidential liar" who is "transcendently stupid," "an idiot-in-chief," "a president manifestly unfit to serve") have the ring of truth and a conviction behind them worth a thousand pictures. Especially when he looks straight into the camera and says in his closing remarks, "You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar."
Posted by jherman at 10:41 AM
December 4, 2007
Mad Magazine + Tom Hayden = SDS
Who knew? I didn't. But that's what Tom Hayden reveals, give or take a few details, in a blurb for "Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History," a new book due out in January from Hill and Wang. "My own radical journey began with Mad Magazine," he says, "so it feels great that SDS should enter the culture of comic folklore ..."
OK, it's only a blurb. But I believe him. And in one of those perfect coincidences that border on the paranormal, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, who collaborated on the book with others, will discuss comics and politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, on Monday -- Dec. 10 -- which also marks International Human Rights Day and the culmination of this year's Amnesty International Global Write-a-Thon.
Pekar is best known for his comic book series "American Splendor." He's also the subject of the movie documentary with the same title. Buhle was the founding editor of the 1960s SDS magazine Radical America. They'll be joined in a panel discusion by Jeff Jones, an environmental activist who was a former SDS officer and one of the founders of the Weather Underground. Hayden won't be there, hélas.
Since Buhle and Pekar will be, here's some of what they say in the introduction to their graphic history:
[The book] is, finally, a series of stories from the life of a generation, ending where SDS peaked, at around eighty to a hundred thousand activists and followers. So much had happened so quickly around them, it was no surprise that many young radicals and quite a few conservatives imagined American society to be on the verge of some vast transformation. A significant chunk of SDSers joined and in some cases actually organized the women's liberation movement, the gay and lesbian movements, the environmental movement, and so on. These causes, still far from won almost a half century later, had been essentially invisible before the era of SDS. It is difficult for today's young people to conceptualize a society at once so self-satisfied and so deep in social conservatism, race sentiment, homophobia, environmental indifference, and the assumptions of fixed roles of the sexes, and just as difficult to imagine that all these issues were tackled almost simultaneously, and very largely by the young themselves.
Can't make it to the panel discussion? How about the SDS Comic Show? It's a traveling exhibit of all the graphics from the book, and free, too, in the Graduate Center lobby. Just walk in any time.
Wanna read more? Here's another excerpt from the intro (on view at the exhibit):
The Vietnam War was, of course, the central political issue of Students for a Democratic Society, as inevitable as its locus on the nation's campuses. The mystery of the rebellion unraveled in this book is that SDS and all its energies never resembled the specter that so many in powerful places and in lonely living rooms feared and pondered. If, according to polls conducted among them, a large segment of the student population considered itself somehow "revolutionary" by the peak years of 1968-70, it was not in the name of any revolution that had existed or would exist, perhaps any that could exist.
Some more samples from the exhibit and intro:
In our twenty-first century, the perspective has, of course, become very different. Not because the doddering radical veterans of that era have lived through so many years (and tears, and beers) and still remain part of the largest population bubble. Not because the structure of American society has changed in any fundamental way. Rather, it has to do with the sobering fact that just as the sixties generation is itself entering old age, its hard-won lessons seem to have reappeared.
Today the Empire has badly overreached again. Our political elite is once again in disarray. The current Iraqi conflict, raising the voices of the powerful against each other as never since the sixties, exposes the flawed logic of Empire. However different the nation has become in forty years, creativity still arguably blossoms best among youth, those who have the least stake in the existing rules of society.The reasons that the 1960's have never quite gone out of common perspective is that the music, the cartoons and comics, the posters, the impulses, and the fears did not actually get old with the people who first lived them. The idea that any little group of saviors, self-avowed Weathermen or dogmatic Marxists, would lead America or the world into the promised land is over. Everyone in the Wal-Mart Nation knows better. But the crises didn't really go away, any more than did the urgent need and the simultaneous improbability of an inspired mass awakening to a better, more ecologically sound, more peaceful and cooperative, Age of Aquarius-like future.
You could spend a couple of hours just looking and reading. And shaking your head up, down and sideways.
Posted by jherman at 12:24 PM
December 2, 2007
A Taste of 'The White Beast'
It's an excerpt from William Osborne's 50-minute music video, "Music for the End of Time." He also composed the music. The video features digital stills by Norbert Bach and the trombone playing of Abbie Conant. And here's a trailer for the video, which gives a broader sample of the work.
Now for a change of pace ... how about an Osborne-Conant Song of the Week called "Number Crunchin' Cowboy"?
Hard to believe both videos come from the same artistic team.
Posted by jherman at 12:38 PM
November 26, 2007
Ppffshaw!
She's making me blush. I don't usually get admiring emails from law profs.
Hi Jan -- I just wanted to introduce myself, having followed your blog with great interest. My name is Sonia Katyal, and I am a law professor who specializes in the area of art, law and technology at Fordham Law School in NYC.
Being a fan of your work, I wanted to send you an abstract and article I finished on intellectual property, appropriation art, copyright, and the notion of the relationship between semiotic democracy and disobedience; it seemed like something that was relevant to your work. I'm thinking of turning part of it into a book, and so would be thrilled for any thoughts you might be able to share -- you can also download the paper for free on SSRN. Feel free to pass it on to interested folks via blog or otherwise, and I'd be grateful for any thoughts you might be able to pass along.
I told her I read the abstract. Twice. I also said I'd have to study it, let alone the paper it refers to, before I had any thoughts she might find worthwhile. Since I'm no academic, the terminology went right by me. Off the top of my head, though, I said the whole issue of postmodern appropriation and what it entails made me gravely ill. I called my illness "conflicted feelings." And just to show I was still breathing, I added, "Whether it's semiotic disobedience or outright theft seems to me to depend on whose ox is gored."
When I was finally able to download the paper itself -- not easy to do, it turned out -- I got a short way in and came across this passage:
...the spirit of semiotic disobedience reflects some of the same classic goals and interests of traditional civil disobedience. The individuals I am speaking of do not expressly seek to reclaim the protection of the law; rather, their very objective is to demonstrate the expressive value of transgressing its limits. If our First Amendment jurisprudence has taught us anything, it has taught us the importance of recognizing the value of symbolic dissent, even when unpopular, as a key mediating tool in integrating the marketplaces of prohibited and protected expression.
Which clarifies what she's getting at. I think. More thoughts, anybody?
Postscript: A reader writes:
Hey, who cares what she's saying? She's pretty hot. In the immortal words of Baudelaire:Que m'importe que tu sois sage?
Sois belle! Et sois triste!
PPS: Clayton Patterson writes:
If I am getting this, without reading the paper (or going too far into this, as I don't have time), appropriation -- especially after Warhol -- seems like the backbone of many of today's art treasures. The Warhol soup can is clearly someone else's design. I'm not sure why no one seems to mention this fact or gives credit to the original designer. The same for Roy Lichtenstein's comics. (Today's Damien Hirst shark in formaldehyde at least is not stealing another person's work. But please, where is the art?) Young designers are taking lettering styles from The NY Post, for example, and using it -- and on and on. It is unimportant to be original anymore. Just take it -- whatever it is -- use it, and it is yours. This appropriation as art thinking is another large stone sinking the American culture and society. It is like a cancer -- appropriation of words or pictures, or sounds, or tunes, or looks, or whatever -- sad really.
PPS: Another reader writes:
hmmmm ... semiotics, "the analysis of the nature & relationship of signs in language," plus disobedience. er...uh...duh...d'ya think a clenched fist w/ an upright, erect middle finger would qualify? jist askin'.
PPS: Holly Crawford writes:
Given what I read, which was only your quote from her piece, I would want to know if she is OK with you or me publishing [her ideas] with our names and no reference or citation to her. In art and music it's OK, but in other fields it's plagarism and not freedom of speech. Did she draw a line? Everybody gets inspired by others' work. Obviously you can't have satire or parody without some appropriation, which is why appropriation artists position work as a cultural joke.
PPS: Another reader writes:
As cute as you are, I suspect that the law professor's "having followed your blog" and "being a fan of your work" are boilerplate, along the lines of those pop-up IM's one gets from Cinnamon or Tiffani saying that they've just looked at your online "profile" and you seem like a "cool guy." In short, she says "semiotic disobedience" to all the boys.
PPS: William Osborne writes:
An incredibly interesting and very important article. All artists interested in media theory should read it. It's astounding to find a law professor is so erudite in the area of postmodern cultural theory. And she ain't just any law prof either. Read about her brother.How delighted you must be that someone like her has taken note of your blog!!! I think your off-hand deconstructions of the media pass most people by.
I have printed the article out and am going to pour over it. It is closely related to what I have been working on with our music theater studies of the media, like Cybeline. We want to go much deeper into these themes with our newest work, and I think Katyal's article will be very helpful, not so much for legal eventualities, but for how she discusses the social and aesthetic themes involved.
If all someone can say about her is that she is pretty, then I would rather forget the French and use some good ol' German: Was für ein Dumbkopf!
PPS: A reader writes:
"who cares what she's saying? she is hot!" love that guy. and in addition to fortifying ourselves with baudelaire, let's get interested in semantic righteousness and call a rip-off a rip-off. we know it when we see it. lawyers should stay out of this.
PPS: David Ehrenstein writes:
"Semiotic Disobedience"? Isn't that disciplining your slave by thwacking him in the cojones with the complete works of Julie Kristeva?
William Osborne adds:
From the comments, I don't think anyone actually read her article. I at least went through it, even if pretty quickly, and her arguments are very differentiated. She is not advocating stealing people's ideas. In fact, she discusses in detail all of the problems surrounding appropriation, including very sophisticated arguments about how legal theory must distinguish between simple copying and work that turns the appropriated ideas into very different statements, especially those that involve social protest.
Dec. 6 -- Now for la piéce de rèsistance: "If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What's the Original?" And don't forget to have a look at the slide show.
Posted by jherman at 9:19 AM
November 22, 2007
William Burroughs Gives Thanks
Bon appétit!
Posted by jherman at 10:15 AM
November 18, 2007
Just for the Record
I have no idea how many readers wrote to tell them. But I know of at least one. This was my email message to The New York Times Book Review:
One Legend Too ManyTo the editor:
The Chelsea Hotel has so many legends attached to it one less won't hurt. The Chelsea is not "[w]here William Burroughs wrote 'Naked Lunch,'" as Jeff Giles puts it in his review of "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel." ("Chelsea Mornings," Oct. 28) Mr. Burroughs wrote the manuscript at the Villa Muniria in Tangier (at 1 Calle Magallanes, where Jack Kerouac typed up an early version for him) and at the Beat Hotel in Paris (at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, where Brion Gysin and others helped him prepare a later version for publication).
I sent the email three Sundays ago, on the morning of the review. A few days later I received this automated reply: "Thank you for writing to the editors of the Book Review. We read every e-mail we receive, but cannot always respond. We will contact you if we decide to publish your letter." Never heard from them again.
This morning they ran their correction, unattributed. If they had contacted me, I would have told them my correction was incomplete. And now so is theirs. A key section of "Naked Lunch" was written in a hotel in Copenhagen, as a friend reminded me, and as Ted Morgan writes in his peerless Burroughs biography, "Literary Outlaw":
Burroughs left for Copenhagen in July 1957 ... on an intuition that it would be important for his book. He had four main zones, or sets, where the book takes place -- the United States, South America, Interzone (which was Tangier), and Freeland -- and in Scandinavia he found the real model for his imagined Freeland, a place of the living dead. He had already described it as a series of bars along a canal, which was what he found in Copenhagen. What he saw exceeded the most ghastly product of his imagination. ... The dead-level sanity and bone dullness of the Danes appalled him. It was a police state without police, populated by robots completely conditioned by the state. The only antisocial element was the juvenile delinquents, known locally as "Leather Jackets." It was all horribly depressing, the sandwich bars, the workmen in overalls listening to classical music on the radio, the lack of conversation, the general inanity and squareness of the people.
... Scandinavia catalyzed the novel, which was now taking shape faster than he could write it down in his hotel room. Every time he reached an impasse, something happened to show him the way, so he stayed in Copenhagen through August and worked. The main theme, it was now clear to him, was the desecration of the human image by control addicts. As Lola La Chata, the Mexico City pusher, used to say, "Pushing is more of a habit than using."
You think if I send this item to the Book Review -- naturally with all due apologies to past, present and future generations of the Danish pipples -- that the editors will run a correction to the correction?
Oh yeah.
Postscript: Colleen Thornton writes:
Thanks for shedding new light on an old legend. I had no idea that Copenhagen had made such an impression on William Burroughs, though in an entirely understated (typical) way. You see, I have lived in Copenhagen (København) for nearly 15 years and have, over time, found this so-called "sane" society quite NUTS. The whole country is suffering from an astonishing case of collective passive-aggression that occasionally erupts into overt aggression over things of which they are utterly ignorant; such as the world outside of Denmark, except the fictional reality of the USA.While "Danish Design" is used to solve all sorts of problems here, it clearly has no medicinal effect on the junkies, drunks and prostitutes that live their colorful lives just yards from my doorstep.
Burroughs recognized the symptoms of the Danish disease alright. He'd not be surprised by how this "small country" has slid into social schizophrenia -- self-medicating, self-congratulatory and utterly without self-awareness.
So much for the Danny Kaye version, eh?
Posted by jherman at 9:42 AM
November 13, 2007
Overlooked and Undersung
It is a delicious irony of life in New York to ride the subway during the morning rush hour with Dave Frishberg's "Quality Time" playing on your iPod (listen here). Another irony, not so delish, is to miss what's in front of your eyes. Like walking past the art gallery in the CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue without seeing the show.
Talk about quality time, "Jim Dine Selected Prints, 1996-2006" gives you as much as you please. It's in the heart of Manhattan (between 34th and 35th Streets) and a helluva lot less crowded than the subway. Cheaper, too. Admission is free. Oh, did I say Dine's prints are a wow?
Among other things, they offer an eyeful on the not small matter of prevarication, which some would submit is the issue of our time. Have a look at the portraits of Gepetto's boy. There are a handful, and they come in all sizes.
Pinocchio may not resemble the current occupant of the White House. His nose is longer, for one thing. He's also made of wood, although that's a debatable difference, and he pays for his lies. Most of all, Dine personally identifies with Pinocchio. I doubt he feels that way about our prevaricating prez.
In any case, precisely why crowds are not packing the gallery is a mystery to me. Maybe it's because the art critics have overlooked it. There hasn't been a single review of the show, despite the fact that Dine is an acknowledged master. Some of the prints have been exhibited elsewhere -- in Minneapolis, for instance -- and you know how New York critics hate to be second in line.
Or maybe it's because Dine's work sells, thank you very much, but usually not at auction, and so doesn't go public with humongous prices. Indeed, maybe that's the most important reason.
Dine is among the most commercially successful artists in the Pace Wildenstein stable -- which is saying a lot, given the stable. But without humongous prices to attach to his name, Dine is old news, or worse, no news. No matter how much they may deny it, the critics are artworld functionaries. Money impresses them maybe more than art.
Yes, this is a rant.
For a serious discussion of the show, go to Jed Birmingham's Q&A with Jim Dine at the Bibliographic Bunker.
Anyway, have a look at another of Dine's Pinocchios. He calls it "Red Enamel Pants." I call it "What Is He Staring At?"
Full disclosure: Straight Up's staff of thousands is a part-time media consultant to the CUNY Graduate Center, which operates the gallery.
Here's what else you need to know: Jim Dine Selected Prints, 1996-2006 is on exhibit through Dec. 8 in the Amie and Tony James Gallery at 365 Fifth Ave. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12 to 6 p.m. (212) 817-7394.
Posted by jherman at 11:38 AM
October 22, 2007
Are We Still Counting?
Postscript: Oct. 25 -- "Another $200 Billion." Read all about it.
Posted by jherman at 12:05 PM
October 14, 2007
Skulls & Bones
I see that in two New York art shows Jenny Holzer and the rest have taken some kind of lesson from the Aztecs. "Death hangs in the air," NY Times art critic Roberta Smith writes. "Or, more accurately, on the walls."
But to be frank about it, the art of Holzer et al. is put to shame by the death-obsessed thingies on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City's Chapultepec Park.
Maybe it's just a coincidence: The other day I was at the museum, where this stunning Aztec skull caught my attention. (How could it not?) No encrusted diamonds per Damien Hirst, but a helluva lot more expressive. (There were plenty of other masterly pre-Columbian thingies, so many Aztec, Olmec, Mayan and Teotihuac thingies that it was hard to stop taking pictures.)
Meanwhile, now that I'm back from Mex City, I also had a chance to look in again on the show of collages by Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu. (Scheduled to close yesterday, it's been extended through November.) So here's another coincidence: Beach put pants on a diamond-encrusted skull way back in 2001. On paper, of course, but six years before Hirst's full-fledged encrustation.
Postscript: A reader writes:
Damien Hirst is the kind of guy who could have been a great artist if he'd pre-existed the mass media. I think he has decent ideas but he deploys them in the most superficial way possible (without thereby attaining the depth of Warhol -- a paradox that would take me half the morning to try to explain).Every morning when I come to work, I pass by a teaching skeleton that's been tossed on a cart. It's half broken and somebody has hung a blue hair net over a protruding bit of backbone. This ignominious figure probably has more to teach about death than Hirst and co: in death we're discarded and quite likely mocked as well.
PPS: Oct. 23 -- Maybe I spoke too soon. Here, via this week's New Yorker art listings, are two persuasive images from the group show "I Am as You Will Be" currently at Cheim & Read:
They have a certain je ne sais quoi. Nyet? And, I might add, the title of the show is very William S. Burroughs.
Posted by jherman at 1:51 PM
September 26, 2007
The Ghost in Their Machine
The posthumous show of collages by Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu -- now at John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller through Oct. 13 on Manhattan's Upper East Side -- comes as something of a surprise. Their work is not high on the list of swank art collectors. Hell, I'd be surprised if it's on the list at all. And I don't think McWhinnie's appreciation will change that. As the former Newsweek art critic (and painter) Peter Plagens said to me about a Nelson Algren video I praised yesterday, "The trouble with being dead is you can't fight back against tributes people pay to you."
The show itself is eye-popping, however, and so is the gorgeously printed catalogue. Maybe that will bring on the collectors. I hope so. Of course, I'm partial to Mary and Claude. I knew them in San Francisco, back in the late '60s, when we created a little magazine together. They were doing collages then, too, though they weren't nearly as polished as these -- not even close. It seems to me that by 2001, the year almost all the collages in this show were executed, they had fully absorbed the influence of Norman O. Mustill (who also collaborated on the magazine).
Mustill is not mentioned in McWhinnie's appreciation or in the catalogue or anywhere in the show itself. But I believe it was Mustill's work in the first place that turned Mary and Claude onto the method and style of the collages here. (They were so taken by his work that they commissioned an entire book of his collages. It was called "Flypaper," and they published it in 1967 under their Beach Books imprint.) So this show may be regarded as an unspoken homage to Mustill. He's the ghost in their machine.
This is not to say the furious accomplishment of the "2001" collages is not their own. Mary, who died in 2006, had already been a painter many years before meeting Mustill, and it's evident. Her collages, along with a handful of paintings also on exhibit (like the one above), are more freewheeling, less "designed" than Claude's. Claude, who died in 2002, was first and foremost a writer. A prolific one. He was large in everything he did. And this show, though it only scratches the surface of his output, indicates how prolific a collagist he became as well. And how proficient.
Speaking of prolific, proficient and accomplished . . . Ted Morgan, author of more than a dozen books -- including biographies of Churchill, FDR, Somerset Maugham and, not least, William S. Burroughs -- was at the show's Sept. 14 opening. (So were rockers Grant Hart and Thurston Moore, and poet-photographer Gerard Malanga.)
When he met Pelieu in 1970, in London, Morgan recalled, they used to swap stories about the French Army. Morgan had served as an intelligence officer in Algiers. (See his latest book, the memoir "My Battle of Algiers," a swift, informative and, despite the subject, entertaining read.) "Pelieu was an army deserter," he said. "Claude was full of funny stories. We laughed like crazy. "
At the time, Morgan was staying in Brion Gysin's Duke Street apartment on a visit from Tangiers, where he'd been living since 1968 and where he'd first met Gysin and Burroughs through Paul Bowles. I asked him about Gysin, a special interest of mine.
"You know how Brion always hated government or any governing authority," Morgan said. "Well one day, probably through one of his friends, he was offered an apartment-cum-painter's-studio in Paris owned by the Ministry of Education. More or less against his principles, he agreed to take it. The hitch was that the education ministry was entitled to purchase whatever work he turned out while he lived there. So, whenever the ministry felt like it" -- Morgan didn't say exactly how often, but it sounded like a regular affair -- "Brion had to receive a ministry delegation who came to inspect his work." Morgan laughed at the irony. "And they never offered to buy a thing."
Had he written the Burroughs biography "Literary Outlaw" as a change of pace from Churchill and FDR? "That's it exactly," he said. Burroughs, it turned out, was proud to be in their company. "He even boasted about it," Morgan noted. Guilt by association, I guess.
As good a story teller in person as he is on the page, Morgan recounted how he searched through crates of the Burroughs archive before anyone else -- it was purchased in 2006 by the New York Public Library's Berg Collection -- and how he found a letter from his first wife warning Burroughs it would be a mistake to let Morgan write his biography. He laughed at the memory.
You'd think that at 75 -- with all sorts of accolades to his credit, including a Pulitzer Prize for reporting -- he'd be interested in taking it easy. Forget it. Morgan, who is tall, tan, modest and attractive, and who looks younger than his years, says he's working feverishly on a new book, "Dien Bien Phu: A Tragedy in Four Acts."
"It sounds like you're taking a run at Graham Greene," I told him. He laughed. "I've been to so many places," he said, "I could write a hundred books like that." Unlike his Algiers memoir, however, this one is not personal history. "I'm not that old," he said.
Posted by jherman at 8:29 PM
September 25, 2007
Hustlers' Paradise
Dunno know why it took me so long to catch up with "Nelson Algren's Last Night!" Made by Warren Leming and Carmine Cervi, it's a beautiful video that runs for just over 5 minutes but with a long-lasting eloquence that matches its subject's words.
Such as these:
I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.Now we all know.
... The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.
-- Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make
(from the introduction to the 1961 edition dedicated to Joan Baez)
Meanwhile, per World Can't Wait:
Today a belligerent President Bush comes to the United Nations to impress upon the world that the U.S. is in the Middle East to stay, that the war on terror will be endless, and to threaten a murderous war on Iran."That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn or be forced to accept." If you don't show your resistance, it doesn't count.
As the man said, Now we all know.
Posted by jherman at 10:46 AM
September 7, 2007
Have You Heard This One Before?
Posted by jherman at 3:00 PM
Just So You Know, in Case You Didn't
Paul Krugman's column this morning warns us not to put any credence in the claim Gen. Petraeus will make in his upcoming report to Congress "that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq." Excellent point. The column makes lots of excellent points -- like this one:
Oh, and by the way. Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city. And guess what? When a Sunni enclave is eliminated and the death toll in that district falls because there's nobody left to kill, that counts as progress by the Pentagon's metric.
You could argue with the headline "Time to Take a Stand." That time was long ago. So for the record, a few past reminders from this small corner of the world about genocide and ethnic cleansing in Iraq:
Hed: The Sunni Genocide, December 8, 2005.
Lede:
Now that Harold Pinter has given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he has also provided us with cover to post what may be the most incredible item -- truly the hardest to believe -- we've ever put up. It's not only about genocide, which we've written about before, it's about "the coming genocide of the Sunnis in Iraq," to quote a friend of ours, which will be committed by American proxies for a U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder.
Hed: 'Ganda Machine Gears Up, on December 15, 2005.
Lede:
We have led a country to civil war in order to permanently weaken it. We have largely destroyed its cultural patrimony to erase its identity and autonomy. We have set up a potential genocide against our opponents. And now we step aside and claim we can't control what will happen.
Hed: Hidden in Plain Sight, on December 20, 2005.
Lede:
We've been banging on about the American strategy todemocratizeSalvadorize Iraq, as though the coming Sunni genocide is a revelation because a "U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder" has proxies doing the dirty work. But all of this has been hidden in plain sight for so long -- in the mainstream media and elsewhere -- that we're shocked by our own naiveté.
Hed: Bold, Red-faced Contradictions, on February 21, 2006.
Lede:
Iraqi death squads doing America's dirty work? Why would you think that?
Hed: Loud Whispers, on December 17, 2006.
Lede:
Finally, an acknowledgment of Sunni genocide as the BananaRepublic's sub rosa policy in Iraq: "The Whispers and the Why Nots."
Postscript: Sept. 11 -- You can't say the mainstream media is not telling us. Even though it uses the antiseptic term "internal displacement," a New York Times news analysis about yesterday's dog-and-pony show notes that massive ethnic cleansing in Baghdad has soared during the surge:
[M]any Iraqis have told reporters they still do not feel secure, despite General Petraeus's charts showing drops in violence. Internal displacement has doubled since the "surge" began, reaching 1.1 million people nationwide, according to the International Office of Migration and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society. [Emphasis added.]Shiite militias have continued their steady march to force Sunni Arabs from an ever-expanding area of Baghdad and surrounding villages. That has been compounded by mass roundups of Sunni Arabs suspected of being insurgents, who are held for months in dangerously crowded detention centers without trial or charges. Shiite judges concede that 40 percent to 50 percent of those detainees are innocent.
Of course, the analysis by reporters Alissa J. Rubin and Damien Cave, who are in Baghdad, is almost unfindable on the front of the NYT Web site and pretty much buried in the print edition. It's on the bottom of page A16 (though, to be fair, the editors cite it above the fold as part of a front-page package).
Now read "The erasing of Iraq," in The Guardian of London. It's excerpted from Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine," and it's mind-boggling. But I thoroughly disagree with her conclusion that "'[t]his was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world." Or that "cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated."
(Postscript crossposted at HuffPo)
Posted by jherman at 9:28 AM
September 6, 2007
'Our Palace Press'
Jay Rosen lays it out. Read this.
Posted by jherman at 12:02 PM
Orwellian Zombies All
The jingoism implicit in daily life taints everything we say, let alone what we do. To use my friend Bill Osborne's term, we are all "Orwellian zombies." This includes even the most sincere opponents of the President With His Head Up His Ass and his regime of BananaRepublic war criminals.
Consider Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent. His loathing of war in general and the Iraq war in particular expressed by two of his books -- "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," a cri de coeur, and the deadpan "What Every Person Should Know About War" -- would seem to place him above reproach.
Yet he, too, can't be excluded from the ranks of Orwellian zombies. His latest column, "The Next Quagmire," illustrates the point.
When Hedges writes that "we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect," he is correct of course. Same here:
We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force. It hasn't worked well in Iraq. It hasn't worked well in Afghanistan. And it won't work in Iran. But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project. We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.
But Hedges "goes on to create the same alarmist bullshit as bad as the policy folks he criticizes," Osborne contends, as indicated by a key paragraph. His comments on Hedges's points are bracketed in italics:
The Pentagon has reportedly drawn up plans for a series of airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran. The air attacks are designed to cripple the Iranians' military capability in three days. ... It is not hard to imagine what will happen. Iranian Shabab-3 and Shabab-4 missiles, which cannot reach the United States, will be launched at Israel, as well as American military bases and the Green Zone in Baghdad. [The missiles could be taken out within 24 hours -- and hardly get a shot off.] Expect massive American casualties, especially in Iraq, where Iranian agents and their Iraqi allies will be able to call in precise coordinates. [They would not have a window of opportunity for massive casualties. I would say 20 Americans dead.] The Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, will be shut down. [For about 5 days at most.] Chinese-supplied C-801 and C-802 anti-shipping missiles, mines and coastal artillery will target U.S. shipping, along with Saudi oil production and oil export centers. [Utterly vulnerable to A-10 jets so no big threat. Boats laying mines would also be instantly wiped out by A-10s and F-16s.] Oil prices will skyrocket to well over $4 a gallon. [Or at least the plutocracy hopes.] The dollar will tumble against the euro. [Ditto.] Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, interpreting the war as an attack on all Shiites, will fire rockets into northern Israel. [With the same minimal effectiveness as during the last idiotic invasion of Lebanon.] Israel, already struck by missiles from Tehran, will begin retaliatory raids on Lebanon and Iran. [The pretense for hegemonistic invasions would be welcomed.] Pakistan, with a huge Shiite minority, will reach greater levels of instability. The unrest could result in the overthrow of the weakened American ally President Pervez Musharraf and usher into power Islamic radicals. [Yeah, like our actions in Iraq and Iran. It is secular, leftist nationalists we actually fear. In the end, theocracy and plutocracy make great bed partners. See Saudi Arabia. And if business arrangements can't be made, theocracies are easily isolated.] Pakistan could become the first radical Islamic state to possess a nuclear weapon. [Oh dear, I see the smoking gun mushroom cloud already.] The neat little war with Iran, which few Democrats oppose, has the potential to ignite a regional inferno." [Uh, don't let the cat out of the bag about our one-party government.]
Osborne adds: "Yeah, yeah, more mushroom clouds as smoking guns, aluminum tubes, Nigerian yellow cake, attacks on Holy Israel, etc. The Iranians don't have the terrible abilities he describes. Frighten us Hedges, so we will think war with Iran should be brutal and quick. When will someone finally admit that if the Islamic world goes out of control they won't attack Israel with any significant effectiveness, but that they will start slaughtering each other (just as in Iraq and Palestine)? Which is just what the U.S. is counting on.
"Same old story with Serbia, by the way. As the last East Block holdout, it rejected neo-liberal globalism and had to be destroyed. And of course, every fucking honky swallowed the demonizing propaganda hook, line and sinker. Keep up the great work, Hedges. Propaganda disguised as criticism.
"The alarmist Hedges report is a good example of the thinking that gets the sissies (to use Gore Vidal's terms for Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk) shooting at everything. There is nothing more dangerous than a paranoid, belligerent coward with a big military apparatus. They're out to get us; pulverize them!!!!
"And how about the photo (above) that illustrates Hedges's column? It makes his argument hilarious: Iranian female militia members. The column might be called "Big Guns Under Burkas." Notice in the photo how only the front row of women have guns. I can well understand why the patriarchal theocracy in Iran wouldn't want to have too many women running around with AK-47s. There would be some big changes made there really quickly! With just a few touches the column would be great for The Onion."
Posted by jherman at 10:03 AM
September 3, 2007
Still Cookin'
Poetry as Insurgent Art:I am signaling you through the flames. The North Pole is not where it used to be. Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest. Civilization self-destructs. The goddess Nemesis is knocking at the door...
What are poets for in such an age? What is the use of poetry? ...
The master class starts wars. The lower classes fight it. Governments lie. The voice of the government is often not the voice of the people.
Posted by jherman at 8:52 PM
August 27, 2007
Vacation Interruptus -- Again
The ventriloquist dummy took a powder, Stephen Lee Myers reports in The New York Times.
Copy that, said MSNBC.com, which ran his report as its cover story (per the illustration, above), since replaced by the AP report.
There will be many thumbsuckers mulling the whys and wherefores of the dummy's departure, but here's ours (click the photo there or below):
It's our fave foto of El Senor Gonzales because it puts him in the proper perspective. May it long be remembered.
But here's a more important story of this dog day, reported by the AP's Deborah Hastings and published in the Navy Times:
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.Or worse.
For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
That's just the beginning of the story, which details the BananaRepublic's treatment of whistleblowers in ways you won't believe.
Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM
August 13, 2007
Vacation Interruptus
Straight Up's Calvin Trillin offers this comment on today's White House resignation:
BODY POLITIC
Farewell to Bush's brain, Karl Rove,
Whose loss will never drain us;
Now when do we wipe away Dick Cheney,
The boss's raging anus?
Postscript: Now watch Bill Moyers's beautiful kiss-off, delivered on Aug. 17:
Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God's anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits.
And that's just for starters. Has anybody said it better?
Posted by jherman at 6:20 PM
August 7, 2007
Banana Days Are Here Again
The BananaRepublic has gained a new lease on life from a craven combination of mindless BananaRepublicans and feckless BananaDemocrats. The dog days of summer are upon us, too. See ya later.
Aug. 10: Oh, and before I go ... here's a postscript: Something even scarier, pointed out by mi amigo with reference to the "brown-skinned shadows" in Iraq, "whose violent demise need not touch the American realm."
Posted by jherman at 8:30 AM
August 6, 2007
It Takes a Genius
The U.S. military can't find 190,000 weapons given willy-nilly to Iraqi forces when security training was run by Gen. David Petraeus.
Which raises fears, as The Washington Post delicately puts it, that the military genius who is now the top U.S. commander in Iraq has armed the insurgents fighting U.S. troops.
Makes you wonder what else besides AK-47s, pistols, body armor and helmets will have gone missing by September, when Petraeus is scheduled to report to Congress about "progress" in Iraq.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians maybe? More U.S. troops killed and wounded? Political sanity?
Postscript: And now for a minor update.
Iraq Weapons Are a Focus of Criminal InvestigationsBAGHDAD, Aug. 27 -- Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other matériel to Iraqi and American forces, according to American officials. The officials said it amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here.
The inquiry has already led to several indictments of Americans, with more expected, the officials said. One of the investigations involves a senior American officer who worked closely with Gen. David H. Petraeus in setting up the logistics operation to supply the Iraqi forces when General Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping those forces in 2004 and 2005, American officials said Monday.
Wanna bet the Petraeus report will not mention American war profiteers?
Posted by jherman at 8:59 AM
August 1, 2007
Over the Cliff With Rupe
Is Rupert Murdoch good or bad for The Wall Street Journal? That's the burning question. Today's WSJ editorial assures us, "No sane businessman pays a premium of 67% over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin." Well, nobody has said he intends to ruin it. To use a favorite word of the WSJ editorial board, that's a canard.
Rupe simply intends to run the Journal the way he wants. He has said so himself -- emphatically. No sane businessman pays $5 billion for an asset and does otherwise. Which is no good for the independence of the WSJ news department.
I speak from experience. Once upon a time I worked for a newspaper he took over -- the Chicago Sun-Times. He started it on its downhill slide. Downhill? Ha. He drove it over a cliff.
Personally, I had no cause to complain. He leafed through the paper page by page, an eye witness told me, and stopped at my Sunday "Hanging Out" column. He read it, pointed to it, and said he wanted "more of that." Which is why, in addition to Sundays, I suddenly had a column on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This suited me fine. I even got along with Charles Wilson -- then the deputy editor of The Times of London, later its editor -- who was temporarily installed as the Sun-Times editor in chief. It was only afterward, when one of Murdoch's chief Australian henchman, Frank Devine, replaced Wilson as the permanent editor, that I resigned (following an argument we had about a new assignment, to write a team column modeled on the NY Post's Page Six -- but that's another story).
The Sun-Times is not the Journal and never was. When I began working there, however, it was a really fine daily filled with first-class writing and reporting and a steady diet of major investigative series. During the Murdoch takeover many reporters and editors got out. Not all. Staffers like lifelong Chicagoans Zay Smith, the late Bill Newman and Henry Kisor stayed -- as did others like John Schulian, who remained for a while, and Roger Ebert, who was already a Sun-Times institution -- because they refused to flee to the Tribune or couldn't or had nowhere else to go if they wanted to continue working in their hometown. Mike Royko did eventually cross the street, despite his vow that he never would. But that, too, is another story.
Will the staff dissolve at the Journal? Different paper, different times. But I have no doubt same old Rupe, contrary to the opinion of another old Sun-Times hand. Some folks will be elevated, others ignored -- and many will flee while the fleeing is good or not so good. "I expect the Journal will become even more a place of favorites and outcasts," a longtime WSJ reporter says.
A few marquee names will get more dough and some freedom. They'll be promoted on Fox TV, etc., while those with nowhere else to go will slave on, pressed to churn out more and complain less. Those in the middle will flee when they can. Probably quite a few will leave journalism, because what's the point if it isn't fun and means nothing?I don't think RM cares about any particular staffers at WSJ, but it seems possible that, to the extent the current regime under the very ambitious and generally respected Marcus [Brauchli, the managing editor,] stays intact, they will want to keep people they like in place rather than watch an exodus that will both make it harder to run the newspaper and prove the critics were right about the instant diminution of the Journal's reputation. Once RM's crew insinuate themselves throughout the hierarchy, such attitudes will doubtless change.
Better believe it. And that's no canard.
PS: Lede-ing question
Not to make a big deal about COPYING A LEDE, which wasn't a piece of genius anyway, but have a look:
THE PHOENIX
August 8, 2007
When Rupert came to Boston
Just how badly will Rupert Murdoch screw up the Wall Street Journal?Ever since Murdoch's just-accepted $5 billion offer for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, became public this past May, this has been journalism's great burning question.
A reader writes: "Seems like he ripped off the entire premise -- what did Rupert do at the Bos Herald, just like you did Rupert at the S-T."
Posted by jherman at 10:31 AM
July 27, 2007
War-Funding Mystery Solved
When you're a mathematician who analyses weapons systems as an independent consultant to the U.S. government, you pay attention to military appropriations (not least because you like to get paid). So it was eyebrow-raising to receive a message from just such a weapons analyst telling me how much he'd learned from Adam Cohen's recent editorial, "Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War."
The editorial goes to the heart of the war-funding debate by describing the attitude of the Constitution's framers toward presidential power, which they regarded with apprehension especially when it came to the monarchical prerogative of making war.
Cohen writes, "They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom." [Emphasis added.] To keep that from happening, "they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called 'the foetus of monarchy.' "
The editorial is emphatic about this. Although it appeared in The New York Times on July 23, it should have appeared five or six years ago -- in late 2001 or early 2002, pick a date, but certainly before the invasion of Iraq. And here's why:
The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe's history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. [Emphasis added]. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that "absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal."Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. "In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed," he warned. "It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle." [Emphasis added.]
When the weapons analyst, who happens to be a friend and who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons, read the last part of that sentence about the laurels, he says an image of Bush in a flight suit and the "Mission Accomplished" banner prominently displayed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln instantly came to his mind.
In that context the next paragraph was revelatory, solving what had been a mystery to him. It tells exactly how "the framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters."
The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. [Emphasis added]. [Alexander] Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting "in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence."
"I had known but not understood why such appropriations never exceed two years," my friend the weapons analyst wrote. "But there it is, Article 1 Section 8. I have developed a much deeper respect and appreciation for the honesty, integrity and foresight of the Founders. And, in addition to those qualities, they were smart."
Yup, check the 12th clause of that article and section. It's goddamn clever.
Posted by jherman at 9:51 AM
July 24, 2007
The Thinking Part of My Brain
I'm still pondering why Noam Chomsky's recent article, "Imminent Crises: Threats and Opportunities," was listed on the rightwing cultural site Arts & Letters Daily.
At first I thought it was because the site's founding editor Denis Dutton and managing editor Tran Huu Dung sometimes include maverick pieces from the left that have intellectual heft. Besides, I figured they have a grudging respect for Chomsky's take on the world even if they disagree with it.
But the thinking part of my brain -- actually, my friend Bill Osborne -- disputes that. He believes the A&L editors occasionally aggregate far left articles they deem "so extreme that they pillory themselves," especially feminist articles they regard as nonsense. The Chomsky article is different however. It makes enormous sense.
"So something else seems to be at work," Osborne says.
Here's what the thinking part of my brain came up with: "The right has to find a new narrative, and there is something in the article they think they can work with." It hints at the new story the right is going to tell us:
1. The Middle East has always been a cauldron and so we are not to blame for the mess in Iraq.2. The Middle East is of such historical strategic importance that even our "failed" attempt was justified. We must, for example, not let China control Middle Eastern oil -- to say nothing of the Europeans.
3. Freedom is the essence of good government and economies, so the Iraqis (not America) are to blame for the chaos, killing, and poverty because they would not accept the "freedom" we offered.
"One could twist Chomsky's logic to that narrative," Osborne says. "I am pretty sure this is going to be the new empty oil barrel they drum on." And he adds:
The right is now also openly admitting that genocide is evolving, so they need a narrative to explain it. They must hide that we planned on the genocidal civil war from the outset, and that the war has not been a failure at all. Let them bleed each other white, then go in for the kill. (That same strategy was used for Germany and the Soviet Union before and during the Second World War.)These high level government people are ingenious, the cream of our elite schools. They always amaze me. And of course, actions speak for themselves. We see that in the end those schools, and the entire governmental and economic system they support, ring as morally hollow as someone kicking an empty oil barrel.
Which bolsters what Arianne Huffington wrote last week, "Bill Kristol: On the Train to Delusionville," about his article in the Washington Post, "Why Bush Will Be A Winner," and what she calls this morning "The Long Tail of Bill Kristol's Delusions."
Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM
July 20, 2007
Mr. Patsy Pundit
Paul Krugman zapped a fellow New York Times columnist this morning with a sharp rebuke, basically calling him a Bush patsy and accusing him of being an enabler if not a believer:
In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits -- amazingly, they still exist -- to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever.
Perhaps out of politeness, although more likely out of Times protocol, Krugman doesn't name him. But in case you missed who he means -- since he does name Republican Sen. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana and Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, as key Bush enablers -- the patsy pundit Krugman means is David Brooks.
On Tuesday, in his column, Mr. Patsy Pundit described a meeting he attended at the White House to hear Bush talk about the war in Iraq:
I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency. [Emphasis added.]
Though Krugman is willing to concede that Mr. Patsy Pundit's description of an upbeat, confident Bush "might even be true," he points to an obvious problem. "What I don't understand," he writes, "is why we're supposed to consider Mr. Bush's continuing confidence a good thing."
This doesn't occur to Mr. Patsy Pundit, who goes on to describe Bush in typically grandiose language. Besides gushing about a president with "a capacious view of the job and its possibilities," he elevates Bush to the rarified intellectual realm, believe it or not, of an anti-Tolstoy.
He refers to Bush's "theory of history" as if he actually has one, and "only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back" from believing how "smart" and "compelling" Bush is "in person."
There are always patsies and enablers who surround the worst leaders, who flatter them with euphemisms and heroize them with outright lies. But as Krugman says, "we need to stop blaming" Bush for our mess. "He is what he always was, and everyone except a hard core of equally delusional loyalists knows it."
Even if Mr. Patsy Pundit is not a hardcore loyalist -- and he's not -- he is delusional for writing about Bush the way he does. And that's the trouble. "Many people" who realize what's wrong -- the pols, mainly Republicans, and the U.S. generals at the top -- "still refuse, out of political caution and careerism, to do anything about it," Krugman writes. But it's the patsy pundits like Brooks who enable them.
(FYI: Krugman's column is free to read here.)
Posted by jherman at 12:22 PM
July 17, 2007
Cultural Analysis For Your Viewing Pleasure
Who says we don't blog about high kulcha? Here's something to chew on. "One of the more profound statements on German opera," a friend writes.
Online Videos by Veoh.com
And here are some other Chuck Jones opera classics not to be missed: "The Rabbit of Seville"; "Long-Haired Hare"; "Nelly's Folly"; and, for a change of pace, "One Froggy Evening."
Now the staff of thousands will take some downtime.
Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM
July 16, 2007
Impeach Now!
Never thought I could listen to Bruce Fein without throwing a brick at him. But, man! The nerdie rightwing legal beagle is worth hearing on why the President With His Head Up His Ass and his Attack Dog must be impeached. Yes, must.
Why would I believe Fein on impeachment now when I didn't believe him when he went after Bill Clinton? (He wrote the first article of impeachment against Clinton.) Because in this instance, contrary to his specious puritanical reaction to a sex scandal, Fein makes a be-yooo-tifully justifiable case against the two of leaders of the BananaRepublic.
He did it on Bill Moyers Journal the other day, as he did earlier on Slate against the Attack Dog alone. You can watch Fein do it. Click "watch video" to see the segment. He makes the case, along with leftie John Nichols. (The 'twain doth sometimes meet.) If you prefer to read what they said, click "read transcript."
And here's the video of Moyers' intro. I hope it's a sign of things to come, though our spineless pols make it doubtful.
Cherry-picking is kosher -- yes it is.
Posted by jherman at 8:52 AM
July 12, 2007
Did Someone Say Gestapo?
Can't let the week go by without noting "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness" in The Nation, a devastating piece of eye-witness testimony described by its authors as an investigation into "alleged military misconduct" of U.S. troops in Iraq.
The three words alleged military misconduct are a legalistic euphemism for the banalized horrors of the war -- "indiscriminate killings" of innocent civilians, "checkpoint shootings," night raids by stormtroopers who act like the Gestapo -- all of which are detailed in firsthand accounts by veterans willing to speak up.
As Spc. Garett Reppenhagen, 32, of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a cavalry scout and sniper, points out, "It's just the nature of the situation you're in. That's what's wrong. It's not individual atrocity. It's the fact that the entire war is an atrocity."
But will the American public get it? Despite polls that say popular opinion has turned against the war, some observers doubt it will make much difference in the long run.
Consider what mi amigo William Osborne wrote before the invasion and in another context: America seems to regard its victims as "little more than nameless bystanders, shadows without identity in a netherworld of 'collateral damage.'"
[They are] brown-skinned shadows whose violent demise need not touch the American realm, even if their deaths were caused or abetted by the U.S. government. In short, it's just massive suffering and death in a remote world, something like images of video games beamed from the ethers.
Today, speaking of the war, he dismisses all talk of an American withdrawal as nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Everything is going exactly to plan -- the civil war, the destruction of Iraq, the strategic 'retreat' into bases, and a gradual genocide, both physical and cultural, against the Sunnis (and, in a way, against all Iraqis).The Americans will back into their bases and wait out the genocidal civil war. It's been U.S. strategy in Iraq all along. How clever to hide it behind the facade that we 'lost' the war, or are withdrawing in failure.
The theater even includes putting Hillary in office to make the presumed de-escalation and partial withdrawal appear to be democratic -- once we have sown the seeds of death.
And now that it is all done, we will, of course, shed a crocodile tear or two, including suitable articles in The Nation and The New York Times.
Or as that now-forgotten prevaricator Rummy Boy would say, "By golly!"
Posted by jherman at 9:56 AM
In Promo Mode
Steve Skrovan writes:
Just read your blog on Huffington about Ralph Nader. As one who has studied Nader for the past five years, I found it to be [praise omitted]. I directed along with my partner, Henriette Mantel, a documentary on Nader's life entitled "An Unreasonable Man," and since I suspect now you will be receiving the same shit that we have been dealing with all this time, it might be worth a look-see.
We were in the documentary competition at Sundance in '06, made the Oscar shortlist this year, had a theatrical release this past spring and had a two-disc DVD released last month. In addition to the film, the DVD has a number of featurettes on such topics as "The Role of Third Parties," "Corporate Power in America," "Why the Right is Better Organized than the Left," "What Happened to the Democratic Party?" "Ralph on the Iraq War," "What Kind Of President Would Nader Be?" and a psychological profile of Nader entitled "Profile Of A Charismatic Leader." Our website is anunreasonableman.com. There you will find links to many of our reviews.
We'd be curious to know what you think.
Here's what I think. I haven't seen the flick (yet). The reviews are remarkable. But the best, by far, is Chris Hedges' review at truthdig.
He writes:
It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party, that threw the 2000 election to Bush, not Ralph Nader. Nader received only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 and got less than one-half of 1 percent in 2004. All of the third-party candidates who ran in 2000 in Florida -- there were about half a dozen of them -- got more votes than the 537-vote difference between Bush and Gore. Why not go after the other third-party candidates? And what about the 10 million Democrats who voted in 2000 for Bush? What about Gore, whose campaign was so timid and empty -- he never mentioned global warming -- that he could not carry his home state of Tennessee? And what about the 2004 cartoon-like candidate, John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us "victory" in Iraq?
Hedges also comments about the unwise choice of voting for "the least worst" -- a choice I myself made in 2000 and 2004 -- and the anger on the left about Nader's so-called betrayal:
There is a fascinating rage -- and rage is the right word -- expressed by many on the left in this fine film about Nader. Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman and Michael Moore, along with a host of former Nader's Raiders, spit out venomous insults toward Nader, a man they profess to have once admired, the most common charge being that Nader is a victim of his oversized ego. This anger is the anger of the betrayed. But they were not betrayed by Nader. They betrayed themselves. They allowed themselves to buy into the facile argument of "the least worse" and ignore the deeper, subterranean assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed.
Cliff Doerksen, in his review in Time Out / Chicago, also makes an excellent point:
"[I]t's quite absurd to exclude a third-party candidate from the choreographed pillow fight laughably called the presidential debates on the grounds that he's too insignificant to be a factor, then later single him out as the factor responsible for handing the White House to the most incompetent and ill-intended administration in history."
PS: Henriette Mantel writes:
Jan, Can't wait for you to see the movie!! If you get too beat up by angry dems, just let us know. We are really good at fighting them off now. Once again, [praise omitted]. Such a nice break from all the (mostly uninformed) Naderhaters on Huffington.
Posted by jherman at 8:47 AM
July 9, 2007
Waiting for Nader
Whenever Ralph Nader comes on the tube, which isn't often enough, it's must-see TV. He's in a class by himself. I don't know of any politician, civic leader or social firebrand who can match him for his unique combination of level-headed insight, deep intelligence, real accomplishment and passionate straight talk.
For instance, in a must-see interview that aired this morning on Democracy Now!, here's what he said about whether the lame duck President With His Head Up His Ass still matters:
Yeah, he matters because he's a national security menace. He's a destroyer of our Constitution, a violator of our statutes, a revoker of our regulations. He's a war monger. He's a war criminal -- clinically a war criminal -- and he's still in charge. And as I said some time ago, he's a giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being, although I sometimes wonder about the word "human." I don't think it's possible to see a more obsessively compulsive person with so much contempt for the traditions of our country ...
That's just a snippet of Nader's wide-ranging discussion of health care, corporate government, campaign financing, the current crop of presidential candidates and the general political realities of the BananaRepublic. (You can also read the transcript.)
I voted for him in 1996 but didn't in 2000, because I wanted Al Gore to win. Nor did I vote for Nader in 2004, because I thought it would mean one less vote to unseat the illegitimate BananaRepublican regime. As I noted then,
If the American people want to elect the nasty little shit now in the White House, they should remember they will be indicting themselves as co-conspirators in his administration's criminal misadventures. They will no longer have the excuse that he was an appointed president, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, and not an elected one.
Even so, I still believed Nader had every right to run in 2004. And now I wish he'd run again, because now I'd vote for him again. His assessment of the political realities following the 2006 Congressional elections has so far proved true, unfortunately, right down to the last detail:
[T]o the extent the Democrats gained the majority in the House, it was on the backs of some very rightwing Democrats who won the election against rightwing Republican incumbents. And so, there was no mandate for any progressive agenda. ...[One] thing that is good, though, is that there's some very good veteran chairmen who are coming in: George Miller, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey and, of course, John Conyers. But to counter that, both John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi have taken the impeachment issue right off the table, before the election, and that means there's going to be no Bush accountability for his war crimes and his inflation of unlawful presidential authority.
... The Democrats will throw a lot of subpoenas at the White House. The White House will, of course, drag it on and on and on. And the public will get fed up with it. The White House has great reserves in dragging it on and on and on. Because Bush can't rely on Republicans as a majority of the Congress, he's going to inflate his presidential power even more extremely and unlawfully, in the opinion of many legal scholars -- to do through the inherent power of the presidency, as Dick Cheney and Bush have talked about, what he can't do through the Congress, which he no longer controls.
That's why the drive to impeach is long past due.
Posted by jherman at 11:16 AM
July 3, 2007
Woof! Woof!
Whatever it's called -- an assault on the rule of law or a prison break -- it comes as the latest illustration of the BananaRepublic's independence from democratic principles. The President With His Head Up His Ass and his Attack Dog have sprung their Lap Dog, just in time for the nation's Independence Day fireworks.
So the coverup continues.
Makes me feel foolish to have asked, "Is the BananaRepublic on its way out?"
Postscript: A reader writes:
Good links. Liked the Abrams piece on the coverup. He's absolutely right. They need to follow that to the end. Until we have the pleasure of seeing Darth Cheney frog-marched across the White House lawn in leg irons.
PPS: Another reader writes: "Rogue Republicans don't let a fellow rogue down." And as others have said: "Paris Hilton served more time."
Posted by jherman at 10:35 AM
June 22, 2007
Web Shorthand
It lacks the humor of the blowjob sign displayed outside the White House several years ago. But the full-page ad in this morning's NY Times shows more fervor. Talk about powerful!
Postscript: Now for the longhand:
YOUR GOVERNMENT, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in its sights.YOUR GOVERNMENT is openly torturing people, and justifying it.
YOUR GOVERNMENT puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night.
YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.
YOUR GOVERNMENT suppresses the science that doesn't fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.
And that's just the beginning. Click on the image and listen to Olympia Dukakis deliver "the call" to drive out the BananaRepublic and impeach the regime's leaders for war crimes. It's wall-to-wall stunning. ("Olympia Dukakis is begging for a one-way ticket to Gitmo." -- David Ehrenstein)
Posted by jherman at 8:09 AM
June 21, 2007
Under and Over
When Ed Sanders made the cover of LIFE magazine 40 years ago -- on Feb. 17, 1967 -- the editors took note of a growing resistance to the mainstream with a cover line that read: "The worldwide underground of the arts creates THE OTHER CULTURE." The "human be-in" in San Francisco had made news four weeks earlier, on Jan. 14. The "summer of love" -- now being memorialized in a show at the Whitney Museum, "Art of the Psychedelic Era" -- was still several months away.
Sanders was not only a founding member of The Fugs, whose songs included "Kill for Peace," "Slum Goddess," "CIA Man," "Group Grope" and "River of Shit," he owned the Peace Eye bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he published a mimeographed literary rag called Fuck You / a magazine of the arts. (Arrested and charged with obscenity, he was found not guilty.)
Meanwhile, the hippie counterculture was turning political. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others (including Paul Krassner, who reputedly coined the term Yippie at a 1967 New Year's Eve party) founded the Youth International Party. Peace activists led huge protests against the Vietnam War later that year. On Oct. 21 more than 100,000 demonstrators marched in Washington, where Yippie leaders tried to "levitate the Pentagon" and Sanders performed an "exorcism."
The most dramatic, most violent culmination of the politicized counterculture -- bombings by the Weather Underground excepted -- came on the streets of Chicago. Yippies clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention and were charged with conspiracy in the notorious trial of the Chicago Seven. (Their convictions were reversed on appeal.)
But while all of that has receded into history, the counterculture itself has merged so comfortably with the mainstream that its concerns, if not its aspirations, are often similar to those of today's homogenized society. Issues that were once too "far out" for the mainstream to take seriously are now part of common debate. Just yesterday, referring to his antiwar stance, Michael Moore said in a press conference for "Sicko," his latest movie: "I am now in the mainstream majority, which is weird."
Still, it's worth recalling the nascent days of the counterculture, when "beatnik" was the opprobrious term applied to Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg and their ilk well before underground art turned psychedelic and the "summer of love" had hippies putting flowers in their hair. For a fine retrospective, check out the current summer-long show "FUCK FOR PEACE: A History of The Fugs." It runs through Sept. 8 at Printed Matter on Manhattan's West Side in Chelsea. Psychedelic it's not, but it opens your eyes.
Postscript: A reader writes:
And what a wonderful world we went on to create afterward.Some things never change. We had reasons to hate our parents' generation, and, now, our kids have reasons to hate us, too.
Touché.
A reader writes:
Interesting! A lot of cool things went on in the 60s, but in my opinion the root cause of the problems the nation is going through right now is Me-Generation selfishness institutionalized.IMHO Rove, Shrub, et al. have a serene sense of entitlement that only comes from being preened and fawned over by parents substituting empowerment for love, and ego-boosting for education.
This goes BEYOND partisan politics and ideological orientation. I have met tons of sour-ass ex-hippies who are as dark and cynical as any Cheney aide, and everyone from that time seems to have an addiction to auto-validation through olympian pronouncements rather than honest, respectful debate.
Uh, really? No doubt there are plenty of sour-ass ex-hippies out there. But "as dark and cynical" as Attack Dog's helpers? Please. As for Rove's "serene sense of entitlement," or Shrub's et al., I doubt that Me-generation parenting had anything to do with it. Rove was a self-generated nerd. Shrub was a self-generated jerk.
PPS: The Printed Matters exhibition has an FBI surveillance document, dated Oct. 10, 1968, describing Sanders as "a leader of the Youth International Party (Yippies) and leader of the rock music group 'The Fags.'" I presume that was an agent's typo, but on second thought I wonder if it was an intentional insult. Funny either way, eh?
I should mention here that the Whitney show is a complete dud. It's a piece of curatorial junk, no more psychedelic than a lifeless collection of antiquarian memorabilia. Anybody who wants a real sense of the art and culture of the "summer of love" would do better just to look at this "flower power" photo, taken at the Oct. 1967 peace march on the Pentagon:
Click the photo for a Universal Newsreel about the march, which was broadcast at the time.
Posted by jherman at 6:29 PM
June 18, 2007
Just Ducky
As American and Iraqi troops launch an offensive near Baghdad, it may be unwise to apply a description of the morale of the French troops at Dien Bien Phu to the mood of the American troops in Iraq.
But even given the enormous differences between the Indochina war and the one in Iraq -- in geography, battle conditions, politics, culture, technology and, of course, causes -- I can't help noticing the aptness of Graham Greene's observation: On the eve of their defeat, in May 1954, the French troops had reached a period "not so much of exhaustion as of cynicism and dogged pride -- they believed in no solution but were not prepared for any surrender."
Greene spent only a day and a night at Dien Bien Phu in January of 1954, two months after six parachute battalions were dropped on the French outpost in a doubling of the military force there. But he sensed the mood accurately, surge notwithstanding. "It was no novelist's imagination which felt the atmosphere heavy with doom," he writes, "for these men were aware of what they resembled -- sitting ducks."
Despite news reports testifying to the can-do spirit of the U.S. Marines, the underlying question "Is U.S. troop morale slipping?" seems more pertinent than ever, especially when a recent study commissioned by the Pentagon has found that "45 percent of the junior-enlisted Army soldiers overall rated unit morale as low or very low" and "one in five soldiers suffers from a mental health disorder like depression or anxiety."
In Iraq the ducks have gone on the offensive, we're told. They're not just sitting there, say the American generals. But let's not forget the French generals said that, too. "What remains a mystery to this day," Greene writes, "is why the battle was ever fought at all, why twelve battalions of the French Army were committed to the defense of an armed camp situated in a hopeless geographical terrain -- hopeless for defense and hopeless for the second objective, since the camp was intended to be the base of offensive operations."
Is the surge in Baghdad like the parachute drop on Dien Bien Phu? I hope not. Military analysts would find the question ridiculous on the face of it. But then it's not the military analysts who've been running this war. It's the French generals in the White House.
Posted by jherman at 2:00 PM
June 13, 2007
Land of Shadows
Is the BananaRepublic on its way out? I don't mean just the elected officials like the President With His Head Up His Ass and his Attack Dog in their lame-duck days. I mean their modus operandi or, if you like, their institutional style and substance.
Not to stretch the point, but "there is no crueller tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice." That's Montesquieu, via Clive James, speaking about the Roman emperor Tiberius. "Montesquieu was impressed by the efficiency Tiberius brought to the business of perverting the judicial system," James writes.
Jess Bravin, reporting in today's Wall Street Journal, gives me hope our boys are less efficient. He writes that the "effort to create a separate legal system for the war on terrorism may be foundering."
The latest sign, Bravin notes, was Monday's federal appeals court ruling that it's illegal to hold a U.S. resident arrested in this country in indefinite military detention without charging him with a crime simply because the president has declared him an enemy combatant. He writes:
Skeptical civilian and military courts, using language both sweeping and technical, have blocked the government's contention that to fight terrorism the president can invoke military powers that supersede traditional legal protections. None of these setbacks has resulted in the immediate release of prisoners, but they raise questions about the long-term viability of the legal regime.
Bravin is not alone in his analysis. Others -- law professor Jonathan Turley on "Countdown," for one -- have commented pretty much likewise, which is heartening. And yet ... it staggers the mind to realize what we've come to.
Postscript: A reader, "Balakirev," comments:
Not when you factor in a benignly complicit press -- owned and operated as conservative/neo-con radical organs, or taking refuge in bland reporting without investigation. This is the tool that has allowed Bush and his cronies to get away with aggravated assault on the Constitution, a smoke screen of Hiltons and Brittanys, haircuts and madrasses, that keep the public from any chance of developing a sense of outrage.
(June 14, 2007 at 11:42am AM EDT)
PPS: Point taken.
Meantime WSJ's editorial page has already attacked its own reporter's analysis. Yesterday (June 14) its lead editorial dissed Bravin without naming him. Here's the first graf:
On Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that al Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can't be detained as an enemy combatant. The press corps is reporting -- no, shouting, cheering, doing somersaults -- that this is further proof that Bush Administration detainee policies are doomed to legal oblivion.
The headline "Al Qaeda's American Harbor" and the subhed "A bad decision likely to be overturned" summarized the theme.
If that wasn't aggressive enough, the op-ed page led with a piece, headlined "Terrorist Safe Haven," by a former associate White House counsel to Bush that took the same line as the editorial. The pull quote: "Thanks to the Fourth Circuit, al Qaeda operatives can breathe easy once they hit our shores."
Posted by jherman at 4:56 PM
June 11, 2007
The Albanian Idol of the BananaRepublic
His latest moniker on the front page of The New York Times print edition did not make the paper's Web site, except here, where the text type is so small it's unreadable. So I offer it now as a public service: "American President, Albanian Idol." It's the caption head on the photo -- above the fold, no less.
Did the news editors of The Times believe the implied satirical content needed to be eliminated for the Web? I didn't ask. Maybe the newly installed public editor will.
But at least the following exchange in the story itself -- a great snapshot by Sheryl Gay Stolberg -- was allowed to stand:
On Saturday in Rome, the president agreed that there should be a deadline to end the United Nations talks [about independence for Kosovo], saying: "In terms of a deadline, there needs to be one. It needs to happen."But on Sunday, Mr. Bush tried to backtrack when asked when that deadline might be. "First of all, I don't think I called for a deadline," Mr. Bush said, during a press appearance with [Albanian Prime Minister] Berisha in the courtyard of a government ministry building. He was reminded that he had.
"I did?" he asked, sounding surprised. "What exactly did I say? I said deadline? O.K., yes, then I meant what I said." The reporters laughed.
He's so laughable it tempts me to change my term for him from the President With His Head Up His Ass to, yes, the BananaRepublic's "Albanian Idol."
Postscript: A friend writes: "For folks w/ a long history of being fucked over, wot a superb cherce!"
PPS: Stolberg is on the case again today (Tuesday, June 12). She quotes another of the idol's brilliant remarks: "We're proud to stand with you in NATO," he told Bulgaria's president. "These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved."
Posted by jherman at 8:39 AM
May 28, 2007
Where Have All the Coffins Gone?
Posted by jherman at 1:06 PM
May 23, 2007
Conscientious Objection
If brave Olaf "whose warmest heart recoiled at war" were alive today, would he tell the President With His Head Up His Ass what e.e. cummings once had him tell a West Point colonel? "I will not kiss your fucking flag."
It would be unfeeling at the least, given the stunning 5-column photo on the front page of this morning's New York Times and the accompanying story of a young soldier killed, of others wounded, on a foot patrol in Iraq.
Besides, the absence of a military draft and the use of an all-volunteer force for making war tend to neutralize the very idea of Olaf the C.O. If you're a conscientious objector, what are you doing in the military in the first place? (Pace Pablo Paredes, the sailor who refused to deploy to Iraq, filed a C.O. application and -- surprise! -- avoided prison time.)
Still, Olaf certainly would not say "DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI," the famous words of the Roman poet Horace that are etched above the west entrance of the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. (Translation: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.")
Olaf didn't believe in patriotic gore. And when saying so got him beaten up and reamed with a hot bayonet, he made it even plainer, "There is some shit I will not eat."
Would that all of us were as brave as Olaf.
Posted by jherman at 11:15 AM
May 17, 2007
One Mo' Time
Have we beaten this to death? I mean the Copycat and the Original Cat, which I've already referred to twice before, here and here. But Randy Kennedy's item, "Photographer Wins Suit Against Designer," in the Arts Briefly column of The New York Times, revived the issue for me -- particularly his description of the plagiarism involved.
A French judge ruled that John Galliano's fashion ads "too closely mimicked a technique" created by William Klein. (An example of Klein's technique, right.) In other words, the plagiarism did not involve an exact image but rather the imitation of a style -- or as the Associated Press put it, "[the judge] said the ads clearly violated intellectual property laws because Galliano never asked Klein's permission to use the style, which the New York-born photographer developed more than a decade ago."
The parallels to the case of a Vik Muniz fashion spread in The New York Times Style Magazine, which imitated the technique and the imagery of the artist Norman O. Mustill, are so close that it's bizarre. Here's some of the evidence one more time, as quoted from the original Muniz-Mustill item of March 13, 2006:
Exhibit A: On the left, Mustill (from 39 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the exact material: tree branches within a human form in the context of a fashion statement and the referential hand.
And that's just Exhibit A.
Perhaps more bizarre than the "paraparallels" between Galliano-Klein and Muniz-Mustill is the fact that the dreadful former public editor of The Times never responded to my complaint. The editors of the NYT Style Magazine published the Muniz spread, undisturbed, and it's too damned expensive to sue.
Without seeing the incriminating Galliano ad spread, which I can't find online, I'm drawing conclusions based on words. If anybody has the spread, please let me or my staff of thousands know. It would be much appreciated. Here's a more detailed explanation of the ruling, from Le Monde.
Posted by jherman at 11:08 AM
May 9, 2007
While We Were Out
Yes, the royal editorial we took a break from blogging. But not from reading. A theater column, of all things, caught our attention while we were out because of its straightforward accuracy, let alone strong writing: "Prisoners of the Past" by Michael Feingold, in the Village Voice. He pinpoints the connection between the Living Theatre revival of Kenneth H. Brown's 24-year-old play "The Brig" and the American premiere of Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon."
If The Brig's power comes from the U.S. military's being tragically the same in 2007 as in 1963, or worse, Frost/Nixon gets its resonance from the difference. Though Peter Morgan's play centers on President Nixon's on-camera post-Watergate "confession" to British interviewer David Frost, its unconscious moral is how good Tricky Dick looks, compared to the slime we have in office now.
The slime, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass, recently reminded the Congress: "I'm the commander guy." That also caught our attention. (See the video.)
Had the royal bloviator kept up his reading, which we doubt, he might have seen Greg Jaffe's frontpage story, "At Lonely Iraq Outpost, GIs Stay as Hope Fades," in The Wall Street Journal. "None of the soldiers in Tarmiyah talk about winning anymore," Jaffe reports.
Tarmiyah is a "small, trash-strewn city 30 miles north of Baghdad" where "U.S. troops just walking a simple foot patrol ... has become unthinkable," Jaffe writes. The 50 soldiers in the outpost are surrounded by about 30,000 Iraqis. The goal of the troops "is to keep the enemy off-balance, with periodic raids. It's the best they can hope for under the new U.S. 'surge strategy,' which some U.S. officers in Iraq say does little more than chase insurgents from one part of the country to another."
Jaffe's war reporting is particularly good (not that it makes any difference to the "commander guy," of course), and we've cited it before -- here and here.
Meanwhile, leave it to The Journal to slam dunk George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," with the most devastating review that we also read on our break from blogging: "Inside the Inside Story," written by Doug Feith, one of the chief Pentagon culprits for the phony intelligence and "facts fixed around the policy" to justify the invasion of Iraq. It's behind the WSJ subscription wall, unfortunately, but Feith provides a way around that by posting the review on his own site.
See if you don't get the impresson of a viper baring its fangs. Note, too, the tin-eared attempt at humor in the last paragraph of the review. While that doesn't undermine the points Feith makes, it does reveal a peculiar callowness -- not suprising, I suppose, given his war crimes, but strange nonetheless.
Posted by jherman at 10:10 AM
April 30, 2007
Mission Impeachment
Nobody mentioned "Mission Accomplished" -- Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of that infamous photo op -- but when Chris Hedges called for the impeachment of the President With His Head Up His Ass during a panel on the Iraq war at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, he got a standing ovation.
Hedges read a short speech, "No One Should Be Above the Law," which he'd given earlier last week in Washington at a large gathering of activists, politicians and others to launch an impeachment initiative.
The speech began by pointing out that Prez Huha "has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. ... Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public."
This president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the "crime of aggression." And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we do not begin the process of impeachment, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences.
As noted last week, Dennis the Menace has already introduced a bill to impeach Prez Huha's Attack Dog. The Democratic leaders in the Congress have said that bill is going nowhere, however, and I don't think Hedges expects the impeachment initiative against Huha himself to go anywhere either. What it will do, he hopes, is show the world that not all Americans are complicit in the BananaRepublic's war crimes.
Posted by jherman at 9:46 AM
April 27, 2007
Grrrr...
It was unanimous. When asked for a show of hands not one went up to support impeachment proceedings against Prez Huha's Attack Dog. Thus did last night's lineup of Democratic presidential candidates distinguish itself.
Make that unanimous minus one. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who introduced the impeachment bill -- House Resolution 333 -- was apparently too modest to raise his own hand.
Here he is in a video interview about HR 333 earlier this week, as posted on YouTube. And here's a synopsis of the three articles of impeachment with supporting documents.
Missing from the documents is "Buying the War," the debut program of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. If you didn't catch it Wednesday night on the tube, you can watch it online. The program doesn't just indict the press, as advertised, for its contemptible submissiveness in the run-up to the Iraq war. It indicts all the president's men for a crime as serious, according to my Staff of Thousands, as Watergate and Iran-Contra combined.
Postscript: Essential reading from Greg Palast.
Posted by jherman at 10:20 AM
April 25, 2007
Welcome Back, Bill Moyers
"You can't keep asking young people to die for a lie," he said this morning on Democracy Now!, where he talked about his return to public television with a new weekly series called "Bill Moyers Journal." (Have a look at the DN! interview.)
The first program in the series, "Buying the War," debuts tonight. Variety's Bryan Lowery describes it as "a methodical, devastating, pull-no-punches recap of mainstream journalism's collective failure to challenge the Bush administration [a k a the BananaRepublic] in the run-up to the Iraq war."
He quotes Moyers as saying, "The press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration [again, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass] to go to war on false pretenses." Which dovetails with this from yesterday's item, dontcha think?
Tom Shales raves about the program: "Perhaps the truth shall eventually set you free, but first it might make you very, very depressed." He calls tonight's program "one of the most gripping and important pieces of broadcast journalism so far this year." He also notes, "It's always depressing to learn that you've been had, but incalculably more so when the deception has resulted in thousands of Americans dying in the Iraq war effort."
(Gee, Tom, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dead, dying, and displaced Iraqis. You forgot them.)
Meanwhile, here's something else Moyers said this morning on Democracy Now! (not that you haven't heard this before either): "Let's just face it, democracy has become a racket when it comes to politics and the media. ... This is contempt -- contempt for democracy and freedom. We cannot rightly claim to have a democracy as long as money is sovereign. ... There is a cancer eating at the heart of democracy, and it's money in politics."
Finally, congratulations to Sen. Harry Reid for calling Huha's vice president by the right moniker. "The president sends out his attack dog often. That's also known as Dick Cheney."
I've never really decided how best to refer to the vice president. I've called him everything from the chief crony, Assistant Maximum Leader and the oily conman to the wayward shooter, Cheney Boy and Mr. Sourpuss. But this settles it. Henceforth he will be called Attack Dog.
Posted by jherman at 10:04 AM
April 23, 2007
Bulletin From Harm's Way
Statements made by the chain of command [during an investigation of the Haditha killings] suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to "get the job" done no matter what it takes.
The killings in Haditha, in Anbar Province, began with a roadside bombing that killed one American marine and wounded two. Several marines then began methodically killing civilians in the area, eventually going door to door in the village and killing women and children, some in their beds, according to a Naval criminal investigation.
So don't forget to do the patriotic thing: Support the troops.
Postscript: A reader writes:
Yes, the linked mainstream media reports about the military investigation deflate the "support our troops" propaganda, at least in part, by showing that a tiny fraction -- a few rogue Marines -- have behaved like murderers. But at the same time another propaganda tactic seems to be presented, which banalizes evil under the guise of journalistic neutrality.The reports leave the impression we are concerned with justice when, in fact, we're engaged in an unjust war in Iraq that, along with an embargo, has killed around a million people and has so thoroughly decimated the country that the effects will last for a century.
But America's mainstream media never (or rarely ever) publishes articles that mention, much less discuss in detail, that several of our highest leaders are seen as war criminals by many, many very reasonable people throughout the world. It is just some rogue Marines killing 24 Iraqi civilians. Glad to see the media has its priorities straight.
Posted by jherman at 8:05 AM
April 20, 2007
Dummied Up
Is it any surprise the ventriloquist's dummy had so many memory lapses? Or that the President With His Head Up His Ass let it be known he was pleased with the dummy's testimony? Of course not. Nobody is fooled. Certainly not the news photographers who covered the hearing, Don Mills among them.
Meantime, John McCain offered his quippy version of truth on the campaign trail in South Carolina. "Remember that old Beach Boys song 'Bomb Iran'?" he joked, in answer to a question about sending "an airmail message" to Teheran. "Bomb, bomb, bomb," he sang, aping the song "Barbara Ann."
As The Wall Street Journal said last week in "McCain's Finest Hour," an adoring editorial defending his support for the war escalation in Iraq, "he has demonstrated that his views on the subject are serious and born of belief, not of polls."
Uh-uh.
We are supposed to measure McCain by the seriousness of his belief, not by the empirical reality of Prez Huha's so-called "surge." As if "belief" exempts McCain from the stupidity he shares with Huha, let alone the cynicism of overweening political ambition.
Postscript: Moveon.org has just put out an apt video ad: Bomb Iran. Bomb. Bomb. Bomb.
Posted by jherman at 8:46 AM
April 16, 2007
It's All in the Clicks
Be a good citizen and don't forget: The deadline nears for "la machina de guerra," as a friend puts it. This is what he means, of course.
Another essential click is this equation from James Fallows: Wolfowitz = Swaggart, chap. 1.
Posted by jherman at 5:27 PM
April 6, 2007
Eptitudes
This image -- received from a reader who writes, "I am surprised, too!" -- has been making the rounds of the Internet for a long time as a theme with variations (and in many iterations from left, right, and elsewhere):
Although we know what it means, the caption does not parse. It's grammatically inept. But -- I'm switching gears here -- Sam Zell's grammatically ept "I've never read online" also fails to parse and is truly scary, given his winning bid for the Tribune media company.
Since I'm parsing, have you read the LA Times drama critic Charles McNulty lately? Here's what he wrote the other day: "Redgrave honors this journey not by mimicking it but by processing it through her own sublimely empathic instrument." Whoa! The Times would be doing its readers a service by processing empathetically inflated criticspeak like that through a flapdoodle strainer.
Postscript: April 7 -- And now for a caption that parses all too well:
Posted by jherman at 9:28 AM
April 3, 2007
'Ten-Forty'
Sometimes a magazine cover is perfect. This one, by Christoph Neimann, nails it.
Click that thang.
Posted by jherman at 2:02 PM
April 2, 2007
Corporate Artists
Remember when Jay Critchley was blowin' in the wind with his proposal for "Martucket Eyeland,'' a Disneyfied Vegas-style Resort & Theme Park in Nantucket Sound? It was designed to help scuttle the plan for an offshore wind farm of 130 giant wind turbines, each taller than the Statue of Liberty, to stretch across roughly 25 square miles of the Sound from Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. And scuttled it was. Or so it was thought. Well, a year later the wind farm is back.
So is Critchley. Only this time he's up to no good with a new twist on an old project: "TransAmerica -- Condoms with a Conscience." It's part of an exhibition, Corporate Art Expo '07, at THE LAB in San Francisco featuring artists who, in the curator's words, "package themselves as corporate entities" with "whimsical" (read: subversive) agendas.
The exhibition includes Critchley's 3-foot scale model of the TransAmerica Building made out of condom boxes with the logo of his patriotically named Old Glory Condoms Corporation on them. The condoms are imprinted with an American flag. Company motto: Worn with pride country-wide.
Critchley says he wants "to initiate a public dialogue on the role of global corporations in the fight against HIV/AIDS."
As Shane Montgomery, who curated the show, puts it (in corporate-style artspeak, naturally):
Over the last few years, a new group of artists have emerged that package themselves as corporate entities. They develop a company name, a branding scheme, and utilize the language of advertising and marketing. These individual artists and collectives create art objects, marketing materials, and performative event-based pieces that can exist in a gallery setting as well as in the public sphere. Much of this work centers around issues of capitalism and consumerism. By putting this work within the context of fictional products or alternative services, we are able to engage in a more enhanced conversation around topics ranging from globalization, immigration reform, and health care in a way that is whimsical and visually inspiring.
Other artists in the show include the Anti-Advertising Agency, Acclair, C5 Corporation, Davis & Davis Research, Meaning Maker, My Death and Taxes, PP Valise, SubRosa, Slop Art, TDirt, Tectonic Corporation, and We Are War. Among the products on exhibit are "psychological prosthetics, self-help services, psycho-geographic mapping, research and development services, neurotransmitter security services, safety educational materials, and product placement services."
Sidebar
"Old Glory was launched in 1989 at MIT List Visual Arts Center," Critchley writes in a press release. "[It was] inspired by Bush I and the US Congress' attempt to amend the Constitution to ban flag desecration, and the invisibility of HIV/AIDS in the government. Although I had often utilized the corporate structure to create a media platform for ideas and interventions, Old Glory was the real thing -- shareholders and marketable products."
He continues:
My strategy was to challenge the government's silence and redefine patriotism -- it's patriotic to protect and save lives. My US Trademark application was rejected as "immoral and scandalous to associate the flag with sex," but the Center for Constitutional Rights' lawyer, David Cole, represented me pro bono, and we won a three-year legal battle. As a business, it was less successful because the FDA did not approve multi-colored condoms − over concern for the effect of inks on latex. Our successful Latex is 4 Lovers campaign brought attention to lambskin condoms' ineffective prevention of HIV transmission. Senator Jesse Helms, ironically, created the first global safer sex ad, holding up the Old Glory logo in the Senate on CNN, denouncing the trademark designation. Old Glory is now in standard law school textbooks on trademark, copyright and patent law. Long May It Wave.
Hail to the condom.
Posted by jherman at 10:18 AM
March 31, 2007
The Article Speaks for Itself
Here's one of those Wall Street Journal frontpagers that ought to be required reading for its editorial board: "The Conscience of the Colonel," by Jess Bravin. It's about a military prosecutor with a deeply personal reason to seek the conviction of a Gitmo prisoner connected to 9/11 and an even deeper reason not to prosecute him.
The prosecutor's "old Marine buddy, Michael 'Rocks' Horrocks, was co-pilot on United 175, the second plane to strike the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001," Bravin writes. "The prisoner in question, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, had already been suspected of terrorist activity. After the attacks, he was fingered by a senior al Qaeda operative for helping assemble the so-called Hamburg cell, which included the hijacker who piloted United 175 into the South Tower. To Col. Couch, Mr. Slahi seemed a likely candidate for the death penalty."
"Of the cases I had seen, he was the one with the most blood on his hands," Col. Couch says.But, nine months later, in what he calls the toughest decision of his military career, Col. Couch refused to proceed with the Slahi prosecution. The reason: He concluded that Mr. Slahi's incriminating statements -- the core of the government's case -- had been taken through torture, rendering them inadmissible under U.S. and international law.
The Slahi case marks a rare instance of a military prosecutor refusing to bring charges because he thought evidence was tainted by torture.
It's too bad Bravin's reporting legitimizes a newspaper whose editorial writers and columnists refuse to believe the work of the paper's own news staffers like him.
Go read his article on online. I wouldn't bet on it, but the link is supposed to be available to non-subscribers for the next seven days, along with links to "key documents." This one, for instance. (If you click and can't get more than a summary of the story and/or the linked document, it's because The Journal has locked you out, despite advertising the freebie.)
Postscript: William Osborne writes, "Good point. ('It's too bad Bravin's reporting legitimizes a newspaper whose editorial writers and columnists refuse to believe the work of the paper's own news staffers like him.')" He continues:
What is so amazingly clever about these big papers is that the propaganda is never based on a single article. Instead, a Gestalt of articles is created serving different purposes that all work together: articles with false information and analysis; articles to establish false alibis; articles to create the false impression of balance and impartiality; articles to distract people from the truth hidden in plain sight; and articles banalizing immoral or unethical actions in order to inure the readers to their wrongness. Often the writing is very subtly specious.It is only through all of these methods placed along side each other and in sequence, then repeated over and over, that true propaganda is created. And the motive? It takes little more than being allowed into the circle of big-foot reporters with full knowledge that status will be lost if they cross certain lines. There are a lot of views and approaches, but all guided into an isomorphic stance shaped by big money. People will naturally circle around the Golden Calf, and it will eventually shape their view of reality.
There is more to it -- and there are exceptions like Bravin's (whose work, in any case, is put to use for the Gestalt) -- but at least that much I can see.
Speaking of the pressure to conform: The author of the V.I. Warshawski novels, Sara Paretsky, who has a collection of essays, "Writing in an Age of Silence," due out this month, recalls her chilling experience in today's Chicago Tribune.
The night we began our invasion of Iraq -- March 20, 2003 -- I was speaking at the Toledo public library. The day before, my speakers bureau told me that the library wanted me to change my proposed remarks; my talk on how the Patriot Act was affecting writers, readers and libraries was too political. The library wanted instead the kind of humorous anecdotes that other writers used. With war imminent, the library felt that a criticism of the Bush administration was an insult to local families who had relatives in the service.
Haven't we had enough of our BananaRepublic-cum-President With His Head Up His Ass?
Posted by jherman at 12:01 PM
March 29, 2007
The Invitation Speaks for Itself
(Mouse over it for details, and click for Emmett.)
Posted by jherman at 2:14 PM
March 22, 2007
March Madness
This was the week to remember the invasion of Iraq and the climate of opinion four years ago, per "The Ides of March, 2003." Can't let it pass without recalling what I posted at the time on MSNBC.com, links included. (Miracle of miracles, many still work).
Looking back, I see the posts are very tame. I tried not to be, but I knew I could go only so far. Most of the stuff did not sit well with certain company-minded bosses to whom I reported. I was never asked to take a particular point of view, but I was called on the carpet for the viewpoint I took. They wanted me to stick strictly to entertainment commentary without harping on the war or emphasizing antiwar views.
March 13, 2003 / 12:59 p.m. ETThe case for war branding: Selling war to the public depends on branding. Well-branded wars include the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I and World War II. Poorly branded wars are losing or less-than-winning propositions. They include the War of 1812, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.
Is this nutty thinking or what? If you answered "or what?" you would make Tracey Riese, 46, a happy branding warrior.
"As we move daily closer to war in Iraq, President Bush might benefit from examining how America has branded major wars in the past -- and how each branding strategy contributed to the outcome," says Riese, whose corporate clients have included Revlon and RJR Nabisco, Scholastic Inc. and Schwab.
Her notion of war branding sounds like commodified propaganda. And in our society, commodification is the way to go. But Riese says "the process of branding is the opposite of commodification. It's the opposite of sloganizing. It's finding the true meaning of things. It's not about finding a snappy slogan for war."
She says, "Really great branding connects the product, if you will, with some very powerful emotional need on the part of the people who must pay for it or who you want to pay for it."
For instance, the War for Independence was transformed from a contest between a colony and a great power into a struggle for "liberty" by enlightened citizens. The brand went global as France picked up the idea and went to war in 1789 for "liberté, fraternité, égalité." That's strong branding.
"Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death was a fancy rhetorical point," Riese says. "But it was not just sloganizing. It had an underlying meaning. In the face of war, citizens are asked to pay the highest price. And so they need to make a fundamental connection to the purpose of any war."
The American Civil War began as a struggle between two economic systems over constitutional rights. But it took on new meaning -- and vigor -- when Lincoln was able to characterize it as a battle for the soul of a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Strong branding.
World War I, the tragic, outsized result of a series of petty miscalculations, was redeemed when Wilson transformed it into the "War to End All Wars." Strong branding.
World War II became a moral test of humanity. So pervasive was that brand that it was reflected even in the post-war peace, when the victors revitalized their former enemies and laid the foundation for the modern global economy and the growth of democracy. Its later characterization as "the good war" was strong branding, too.
By contrast, she says, calling the Gulf War Operation Desert Shield and then Desert Storm was "just creating a name or logo. That's an expression of the brand that isn't the brand itself. The underlying meaning was that it was not really war, that it was nothing for anyone to worry about. It was just a military operation. The administration wanted to create the sense that it would all be over in no time." Weak branding.
So what about President Bush's "axis of evil" slogan? And what about the expensive set now being built in the desert by the military for branded TV press briefings? A no-brainer."Right now the brand the administration has established in the minds of Americans and in the global community -- whether it meant to or not -- is that war in Iraq is an American prerogative," Riese says. "We are threatened, and we do not have to be threatened, and so we are going to eliminate a threat to us, regardless of how it affects others. That's the brand."
Full disclosure: Riese also gives branding advice to the World Wildlife Fund. In some quarters that would mean she's a tree hugger.March 14, 2003 / 1:28 p.m. ET
George Bush and Humphrey Bogart: I've been trying to find the apt movie metaphor that evokes the reality of President Bush, and now I've finally got it: "Capt. Queeg." I wish I had thought of it myself, but it's Paul Krugman who came up with it this morning for the title of his column: "George W. Queeg."
The reference, of course, is to Capt. Philip Francis Queeg, the tough-talking, ship-shaping, mind-boggling, nervous-making Navy martinet that Humphrey Bogart played so perfectly against type in the 1954 movie "The Caine Mutiny."
"Aboard the U.S.S. Caine," Krugman writes, "it was the business with the strawberries that finally convinced the doubters that something was amiss with the captain. Is foreign policy George W. Bush's quart of strawberries?"
If you've never seen the movie, you must. It's based on Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and it gives us Bogart's last great role. (He died of cancer three years later. He also lost the best-actor Oscar to Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront," which aced "Mutiny" for best picture.)
You've got to read Krugman's column, too. It's the best summary I've read about the U.S. commander-in-chief's strange command. By his account, Bush is a Capt. Queeg for our time.
And just to be even-handed, here's a very different sort of opinion: the rambling but impassioned Oriana Fallaci's thoughts on the eve of battle. Which is not to say that she's confident of Bush's leadership either.
Finally, a poem by Robert Creeley, called "Help!" It reads like rap, which is totally uncharacteristic of his poetry. This is the way it begins:
Help's easy enough
If it comes in time.
Nothing's that hard
If you want to rhyme.
It's when they shoot you
It can hurt,
When the bombs blast off
And you're gone with a squirt.
Sitting in a bunker,
Feeling blue?
Don't be a loser,
It wasn't you--
Wasn't you wanted
To go kill people,
Wasn't you caused
All this trouble.
I can't say, Run!
And I can't say, Hide!
But I still feel
What I feel inside.March 17, 2003 / 7:43 a.m. ET
Norman Mailer nails it: Just when critics like Michiko Kakutani pretty much dismissed him as an old cuckoo, calling him a writer full of "wacky mumbo jumbo" who could barely cobble together his latest book, the old cuckoo has shined a clarifying light on the American dilemma and the "liberation" of Iraq.
In a powerful speech he gave recently in San Francisco, now published in the New York Review of Books, Mailer asserts: "Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Near East as a stepping stone to taking over the rest of the world. That is a big statement, but I can offer this much immediately: At the root of flag conservatism is not madness, but an undisclosed logic."
Read the article and see if you don't agree. Mailer offers straightforward thinking in plain language. His diagnosis of the dilemma as the Bush Administration's dream of an "American empire" may be more frightening than ancient Rome's worst nightmare, but it doesn't sound like "mumbo jumbo" to me.
(By the way, a note to all the folks who prefer to think of George W. Bush as Capt. Ahab rather than Capt. Queeg: That's giving Bush far too much stature.)March 17, 2003 / 4:53 p.m. ET
Turning the Chicks into Chickens? It took a lot of guts for the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines to say she was ashamed of the president of the United States. Foolish guts. And it would have been surprising, given the stakes for a group of platinum-selling superstars, if she hadn't apologized.
But the backlash against them -- pulling them from radio playlists -- is more than mere patriotic outrage. The indefatigable Eric Olsen, who's been following the latest pro- and anti-war stories from Nashville with keen attention, points out that there's been a concerted e-mail campaign orchestrated by "a radical right-wing online forum" to stoke the anger, manipulate the radio polls and pressure the Lipton company to drop its sponsorship of the Dixie Chicks' upcoming U.S. tour.
Do celebrities have a right to speak out on political issues? Should they? Do the media trivialize antiwar messages by providing a forum for celebrities? Media reporter David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times believes so. "We've paid too much attention to celebrity opposition to the war," he writes.
To correct the balance, my staff of thousands and I have taken a solemn vow to report on all the celebrities who favor war. Please help us carry on. Let us know when you hear of celebrities as famous and foolish as the Dixie Chicks going out of their way to praise the Bush team and war in Iraq. There's Charlie Daniels, Bruce Willis, Kid Rock and Dennis Miller. Do I hear more?March 18, 2003 / 4:43 p.m. ET
Martin Sheen strikes back: "The West Wing" star who plays fictional President Josiah Bartlet has written an Op-Ed piece, "A Celebrity, but First a Citizen," in the Los Angeles Times. With eloquence, he defends his right to speak out against war in Iraq.
"I am not the president; instead, I hold an even higher office, that of citizen of the United States," Sheen begins, in reply no doubt to a story the paper carried by LA Times staffer David Shaw that said the media pay too much attention to celebrities who oppose the war.
Sheen notes: "Although my opinion is not any more valuable or relevant merely because I am an actor, that fact does not render it unimportant. Some have suggested otherwise, trying to denigrate the validity of this opinion and those of my colleagues solely due to our celebrity status. This is insulting not only to us but to other people of conscience who love their country enough to risk its wrath by going against the grain of powerful government policy."
Yesterday, my staff of thousands and I took a solemn vow to report on all the celebrities who favor war -- just so we could right the balance that Shaw complained about.
Well, it turns out to be a burning issue. I've received hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, pro and con, about celebrity rights and the Dixie Chicks and famous people who've said this or that. I realize now that even with a staff of thousands I don't have time to fact-check the allegations. So here's a site where you can see for yourselves what some of Hollywood's famous have said, pro and con, about the war and about President Bush and his policies.March 19, 2003 / 10:37 a.m. ET
And now for the petitions: We've heard of famous Hollywood actors against the war (Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, Sean Penn, Jessica Lange, George Clooney), and we've heard of famous pop stars against the war (Sheryl Crow, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and Barbra Streisand, of course), but what about famous writers against the war?
Well, writers tend not to be famous. But some of them are -- Stephen King, Russell Banks, Amy Tan, Richard Price, Jonathan Franzen -- and they, along with about 150 others, have signed a petition that says to President Bush:
"Iraq, while led by a tyrant, represents no clear and present danger to our shores. We therefore see no sufficient moral or historical justification for a pre-emptive war. ... As you yourself have noted, there are evildoers in this world. Let the United States not be one of them."
Of all people, writers who depend on precise language should know better than to use the term "pre-emptive war." Perhaps they can be excused because everybody's been using it, including President Bush, news reporters, pundits and even foreign-policy experts.
But the proper term is "preventive war." A "pre-emptive war" is undertaken to thwart an imminent attack. A "preventive war" is what we're about to see in Iraq. (I notice that Tom Friedman at last uses the correct term this morning in his "D-Day" column.
Bush has promoted the wrong term precisely because he has had to justify the urgency of an invasion. (It's also why Bush has always made clear that Iraq is a threat to other shores and wants to depose Saddam for that reason.)
Meanwhile, there's another online petition out here in cyberspace. Called "Support of the Dixie Chicks," it endorses the group's right to dissent from President Bush's style of diplomacy. Not many have signed it, only 126 people so far. Many more Dixie Chicks fans have e-mailed me in support of the group. I suspect the reason so few have signed is that they don't know of the petition or can't find it.
Postscript: Whaddya know. At this time -- 5:54 p.m. ET -- many more people have signed: 1,697 ... and counting.March 20, 2003 / 8:27 a.m. ET
When Bush comes to shove: The number of people who have signed the online petition supporting Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and her right to dissent has climbed to 2,642. When we first posted the petition's address yesterday, the number was 126. So we may have helped people find the petition. We also may have flooded Hollywood on the March, a rightwing site that's been listing what actors have been saying for and against war. At the moment, the site is down. Possibly can't handle all the traffic.
A quick note: Amen to this morning's column by Bob Herbert. He writes: "Now that the U.S. strikes against Iraq have begun, we should get rid of one canard immediately, and that's the notion that criticism of the Bush administration and opposition to this invasion imply in some sense a lack of support or concern for the men and women who are under arms."March 24, 2003 / 9:52 a.m. ET
Oh! What a lovely Oscar war: The real suspense of Sunday night's Oscars was when or even whether the show would be interrupted by news of the invasion of Iraq and what, if anything, the stars would say about the war rather than what they would say about winning an Oscar.
For a long while, you might never have known there was a war at all -- except for Steve Martin's opening monologue. The Oscar producers ought to get down on their knees and thank him. As good as the show became -- only in part because of the classy production -- it would have died without him.
And let us all thank Adrien Brody for his stunning, unprepared remarks about the "sadness and dehumanization" of war. But let's also thank him for his sense of humor, not to mention his wonderful grace under pressure. Before Brody ever got to his serious remarks, he reacted with charming wit to his surprise at winning the best-actor Oscar. "There comes a time in life," he said, "when everything seems to make sense, and this is not one of those times."
Now, about Michael Moore's outburst. I'm all in favor of tasteless outbursts at the Oscars. They lend spice. Tom Shales disagrees. What I wonder, though, is whether the boos his remarks provoked were the result of anger at his lack of taste or disagreement with his political views. Or was it both?March 25, 2003 / 9:47 a.m. ET
Cheers, jeers and Michael Moore: Many readers hated my remarks about Michael Moore's remarks about President Bush. They would like me to take a hike (preferably off a high cliff). Of hundreds of e-mails, this one was typical:
Kelly Evitts
Atlanta
"Of course you agree with Moore. I only hope that when we get attacked, you and he are the first to go. Why don't you communists go over and join your 'human shield' friends. ... God bless our troops, our president, and if there is any justice in the world, let God turn his back on you, and your fat friend."
Here's one of the more pleasant jeers:
Jeff Curran
Oklahoma City
"Michael Moore? Michael less, please."
Some flat-out cheered:
Eduard Itor
Tampa, Fla.
"What Michael Moore did was brave and right."
One cheered with an explanation:
Sarah
Cleveland, Ohio
"Politically, I agree with Moore, too, but in terms of PR value, he's 'our side's' version of Rush Limbaugh: a self-congratulatory clown who behaves like a braying jackass in front of an audience."
Here's an e-mail exchange of March 20, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, with a thoughtful reader who doesn't like my views about the war:
Air Force TSgt. Gary J. Kunich
Kenosha, Wisc.
"I'll take it as a small victory for me that you allotted at least one paragraph to give a nod of support for the troops, even if you don't support the action in Iraq. Still think you're wrong, and your column really ticks me off, so begrudgingly, I guess that means you're doing your job.
"Speaking from my personal experience during Desert Storm, public support was very important to us. We were afraid it would change once that war started, and were grateful that the support for us -- and the war -- never wavered. But not everyone fighting this fight is able to see the 'support' through the smoke and noise of the protest. There definitely was no support for the troops when several celebrities and pseudo-politicians signed that full-page ad in the New York Times comparing our military to the terrorists.
"I -- and the majority of Americans according to several polls -- believe this to be a war to ensure our security. The war on terror cannot be summarized by just the face of Osama bin Laden. There are many facets, and this is but one of them. This isn't Vietnam. This isn't a gray area, or a murky quagmire. This is our only option. If you can add just one line in your column, add this on behalf of the U.S. military."
This was my reply:
"I appreciate your point, especially since you are speaking from personal experience. I worry about the safety of U.S. troops. I want them to win -- swiftly and with no loss of life or limb, if that is even possible -- because I, too, am an American who believes in the ideals this country was founded upon. But I fear the motives of our president. I do not believe that this nation should be ruled by Christian fundamentalism or by the imperial mandate of corporate power, both of which I believe is at the heart of the president's beliefs."
And here are words of warning: Though they were never intended as such, they ought to remind us of the perils we face not only from enemies who would destroy us but from leaders who would destroy our enemies.
"Why of course the people don't want war. ... That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Who said that? Hitler's accomplice, Hermann Goering (commander of the German Air Force and president of the Reichstag), at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals in 1946.
Postscript: For all you folks who think I'm making an implicit comparison between Hitler or Goering and President Bush, please put that out of your minds. I don't believe that for a minute. I'm merely using Goering's words to point out that people are too easily manipulated by leaders who are "good" and leaders who are "bad." People are too easily led, period.March 27, 2003 / 10:43 a.m. ET
Rock the protest: The war on the song front has heated up again, and it's not a confrontation over the Dixie Chicks. Lenny Kravitz has joined the battle with a song titled "We Want Peace." You can hear it or download it free at a get-out-the-vote Web site Rock the Vote.
One major critic describes the song as reaching down deep "for a funky, Middle Eastern-flavored ode to peace." What bothers this critic though, is that "it's by far the best song to address" the issue of war in Iraq. So why does it bother him? Because, he writes, it's "anti, and people, I am way pro!"
Critic Eric Olsen, who is also a radio DJ, a music historian and a relentless blogger, further objects that Rock the Vote -- which is dedicated to getting young people to participate in democracy -- is perverting its mission by taking sides on Iraq. He wonders whether the site would give equal time to "equally heartfelt, pro-liberation" songs by -- let's say -- Clint Black or Toby Keith, Darryl Worley and the Warren Brothers.
Olsen contends that the issue dividing Americans on Iraq should not be characterized as "pro-war vs. anti-war." His point is that both sides are pro-peace. When Rock the Vote's executive director states: "We hope the war will come to a swift conclusion with a minimum loss of human life and that we can move on to build a better future for the Iraqi people," Olsen counters: "Who doesn't agree with this?"
His formulation -- "pro-liberation vs. anti-war" -- smartly frames the issue with more nuance than "pro-war vs. anti-war." If it ignores the deeper issues dividing American public opinion, well, you can't expect a music critic-radioDJ-blogger to do what our clever leaders -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other geniuses leading the administration -- haven't done themselves, can you?
Meanwhile, Olsen is not the only blogger seeking some sort of middle ground in the war debate. Here's Ryan McGee, a Harvard smart aleck, prompted by a support-the-troops rally at Yale.March 27, 2003 / 12:36 p.m. ET
What is patriotism? Are we born with love of country? Is it written into our genes, having proved useful for survival from earliest times like a trait expressed through natural selection? Is it hard-wired into our brains like a universal grammar theorized by Noam Chomsky, simply waiting to be applied in specific languages? Is it wholly learned?
Writers, artists and philosophers have grappled with the issue of war and patriotism for centuries -- as a theme in poetry and novels (Tolstoy's "War and Peace"), as a pictorial force (George Washington Crossing the Delaware or The Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima), as a subject of academic inquiry and just this morning as a topic of debate in the media.
The secret of Rome's success, according to the Roman historian Livy, was its belief in the supremacy of country over family and -- just as important -- its ability to inculcate that belief in its citizens. "This, without question," Lee Harris writes in Policy Review, "was the steady drumbeat of Roman pedagogical legend, the unquestioned primacy of one's ethical obligation to the team, the origin of the specifically Western concept of patriotism."
Before that, the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes had challenged the idea of a narrow, that is to say, national patriotism. Reputedly, when anyone asked him where he came from, he said: "I am a citizen of the world."
The noted contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes: "Diogenes knew that the invitation to think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an invitation to be an exile from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our own ways of life from the point of view of justice and the good. The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation.
"Recognizing this, his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect."
Where does that leave us today as American and British soldiers fight and die in Iraq and as Iraqis fight and die? Basically nowhere. Certainly not with definitive answers, not even with tentative ones.March 31, 2003 / 10:33 a.m. ET
This is patriotism: It's no secret that my staff of thousands and I receive a lot of e-mail messages. Some are more heartfelt than others, but I'd say that with few exceptions they're all sincere. On Friday, we asked the question: "What is patriotism?" Below are a dozen replies. Some are frightening, others reassuring, and still others fall in between. Which are which? We leave that to you.
Jim Nabors
Baltimore, Md.
"Patriotism is being WITH one's country, right or wrong, especially if the overwhelming majority of its citizens are in favor of the government's actions. It is NOT being a minority rebel-rouser who uses 'free speech' as a pretext for one's fringe political leanings against one's country or its leaders. The 'free-speech' argument is a crock, and is used by today's anti-government newspapers, news shows, and 'unpatriotic' low lifes who have no life."
R. Guerrero
San Lorenzo, Calif.
"I believe patriotism is developed and attained by the way in which the government of a nation treats its citizens."
David Maddux
McKinney, Texas
"I firmly support our president and our efforts to remove Saddam Hussein and his oppressive regime. We live in the most loving, caring country on the face of the earth as we have given billions of our tax dollars to help suffering humanity. I respect dissent done in a civil manner but when celebrities or anyone else start getting personal with our leaders, they cross the line of being 'un-American' in my view. For example, Michael Moore's comments at the Oscars. He was disgusting. My forefathers fought and died for his right to be 'disgusting' and my right to call him 'un-American.'"
Sandra Isaacs
Oak Park, Illinois
"I am not in favor of any government that chooses violence. I am a citizen of the world. I wave the flag of Mother Earth."
Brian Kiser
Macon, Ga.
"You quote Martha Nussbaum saying, 'We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.' Should we not also recognize inhumanity in the same way? Wherever it occurs, should it not be worthy of our disdain and efforts to remove it from this world? Surely Saddam and his Baath party are guilty of some of the most inhuman crimes against his own people, yet those opposed to this war want to look away believing that the United States and its allies should not get involved. Thank God for President Bush and our brave military men and women who are willing to be true citizens of the Earth!"
John Smith
Heathsville, Va.
"Patriotism is loving your country and being willing to defend it. Our country was found on the principle: 'Don't tread on me!' Liberals would change all that. Liberals would allow terrorists and tyrants to overrun us in the name of peace. They prove that by insulting their president at a time of war, and protesting in the name of peace while throwing rocks at service men, beating up policemen, and collaborating with the enemy by not having enough sense to find out who is bankrolling their noble effort."
Michael Anthony
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
"True love of country -- especially a democratic one -- should embrace the concept of keeping that country true to its ideals, and holding its leaders accountable for upholding its founding principles. It is our patriotic duty to blow the whistle on an unprovoked, illegal and shamefully 'manufactured' war. If we love America we will try to keep her hands clean. If we cannot do that then at least we should remember we have dual citizenship -- we are also citizens of the world."
Daniel Hendriks
Chico, Calif.
"I think patriotism is good when you are rooting for your team in the World Cup, but when it comes to a war without support from the U.N. I question my love not for this country as a whole but I question my trust in the government. This whole situation is too fishy for me. ... I will be able to vote come next election and if George Bush gets re-elected I will move to Holland and not come back until a Democrat is in office."
Letitia Little
Bartlett
"We are as one. That's why we are in Iraq. Justice and Freedom for all, is the key. We cannot stand back and allow a government destroy innocent people. And the manner that these people murder is like nothing I've ever heard of before and everything I've ever feared. While I do believe we should have done this long ago (1991) we are where we are. Let's get the job done and get our boys and girls home."
Bob Johnson
"We ARE recognizing humanity as it occurs in Iraq. And we are also recognizing man's inhumanity to man and trying to stop it. After World War II, Harry Truman said, 'We need to build a better world.' We can help to build a better world for the oppressed people in Iraq. That is something that makes a lot of us proud to be Americans."
Tanya D. June
Troy, N.Y.
"Are we going to war with North Korea -- because of lack of disarmament? NO
"Are we going to war with Saudi Arabia -- because of connections to terrorists? NO
"Are we going to war with Iraq -- because he tried to kill our president's daddy? YES
"Have we secured our homeland from future terrorist attacks? NO
"Have we left our men in Afghanistan more vulnerable? YES
"I am a proud Trojan. Because I am an African-American I see our country's values much differently. We are a 226-year-old country trying to tell countries that existed for thousands of years how to live their lives -- when our civil rights movements is barely 40 years old.
"Did we get freedom from the Revolutionary War? NO.
"Did we get freedom after our Civil War? NO.
"Did anything change after we fought in both World War I and II? NO.
"I think our government is so hypocritical. Thank you for giving me a forum to express my views."
Linda C. Strain
Tucson, Ariz.
"I am an American Citizen. Bred, born and reared here in this country. Some of my people were here to greet some of my people on the Mayflower. I love my country, and, yes would give my life for this country and it's people. But I also consider myself a world citizen, and care greatly what happens to my sisters and brothers in other parts of this world.
"The Iraqi leadership was not only a threat to it's own people, but to all of us everywhere. We need to be there, and the rest of the world needs to be there too. It's not about Islam, and it's not about oil. It's about the right of everyone to be able to live and speak freely about their own country and government without fear of reprisal. We are getting rid of a world threat.
"Do I like war? No indeed. Everyone in my family has always served this country from the Revolution to the Gulf War. I considered it an honor, even if I couldn't be sent to the front lines [at that time] because of gender. I still felt obligated to wear the uniform -- for my country and my people, not the government. I still feel that way, and wished I were younger so I could join up. I am flag-waver, tree-hugger, and I break for butterflies."March 31, 2003 / 2:41 p.m. ET
This is satire: We've heard anti-war songs from Lenny Kravitz ("We Want Peace") and from The Beastie Boys ("In a World Gone Mad"). Here, direct from England, is the latest entry: a Bush-Blair duet, "Read My Lips." It's also the funniest.
As I said, pretty tame stuff. But it's not difficult to understand what bothered my company-minded bosses. The MSNBC cable channel, our corporate sister, was veering to the right. Phil Donahue had been fired several weeks earlier, on Feb. 23, ostensibly for poor ratings but really for being antiwar and anti-Bush. If Donahue could be fired, so could they. (And of course so could I.) Paradoxically, the popularity of the blog was cause for concern. It drew tens of thousands of hits on any given day, as many as 500,000 on its best day. This would have thrilled my bosses ordinarily, but not under the circumstances
Posted by jherman at 12:18 PM
March 20, 2007
Playwright Sends a Letter: Tenenbom vs. The Times
First he took on the Polish government, which claims he's stereotyping Poles as anti-Semites, a charge he denies. Now he's taking on a bigger fish -- The New York Times, which has declined to review his play.
In an open letter to news media, Tuvia Tenenbom accuses The Times of doing "the Polish government's bidding ... by refusing to allow Times critics to review 'Last Jew in Europe.'" The play opened last week in an off-Broadway theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
The letter also calls for the firing of the recently appointed chief of The Times theater department, Rick Lyman, whom Tenenbom deems responsible for "censorship by omission" and an attempt to "stifle free speech."
I phoned Lyman for his response. He declined to comment, referred me to The Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, and hung up on me in mid-sentence. She was unavailable. (See PPS, below.)
Several major European newspapers and magazines have written about the play, in largely laudatory terms, including the top German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel ("Das Drama mit dem Antisemitismus"), the Frankfurt daily Frankfurter Rundschau ("Tuvia & Erika"), and Italy's most respected daily Corriere della Sera ("Teatro d'accusa").
"It never occurred to us that The New York Times would join with anti-Semites so easily," Tenenbom writes. "We did not ask for a 'good' review; all we asked for was that this important project not be ignored." He contends that the paper's unwillingness to write about the play is a "slap in the face on an issue of utmost concern to millions of American Jews, many of whom are faithful readers of the Times." The paper has covered other plays of his.
Full disclosure: I reviewed the play last week.
Further intelligence: Princeton University professor Jan T. Gross, the author of "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation" and "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland," will participate in a post-show panel discussion with the author Thane Rosenbaum, who teaches human rights law at Fordham University Law School, on March 27 at The Triad Theater, where "Last Jew in Europe" is being produced. (A spokesman for the Church of Latter-Day Saints who was to participate has dropped out.)
Here is Tenenbom's letter in full:
For Immediate Release The JTNY, 212.494.0050The Jewish Theater of New York calls on The New York Times to Remove Rick Lyman from his new post of Theater Editor.
The Polish government, using its embassy in Washington D.C. and its Consulate General in New York, is investing resources and time in order to discredit our new show, LAST JEW IN EUROPE. According to the Polish government the show, which uses authentic documentary materials to illuminate the newly resurgent anti-Semitism in the heart of modern-day Europe, could "create a set of negative emotions" in American Jews towards Poland. To prevent this from happening, they urge our theater not to use the documentary materials we collected while in Poland. If we fail to do so, they insinuate, we are "racist." This bizarre intervention by a foreign government in the affairs of an American theater should not be allowed to succeed and will not; we will continue to present our show. However, we are shocked to learn that the Theater Department of the New York Times, under the new leadership of Mr. Rick Lyman, decided to do the Polish government's bidding and do its share to kill the show by refusing to allow Times' critics to review LAST JEW IN EUROPE. This slap in the face on an issue of utmost concern to millions of American Jews, many of whom are faithful readers of the Times, was so important to Mr. Lyman that he issued his order on the second day on the job. To achieve this dubious goal, Mr. Lyman and some of the administrators in the Theater Department engaged in outright lies while speaking to our Artistic Director, Mr. Tuvia Tenenbom.
After being notified that "we'll pass on reviewing" the LAST JEW IN EUROPE because "not one of our critics wants to review" the show, Mr. Tenenbom personally called a few critics. They flatly denied that they ever refused to review the show and claimed that they were not given the opportunity to do so by Mr. Lyman; in addition, they expressed their own opinion that LAST JEW IN EUROPE should indeed be reviewed. Some even asked Mr. Lyman to change his mind, but he refused. Mr. Tenenbom also spoke with Ms. Patricia Cohen, the Theater Editor prior to March 1, 2007 and was told by her that this was "Rick's decision; I can't do anything about it, I'm no longer the editor." But Rick Lyman is not Patricia Cohen. In an angry and uncontrolled outburst that followed days later, Mr. Lyman told our Artistic Director that since the "last two reviews by the Times were negative, we won't review your theater this year."
Commenting on this patently lame excuse, Mr. Tenenbom said: "His words were so strange that my ears could hardly tolerate listening to him. This is not about "good" reviews, this is about abhorring censorship. In our theater we regularly deal with sensitive political issues, where the chance of negative review is higher. We understand it, and we never complained about a bad review; why does he? We are the only English-speaking Jewish theater in the city, all the others closed down years ago. What does he want, to close us down as well?"
What the New York Times is doing in this case is censorship by omission as it tries to stifle free speech. It never occurred to us that The New York Times would join with anti-Semites so easily. We did not ask for a "good" review; all we asked for was that this important project not be ignored. But after more than a decade of continuous coverage by the Times, this new editor flexes his muscles, aided by outrageous lies, and all-too-gladly joins racist censors of the Polish government.
We understand the risk we take by making this story public. After all, the Times' Theater Department is the unquestionable lodestone of most theater people in this city. But we cannot be silent in the face of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the New York Times' attempts to keep it out of the public awareness. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe should not, and will not, be kept a secret from millions of New Yorkers just because of one man.
The New York Times, due to its enormous influence, has obligations to the public that it must meet. If it refuses to do so, it is our obligation to make this story public. It is our belief that if the New York Times wants to be a liberal paper it should never support either racism or censorship.
LAST JEW IN EUROPE was just recently reviewed by some of the most prestigious publications in Europe. The New York Times can do no less. It is a well known fact that during WWII the New York Times wrote as little as possible about the horrors that befell the Jews during the Holocaust. Indeed, the outstanding order at the time was not to have Holocaust stories on the front pages. Is the New York Times returning to the same patterns? Is every mistake bound to repeat itself?
We hope that our call won't be a voice calling in the wilderness and that the top echelon of the Times will rise to the occasion and either fire Mr. Lyman or revoke his boycott of our show immediately. We also urge the other critics in our city to not follow Mr. Lyman's example. If one man chooses to be blind, the rest of you are still allowed to open your eyes and see. Judge for yourselves. Judge us harshly if you wish, but judge us!
With hope for better times to come,
The Jewish Theater of New York
Postscript: A reader writes, "I guess Lyman picked up on Clive's take on totgeschwiegen and put it to use."
Here's the reader's reference, from an item called GERMAN LESSONS in Dwight Garner's column in The New York Times Book Review of March 11, 2007:
Leave it to Clive James, the London-based critic and poet -- his new book, ''Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts,'' is due out any minute -- to remind us that the Germans have yet another useful word Americans should be more familiar with. It is totgeschwiegen, which James defines this way: ''Killed by not being mentioned.''
PPS: Sam Sifton, culture editor of The Times, replied in an email late this afternoon to my request for a response. He wrote:
The New York Times has by no means decided not to review shows put on by The Jewish Theater of New York. Instead, we are adopting the same policy that we use when evaluating which books to review, or musical performances (or recordings), or art shows, or restaurants. There's simply no room for them all. And in this instance the editors have decided to take a pass.
Moving right along: A reader writes, "Yes, I have seen how things can be totgeschwiegen in the NYT -- like the half a million people protesting the Iraq War in NYC before the war began."
Posted by jherman at 11:25 AM
March 19, 2007
Obamarama
Text, subtext and context, David Ehrenstein's op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times is cultural critiquing at its finest -- the best I've read to date about Barack Obama. It begins:
As every carbon-based life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. ... But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination -- the "Magic Negro."
And it ends:
Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
In between, Ehrenstein provides substantial insight based on evidence drawn from Hollywood trivia that few cultural critics have the expertise to marshall and fewer still would know how to apply to matters of race and politics.
Posted by jherman at 12:08 PM
Collateral Damage
Katrina vanden Heuvel writes: "Jan -- Enjoyed your post this Sunday." Nice of her to say so. But here's the real import of her message:
The WashPost editorial page is beyond the pale at this stage not only on Iraq, but on fundamental issues of justice. A week or so ago it was attacking efforts to strengthen the right to organize among workers in this country; then it dismissed the Libby verdict; and on Russia, it crusades with a vengeful hypocrisy.
Vanden Heuvel, who is the editor and publisher of The Nation, also sent her Sunday piece "End the War (On Terror)," the latest entry in her blog Editor's Cut. It marks the fourth anniversary of "America's war against Iraq" as a "time to consider the longterm damage [of] the misconceived 'war on terrorism.'"
BananaRepublicans will accuse her of "mandating failure" of course -- as if they have any right to preach about success -- but it's just another of their galling pet phrases (like "micromanaging the war") to deflect attention from their own arrogance and incompetence.
She writes:
Eventually US troops will leave Iraq because the brutal facts on the ground will compel it. But even as we struggle to get out of this failed war, our political system continues to evade the challenge of finding an exit from the "war on terror." At a time when we need a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine and an alternative vision of what this country's role in the world should be, we see both parties calling for intensifying the "war on terror" -- even for increasing the size of the military, and for expanding its ability to go places and do things. But who is asking the fundamental question: Won't a war without end do more to weaken our security and democracy than seriously address the threats and challenges ahead?Witness the collateral damage to our democracy. This Administration has used the "war" as justification for almost anything -- unlawful spying on Americans, illegal detention policies, hyper-secrecy, equating dissent with disloyalty and condoning torture.
The Administration has also justified the expansion of America's military capacity -- over 700 bases in more than 60 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion -- as necessary to counter the threat of Islamic extremism and to fight the "war on terror." What too few politicians are willing to say is that combating terrorism -- a brutal, horrifying tactic -- is not a "war" and that military action is the wrong weapon. Illegality and immorality aside, it simply doesn't succeed. Yes, terrorism does pose a threat to national and international security that can never be eliminated. But there are far more effective (and ethical) ways to advance US security than a forward-based and military-heavy strategy of intrusion into the Islamic world. Indeed, the failed Iraq war demonstrated anew the limits of military power.
Amen, sister.
Postscript: Gary Hart weighs in.
Posted by jherman at 8:59 AM
March 18, 2007
Lessons Four Years After? What Lessons?
A friend who deals in matters of national security writes: "All the major newspapers seem to have a common, inexplicable blind spot in discussing the war in Iraq, which I find very disturbing because it obfuscates the fundamental failures, their nature, and their cause." The most recent example is today's editorial, "Lessons of War," in The Washington Post:
Clearly we were insufficiently skeptical of intelligence reports. It would almost be comforting if Mr. Bush had "lied the nation into war," as is frequently charged. The best postwar journalism instead suggests that the president and his administration exaggerated, cherry-picked and simplified but fundamentally believed -- as did the CIA -- the catastrophically wrong case that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented to the United Nations [emphasis added].
In fact, "many high-level, very experienced career CIA people not only did not believe the stuff, but knew it was wrong," my correspondent notes. "The same is true at State and the Pentagon. The believers were the political appointees -- the agency or department bosses and therefore their unimpeachable mouthpieces, the bosses' immediate staffs, and the upward-bound opportunists. Why should but fundamentally believed even be in the sentence? The core failure at CIA, State, and Defense is that the facts were side-tracked and those who knew them and would speak them were muzzled."
Amen, brother.
Postscript: Furthermore, "take Powell's function as a mouthpiece: An Army four star who does not even suspect that the 'mobile bio-weapons labs' might be just hydrogen generators for inflating artillery weather balloons -- if anything at all? Even though our own Army has them? Even when the intelligence source is Curveball and only Curveball -- whom the CIA knew at the time to be a fabricator? I often wonder whether the editors read their own papers."
Worse, do the editors read their own papers and either 1) not care or 2) choose, for any number of reasons, to act as mouthpieces themselves?
Posted by jherman at 10:41 AM
March 15, 2007
It's Pantheonic
Something else to turn your stomach: The Waverly Inn in the West Village -- Manhattan's "latest clubhouse to the rich and famous under the direction of its host-with-the-mostest, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter" -- where a $50,000 mural by Edward Sorel features caricatures of Anaïs Nin, e.e. cummings, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Eugene O'Neill, etc. But the actual caricatures are the host and his rich-and-famous customers.
Posted by jherman at 8:38 AM
March 14, 2007
More VD
It was two months ago that the Ventriloquist Dummy claimed "good management" to justify the Justice Department's political purge of federal prosecutors. Now that his excuse has been exposed as one more Orwellian lie in a cynical grab for power by the BananaRepublic's very own President With His Head Up His Ass, the VD's nonconfession that "mistakes were made" reminds me of The Pure Malarkey of Softspeak and his Tortured Testimony in January of 2005.
Posted by jherman at 9:00 AM
March 12, 2007
No Polish Joke -- It's Ecumenical
The government of Poland objects to "Last Jew in Europe," a play by Tuvia Tenenbom that documents and then satirizes the anti-Semitism still visibly thriving in Lodz, the country's second-largest city, a half-century after the Holocaust. Staged with the simplified power of a cartoon, "Last Jew" puts Polish anti-Semites on trial by ridicule. No wonder the government protests.
Self-hating Jews are not spared, either. And Mormons are also likely to be upset when they get wind of the show, which opened Sunday at The Triad Theater in Manhattan. A young Utah missionary from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a central figure in the action. He arrives in Lodz seeking the names of Jews buried in the local cemetery so he can have them baptized -- retroactively. ("Why is he interested in dead Jews?" "I heard they have a law in America to recycle everything.")
The plot revolves around the wedding plans of a butcher's daughter and a morgue pathologist's son. She's a hot young thing who drinks like a sailor and moves like a go-go dancer. Her father is a pastor in the Crucified Church of Christ in Christ. Her fiancé is a Jew, or so he thinks. And of course he's a klutz. The Mormon interloper complicates the couple's plans. Like it or not, "Last Jew in Europe" is the theatrical equivalent of a graphic novel. (More sample dialogue: "Americans know everything. They have good satellites.")
Tenenbom's outrageously comical take on anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred is a long way from the somber vision of Art Spiegelman's in "Maus," for instance. But Tenenbom, the provocateur, is no less serious in his grim estimate of human nature. He says he based the play partly on "a real story," partly on his own travels in Poland, and partly on the "rampant" anti-Semitic graffiti he saw everywhere in Lodz.
Fire did not engulf the stage, as promised in a press release, and the spectacle of crosses with "crucified young females nailed onto them" also failed to materialize. But they weren't needed. As performed by an enthusiastic troupe, "Last Jew" easily made its point without having to go any further over the top.
Produced by The Jewish Theater of New York in association with Peter Martin. Directed by Tuvia Tenenbom and Andreas Robertz. With Bill Barnett (Papa Jocka), Lila Donnolo (Maria), Michal Gregorewski (Dr. Kweczke), Caba S. Lucas (Józef), Aleksandra Popov (Zbrodzka) and Daniel Shafer (John Jay Smith). At The Triad Theater, 158 W. 72nd St., NYC (btwn. Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.) Performances: Sun. (3:00 p.m.); Mon. and Tues. ( 7:00 p.m.) No show on March 12. Open-ended run. Tickets: $55. Available online or by phone: (212) 352-3101.
Posted by jherman at 1:07 PM
March 7, 2007
Fisk's Prize 'Flak Jacket'
So much happens when Straight Up's staff of thousands leaves town. Here's something else that happened. We regret not being there. It isn't everyday that Robert Fisk picks up a Freedom Prize worth $350,000.
But we caught up with him by proxy on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman asked him in an interview to explain why he considered the prize as "important as a flak jacket." She said that's what he'd told the crowd at Town Hall in Manhattan, where the award ceremony was held Saturday.
Fisk, if you don't already know, is the veteran Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London, and the author of several books, including "The Great War for Civilisation" (see Postscript, below*) and "Pity the Nation."
He had much to say worth hearing, as usual. Speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, he noted:
[T]his is the first war I've ever covered in which the leadership in the West bases its policies on its own lies. I mean, it's one thing to lie to the people, and then you have your own policy of how to pursue a war, but to pursue the war on the basis of the lies you're telling the people, this is an entirely new concept in war and strategy in foreign policy. I've never seen it before.
Goodman's interview aired on Monday, the same day that USA Today's top front-page story was headlined "Iraq ousts 10,000 in security ministry." Coincidentally, a manufacturer of armor-plating for U.S. military vehicles in Iraq pointed out the headline to me. He believed the news was a good sign perhaps of better things to come. Anybody who has read Fisk would understand why it isn't. Here's one of the things he said to Goodman:
[W]ho is funding the interior ministry militiamen who are murdering people? The interior ministry is funded by us. We use local gunmen and murderers to do our job for us and save our soldiers' lives, not very successfully, but that's what we do. And, of course, we'll do the same if necessary in Lebanon with all these unsavory groups, all of whom have got blood on their hands. I mean, there's one Lebanese politician -- he's a friend of mine, I know him very well -- who ran a militia during the civil war, which brutally tortured its opponents, committed war crimes, and he met Condoleezza Rice a few days ago. I mean, you know, we will make friends with those who want to help us and whom we think are worthy of our support on the short term. And if -- I mean, who did bin Laden used to work for when he was fighting the Russians? Us, you know? I mean, we use these unsavory -- who was Saddam working for for most of his rule? Us. Who gave him the gas? The components came from the United States.
None of that is secret. We've been going on here for months about death squads doing America's dirty work as the "Salvador option" in Iraq. Shit, years even. Most recently last December (see Loud Whispers). Fat lot of good it does.
*Postscript: March 9 -- "The Great War for Civilisation" has been short-listed for the Arthur Ross Book Award by the Council on Foreign Relations, along with five other books, including Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco" and Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower." The award honors "the best book published in the last two years on international affairs."
(This ought to embarrass the editors of The New York Times Book Review, especially if Fisk wins the $25,000 first prize. In 2005, when Fisk's book was published, The Times failed to include it among the 100 Notable Books of the Year.)
Posted by jherman at 10:27 AM
March 6, 2007
Critic Earns a Rave
Do I hear any bravos for Justin Davidson's principled stand against the Vienna Philharmonic? He wrote he would not be attending the orchestra's Carnegie Hall concerts this past weekend. For that matter, he added, "it may be years before I review it again." This is no small thing. Davidson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning music critc with readers in the New York region.
His piece in Newsday, headlined "Vienna is slow to change its tune," appeared while I was away in Alabama.
Further, Davidson wrote: "I believe that the Vienna Philharmonic has relinquished its claim to serious consideration as a dynamic cultural organization." To feminists who have criticized its exclusion of women that has been obvious for decades, as well as the fact that "the geological pace of change is not merely a regrettable obstacle in the relentless pursuit of quality. It is the product of a narrowly preservationist, antiquarian philosophy, which fetishizes sound at the expense of spirit."
But Davidson makes the unusual point, so easily overlooked, that the orchestra's backward attitude contradicts the most significant aspect of its musical history:
The composers in the Vienna Philharmonic's pantheon were all disturbers of the peace, and they railed against the city's recurring fondness for the status quo. Beethoven was a liberal idealist, a radical egalitarian and artistic revolutionary who would have been revolted by the claim that performing his forward-looking, constantly renewable music required an inflexible reverence for custom.
"This idea that the true tradition of the orchestra is one of innovation is very interesting," says William Osborne, the Vienna Phil's longtime nemesis. "It was only after the Nazification of the orchestra during World War II that it became associated with conservatism and tradition."
(Osborne, I wrote long ago, was the chief instigator who "mobilized a tiny, far-flung band of feminists" that pressured the Vienna Philharmonic to accept its first woman member.)
Meanwhile, this morning's headline over Bernard Holland's swooning review of the Vienna Philharmonic in The New York Times, "Viennese Boys' Club, in for the Weekend," probably won't be clipped for the orchestra's scrap book.
The review itself -- with phrases such as "overpowering beauty" and "Viennese mist of loveliness" -- leaves no doubt that Holland adores the sound of the boys' club. But Holland's unctuous disregard of its sexism has begun to crumble -- slightly. He spends three of 11 paragraphs on the orchestra's "lack of women" and the "ruckus" it has caused, even critiquing the orchestra's program notes as "coy" and "oozing."
Holland is still as condescending as ever about the issue of feminism. And he merely repeats what Osborne has said about the importance of the Vienna Phil's reception in America "for a lot of its prestige and bottom line." But for the first time I'm aware of, he says: "I think the orchestra's embrace of an all-male sound is wrong." That's a milestone for Holland, his caveat about American do-goodism notwithstanding.
Postscript: Davidson follows up with his take on race in American orchestras and gets a snide response at the American Spectator.
Posted by jherman at 10:47 AM
February 28, 2007
Gone South
To the Hellman Wyler Festival, where they're celebrating Lillian Hellman's plays and William Wyler's Hollywood film versions.
South means Birmingham, Alabama, and the town of Demopolis in Marengo County not far from there.
Why there? If you ever saw "The Little Foxes" you'd know. Hellman, who was born in New Orleans, based the scheming Hubbard clan in "Foxes" on her mother's family, which came from Demopolis.
The festival will be staging "The Little Foxes" and screening the film, along with three other Wyler-Hellman pairings: "These Three" (based on her first play "The Children's Hour"), "The Children's Hour" (a remake more faithful to the play), and "Dead End" (based on a Sidney Kingsley play that Hellman adapted).
As a Wyler biographer, I've been invited to take part in panel discussions with Deborah Martinson, Hellman's latest biographer, and many other invited guests.
Back next week.
Postscript: March 2 -- I've returned home with several trophies. This one was bagged in the Demopolis town square.
The festival continues in Birmingham through Sunday.
Posted by jherman at 3:26 PM
February 26, 2007
Hersh Abbreviated
Don't have time this ayem to read Seymour Hersh's lengthy New Yorker report on our Banana Republic's new strategy in the Middle East? Here's a short analysis by Ian Black in The Guardian. No time to read that, either? Here's the lede of The Guardian's news story about Hersh's report: "[The President With His Head Up His Ass] has charged the Pentagon with devising an expanded bombing plan for Iran that can be carried out at 24 hours' notice. ..." Quicker still: N.O Mustill's yummy collage. When it was first published in 1969, in VDRSVP, it was titled "The Vietnam Question." Today it could just as easily be called "The Iran Question." Anyway, you read last week's Apocalypse When and Surging With Chomsky. Right?
Postscript: On a separate issue, how's this for hair-splitting? The International Court of Justice in The Hague, the main U.N. judicial organ, "today overwhelmingly acquitted Serbia of committing genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Balkan war of the 1990s but" -- get this -- "found it guilty of failing to prevent genocide in the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica," a U.N. press release says. Yeah, we know. It's all about the legalisms. This way Serbia doesn't have to pay reparations.
Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM
February 22, 2007
'Just Get to the Verb'
Five little words of wisdom. Robert Altman's words. Words cited earlier this week in a tribute to the late director at the Majestic Theatre in New York. Smarter words than the old Hollywood cliché cut to the chase, which of course is what he meant. Fitting, too, given the paradox of a filmmaker who loved words, especially words that overlapped.
It wasn't only Altman's words that dazzled the crowd at the tribute, which ran uninterrupted for more than two riveting hours.
"I do not think he was a lover of truth as much as he was a hater of lies," Robert Reed Altman, one of his sons, told us. "He did not like conformity," Bob Balaban remarked. "This is an understatement. Bob never met a status quo he didn't hate."
The wire reports I read -- AP's in USA Today and Reuters' in the NY Times -- give a pretty good account of what was said, including Balaban's remark and others I took down in my notes. (Tim Robbins: "He would not only not suffer fools, he'd make fools suffer.'' Garry Trudeau: "I just talked about my old friend for several minutes without interruption, with no overlapping dialogue, without him being able to change a word. He would have hated it.")
But the funniest words of the afternoon -- Julieanne Moore's -- went unreported. Moore recounted the thrill she felt when she was cast in "Short Cuts" early in her career. Altman warned her to read the script before accepting, she said. The role he was offering called for frontal nudity, and it was "not negotiable." She said she didn't need to read the script. Plus, she added, "I've got a bonus for you: I really am a redhead."
That is how Altman always told the tale of "my bush," she said. But he told it so many times to so many interviewers that she became sensitive about it and asked him to stop. Besides, she didn't remember making that comment -- not exactly, anyway. Of course he would stop, he told her. He was a gentleman, after all.
Then one evening over dinner at one of his typically convivial gatherings with lots of friends, including Moore, Altman's wife Kathryn began to tell the tale of the bonus. Altman looked up, and true to his gentleman's word, politely shushed her. "Julieanne," he said, putting his fingers to his lips, "doesn't want us to talk about her pussy."
Posted by jherman at 1:59 PM
February 21, 2007
Surging With Chomsky
Shuttling among poetry, art and politics, yeah. Here's more politics. It's an excerpt from "Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, and the Rest of the World," the latest commentary at Foreign Policy in Focus. He was asked, "What do you think the surge is for?"
This is part of his reply:
It's very hard to predict [President Huha's] administration today because they're deeply irrational. They were irrational to start with but now they're desperate. They have created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true. Allowing an independent and sovereign Iraq could be a nightmare for the United States. It would mean that it would be Shi'ite-dominated, at least if it's minimally democratic. It would continue to improve relations with Iran, just what the United States doesn't want to see. And beyond that, right across the border in Saudi Arabia where most of Saudi oil is, there happens to be a large Shi'ite population, probably a majority.
Moves toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle.
China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary. In particular, it's dangerous in the case of the Middle East. China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.
Chomsky had a lot more to say. Read the whole thing.
Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM
Boris on the Bill
Are you ready for three nights of "Shoah and Pin-Ups," a documentary about the NO!-artist Boris Lurie? I am.
Screenings begin this evening in Manhattan. The first one, at Hunter College, is free (followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers). The second screening, on Thursday, is at Makor ($15); the third, on Friday, is at Anthology Film Archives ($8).
"Most of the film's protagonists will be at the AFA screening," Matthias Reichelt, the curator and art historian who collaborated on the film with the director Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, tells me. Appearing at the AFA "makes sense," he adds. "It's a substantial downtown art institution that's well known, and it's linked through the great Fluxus artist Jonas Mekas to the good old days of the '50s and '60s" -- when Lurie and his fellow NO!-Artists flourished. Did I say flourished? In fact, it is precisely the opposite of what happened.
Unfortunately, Boris Lurie, who's in his 80s and lives in New York, will not be able to make the screenings. "For understandable reasons," Reichelt says. After recovering from heart surgery, "he had two strokes and has been in hospital for more than one year now."
Here's the screening schedule:
HUNTER COLLEGE (Free admission)
Wednesday (2/21) 7:30 p.m.
A presentatioin of the Visual Culture Roundtable
Screening followed by Q+A with the filmmakers
695 Park Avenue at 68th Street
Room 1527 Hunter North Building
MAKOR ($15)
Thursday (2/22) 7:30 p.m.
At Makor/Steinhardt Center
35 W. 67th St.
NY, NY, 10023
T: 212-413-8821
F: 212-413-8860
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES ($8)
Friday (2/23) 7:30 p.m.
Special Screening
32 Second Ave. at 2nd St.
F or V train to Second Ave; 6 to Bleecker.
Posted by jherman at 8:51 AM
February 20, 2007
Cloud Nine
Norwegian master photographer Tom Sandberg's first solo exhibition in the United States -- on view at P.S.1 MoMA -- made me feel like I was walking on air. 
That's my groundling's take on what one expert, Yngve Kvistad, describes as the "ambiguous surfaces that do not quite reveal themselves" in Sandberg's large-format, often painterly, black & white photographs. It's not just in the "titanic, almost monochrome skyscapes" that there's "an invigorating presence of visual paradoxes" or a "tangible absence revealed." It's in the portraits, too. They show what Derrida called the "invisible interior of poetic freedom," Kvistad notes. I'll leave the technical terms to the experts and philosophers. Here's what the Sandberg exhibit did for me: It turned my eyeballs into flotation devices.
Postscript: Speaking of a "tangible absence" ... A sense of the enormous scale of Sandberg's work is missing from the skyscape sampled above. Without that scale, you don't really feel the true impact of his photographs. So here's a snapshot from the exhibition to give you some perspective. The skyscape behind me, "Untitled," is one of Sandberg's latest. It was made in 2006.
Suggested title from an ol' glider pilot: "Hang Time."
Posted by jherman at 9:55 AM
February 19, 2007
Apocalypse When
Chris Hedges was way ahead of the curve. Back in October he wrote on his blog:
War with Iran -- a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East -- is probable by the end of [Prez Huha's] administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks.
Probable? Was he nuts? Three weeks? Really nuts? Well, his timing may have been off, but the clock is still running.
This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as "the Axis of Evil." They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.
This morning, interviewed on Democracy Now! about his latest book, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America," Hedges repeated his warning: "Before the end of [Huha's] administration, they [the BananaRepublic] will make a strike against Iran. ... I think these people live in an alternate reality."
Hedges cannot be easily dismissed. You'll see why when you check out the interview.
Posted by jherman at 8:54 AM
February 16, 2007
Emmett Williams, RIP
Another old friend is gone. We spent many a winter night together in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, keeping ourselves entertained over a bottle or two. He died in Berlin. He was 81.
Emmett Williams was a poet who'd mastered "the write of arting." Here's an interview worth reading that fills in lots of details about him. And here's an excerpt from "THE VOY AGE," which "started out," he once explained, "as a long kinetic poem celebrating the travels and exploits of Two Buk Tim in Tim Buc Too." The format is based on a mathematical progression, the words a mere taste of Emmett's playfulness.
During our time in northern Vermont, after I had succeeded Emmett as editor of the Something Else Press, we taped a long conversation about poetry and art that was later published in the West Coast Poetry Review, in an issue devoted to his work. I asked him if he agreed that he was "a poet before anything else."
"I agree, with a few reservations," he said. "The 'anything else' bothers me."
We sat on a rolling lawn beneath giant pines in a high clearing. Jay Peak could be seen some thirty miles to the north at the Canadian border.
"I was a pretty good bartender once," he went on. "And foreman of a landfill project. I can wield a mean axe in the forest, too. Yes, I'd call myself a poet before anything else, though I wouldn't call it my occupation. Call it my preoccupation. Making poetry is the thing I've always done, or wanted to do, whatever else I was trying to accomplish. The thing that interrupts whatever else I'm doing. A 'disturbance' that I can't tune out."
I said he made it sound painful. "I know," he said, "I'm very romantic about it." He continued:
I see no practical reason whatsoever for making poetry or art. But that's what I do, and there must be a reason for it. I wrote a spooky poem about it once, about this disturbance, how it was like the sound of a baby crying somewhere, you don't know where, and nobody else hears the crying, but you feel compelled to look in every room, comb the fields and forests, and you never get to the source of the sound. Something deep down inside that pushes you on full speed ahead even though you don't know where you're headed. And the poem, or painting, or whatever, is a by-product of the search. It sounds melodramatic, I know. But face it, it's something of a curse. The curse of Erato. Say, that's a good title!
I pointed out that his love poetry was peculiar. In one love poem, for instance, he substituted "objects and activities for the letters of the alphabet." According to the documentation of a performance in London, "the word 'love' could have been spelled the smoking of a cigar plus blowing a silent dog whistle plus eating a chocolate off the floor like a puppy plus tooting a little ditty on the flute."
But "read on," he said. "It says that during the Darmstadt performance it could have been spelled peering at the audience through a hole in a piece of paper plus offering a cigar to a girl plus extracting an egg from a portable vagina plus covering my eye with a patch. And so on." He continued:
The poem is as depersonalized as the letters of the alphabet the twenty-six objects and activities are substituted for, and using an alphabet of objects and activities to spell "love" or anything else is bound to produce combinations that go far beyond the barriers of logic and common sense. Chance encounters make strange bedfellows.
How come he didn't call the poem a Happening? "I call it a symphony," he said, referring to the title ALPHABET SYMPHONY, "though it's a poem, of course. A poem that gets off the page."
If the idea of transposing one set of symbols into another was essential to his poetry, or at least some of it, so was a compulsion to make pictures. "Why does a poet make pictures?" I asked.
"Something Kandinski said years ago about his own poems is as good an answer as I could give, to the effect that writing poetry was for him simply a 'changement d'instrument,' and that the driving force behind all his work -- paintings or poems -- remained always the same. He was a fine poet, you know, only most art historians are too busy with the pictures to bother with the poems."
Emmett made a living through the sale of his lithographs and prints, as well as by teaching. But, "one thing I'd better say right here," he said:
I consider myself a Poet, capital P, without any qualifiers. Not a concrete poet, not a visual poet, not a veri-voco-visual-something-or-other poet, just a plain poet. But a poet who has found his expressive form in some untraditional ways of using language, of using it as raw material. My methods are closer to composing and painting and sculpting than to the methods of most other contemporary poets. I can write sonnets, too, and I have a fairly large body of more or less traditional verse, but that's not what interests me. I feel much more at home in the restricted landscape of "programmed" books like SWEETHEARTS or THE VOY AGE. Maybe restricted is a misleading word. I mean it the way Paul Valery uses it, where he says that the greatest freedom comes from the greatest strictness. I don't like to run off at the mouth in poems. I do that all day long. I'm not a diarist, or a politician, or a hysteric, or an analyst, or merely a recording instrument. A poet is a maker, a creator, and I take that literally.
The conversation went on like that, running off at the mouth for more than 20 pages. It touched on all sorts of subjects, from his early career in Europe as a feature reporter at the Stars and Stripes, to the artists and writers he knew and admired and whose work influenced him -- Diter Rot, Brion Gysin, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Hamilton, Ay-o, Wolf Vostell, Claus Bremer, Hansjorg Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, Jerry Rothenberg, David Antin, Dick Higgins, John Giorno, Ian Hamilton Finlay -- to his interviews with Ezra Pound, to his Kenyon College days as a student of John Crowe Ransom.
"I went to school with Tony Hecht, and James Wright, and William Gass," he recalled. "And so what. It's really irrelevant. There are a lot of people on the planet, and you bump into a lot of them as you travel around. Damn few of them become your traveling companions, though."
Postscript: There will be A Memorial Celebration for Emmett Williams in New York City on Sunday, April 1 (from 7:00 p.m.) at the Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway (at Spring Street), 2nd floor. The program will include videos and live performances of Williams' scores by artist friends and his son Garry Williams. Cake will be served. Event organizer: Geoffrey Hendricks. Contact: 212-431-8625 or cloudsmith@aol.com
Posted by jherman at 4:51 PM
February 12, 2007
John Bryan, RIP
They left 12 roses on his doorstep along with half of their kidnap victim's California driver's license. He was grateful for the roses. "They could have been 12 bullets," he said.
The kidnappers were the Symbionese Liberation Army. The license belonged to Patty Hearst. The year was 1974. The roses were both a warning and an invitation. He'd done an "interview" with the SLA and printed it in his newspaper. This was their response.
The interview was faked -- nobody knew where to find them -- but their statements were real. He'd cobbled them together from fugitive literature, mainly a manifesto they'd issued. I'm talking about John Bryan, cherished friend and colleague, who died in San Francisco on Feb. 1.
As Warren Hinckle once described him, he was "the Peter Zenger of the underground press ... unconquered and ungovernable by the puny laws of journalism."
The world is a much poorer place without him. Here's the obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, which gives an accurate (though necessarily incomplete) account of his life and career.
That warning-invitation led to meetings with the SLA. John became a go-between for the Hearst family in an unsuccessful ransom attempt. The SLA had claim it wanted to trade Patty Hearst for SLAers Joe Remiro and Russ Little, who were in jail on murder charges (for the assassination of the superintendent of the Oakland schools, Marcus Foster).
John eventually wrote a book about Remiro (a Vietnam vet) and the SLA, "This Soldier Still at War." It was one of several books he wrote, in addition to the tons of newspapers he published. John was nothing if not prolific.
What the Chronicle obit doesn't say -- I dunno why -- is that John killed himself. He'd been suffering from full-body rheumatoid arthritis for more than a decade and was in constant pain. The last time I talked with him, in September, he was working at an indie bookstore, the Abandoned Planet. He sounded reasonably well, considering, though hardly like the roaring tornado I was familiar with during the good old bad old days -- when he was fiery, almost crazed, with anti-establishment fervor. I admired many things about John, his unrelenting conviction especially, but what I admired most was his raw personal courage.
He had a stroke in November, which prevented him from writing. That was the final insult. He downed a bottle of vodka and "blew his head off" with an antique rifle. Shades of Hemingway and Hunter T., whose company he joined.
Posted by jherman at 9:58 AM
February 9, 2007
Blogs Are Personal (in Case You Hadn't Noticed)
Been gone. Now back. Why gone? Flew out west to see an old friend and collaborator, Norman O. Mustill, in his desert hideaway. Hadn't seen him or his wife Norma in nearly 40 years. Here I am in their living room, leafing through a cherished item in his vast media collection -- Bruce Bernard's "Century," a massive volume of photos from London's Sunday Times Magazine chronicling the years 1899 to 1999. The main point of interest, however, is the partial view of Mustill's large collage from the mid-1960s on the wall behind me. It's one of several I used to see decades ago on visits to his former home in northern California. And there he is -- l'artiste lui-même -- standing next to another of his large collages.
Care for a further taste of his fun & games? Go to Down With Culture! Up With Barbarism! and Anthem for America.
Posted by jherman at 11:49 AM
February 1, 2007
Molly Ivins, RIP
Molly Ivins, who died too soon, published her last column a few weeks ago. Headlined "Stand Up Against the Surge," it was a sober, even solemn commentary without so much as a hint of the satirical wit for which she was famous. She called it part of an "old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war."
But Ivins wouldn't be Ivins if her thoughts weren't ripe with a sense of the ridiculous. She loved to skewer the President With His Head Up His Ass as often as possible. For good reason. (See The Molly Ivins Touch.) Her next-to-last column, "Iraq Exit is Up to Us," was more typical of her downhome style. "The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck -- so it's up to us," it began. "You and me, Bubba."
There are many tributes to Ivins being published. Here are two at truthdig with a great photo of her. The headline on her obituary in Mother Jones, "Death of a Hellraiser: Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living," says what's needed. Or as she concluded in her last column:
We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.
Here's a video interview with Ivins from July, 2004, when her last book was published. Click the link. There's also a transcript.
Postscript: My staff of thousands should have paid more attention. Whitney Balliett has also died. Doug Ramsey -- whose Rifftides blog on jazz I love to read -- waved good-bye with a note of appreciation that had, as usual, just the right touch.
PPS: I just got around to reading "Missing Molly Ivins," (this morning's, Feb. 2, Friday column) by Paul Krugman. It's too good to keep locked behind the NYT subscription wall. He writes:
I've been going through Molly's columns from 2002 and 2003, the period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as "Bush haters" anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the victory celebrations were premature. Here are a few selections:Nov. 19, 2002: "The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now."
Jan. 16, 2003: "I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, 'Horrible three-way civil war?' "
July 14, 2003: "I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I'd rather not see my prediction come true and I don't think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. ... We don't need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers -- we need people who know how to fix water and power plants."
Oct. 7, 2003: "Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. ...
"I've got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I've had a bet out that I hoped I'd lose."
So Molly Ivins -- who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East -- got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do?
With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the obviously cooked case for war -- or found their own reasons to endorse the invasion. They didn't see the folly of the venture, which was almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight. And they took years to realize that everything we were being told about progress in Iraq was a lie.
Was Molly smarter than all the experts? No, she was just braver. The administration's exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious.
Molly had that courage; not enough others can say the same.
That's just part of what Krugman had to say. truthout is likely to break the subscription lock and post the entire column tomorrow. So go there for it.
Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM
January 28, 2007
The Experts Do Their Thing
You could say they rounded up the usual suspects experts -- long on scholarship, long on experience, not as long on influence (to judge from the way the Iraq war has played out), in some key particulars short on insight. It was nothing if not a star-studded conference.
"Iraq, Iran, & Beyond: America Faces the Future" opened with an informal talk by Pat Lang, who offered background. "We invaded the Iraq of our dreams," he said. In other words, "the country was not, in fact, what we thought it to be."
Furthermore, Lang said, differences in values between Americans and Iraqis are so great and so misunderstood, on both sides, that there is no basis for believing they can be overcome in the short term and, he strongly implied, not in the long term, either.
The first panel -- Patrick Clawson, Toby Craig Jones, Dafna Linzer, Lawrence Wright -- addressed the subject of "The Proxy War: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran." The conclusion was unanimous (despite huge but unmentioned political differences among the panelists), which made it striking: Conditions in Iraq are so dire that nothing the U.S. can do -- absolutely nothing -- will end the war there.
This means (though the panel didn't say so) all the BananaRepublican talk of a "new" strategy is pure propaganda. Ditto for the accusation that those who oppose it are defeatists. (OK, you knew that.) Wright did say this: "Reading Al Qaeda strategists is like reading a neocon think tank. They want the U.S. to do things they can't do. For instance, take on Iran."
Panel moderator Stephen Simon won the prize for honky weirdness when he said "genocidal killing" in Iraq was not happening because the Shiites do not have the two defining requirements 1) "heavy weaponry" and 2) "broad communal consent." Progroms? Yes. Genocide? No. (In that case, what would he call the genocide in Rwanda? A large pogrom?)
There was much more to the conference, all of it recorded: Peter Bergen, Steve Coll and Barnett Rubin on "The Taliban Resurgence and the Future of Al-Qaeda"; Max Boot, Noah Feldman, Salameh Nematt, Paul Pillar and Lang on "The Last Best Chances? New Plans of Action"; and Steven Cook, Fawaz Gerges, Farhad Kazemi, and Craig Unger on "The Neighborhood: Dominoes Ready to Fall?"
NYU's Center on Law and Security, which hosted the conference, plans to post video and transcripts, a spokesman says. When it does, I'll link.
Postscript: Feb. 23 -- Tomorrow it will be four weeks since the conference was held, but the center still hasn't posted video or transcripts. The reason for the delay, I'm told, is a lack of staff and resources. But the center hasn't given up. "I imagine we'll have it out in a few weeks," Nicole Bruno, the associate director of programs, says. Doubtful, methinks.
Posted by jherman at 11:49 AM
January 24, 2007
Yeah, Yeah
The state of the union is "strong" wrong. Make that delusional.
Postscript: "Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney." -- Maureen Dowd, 1/27/07
Posted by jherman at 7:52 AM
January 22, 2007
Proud of His Steadfast
The President With His Head Up His Ass made a surprise appearance at the National Conference for Media Reform and gave one of his typical brain-addled speeches. It's guaranteed to make you laugh. Then Helen Thomas asked him a few questions:
As Huha said in closing, "If there's questions that has not been answered that's not my fault."
Now stop laughing and watch or listen to Helen Thomas answering questions put to her at the conference by Amy Goodman. The interview aired this morning on Democracy Now! Thomas is withering about Huha and his regime, and about the mainstream media's craven acceptance of the invasion of Iraq -- before the war, during its early years, and for a long time afterward. She didn't use the word "complicity," but others have. It's clearly what she meant. She also talks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Nixon pardon, Bill Clinton, etc.
And here's a bunch of video excerpts from the conference, featuring Bill Moyers's keynote address and speeches by political luminaries from Bernie Sanders to Jesse Jackson and celebrities from Jane Fonda and Danny Glover to Geena Davis.
Posted by jherman at 9:12 AM
January 19, 2007
He's B-a-a-a-ck!
Whenever this ventriloquist's dummy trots out to justify the latest effort by the BananaRepublic to subvert the Constitution, we feel obliged to post his picture.
This time we also offer the latest example of what he calls "good management," his Orwellian term for firing more than a dozen federal prosecutors who've been investigating corruption fostered, protected, or simply allowed, by his enabler and boss, The Bullshitter, a k a the President With His Head Up His Ass.
As this morning's column by Paul Krugman, "Surging and Purging," points out:
Since the day it took power this administration has shown nothing but contempt for the normal principles of good government. For six years ethical problems and conflicts of interest have been the rule, not the exception. ...[N]ow that [The Bullshitter] can no longer count on Congress to do his bidding, he's more determined than ever to claim essentially unlimited authority -- whether it's the authority to send more troops into Iraq or the authority to stonewall investigations into his own administration's conduct.
For whatever reason, possibly because Krugman has said that umpteen times before -- justifiably, in our opinion -- or because of copyright protection, t r u t h o u t has chosen not to post this particular column for free distribution (as it has done with his others, such as "The Texas Strategy").
Postscript: "Surging and Purging" is now free to read.
Posted by jherman at 9:58 AM
January 16, 2007
Shoah and Pin-Ups
That's the title of a new documentary about Boris Lurie, the 80-year-old New York NO! Artist, whose work breaks taboos by combining gassed corpses and nudie pictures, Holocaust realities and sado-masochistic fantasies. "It's not perverted art, but a comment on a perverted society," says Lurie, a survivor of Buchenwald-Magdeburg and other concentration camps, who, not incidentally, draws a line from the Shoah to the war in Iraq.
"Lurie would like to have painted comfortable, comforting things," says Matthias Reichelt, a curator and art historian who collaborated on the film with the director Reinhild Dettmer-Finke. "But something kept him from doing so. And that something is what this film explores."
"Shoah and Pin-Ups" travels from Riga and Buchenwald to the New York of the 1950s and '60s, when NO! Art developed as an obstinate reaction to Pop Art. "NO! is Boris Lurie's motto," says Reichelt. "NO! to the expectations of the art market, NO! to bourgeois decorum, NO! to victim mentality. The film is about the timeless, timely questions of remembering and about coping, through art, with the extermination of the Jews."
The documentary will have a special screening next month (Feb. 23) at Anthology Film Archives in New York. We'll have more to say later.
Posted by jherman at 9:08 AM
January 15, 2007
Bold and Beautiful
Today's national holiday marks the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. He would have been 78. That's younger by five years than two living ex-presidents, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, and yet he seems a figure from a far more distant past.
Is it because he died so prematurely, killed by an assassin's bullet, at 39? Or does he recede into history because someone of his towering stature is unimaginable in a BananaRepublic led by blustering moral pipsqueaks?
Click these links: 1) to read or watch King's greatest address, the "I have a dream" speech, of Aug. 28, 1963, which he delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and 2) to hear an audio excerpt of his peerless "Letter From Birmingham Jail," of April 16, 1963. Writing from his cell on a yellow pad of legal-size paper smuggled to him by his attorney, he says:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. ... Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait."
To read the whole letter, click this link. King defends "direct-action nonviolence," explains its principles and expresses his bitter disappointment with white moderates who are "more devoted to 'order' than to justice." Notice he has "almost reached the regrettable conclusion" that they are a bigger stumbling block to freedom and equality for blacks than the White Citizen's Council or the Ku Klux Klan.
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Listen to him speak on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City about the difficulty of resistance during escalation of the Vietnam War:
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
Finally, apply what he said then ("A time comes when silence is betrayal") to the war in Iraq:
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. ... I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. ... I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
And wish like hell he were still alive to set an example and stiffen the spine.
Postscript: At least John Edwards is giving it a shot.
Posted by jherman at 1:01 AM
January 11, 2007
Old Bull on Top of New Lies
If anybody needed further proof that whatsisface is still flogging the same old bullshit, let him read "The Real Disaster," which pretty much says what needs to be said about his speech on Iraq. It's the lead editorial in this morning's New York Times. (Then compare it with the Washington Post mush and the Los Angeles Times drivel.)
Meanwhile, the same old bullshit is being floated on new lies: "As part of a campaign to market the new strategy, [Prez Huha's] aides insisted that the plan [for more U.S. troops] was largely created by the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki," David Sanger reports. But, in fact, the Iraqi government "does not really want them," according to another NYT report.
What should be highlighted in big bold print is Huha's comments in a private meeting with Congressional leaders before making his speech. "I said to Maliki this has to work or you're out," Sanger quotes him as saying, according to two officials who were in the room. "Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, [Huha] shot back: 'Because it has to.'"
Really.
The Wall Street Journal naturally supports the President With His Head Up His Ass. In its lead editorial, under the jingoish headline "Mission Baghdad," it ignores reality and claims that "with the new strategy, new forces and new generals [Huha] is putting in place, we have a fighting chance to create a virtuous circle whereby better security leads to more anti-insurgent cooperation from the [Iraqi] public -- which in turn leads to still better security."
Everything just gets better and better.
Its secondary editorial, "A Cynical Opposition," then tries to shift the focus: "The real question is whether the Democrats are prepared to act like a responsible opposition now that they control both houses of Congress, in contrast to the last four years of partisan minority sniping." Ludicrous as that sounds, it's not surprising. Last June The Journal drew this conclusion: "The U.S. has sacrificed too much already in Iraq to withdraw just when victory once again looks possible." [Italics added.]
Which pretty much defines ludicrous.
Finally, it's worth noting the historian Gareth Porter's take on the perverse logic of Huha's war and, most especially, the involvement of Henry Kissinger, whose "sudden emergence as a key figure" in the so-called new Iraq policy "deserves closer examination."
Although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi'ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the U.S. position in the war is actually weak and unstable. One of Kissinger's accomplishments was to sell the news media on the Nixon administration's propaganda line that the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi had so unnerved the North Vietnamese that it had allowed president Richard Nixon and Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic victory over the communists in the Paris Agreement. That line was a gross distortion of what actually happened before and after the bombing.
And so, Porter writes further, Huha "may be equally interested in Kissinger's experience in shifting the blame for defeat to the Democrats."
That is exactly what he tried to do in spring 1975 when the South Vietnamese military regime fell apart under the pressure of the North Vietnamese offensive. Even though Kissinger had privately admitted at the time of the Paris Agreement that the regime of president Nguyen Van Thieu was unlikely to survive, he insisted that Nixon's successor, president Gerald Ford, go through the motions of asking for an additional U.S. $722 million in military aid on April 11, less than three weeks before the final collapse.
Are we going through the motions again? It would seem so. Only now, in addition to the untold casualties and lost lives, Huha is talking billions -- $6.7 billion, to be precise -- on top of the billions already spent. If the Democrats don't stick it to him, who will? The BananaRepublicans?
Postscript: That was not a rhetorical question. See this:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 -- Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee came to the defense of [the President With His Head Up His Ass] on Friday, lending support to his decision to send more troops to Iraq and hoping to head off a Senate resolution criticizing the plan.
Posted by jherman at 10:45 AM
January 10, 2007
Over the Top
Take a close look. Does he bear any resemblance to the President With His Head Up His Ass, a k a Prez Huha?
It's Alfred Jarry's woodcut of Père Ubu, better known as Ubu Roi, and it comes to mind as a prelude to Huha's speech tonight because a reader has just suggested Père Bubu (Papa Bubu) or BuBu Roi (King BuBu) as our new moniker for the whatsisface who occupies the White House.
"Maybe a bit literary," he writes, "but fitting for an arts website. And this is the centennial year of Jarry's death."
The staff likes the term, especially the kicky Wikipedia description: "Ubu is a nobody. He is fat, stupid, greedy, cowardly, and evil." But I'm not sure.
When I say Papa Bubu I get a different echo, more of an association with Papa Doc, who terrorized the Haitians under his misrule as an incarnation of the voodoo spirit Baron Samedi in top hat and tails. (His secret police, the Tontons Macoute, did the dirty work.) But while Papa Doc's infamous declaration -- "God and the people are the source of my power. I have twice been given the power. I have taken it, and damn it, I will keep it." -- fits Prez Huha with eery precision, it's all a bit over the top, methinks.
Even Papa Huha (sorry, Prez Huha) would not claim, as Papa Doc did, that he was a voodoo Jesus Christ and God himself, would he? And if he did, I doubt that his evangelical base would buy it. Besides, has Huha ever appeared in public in top hat and tails? Not to my knowledge (although he gave it a try in post-Katrina New Orleans).
Posted by jherman at 11:01 AM
January 8, 2007
Terminology
The question was, "Does anyone out there have a suitably demeaning substitute for Bullshitter-in-Chief?" The answers were, "Of course." But the suggested terms, ranging from "d'Oily Farte" and "Mr. Stupid" to "Banana Head," "Fratboy" and "The Dolt," failed to inspire the staff.
So we'll stick with our term, shortened to The Bullshitter. We hope this will underscore his iconic status not just as the first among equals in a fraudulent regime but as an exemplar of fraudulence. From time to time we may also refer to him as the President With His Head Up His Ass, Prez Huha, or PWHHUHA (the other acronym).
When he gives his expected "surge" speech later this week, let's all remember what Harry G. Frankfurt says in the foreword to his latest little essay, "On Truth," about his previous one, "On Bullshit":
...bullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all. Instead, and most essentially, they are fakers and phonies who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and attitudes of those to whom they speak. What they care about primarily, therefore, is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false.
And keep in mind Paul Krugman's "Quagmire of the Vanities."
Postscript: Also, Arianna Huffington offers a smart "Diagnostic Guide" to watching the speech.
Posted by jherman at 10:45 AM
January 5, 2007
More Popcorn
If it's true he hasn't seen the video of Saddam Hussein's execution, as the White House claims, will somebody please explain why not? Is it because it would offend his compassionate soul? Or is it because he would have to describe how he felt about it? And you know what a mumbler he is.
He's already said what he's been told to say by his handlers. (The execution should have been "more dignified.") Presumably, they saw the video. But shouldn't he see for himself what millions of others have seen? If he's too sensitive to watch the raw execution video, he could watch the not-so raw video.
Shouldn't he know first-hand what's happening before he makes next week's do-over speech about his latest "new" strategy for Iraq? (Not that it would make a difference.) Or has he watched the execution video, while munching on popcorn, and that's a national security secret?
Posted by jherman at 12:06 PM
January 3, 2007
The Believer's Gas
He has called himself The Decider. Now he wants to be known as The Cooperator? So it would seem from the ghostwritten gas of his horseshit op-ed column in today's Wall Street Journal.
We're still mulling a suitably demeaning term to substitute for our customary Bullshitter-in-Chief. Based on the column's "I believe" graf, one staffer has suggested The Believer.
Here's the graf, with footnotes for clarification:
I believe that when America is willing to use her influence abroad, the American people are safer and the world is more secure.1 I believe that wealth does not come from government. It comes from the hard work of America's workers, entrepreneurs and small businesses.2 I believe government closest to the people is more responsive and accountable.3 I believe government plays an important role in helping those who can't help themselves. Yet we must always remember that when people are hurting, they need a caring person, not a government bureaucracy.4
1 This is why I ordered up the war in Iraq.
2 This is why I believe in tax relief for the rich and nothing at all for the poor.
3 This is why I'm ignoring the midterm elections and am sending more troops to Iraq.
4 This is why I will pray everyday for the flood victims in New Orleans.
Postscript: The Believer was never under serious consideration.
Posted by jherman at 9:56 AM
January 2, 2007
2007: Time for Him to Go
It's the new year, so nu? What's the point of leaving the old one at the top of this column? There is no point. It just signals my hangover -- not from too many champagne toasts, but too few. There wasn't much to celebrate unless it was the hope that 2007 will bring us closer to the end of our collective humiliation by the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his BananaRepublic.
It could happen. But the Bullshitter's remarks about the Iraq war, as reported this morning in The New York Times, make it doubtful. "What I want to hear from you is how we're going to win, not how we're going to leave," he is quoted as warning the military's top brass. He still insists on talking about victory, the report notes (italics added), because, he claims, "It's a word the American people understand."
Sure. Why should he accept the blame for his own catastrophic failure? Blame everyone else. The warning and the victory talk merely reaffirm his arrogance, incompetence and deceit. Which leads to a niggling little matter. What should he be called these days? Given current conditions as shown by his highly unfavorable poll ratings, our customary term of reference may have outlasted its usefulness.
Does anyone out there have a suitably demeaning substitute for Bullshitter-in-Chief? The staff likes "Junior," per Maureen Dowd, for its connotation of a lightweight. But I'd much prefer something that goes with the "head-up-his-ass" photo (originally posted here in 2005, when a staff conscript sent it per the ravages of Katrina).
Posted by jherman at 11:24 AM
December 26, 2006
Dirty Stockings: 2006
We live now in the dirty stockings of Adolph. That's how we saw it. No surprise there. As we await the Bullshitter-in-Chief's next maneuver to cement two legacies of his regime -- the genocidal war in Iraq and the BananaRepublic -- here's a year-end review of some political postings favored by readers:
To Our Pipsqueak Leaders
Bad Bargains
One More Ventriloquist Dummy
No. 1 With a Bullet
'I Am Me and Rummy's He ...'
Frankly, He's a Toad
Deja Prevu, or Just the Facts
President Neuman
No Parking for 9/11's Fifth
Tears of Bullshit
On a Bicycle and a Prayer
Banana Republicans
Pants on Fire
No Full Stop
Pass the Milk, Please
And Still Counting
The One True Person of the Year
Tomorrow: Postings on arts and culture.
Postscript: Ah well, tomorrow came ... and went. Mebbe later.
PPS: Later has come.
The staff fell down on the job this year. It posted only 160 or so items since last January, and just a fraction had something to do with arts and culture. Tant pis. To its everlasting credit, however, the staff did take note of some admired writers, artists, filmmakers and assorted crackpots for work they did, mostly long ago, and for the issues they raised. 
It was a narrow "some" -- William S. Burroughs, Nelson Algren, Norman O. Mustill, Henry Miller, Willy Wyler, Mary Beach, William Osborne, Ernest Hemingway, John Bryan, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron. Other notables were loathed.
Help yourselves:
Memorial for Mary, Au Revoir
Picture This
Forward Nails Lauder
Master of the Cosmodemonic
Deep Focus, Es Claro?
Dead Reckoning
For the Love of Algren
The Copycat and the Original Cat
The Good Old Bad Old Days
'Wild Side' Still Rocks
Forever and a Day
Repulski's Revenge
Hello! (Is My Boat Comin' In?)
Music of the Spheres
Take Two: Bill Burroughs & Tony Balch
Wo ist Die 'Opera Toilet'?
Like Father, Like Son
Human Wrongs
A Different Kind of Bushwack
William Styron, RIP
VPo + America - Blacks = (Classical Music x Cultural Racism)²
Posted by jherman at 8:23 AM
December 21, 2006
'Tis the Season
And now we defer to the merry holiday. For wicked wunnerful, ya can't beat "The Junky's Christmas." It's the perfect gift. Originally produced in 1993 and presented by Francis Ford Coppola, the film has just been released on DVD. It combines claymation and live action, and the pristine cinematography in black and white looks gorgeous.
William S. Burroughs, who wrote the tale way back in 1952, narrates. Christmas music swells as the camera tilts in on him, standing by the living room fireplace. He takes a book down from the shelf and sits in an armchair by the fire. Gifts beneath the decorated Christmas tree are waiting to be unwrapped. His eye watches, all-seeing, like a wise old elephant's eye. He reads from the book in a deadpan voice, his clipped Midwestern accent offering dry counterpoint to the swollen music:
It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat.This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought.
He was in the West Nineties. A long block of brownstone rooming houses. Here and there a holy wreath in a clean black window. ...
And so begins a tale to cherish. Jean Shepherd and Lenny Bruce would be jealous.
Incidental intelligence: The DVD also includes two VH-1 music films, "Ironbound" and "Traveling Light" -- neither one related to "The Junky's Christmas" and both, to my taste, fine examples of pretentious drek. No matter. Ya don't hafta watch 'em.
Postscript: realitystudio.org has posted a Burroughs expert's detailed review of "The Junky's Christmas." Verdict? "It's a small masterpiece."
Posted by jherman at 12:21 PM
Nobody Owns Headlines
Forget the substance, look at the form:
That's the subhead on a TV ratings item in today's "Arts, Briefly" column of The New York Times.
Now look at the headline on yesterday's item about the Vienna Philharmonic:
Posted by jherman at 9:20 AM
December 20, 2006
VPo + America - Blacks = (Classical Music x Cultural Racism)²
Having taken his latest whack at the sexist-cum-racist policies of the Vienna Philharmonic, which is, historically, Europe's most iconic classical orchestra, William Osborne relates its continued euphoric reception in the United States to "patrician rituals" and America's cultural racism.
Osborne is a composer, musicologist and social historian. He divides his time between New Mexico, where he was born, and Germany, where his wife Abbie Conant is a professor of trombone at the University of Tubingen.
Given the many European press reports about the Vienna Philharmonic's sexism and racism -- see articles in Der Standard and Profil magazine for two recent examples -- one might ask why the orchestra continues to be euphorically received in the United States. How can we explain that the Philharmonic's sexist and racist employment practices are largely overlooked? Does this acceptance have something to do with classical music and the nature of America's cultural life?
One of the most obvious answers involves the demographic of American classical music, which is overwhelmingly white and elitist. Forty years after the American civil rights movement began, the country's major orchestras are still 98% white; its conductors are still 99% white; the composers presented are almost 100% percent white; and the audience at least 95% white -- even though the urban areas where these orchestras reside are from 30% to 50% black.
Many Americans rationalize this situation with the naive (and smug) assumption that African-Americans have their own rich musical traditions and are simply not interested in classical music. Such views, of course, are absurd and racist. They represent a form of aesthetic segregation. It is grotesque that one would even need to explain that the talents of African-Americans are as manifest in classical music as in jazz and pop. We practice musical racism through bourgeois essentialism that presumes to define black and white forms of taste and ability.
These racially informed perspectives are strengthened by our plutocratic method of funding the arts. Most of our funding comes from donations by the wealthy, which inevitably allows a racially based class system to strongly influence our cultural lives. Elite white interests, as represented by institutions such as Lincoln Center, are where the money goes, while the cultural needs and identities of the poor and colored remain mostly ignored.
This is clearly illustrated if we look at the cultural status of areas such as Harlem. Due to its remarkable history, Harlem should be one of the great artistic centers of the world, a cultural Mecca visited by millions around the globe each year. The reality is almost the opposite. Instead of being the pride of New York City, for over half a century Harlem has been decimated by poverty, degradation, and neglect. The area must continually struggle to maintain its cultural existence. Our Eurocentric perspectives not only inure us to the sexist and racist values that shape institutions like the Vienna Philharmonic, they blind us to profound forms of cultural expression directly in our midst. And worse, they create forms of racist neglect and contempt that actually destroys culture.
With an irony so extreme it boggles the mind, whites have recently taken an interest in Harlem, but only as developers who want to make fortunes by gentrifying it. (These developers include Columbia University which plans to expand its campus into the area.) In an age-old pattern, as the real estate prices rise, African-American residents will be forced into yet another racist, cultural Diaspora that will weaken both their and New York City's cultural identity. (The destruction and rebuilding of New Orleans along elite white interests is another well-known illustration.)
None of this should be surprising. An ethnocentric and self-serving perspective is an inherent part of any racially informed plutocratic system of arts funding. While most concert halls in Europe, for example, are named after great cultural figures in their history, our halls are usually named after wealthy white people whose backgrounds are so mundane we don't even know who they really are. Even if these cultural institutions are built in areas where the poor live, they are surrounded by social barriers that allow for very little communal interaction.
An effective integration of our "minority" communities into classical music would require a commitment to education and accessibility that simply does not exist in the United States, and probably never will under its current system of funding the arts. Programs exist, of course, but they fall vastly short of what is needed. The problems represented by our extreme social dichotomies are simply not within the purview of corporate donors. And the wealthy alone could never solve such immense problems.
We also have to admit no solution is in sight. Our political culture refuses to acknowledge that our massive legacy of human slavery is a responsibility so large it can only be met and solved by our government. As a result, paradoxes abound. Why have we spent a trillion dollars to occupy and "rebuild" Iraq, for example, while leaving close to 30 million of our own citizens in ghettos where they live deeply deprived and degraded lives? Can it be any wonder a society like ours could easily overlook the racism of the Vienna Philharmonic?
The ironies of our one-sided cultural policies were vividly illustrated when New York's cultural elite built Rose Hall, a new venue for jazz at Lincoln Center, while continuing to ignore the decades-long cultural destruction of Harlem. On one hand, it is wonderful that African-American culture can be celebrated near the most privileged center of New York's cultural life. But, on the other hand, it cannot be overlooked that the entire orientation of the hall's programming has been shifted toward a conformist form of jazz stripped of its traditional sense of protest, and oriented toward consumption by a white gentry capable of paying for high-priced tickets. It is little wonder that cynical observers sometimes refer to Rose Hall as the Lincoln Center Jazz Plantation -- a terribly harsh metaphor, but not without an important point.
We are left with the vague but prevalent idea that black and Hispanic communities are little more than something over which an elevated freeway is built so whites can rush to their comfortable suburbs. It is simply not considered that those communities have rich cultural lives that should be supported and made a central and vibrant part of America 's cultural experience and identity. And it is not considered that these communities should receive the same opportunities for education in classical music made available to many whites (whether those whites use it or not.)
As a result of these social practices, a bizarre atmosphere surrounds places like Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. In ways that have yet to be fully studied, the patrician rituals of classical music vicariously celebrate the highborn and racist character of our Eurocentric cultural heritage. In the euphoric reception of the Vienna Philharmonic, and in the large amount of funding it is given for yearly appearances, one senses a quiet, bourgeois celebration of the ensemble's sexism and racism.
There are many issues enfolded in this cultural landscape. We already feel the devastating loss of whole cultures within our culture. Can we move beyond a mere hip comodification of world music, to a genuine racial and cultural integration in classical music itself?
Posted by jherman at 9:30 AM
December 19, 2006
The One True Person of the Year
For his special comments, Keith Olbermann. Nobody in the media -- mainstream or meanstream, high or low -- has been more compelling or persuasive in voicing outrage at the arrogance, incompetence and rank stupidity of the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his regime of BananaRepublic cronies.
Olbermann's special comments are remarkable not only for their anger but for their boldness and literacy. They're more powerful, hands down (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert notwithstanding), than any televised political editorials I know of. (Hell, even my print faves, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, can't compete with him for charisma.)
If you missed last night's "Countdown" broadcast, a roundup of excerpts, you can have a look at them online one by one. Check them out from top ("Have you no decency, sir?") to bottom ("This hole in the ground"). It's not the same as having them fused together and beamed into your livingroom. Ya hadda be there. But it's a brilliant collection easily worth your time, the more so for offering them whole, and surely deserving of greater recognition than mine.
Posted by jherman at 9:10 AM
Techmeister
Time's Person of the Year is you? "Yes, you," the magazine declares. "You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world." Uh, not so fast. Here's the guy in charge:
He's manning the Help Desk.
Posted by jherman at 1:23 AM
December 17, 2006
Loud Whispers
Finally, an acknowledgment of Sunni genocide as the BananaRepublic's sub rosa policy in Iraq: "The Whispers and the Why Nots." Reported by Helene Cooper, "Whispers"⊗ is the lead story of the Week in Review section in today's New York Times.
"We shall call it the Darwin Principle," Cooper writes of the policy, also referring to it as "the Shiite option." One unnamed senior regime official is quoted as calling it the "stare into the abyss" strategy.
Although the policy is couched as a "proposal" in an ongoing debate within the Bullshitter-in-Chief's regime, as though it hasn't already been implemented, Cooper's report is explicit about the fact that Sunni genocide has been promoted at the highest Banana Republican level, namely by Darth Cheney's office.
Which confirms the worst suspicions we've had of a U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder by way of proxies -- suspicions I must admit I had recently begun to doubt after reading so many news stories about the U.S. military's desire to root out the Shiite death squads.
⊗ The "Whispers" headline in the NYT print edition has been toned down on the Web site to "The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq," a craven minorstroke of what I presume to be second thinking. Maybe the public editor will look into the change and explain it.
Postscript: A reader writes:
The Times article is likely not a report about whispers, but about "staged whispers" that attempt to post-date the decision to allow for genocide through civil war. I suspect this strategy was well-considered from the very beginning. See Robert Parry's article on Truthout. It illustrates that what is happening in Iraq is nothing new and that in fact we are very experienced at this sort of thing.
The Parry article, posted two years ago, discusses the "Salvador option" and notes that the Pentagon was "intensively debating" it as "a new policy" to pacify Iraq, according to a Newsweek report in January of 2005.
We've talked before about the "Salvador option" in Iraq. Here, for example. In any case, use of the so-called "the Shiite option" explains why the Saudis read Darth Cheney the riot act on his visit to Riyadh earlier this month. Given all the "surge" talk we've been hearing, you don't really believe the meeting was about a troop withdrawal, do you?
Posted by jherman at 9:24 AM
December 12, 2006
Deep Woodstein
Do we really need a book about the impact of Watergate on the lives and careers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? We already know what happened to them. Woodward went on to write a shelfload of best sellers about the government, told from the inside, and Bernstein joined the glitterati.
Well, Virginia, that's not the whole story. Alicia C. Shepard's new book, "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate," fills in the rest with nuances you probably don't know or never considered, and does it with enough thoroughly documented details to slake the curiosity of a news junkie like me.
Is that special pleading? So be it.
Shepard has scrutinized the pair's Watergate papers (bought by the University of Texas for $5 million in 2002). She has interviewed both guys, their wives and former wives, their editors, their competitors, and plenty of others including Alan Pakula, the Hollywood director who did his own interviews for the film version of the Woodstein book "All the President's Men."
All in all, Shepard has put in a prodigious amount of work. Yet "Woodward and Bernstein" is a swift read, its lackluster prose notwithstanding. Which left me feeling grateful -- even surprised -- given the sense I must admit having of a magazine feature padded out to textbook length for journalism courses.
Besides, who can resist the opening bars of the "Dance of the Knights" from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" in a book promo that riffs on the emblematic scene of the Pakula flick?
Posted by jherman at 8:19 AM
December 8, 2006
Foodies on Iraq
Don't treat it as a "fruit salad," says James Baker. It's a "recipe for our defeat," says John McCain. At last we've come to the real terms of debate over the Iraq Study Group Report. It's a foodie fight.
Conservative jerks like McCain who support the war call the report a recipe for defeat as if the Bullshitter-in-Chief has ever offered a recipe for anything but. You have to wonder about their sanity and their tastebuds. Baker asked pols to eat the report whole, not to pick at it ("I like this but I don't like that."). You have to wonder about his fruity choice of language. (Arianne Huffington treats the thing more like a Big Mac®. She's for "cutting the fat.")
Foodies, feh!
As a British political analyst and antiwar activist, Milan Rai, pointed out this morning on Democracy Now!, the report offers a mere "modification of the occupation" of Iraq. The debate over the report gives the erroneous impression that real withdrawal is at stake, which is "not the case at all."
Posted by jherman at 10:57 AM
Still Delusional
It's always refreshing to see the news of the day told with accuracy, in this case the Bullshitter-in-Chief's reaction to the Iraq Study Group Report:
In light of the report's stark warning that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating,"Mr. Bush came close to acknowledging mistakesthe Bullshitter showed just how delusional he is. "You wanted frankness -- I thought we would succeed quicker than we did," the president said to a British reporter who asked for candor. "And I am disappointed by the pace of success."
That's from the fourth graph of the lead front-page story in this morning's print edition of The New York Times -- with our bold-face phrase subbed in, of course, per the postscript to yesterday's item, Here We Go Again.
Posted by jherman at 9:28 AM
December 7, 2006
Not Quite Cole Porter
But the lyrics have a certain swing, ring, sting.
Posted by jherman at 11:05 AM
Here We Go Again
When [the Bullshitter-in-Chief] insisted that the Iraq Study Group would not provide cover for the White House to chart a 'graceful exit' of American troops, he was missing the whole point.
By the way, the report is already on two best-seller lists. At the moment it's No. 3 at Barnes & Noble online and No. 6 on Amazon. I haven't read it yet, just the news stories about it.
To judge from the first sentence by the study group's co-chairmen -- "There is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq." -- my guess is that it's a pretty good sleeping pill. Anyone for calling in Houdini?
Postscript: Just got a huge laugh out of the Bullshitter's definition of failure in Iraq. "I am disappointed by the pace of success." Apparently still delusional, he thought he was auditioning for "The Daily Show" at today's press conference.
Q: Mr. President, the Iraq Study Group said that leaders must be candid and forthright with people. So let me test that. Are you capable of admitting your failures in the past, and perhaps much more importantly, are you capable of changing course, perhaps in the next few weeks?A: I think you're probably going to have to pay attention to my speech coming up here when I get all the recommendations in, and you can answer that question, yourself. I do know that we have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed. I do understand that progress is not as rapid as I had hoped. ... You wanted frankness -- I thought we would succeed quicker than we did, and I am disappointed by the pace of success.
Such is frankness.
Posted by jherman at 9:13 AM
December 4, 2006
Old Leaks
The editor of Partisan Review, William Phillips, asked me to review Daniel Odier's "The Job," a book of interviews with William S. Burroughs from Grove Press. This was in 1970.
I wrote the piece and then thought I'd test the limits of the magazine, which had already entered its long dotage, by cutting up what I'd written and submitting the result.
I think Phillips was a bit dumbfounded. To his credit however, and that of the managing editor, Caroline Rand Herron, the review was published as submitted, although under the category of "Variety."
Why mention this now? No particular reason, except to note that the utterances that leaked out of the cut-up still seem as pertinent (dated references notwithstanding) as they did then.
For example:
We have heard children of the Jews on the way to the ovens. What are we a rerun already? The movie industry comes cheap. We live now in the dirty stockings of Adolph. Remember Apollo 7? Didn't (Frank) Borman coo the gideon bible? So let's stop praying.
Or this:
Didn't you tune in? We saw them armed with tanks and cameras alternatively under the dead stars of Vietam. Now throw back insult tapes. Betray & walk out! Joe Stalin's Dick Nixon's heavy camouflage alone forms that which it opposes. Namely you.
Or this:
Have you been fooled? It is only natural. For the police, actuality overcame theory to attack you. That is their fix with the Senator whose idea is not to be where you arrive.
The review began:
With the recent publication of The Job Burroughs writes who do not listen. He advances against inhuman Ike who made radioactive image junk for greed, conspiring against the daily life of the masses -- so the Authority habit and human smallness, whose methods were properly learned, became history with predatory intent. Can now be overthrown?
The answer, 36 years later, is: apparently not.
Posted by jherman at 10:18 AM
December 1, 2006
And Still Counting
Posted by jherman at 8:11 AM
November 30, 2006
By the Way . . .
"If you're doin' business with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing. His word isn't worth shit, not with the Good Lord tellin' him how to fuck you on the deal." That excellent advice, offered long ago by William S. Burroughs, puts the latest message from Iran's chief Jew hater in the proper perspective. The same goes for the latest message from the Bullshitter-in-Chief. Typically, however, neither message from these jokers is worth getting in writing.
Posted by jherman at 9:20 AM
November 28, 2006
Last Playwright
Where to begin? An acquaintance mentioned him. But I don't know anything about Tuvia Tenenbom except what I've read. Never met him. Never saw any of his plays. I'm not much of a theatergoer these days.
After reading his "Letter From Poland" and watching his video posted on YouTube, however, I plan to see "Last Jew in Europe," his latest play, when it opens in New York.
How could I not? Tenenbom, who is the artistic director of the Jewish Theater of New York, apparently has a combination of brains and balls rarely found in the world, let alone in the world of the theater.
(Here's a review of his previous play -- billed as a "theatrical journey into the pleasures of chaos" -- "The Last Virgin." Love his titles.)
I'll admit when I read that "Last Jew" -- billed as a tragicomedy on racism and self-hate -- is "the story of love between a young Polish Jew and his Christian fiancée," I thought, Uh-oh. Wait a minute. Here come da schmaltz. But then I read on and was reassured:
Blood and vodka flow on stage, accompanied at times by disco music, as characters move deeper and deeper into their fears, hatred of the foreign, illusions and delusions. Crosses amass on the ground; some portray crucified young females nailed onto them, others young Hasidic males. As time passes, fire engulfs stage, burnt papers fly aimlessly, and images of anti-Semitic graffiti pop in & out of sight, dreamily mingling with the smoke.
Sounds promising. A real spectacular, no? "Last Jew in Europe" is scheduled to open on Feb. 7 at a theater in Manhattan, still to be announced.
Postscript: Word comes that the production is to open on March 4, 2007, at The Triad Theater (158 W. 72nd St., between Amsterdam and Columbus Aves.). Triad tel: 212.362.2590. JTNY tel: 212.494.0050
And just in case you missed the YouTube link:
Posted by jherman at 10:11 AM
November 27, 2006
Grab It While You Can
David Remnick must have taken my sterling advice. (Scroll to the last graf.) Or am I just imagining the content of this week's New Yorker is almost entirely online? Next week's might not be, so get it while it lasts.
Postscript: And isn't it nice to see Eric Alterman's latest alert in The Nation? He only lags by 12 days behind Pants On Fire, while managing to cop Frank Rich's "double down" language (applied to a different subject) with a lag time of a mere three days.
Posted by jherman at 1:09 PM
Factual vs. Actual
Do I detect the rank smell of condescension in the belated take on Keith Olbermann in this morning's LA Times? The reporter's reference to KO as a "longtime sportscaster" is factual but somehow belittling. And methinks her description of him as a "folk hero" for the left -- "an unexpected folk hero for the frustrated left," to be precise -- has a patronizing odor.
So does this: "When he's not lecturing Bush, he wears a perpetually amused expression on the air and casually tosses papers off his desk." Indeed he does. I can't gainsay her that. But there's something supercilious in how she puts the facts. Ditto when she describes him as "scribbling out" one of his commentaries (a particularly strong one at that) and when she points to "gushing" messages that come in (one, pointedly, from Joseph C. Wilson IV, who, it so happens, is exactly right about Olbermann and the press).
I could go on (and on). For instance, to the tut-tutting about KO's coverage of celebrities like Tom Cruise, and so forth, but that's getting too picky. Which is so juvenile.
Postscript: A reader from Los Angeles writes:
Whdd y 'spct whn y ct stff t th bn?
Context: To save space in the news hole, vowels have been eliminated as well as lots of top-drawer journalists and editors.
Translation: What did you expect when you cut staff to the bone?
Posted by jherman at 10:29 AM
November 25, 2006
It's Official
In case you've been wondering all this time:
Hold your nose and click the link to see the complete list. The Pentagon offers it without the least apology.
Postscript: "Good gracious me."
Posted by jherman at 11:16 AM
Banana Split
We've been carrying on for a long time about the BananaRepublic. In the last month alone we registered so many objections our insults glaze over. (See Banana Republicans, Rubber Stamps, Regime Change, Pants On Fire and No Full Stop).
So we couldn't help noticing with a certain amount of self-satisfaction that just yesterday Paul Krugman asked, "Do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we're in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?"
We concede he was not pointing at the use of torture and military tribunals that prohibit habeus corpus, as we were, but at "vote suppression and defective -- or rigged -- electronic voting machines" in Florida during the recent midterm election. But let's not split hairs.
Posted by jherman at 11:08 AM
November 23, 2006
Disappearing Act
Does anybody know the whereabouts of Darth Cheney? The big turkey arrived in Baghdad on a surprise visit for Thanksgiving, state-run Iraqiya TV reported. So did Al Arabiya TV. But a U.S. military spokesman said he's not in Iraq "as far as we know." (He also said, "I'm not confirming or denying he's here. I'm trying to figure that out.") The White House denied the Iraqi TV reports. (Anyway, who believes the White House these days?) Our guess is he's sleeping off an early tryptophanic binge somewhere, waiting to come out of hiding.
Postscript: He hath reappeared.
Posted by jherman at 10:30 AM
November 21, 2006
Quitting Time
Another must-see broadcast of indelible outrage: "Lessons from the Vietnam War," Keith Olbermann's latest special commentary on the Bullshitter-in-Chief. It aired last night. I don't know whether KO dines out on sushi, but if he's smart, he'll lay off for now.
Postscript: The bullshitter's takeaway from Vietnam -- "We'll succeed, unless we quit." -- also pisses off Joe Conason, and for the same reasons (expressed in almost the same words). He should watch his back, too.
Couldn't help noticing a peculiar contradiction in Conason's remarks, though. I'm sure he reviles what happened during the Vietnam War. Yet he damns the bullshitter for avoiding it. If he objects to the inequity of a privileged snot being able to cop out of the war by pulling strings while the less privileged couldn't, fine. He ought to say so. Instead he simply calls him "a man who quit Vietnam before he ever got there," as though the war was a worthy cause. Can't have it both ways, Joe.
Posted by jherman at 10:26 AM
November 19, 2006
PASS THE MILK, PLEASE
I try never to miss his Sunday sermons. But to "worship at the Church of Frank," as one of my staff of thousands puts it, is a sin I try never to commit too early in the morning. I generally wait until I've had my coffee.
Today, however, was an exception. Frank struck the sleep from my eyes by pointing to "the one truly serious story to come out of the election." Then I had my cup of coffee and read on.
According to Frank, the Bullshitter-in-Chief "has no intention of changing his policy on Iraq or anything else one iota." This, he says, "is far more significant than the Washington chatter about 'divided Democrats.'" Deeper into the sermon, on my second cup, I realized that Frank's theme sounded familiar. (See this and this.)
Churches customarily pass the plate after the service. Frank's does it beforehand. So you can't get his sermons unless you pony up, via subscription.* We're sorry for that, because Frank has a way with words even when he mixes metaphors and turns all red-white-and-blue.
He says the bullshitter "seems more likely ... to use American blood and money to double down on his quixotic notion of 'victory' to the end" than "to catch the political lifeline" Jim Baker's Iraq Study Group "might toss him." And, he concludes, "Only if [divided Republicans] heroically come together can the country be saved from a president who, for all his professed pipe dreams about democracy in the Middle East, refuses to surrender to democracy's verdict at home."
It will take a helluva more heroism than that, in our humble opinion. See Norman O. Mustill's collage, above, which hasn't dated "one iota." (It was first published in 1970 as the back cover of his Vietnam War commentary, "Mess Kit." It appeared there in black & white. Here it is for the first time in color, per the original.)
And see these: "Padilla Case Raises Questions About Anti-Terror Tactics"; "Gonzales attacks ruling against domestic spying"; "Plea deals pile up in Iraq murder cases"; "United States Rides Weapons Bonanza Wave," and "Lose a War; Lose an Election."
Postscript: Remember the hot-air speech called "Plan for Victory," a k a Plan for More Bullshit?
Well, a year later, here's what Henry Kissinger, the shameless wise man who's been advising the bullshitter to accept nothing less than victory, just told the BBC:
"If you mean by military victory an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."
He even had the chutzpah to talk about "the art of leadership."
*Meantime, a staffer reminds me that Frank's sermon may be read here, no donation required.
Posted by jherman at 11:47 AM
November 16, 2006
NO FULL STOP
To hell with the voters. "U.S. plans last big push in Iraq." The BananaRepublic, like a wounded beast, lives on.
![Last big push [Photo: Peter Turnley/Corbis]](http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2006/11/15/ussoliders372ready.jpg)
And don't forget to read this.
Posted by jherman at 9:25 AM
November 14, 2006
NEWS THAT STAYS NEWS
An especially strong broadcast from Democracy Now! features a segment on the war crimes lawsuit filed today in Germany against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet, General Ricardo Sanchez and other high U.S. officials -- see also this report in Time magazine -- and a segment with the star witness in the case, former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, at left, who headed Abu Ghraib.
Karpinski talks with Amy Goodman about the infamous torture photos, their meaning, and the memo on interrogation techniques that Rumsfeld signed, including "a handwritten annotation in the margin" consisting of four words: "Makes sure this happens!!" It was the "same handwriting and appeared to be the same ink as the signature on the memorandum," she says, indicating at the very least that Rumsfeld "had knowledge of what was being allowed in terms of interrogation." The techniques were, she notes, "authorized, ordered, designed and directed by people at much higher levels than mine or anybody else serving in Iraq."
The memo and notation are old news, pointed out earlier in many reports. Here's one (from tomdispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute):
While testifying this January 21, [2006,] in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Karpinski told us: "General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed [an] eight-page memorandum authorizing literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission."All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been "specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operation," was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to "work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques."
Karpinski met Miller on his tour of American prison facilities in Iraq in the fall of 2003. Miller, as she related in her testimony, told her, "It is my opinion that you are treating the prisoners too well. At Guantanamo Bay, the prisoners know that we are in charge and they know that from the very beginning. You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. And if they think or feel any differently you have effectively lost control of the interrogation."
Miller went on to tell Karpinksi in reference to Abu Ghraib, "We're going to Gitmo-ize the operation."
When she later asked for an explanation, Karpinski was told that the military police guarding the prisons were following the orders in a [one-page] memorandum approving "harsher interrogation techniques," and, according to Karpinski, "signed by the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld."
... In the left-hand margin, alongside the list of interrogation techniques to be applied, Rumsfeld had personally written, "Make sure this happens!!" Karpinski emphasized the fact that Rumsfeld had used two exclamation points.
When asked how far up the chain of command responsibility for the torture orders for Abu Ghraib went, Karpinski said, "The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized [them] without the approval of the Vice President."
What has changed since then? When it comes to prosecuting the top officials, very little. And that's the news that stays news:
"The utter and complete failure of U.S. authorities to take any action to investigate high-level involvement in the torture program could not be clearer," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a U.S.-based non-profit helping to bring the legal action in Germany, [Time reports]. He also notes that the Military Commissions Act, a law passed by Congress earlier this year, effectively blocks prosecution in the U.S. of those involved in detention and interrogation abuses of foreigners held abroad in American custody going back to Sept. 11, 2001.
Precisely, as noted here just the other day: "... despite claims to the contrary (such as "saving American lives"), the bullshitter's Republican enablers rammed through the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [to] protect him and his henchmen from potential prosecution."
So as not to confuse an already complicated legal issue, made more so by the conflation of separate but related problems (Abu Ghraib vs. Guantanamo, Al Qaeda vs. Iraqi insurgents, interrogations abroad vs. in the U.S., captured enemy combatants vs. arrested U.S. citizens, and so on), here's an excellent backgrounder about the original memo of 2002 (the "Bybee memo") that set things off.
Posted by jherman at 10:55 AM
November 13, 2006
OFF THE WALL
Is this the most ridiculous thing you ever read? As if morale in the LA Times newsroom wasn't low enough. Seems to me publisher David Hiller must have wanted to squash it further.
First he forces out the editor when they can't agree on the paper's future, then he offers pap to the staff. Now his mash squash note to Rummy Boy.
Idiot quiz for the day: True or false?
1) Hiller is "a personable, funny and intellectually engaged executive."
2) Hiller is "the equivalent of a mafioso consigliere," also described as "a hard-nosed trial lawyer with no background in journalism."
Posted by jherman at 10:10 AM
November 10, 2006
ED BRADLEY, RIP
This blog is beginning to look like an obit column. Last week it was William Styron. Now it's Ed Bradley. His death made the front page at both The New York Times (here) and the Washington Post. Whether he was an icon or a trailblazer for black journalists is beside the point. He was the real thing, black or white, as this profile showed long ago:
![Ed Bradley, Speaking softly, but carrying a big presence ... [Chicago Sun-Times, Sunday, Feb. 6, 1983]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/bradleytext%20400.jpg)
It ran on Feb. 6, 1983, in the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times. This is how it went:
Q. My daughter and I have been discussing whether Ed Bradley of the Sunday night CBS-TV series "60 Minutes" is black? Will you please settle this matter? -- B.H., Springfield, Ohio.
A. TV journalist Ed Bradley is black. -- Parade Magazine, Jan. 9, 1983CLOSEUP / JAN HERMAN
NEW YORK -- "Is he black?" said Ed Bradley's boss. "I hadn't noticed."
Don Hewitt, executive producer of "60 Minutes," percolated rather than sat behind his desk. Milky daylight filtered through the large windows of his corner office across the street from the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan's West Side. He answered the phone. He asked someone to stop by later to see a videotape. He shouted, "Don't let him get away!" and his secretary nabbed the man with the coffee cart gliding by the door.
"You know," Hewitt continued, "when we finally decided who was going to replace [Dan] Rather, it happened on a day I was addressing a black employee association. They asked, 'Who is it?' I said, 'Ed Bradley.' And there was a lot of applause. I said, 'Hey, hold it. You don't understand something. We would have hired Ed Bradley if he were white.'"
Hewitt came around his desk, fishing coins from his pocket for a can of diet soda. "Coffee for you?" he asked. He pulled out more coins. His mood was ebullient. If it seemed odd that the boss of one of the most profitable news shows in CBS history should have to pay for drinks in his office, it nevertheless confirmed his reputation for the common touch.
"Bradley's as good a reporter as I've met in my life," Hewitt said. "His presence on screen is big and important. He is what he purports to be. He doesn't just look the part, he is the part. He is not a facade. A lot of television journalists are elitists. They didn't get hired, they got ordained. They think journalism is the priesthood, which is complete bull----. Bradley is the opposite of that."
Two years after joining "Don's Angels," as a jocular writer once dubbed Mike Wallace, Morley Safer and Harry Reasoner, Bradley is flying with a full set of wings and a halo around his head. When I caught up with him over breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, I wondered if he had ever heard Hewitt's anecdote about the black employee association meeting. Bradley put down his large glass of fresh orange juice, which he was savoring with his first cigarette of the day, and grinned so hard the gap showed in his chipped front teeth.
"I hadn't heard that one," he said. "Racially, I'm black. I'm not a 'black journalist.' The thing is, I have never allowed myself to be painted into that corner. And I've consciously made that decision. I didn't want to be an 'urban affairs' expert, the reporter who does the 'black stories.' I'm not saying that doing that kind of reporting is wrong. If that's what some people want to do, fine. You need people who specialize. If I had done that, I would never have gone to Paris. I would never have been a foreign correspondent. I would never have covered the Vietnam War. I would never have gone to Israel. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now."
What the 41-year-old Bradley is doing is what he loves best: cover the world. Now that the television networks have bureaus everywhere, "there are no more globe-trotters, like Lowell Thomas, Bob Consodine or Richard Harding Davis," as Hewitt is fond of saying. Bradley and the rest of the "60 Minutes" crew are the exceptions. Catching up with him is like trying to catch the wind. It is easier to stand still and let him rendezvous with you. He'll eventually blow by. His beat keeps him on the move for an average of 250,000 miles a year.
In person, Bradley does not disappoint. Hoisting his garment bag and trench coat for the bellman, he looked very much the world traveler who travels light. His only other piece of luggage was a small leather briefcase bulging with papers, a microphone for his interviews and a book for long, tedious flights.
"I love thrillers," he said. "I get one by Robert Ludlum and read it and I say, 'Damn, why didn't you write two?' It's nice escapist stuff. I think my ambition is one day to write a thriller."
In tweed jacket and jeans, with a maroon tie and matching handkerchief in his breast pocket, Bradley seemed at once nattier and more casual than he does on screen. But his salt-and-pepper beard and tortoise-shell glasses also reinforced the impression he can give of an interviewer so academic and laid back as to appear almost bored.
"Naw," Bradley said. "That's just my style. I don't knock them over the head unless they need to be. I tend to sit back. 'Here, how much rope do you want? You want a little more? Come on, it's yours.' I just sit back and listen. That's the key to doing a good interview, being a good listener. If someone is aware that you're interested in what they're saying, they tend to talk. All you have to do is steer them in the right direction."
He took another swallow of orange juice, fielding the stares of a group of women like a second baseman gloving an infield drive. Sudden recognition is routine for Bradley, and he handles it with aplomb. He respects it. He doesn't bask in it. The women, thrown out at first base, so to speak, returned to their dugout, apparently satisfied at not having struck out completely.
"You know, the funniest thing happened to me just before I got down here," Bradley said, lowering his voice. "I dialed my producer's number and this voice said, 'Hello?' I said, 'OK, you ready?' She said, 'Yeah, uh, what do you have in mind?' I said, 'Monica?' She said, 'No,' and she started laughing. So I said, 'Sorry, wrong woman.' She said, 'Well, it's probably the best one you'll have all day.' I dialed again. Would you believe it? I got the wrong woman again."
Bradley, hugely entertained, began eating his toast. He is a man who knows how to play his luck. For example, in 1978 Bradley flew to Malaysia to do a "CBS Reports" documentary about boat people escaping from Vietnam. It was his first documentary for the program, and when he got to the island of Kuala Trenganu, he found a contingent of TV journalists already there. They had been waiting for refugees to land for a week. None had. So the government set up a tour of its refugee camps, and the camera crews went.
Not Bradley. He decided to catch up on his sleep. As luck would have it, a boat materialized just as he began to doze. Bradley rushed to the beach and got an exclusive. More than that, when local villagers began stoning the boats to prevent them from landing, Bradley dived into the water and helped carry the refugees ashore. Later he played postman for their letters to America. The "CBS Reports" cameras caught it all.
Hewitt was so captivated by the footage of "The Boat People," he grabbed some for "60 Minutes." And he never forgot it. Later that footage helped him decide to hire Bradley. "The Boat People" also won a Columbia-duPont Award andd the Overseas Presss Club Edward R. Murrow Award.
"Awards are weird," Bradley said. "I went to the Emmys certain I would take something for correspondent and I walked away with nothing. I figured if I couldn't win an Emmy for 'The Boat People,' the award doesn't mean anything. [The broadcast as a whole took an Emmy.] Then I didn't go, and I got two [in 1980 for "Too Little Too Late," a series on Cambodian refugees, and for "Miami: The Trial That Sparked the Riots.]" You just can't figure it. So I don't go anymore." (He also won another Emmy for correspondent in 1981 for "Murder Teenage Style.")
Bradley lives in New York and is married to songwriter Priscilla Coolidge. The only child of divorced parents, he grew up in Philadelphia and began his broadcasting careeer in 1963. He was studying to become a teacher when he met thhe most popular disc jockey in town at the time.
"He came to speak at a colleege course called 'School and Community,'" Bradley said. "The idea was to show us what it would be like to teach in tough schools, y'know, where the kids didn't come from homes with white picket fences. All those kids listened to him and that meant he knew how to communicate with them.
"Anyway, he invited me out to the station and I thought, Oh, boy, this looks like fun. How can I get in? It didn't occur to me at that point that I should be paid for it. I wasn't even looking at it as a future career. It was just an opportunity to get my foot in the door. I did a jazz show six hours a day six days a week for no money."
But by 1967 Bradley had made up his mind to give up teaching and become a broadcast journalist. Having moved from music into spot news, public affairs and sports, he went to New York and auditioned for the local CBS radio station. He was hired as a street reporter, a job he held until 1970. He even turned down a couple of CBS television offers during that period, he says, because it would have required desk work part of the time and it would have paid less than his radio salary.
Then Bradley took a month's vacation in Europe and discovered Paris.
"I was supposed to be there for three days," he said. "I stayed for three weeks. I loved it so much I figured that was where I wanted to live. So I came back, quit my job and went to Paris for two years. It's still my favorite city. I didn't work there for the first nine months, and when I ran out of money, CBS asked me to be a stringer. I looked around at all the job possibilities I had -- all two of them -- and that was the most appealing."
Although being a radio stringer gave him freedom, Bradley decided by 1972 that he wanted a staff job again. This time he head for CBS-TV in New York, only to discover there were no openings. What's more, he also discovered he disliked New York. In a flippant moment he told the CBS News foreign editor he would rather live in Vietnam. The editor took him at his word. Bradley found himself assigned to the Saigon bureau, covering the Vietnam War.
Since then his career has been distinguished and his rise has been steady. Reassigned to the CBS Washington bureau in 1974, he volunteered to cover the fall of Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975. (He was evacuated from Saigon and Phnom Penh.) The following year he covered Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign and became CBS White House correspondent upon Carter's election. Feeling confined by that assignment, however, Bradley moved to "CBS Reports" in 1978 and continued to anchor the "Sunday Night News" until 1981, when he joined "60 Minutes."
"You know what?" said Bradley, finishing his breakfast. "I think I'm gonna ask for a raise."
Then he looked at his watch.
"Oh sh--," he said. "I'd better check out. Want a lift?"
"Thanks, no," I said, not wanting to get out at 39,000 feet over some ocean.
Posted by jherman at 3:47 PM
PANTS ON FIRE
Nobody believes him any more. (Nobody except Laura, of course. And the millions of Americans who prefer to be citizens of the not great — we hope, late — BananaRepublic.) Nancy Pelosi, like us, never did believe him. (It's too bad she's taken impeachment off the agenda.)
In any case, Howard Kurtz performed a small but worthy service this morning with his column following up on the Bullshitter-in-Chief's latest pile of droppings. The headline put it politely, "President's Evasion Raises Truth Issues."
Six days before the election, Bush told three wire-service reporters in an interview that Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney were doing "fantastic" jobs."You see them staying with you until the end?" asked Terence Hunt of the Associated Press.
"I do," Bush replied.
"So you're expecting Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld, to stay on the rest of your time here?" asked Steve Holland of Reuters.
"Yes, I am," the president said.
Kurtz reports that White House spokesman Tony Snow wants us to believe the bullshitter wasn't lying (misleading, to be polite) and, furthermore, hadn't announced Rummy Boy's ouster before the elections because, in Snow's words, "He was not going to use that announcement to try to score political points."
Does Snow believe that himself? Yeah, right.
A few dopes on my staff of thousands think I've defamed Laura. They say she doesn't believe her husband either, but pretends to for appearance's sake. Which gives her too much credit.
Posted by jherman at 12:43 PM
November 8, 2006
REGIME CHANGE
Throw open the records. Let the sunshine in. Subpoena power to the people. Now that voters have finally said "Fuck You!" to the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his war in Iraq, let the investigations begin. It's way past time to put a full stop to the BananaRepublic.
Postscript: Good riddance to Rummy Boy. That's a start.
But Ralph Nader's assessment -- in an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! -- puts a damper on expectations. He's correct, methinks:
[T]o the extent the Democrats gained the majority in the House, it was on the backs of some very rightwing Democrats who won the election against rightwing Republican incumbents. And so, there was no mandate for any progressive agenda. ...[One] thing that is good, though, is that there's some very good veteran chairmen who are coming in: George Miller, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey and, of course, John Conyers. But to counter that, both John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi have taken the impeachment issue right off the table, before the election, and that means there's going to be no Bush accountability for his war crimes and his inflation of unlawful presidential authority.
... The Democrats will throw a lot of subpoenas at the White House. The White House will, of course, drag it on and on and on. And the public will get fed up with it. The White House has great reserves in dragging it on and on and on. Because Bush can't rely on Republicans as a majority of the Congress, he's going to inflate his presidential power even more extremely and unlawfully, in the opinion of many legal scholars -- to do through the inherent power of the presidency, as Dick Cheney and Bush have talked about, what he can't do through the Congress, which he no longer controls.
But notice that, in all the debates I've heard between the Senate candidates and the House candidates over the last few weeks, there was almost no mention of corporate power, the 800-pound gorilla, no mention of corporate crime, no drive for corporate reform. And yet, if you look at the forward issues in the country, who's saying no to healthcare, universal healthcare? Corporate power. Who's saying no to a real crackdown on corporate crime against consumers, especially inner-city consumers? Corporate power. Who's saying no to cleaning up the corrupt tens of billions of dollars in military contracting fraud, like Halliburton? Corporate power. Who's saying no to reform of hundreds of billions of dollars of diversion of your tax dollars, America, to corporate subsidies, handouts and giveaways? Corporate power. And yet, reporters and candidates hardly mentioned it. ...
This campaign, this election ... was basically a mandate-less election for the Democrats. There was really no mandate other than against Bush and do something about Iraq. Domestically, virtually no mandate about rearranging of power, shifting it from corporations to workers, consumers, taxpayers, to communities.
Aaarggghhhh.
Posted by jherman at 8:35 AM
SHUFFLIN' ALONG
Seen at 72nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan:
![Times Square Shuffle [Photo: Alice Dayton]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/Times%20Square%20Shuffle%20400.jpg)
It "says something for the intelligence or humor of the people running the [NYC] transportation department," says Mike Reiter, whose friend Alice Dayton took the photo. Cousin Joan passed it along. My staff of thousands says thanks. But methinks Mr. Reiter gives the department too much credit.
Posted by jherman at 8:03 AM
November 6, 2006
FREEDOM PRIZE FOR FISK
British journalist Robert Fisk has won the Lannan Foundation's 2006 Lifetime Achievement Prize for Cultural Freedom. It carries a cash award of $350,000. As Borat might say: "Verr nize!"
A full-page ad announcing the award in today's New York Times cites an excerpt from Fisk's massive 2005 book, "The Great War for Civilisation," which, ironically, the NYT Book Review excluded from its list of 100 Notable Books of the Year.
If you haven't had a chance to read Fisk, have a look at the column he wrote last June in The (London) Independent about Haditha. It ran under the headline "On the shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq." The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reprinted it with this headline: "The way Americans like their war." Believe me, you will be shocked. Even now, knowing what you think you know, you will be shamed:
Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.
Just FYI: We've posted lots of related items, including MR. JONES, MEET MR. FISK, LESS FLAG-WAGGING, PLEASE, CREDIT WHERE DUE, AND BONES TO PICK and FISK ON THE JOURNALISTAS and WHAT MEANS GENOCIDE? There are others. If you're interested, they're easily found by inserting his name under "Search this site" in the right column.
Posted by jherman at 1:30 PM
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
The day after the midterm elections they're holding a downtown book party at NYU for "The Good Fight Continues," a collection of World War II letters from the soldiers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. You remember them, of course.
You don't? Well! "They were a volunteer army of about 2,800 men and women who had enlisted to defend the Spanish Republic from military rebels during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)," the publisher offers as a reminder. "They fought on the losing side. After Pearl Harbor, Lincoln Brigade veterans enthusiastically joined the U.S. Army, welcoming this second chance to fight against fascism. However, the Lincoln recruits soon encountered suspicious military leaders who questioned their patriotism. ..."
No comparison with Iraq intended, but that doesn't sound like much to celebrate -- although if America's Banana Republicans get what they deserve tomorrow, watch out! The party will rock. Time: Nov. 8, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Place: 70 Washington Square South, NYU's Bobst Library, 10th floor. (OK, I confess: This notice is a favor to a friend.) Freeloaders are welcome.
Posted by jherman at 10:02 AM
November 5, 2006
RUBBER STAMPS
We'll see whether the Banana Republicans will be turned out of office -- dumped, I hope, like the old rubber stamps they are -- or whether they will retain their power as enablers of the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his minions.
David Brooks, in his latest inanity, writes: "You do not want your opponent running ads calling you a rubber stamp, because in this climate that hurts." Which is to say, in some it doesn't? (Was he was thinking of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan?)
Not to single him out -- although he also deserves it for his previous inanity (bemoaning the expected defeat of Rick Santorum) -- Peggy Noonan ought to be cited as well. She, too, sees the defeat of that Banana Republican as "a national loss."
In her Wall Street Journal column on Saturday, headlined "We Need His Kind," she writes that she asked a former senator ("a crusty old moderate Republican") if he liked Santorum. "No," he said, "I love him." Why? Because, when the old crust tried to mentor him,
Mr. Santorum was grateful and appreciative, "but he kept speaking his mind!" The former senator: "The political scientists all say to be honest and stand for principle, that's what people want. And he was exactly that, and he's about to get his head handed to him." ... It was sad, he said.
So Noonan wants us to believe Santorum will get his head handed to him not for being a rubber stamp -- a 98% voting record with the bullshitter, according to his opponent -- but for being honest? Now that's a laugh.
Posted by jherman at 10:41 AM
November 3, 2006
ART AND MISDIRECTION
I'm a sucker for a pretty picture. Like this one, made by the guy who used to be Newsweek's art critic:
![Peter Plagens: Paintings on Wood [Warschaw Gallery]](http://www.warschawgallery.com/images/plagens.jpg)
As you can see, he's gonna be there to talk about stuff. I know the guy. So if any of you do show up at the gallery, tell him you saw this notice. It will impress him, I hope, and make him grateful.
Now here's another picture:
This one is not so pretty, but I like it, too:
It was pointed out by the smart guy on my staff of thousands who's been reading French media philosophe Jean Baudrillard and applying his simulacrum-of-reality theory to just about everything -- democracy, Iraq, free speech, Frank Rich, David Brooks -- but especially to the rules of political misdirection. The prose is a little turgid for my taste, but the rules are clear.
Posted by jherman at 10:31 AM
November 2, 2006
WILLIAM STYRON, RIP
Death was never very far from his mind. "Once, when serving with the Marines, Styron was stationed on a desolate island in New York City's East River where unclaimed bodies of the dead were buried." So went my intro to an interview he gave me many years ago. (He died yesterday at 81.)
"This equivalent of potter's field had such a profound effect on him that a long description of it in 'Lie Down in Darkness,' his first novel, is arguably the most evocative passage in the book." And, I continued,
It revealed how readily Styron escaped purely Southern locales even in what he agrees was his most Southern novel, and how masterly he was in transforming a brief experience into a lasting theme. When the body of the young heroine Peyton Loftis, who has killed herself, is brought from the morgue and interred in an unmarked grave, it is not simply a crowning indignity for the tormented Loftis family, but Styron's tragic statement of how close we all are to oblivion.Peyton's husband restores order, albeit in a small way, to the irrational universe of that novel when he exhumes the body and ships it home to her distraught father for a proper burial. And, in a larger way, Styron reclaims history's victims for literature by performing a memorial service, as it were, through the ceremony of his art.
Styron insisted he didn't choose his subjects. It was the other way around. "The subject often chooses you," he said.
I find that I'm interested in all my work in human domination and why people try to dominate one another. I mean it politically and on a personal level. It's just an area of consciousness that has intrigued me. I don't think it's a bizarre thing. Maybe it's just where the tensions reside that motivate me to write.
The interview took place in Chicago. He had come to celebrate publication of the collected works of Herman Melville by the Library of America. Styron, then 57, was at the height of his fame. Later that night, while watching the Academy Awards on television, he was to see Meryl Streep thank him for writing "Sophie's Choice" as she accepted an Oscar for her performance in the film adaptation of that novel.
Styron was wearing a gray robe over a starched white shirt and trousers, and had just finished lunch in a suite at the Whitehall Hotel. He and Saul Bellow were going to speak at the Newberry Library, where the definitive Melville texts were prepared.
It was a good excuse to ask him to single out the writers who influenced him. (No profile of Styron ever left out the fact that he kept a famous saying by Gustave Flaubert on the wall of his study: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.") But he was reluctant to say.
Pressed, he gave in a bit.
Flaubert would be one, but I can't answer the question. I'm sorry. The field is too great. I'd have to write several essays just to locate myself. I still read a considerable amount, but at one time in my life, from about 18 to 28, I read everything, and I'm only barely exaggerating. I read all the writers who were worth reading. Plainly, I must have had some very important influences.
He finally began to list writers by nationality. It was a mainstream selection. Among the Russians: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov. Among the French: Chateaubriand, Stendahl, Balzac. He halted at Zola and put his hand to his temple. "I don't mean to sound like this," he said, "but I'd have to give you a list of a hundred writers, which would be silly to do."
As the obituaries have pointed out -- here, here and here -- Styron was in declining health for a long time before he died. Earlier, in his 60s, depression had nearly driven him to suicide.
A few months ago I chanced to meet his wife Rose Styron. Knowing he was ill, I mentioned to her that I had just enjoyed reading what is possibly his least-known book, "The Long March," a slim novella about a pair of Marines in conflict with their commanding officer. Her face lit up. "He'll like that," she said. "I'll tell him." I hope she did.
Posted by jherman at 8:00 AM
October 30, 2006
A DIFFERENT KIND OF BUSHWACK
Now for a change of pace: "Notre Dame de Video," a leetle sumzeeng I made for the arts fest TROIS SOIRS PARMI long ago in très gai Paris. Thought you might get a tsk-tsk out of a few video stills.
NDdV ran on a bill with Jochen Gerz's very sober conceptual piece, "La Salle et sa représentation," on March 16, 1972. Location: 19 Quai Bourbon on Ile Saint-Louis, a stone's throw from the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris on Ile de la Cité. Thus the title of the video.
Other artists in the festival, besides Jochen Gerz and me, were Bernard Heidsieck and Françoise Janicot (the organizers); Paul-Armand Gette, Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Jan Nordahl and Pedro Morais.
I played the video on a 2-inch monitor. It sat shoulder high on a pedestal in the middle of a room as vast as a Louvre gallery. Word buzzed through the crowd. ("Yum, that's quoit noice!") In fact, the best thing about NDdV was the Peeping Tom effect.
As people gathered to lay eyes on Our Lady, some jockeyed for position. Rowdies cut in line to grab a peek. Fist fights broke out. What a spectacle that was.
Just kidding about the fist fights. The jockeying was very polite, and there were no rowdies.
Posted by jherman at 8:23 AM
October 28, 2006
HUMAN WRONGS
More wisdom from le maître Doctorow:
Human rights is a term of great currency in our political language. When introduced, it tended to refer to a person's right to speak freely or to hold any political opinion of his choosing or to be tried swiftly and under due process of law in the event he was accused of a crime -- in general, to any of the collective rights of Americans under the Constitution. But under pressure of worldwide practices, the term has taken on a humbler meaning. Now human rights refers to standards of treatment that you hope to expect of your oppressor after he has taken all your rights away.
He should not pack you away in an isolation cell while denying publicly that you're under detention; he should not salt you away in a labor camp after a sentence by a kangaroo court; he should not on a whim machinegun you in the street or hack you to death in your bed or with relish take you to a ditch and break every bone in your body before killing you. If you're an infant, you have the right not to have your skull smashed against a wall; if a nursing mother, not to have your breasts sliced off; if a nun, not to be raped and disemboweled; if an old man, not to be made to defecate in front of a crowd and eat your own excrement; if a boy or a young man, not to be castrated and have your severed organs stuffed into your mouth. The right not to have those things done to you -- the right not to be tortured, mutilated, enslaved, or injudiciously murdered -- is what we've come to mean by the term human rights.
Excerpted from the essay "Orwell's 1984," which is reprinted in "Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992"
Posted by jherman at 2:02 PM
BANANA REPUBLICANS
Two news reports. One about a former Chilean dictator. One about our Bullshitter-in-Chief. Note the similarities. This from Reuters regarding Augusto Pinochet's arrest for torture, murder and kidnapping early in his regime and this from the BBC regarding the bullshitter's denial that the U.S. uses torture.
Is it possible we'll read one day about the arrest of a former U.S. president on the same sort of charges? (Pinochet is being held "for 36 cases of kidnapping, one of homicide and for 23 cases of torture" committed at a detention center run by his secret police.)
To ask the question implies an answer -- and why, despite claims to the contrary (such as "saving American lives"), the bullshitter's Republican enablers rammed through the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The new law was designed to protect him and his henchmen from potential prosecution.
The legislation says the president can "interpret the meaning and application" of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts.
The bill not only "authorizes continued harsh interrogations of terror suspects," it applies to "14 suspects who were secretly questioned by the CIA overseas and recently moved to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay."
Since the interrogations are top secret, there is no way to verify the bullshitter's claims. But even if American lives have been saved, the legislation is a statist endorsement of thuggery. It puts government officials beyond the reach of justice by bending the law to their purpose. And it contradicts the U.S. Constitution, let alone American ideals (if not the realities).
Posted by jherman at 1:33 PM
October 27, 2006
ON A BICYCLE AND A PRAYER
Deadline for Iraq? Rummy Boy says we should "just back off" and "relax." The Bullshitter-in-Chief holds his own press conference, then invites a few friendly journalists into the back room -- excuse me -- the Oval Office, and says, "If we leave, they will follow us here." (Subscription required.)
What struck one of the invited -- Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Journal's editorial page -- was how different the bullshitter's press conference was from his private conversation. In public the topic was Iraq. In the Oval Office it was America. But if you read Henninger's rightly named Wonder Land column, it all sounds like the same bullshit. As Lenny Bruce once said, "Yada, yada. Yada, yada, yada, warden!"
Meanwhile, ever on the lookout to probe deeply, Henninger noticed:
The burden of war ... has not sapped Mr. Bush physically. ... The hair's gone gray, but there is little sign of fatigue in his face or demeanor. I asked how he stays normal: "Prayer and exercise."
Or as Jon Stewart has said, "Worry no more!"
Postscript: A friend writes: "I am not for 'cutting and running.' How about just walking out backwards?"
Posted by jherman at 10:07 AM
October 26, 2006
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
When you think of E.L. Doctorow, it's his fiction that comes to mind -- all those novels, "Ragtime" most famously, but also "The Book of Daniel," "Welcome to Hard Times," his latest "The March," and so on. But wait a minute! The guy's a terrific essayist.
![E.L. Doctorow [Photo: Nancy Crampton]](http://www.nationalbook.org/graphics/nba2005/finalist_hs/doctorow.jpg)
I've been reading "Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution," an out-of-print collection of his selected essays you can pick up for a buck, which Mugs McGuinness was kind enough to send me. Here's a morsel from one of them -- it's called "The Character of Presidents" -- and it tastes delish:
You and I can lie about our actions and misrepresent the actions of others; we can piously pretend to principles we don't believe in; we can whine and blame others for the wrong that we do. We can think only of ourselves and our own and be brutally indifferent to the needs of everyone else. We can manipulate people, call them names, con them and rob them blind. Our virtuosity is inexhaustible, as would be expected of a race of Original Sinners, and without doubt we will all have our Maker to answer to. But as to a calculus of damage done, the devastation left behind, the person who holds the most powerful political office in the world and does these things and acts in these ways is multiplied in his moral failure to a number beyond the imagining of the rest of us.
Remember that when the Bullshitter-in-Chief's enablers are up for election on November 7.
Doctorow wrote "The Character of Presidents" in 1992, and he was thinking not of the bullshitter but of his father. I quote:
Mr. Bush is a man who lies. Senator Dole, who ran against him in 1988 [for the Republican presidential nomination], was the first to tell us that. Vice President Bush lied about his opponents in the primaries, and he lied about Mr. Dukakis in the elections. President Bush lies today about the bills he vetoes, as he lies about his involvement in the arms-for-hostages trade with Iran and continues to lie, even though he has been directly contradicted by two former secretaries in the Reagan Cabinet -- Shultz and Weinberger -- and a former staff member of the National Security Council. He lies about what he did in the past and about why is he doing what he is doing in the present. He speaks for civil rights but blocks legislation that would relieve racial inequities. He speaks for the environment but opposes measures to slow its despoliation.
One irony, of course, is that the bullshitter's father is regarded today as the wise and gentle one. If it were true -- which it isn't -- it's only in comparison with his son, who is responsible for even greater damage and certainly more than enough devastation to shame them both.
Posted by jherman at 1:53 PM
October 25, 2006
NOT A TRICK PHOTO
Given the name of this blog, my staff of thousands dared me:
![Enlarge it. This is not a trick photo. [Photo © David Safanda]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/chris_mcnamara_snowboard_jump.jpg)
Nah, that's not me. That's rock climber extraordinaire Chris Mac, a k a Chris McNamara, snowboarding in midair over Lover's Leap (a climb "Rated X") above Lake Tahoe, California. Photo © David Safanda, via Summit Journal, an adventure and exploration magazine on the Web that describes itself as "environmentally responsible." It "weighs 0 grams, pollutes 0 waters, fills 0 landfills, causes 0 deforestation, disturbs 0 wildlife and relies on 0 fossil fuels for dissemination ... leaving no trace."
Postscript: From a friend: "Great photo of the American electorate in flight."
Posted by jherman at 10:04 AM
October 24, 2006
UNSTAYING THE UNCOURSE
Now for the latest addition to the Ministry of Truth's dictionary of Newspeak, offered on camera by the Bullshitter-in-Chief: "We've never been stay the course. ..."
For the record, note the difference between a skeptical story of the uncourse told with a smile, "Bush's New Tack Steers Clear of 'Stay the Course,'" and a credulous story told with a straight face, "Bush Abandons Phrase 'Stay the Course' on Iraq."
The first, from the Washington Post, begins:
President Bush and his aides are annoyed that people keep misinterpreting his Iraq policy as "stay the course." A complete distortion, they say. "That is not a stay-the-course policy," White House press secretary Tony Snow declared yesterday.Where would anyone have gotten that idea? Well, maybe from Bush.
"We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed," he said in Salt Lake City in August."We will win in Iraq so long as we stay the course," he said in Milwaukee in July.
"I saw people wondering whether the United States would have the nerve to stay the course and help them succeed," he said after returning from Baghdad in June.
The second, from The New York Times, begins:
The White House said Monday that President Bush was no longer using the phrase "stay the course" when speaking about the Iraq war, in a new effort to emphasize flexibility in the face of some of the bloodiest violence there since the 2003 invasion."He stopped using it," said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary. "It left the wrong impression about what was going on and it allowed critics to say, 'Well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,' when, in fact, it is the opposite."
Mr. Bush used the slogan in a stump speech on Aug. 31, but has not repeated it for some time. Still, Mr. Snow's pronouncement was a stark example of the complicated line the White House is walking this election year in trying to tag Democrats as wanting to "cut and run" from Iraq, without itself appearing wedded to unsuccessful tactics there.
Postscript: ![Pat Tillman (left) and his brother Kevin before their tour of duty in Iraq in 2003 [Courtesy of the Tillman Family, via truthdigg.com]](http://www.truthdig.com/images/eartothegrounduploads/kevin_pat_350.jpg)
Kevin Tillman, pictured with his brother Pat, has much to say about the "illegal invasion" of Iraq and the Orwellian nature of the bullshitter's regime, including this:
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
Kevin Tillman joined the Army with Pat in 2002 and served with him in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan Pat was killed by friendly fire. The Pentagon lied about the circumstances of his death, claiming he was killed by the Taliban, to exploit him as a hero and prop up the image of the Army.
Posted by jherman at 9:44 AM
October 23, 2006
THE OLD MUD-HOLE APPROACH
The military analysis by Michael Gordon, "To Stand or Fall in Baghdad: Capital Is Key to Mission," is getting a lot of attention from The Huffington Post, not least because it appears above the fold on the front page of The New York Times. Gordon discusses the failure of the military plan to "clear, hold and build" Baghdad, "the center of gravity for the larger American mission in Iraq."
The analysis is not new news. It's basically a wrap-up of what's been happening in the neighborhoods controlled by the militias or threatened by the death squads in the genocidal civil war there. And it's curiously bloodless, making no mention of the death squads or the civil war. Instead it substitutes the antiseptic term "sectarian strife."
But deep in the story there's a revealing comment by the general who commands the American forces in Baghdad that isn't likely to get the attention it deserves. It's revealing because it describes the problem in an analogy that unintentionally compares Iraq to a mud hole, which is a perfect illustration of the military's true take on the country, let alone the so-called mission.
"We can do the clearing," the general tells Gordon. "But once you clear if you don't leave somebody in there and build civil capacity in there then it is the old mud-hole approach. You know the water runs out of the mud hole when you drive through the mud hole and then it runs back in it."
Posted by jherman at 11:27 AM
RUMMY IS OUR SHEPHERD
We shall not want:
MIAMI (AFP) -- The top U.S. general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God. "He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country," said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Methinks the general's cup runneth over.
Postscript: Two weeks later, on Nov. 6 ...
Military Times editorial:
'Rumsfeld must go'
Posted by jherman at 9:33 AM
October 20, 2006
WO IST DIE 'OPERA TOILET'?
![Opera Toilet [AP Photo/Ronald Zak]](http://a.abcnews.com/images/International/60519253-5228-4a56-8089-b56a54b2733c_sp.jpeg)
In Austria, of course. From ein treuer Freund:
ach, herr jan -- ve in vienna can't underschtand all uf der fuss, ja? i'm qvite schure dot herr wagner vould haff lufft zuch decor.
![A 'ready-made' [Marcel du Champ, 1917]](http://80.65.232.176/Photos/00/00/05/55/ME0000055574_2.JPG)
But what would R. Mutt have thought?
PS: As noted two years ago on PervScan, urinals with lips were supposed to be installed at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Posted by jherman at 9:35 AM
October 16, 2006
SERIOUSLY LAME JOURNOSPEAK
I never read Lloyd Grove's gossip column in New York's Daily News. So I dunno how good, bad or indifferent it was. But he seems to be getting lots of mileage out of being dumped, including an op-ed piece in Sunday's LA Times (thank you, Romenesko). Here's what grabbed my eye:
From time to time, distinguished papers such as [T]he New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have ventured into this frisky territory, but have usually ended their walk on the wild side in a hand-wringing identity crisis: Can we be serious journalists and still publish a gossip column?
To "venture into frisky territory" is lame journospeak, far too prim to equate with "A Walk on the Wild Side," the title of Nelson Algren's classic 1956 novel (set among the pimps, whores and con men of Depression-era New Orleans). It's just one more proof of Algren's devaluation.
I've written before that the title of the novel has been "popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue." I should have added journalists, of course, especially headline writers, along with crossdresser boutiques, nature tour operators, animal rescuers, bloggers, nudist surfers, academics, gay activists, and so on.
All of them would have earned a contemptuous chuckle from Algren, if only because of injured pride. But Jimmy Smith's bluesy, laid-back "Walk," though not stellar to my taste, is one use I'm sure he would have approved.
Posted by jherman at 12:43 PM
October 11, 2006
KEITH OLBERMANN HAS THE RIGHT INITIALS
So much goes by so swiftly, there's no point in trying to catch up. But KO's recent editorials must be noted as knockouts. I'm thinking particularly of his special commentary on lying, broadcast on Oct. 5. I presume you've seen it. If not, you missed the single best opinion piece on mainstream television. For that matter, it may have been the best to appear anywhere.
Watch it. Read it. Relish it. The Bullshitter-in-Chief "comes across as a compulsive liar," he says. He "has savaged the very freedoms he claims to be protecting from attack," and "it is now impossible to find a consistent thread of logic as to who [he] believes the enemy is."
It seems to me no accident that "Countdown," Olbermann's daily cable show on MSNBC, has doubled its audience. But if god forbid the Republicans retain control of the Congress after next month's mid-term elections, will MSNBC execs keep him on the air? Or will he be Donahued? Given their lack of principles in the past -- and notwithstanding Olbermann's own comment that "as long as you make them money, they don't care" --- let's hope they're not put to the test.
PS: A friend writes:
I've been watching him a long time & he just gets better. Did you catch his piece on the elimination of habeas corpus, the one where he draws a big red X through one article after another in the Bill of Rights? It's a classic.
PPS: Yes, I caught it. And this, too, the day before, "Habeas corpus sellout," by Nat Hentoff. And just this morning (Oct. 15) the NYT editorial "Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty." Another friend writes, "That Hentoff's piece appeared in The Washington Times gives me hope." Ha. Doan make me laff. The whole shebang is a mockery.
Posted by jherman at 2:14 PM
ROLLERMUSICK
Have you watched this Mozart video? "I can see ole Wolfie," a friend writes, "up there in music box heaven, shittin' his brocade pantaloons!"
Posted by jherman at 9:13 AM
October 4, 2006
GONE
Been traveling. Still am.
Posted by jherman at 2:26 PM
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
![Click to enlarge and see the entire 'State of Emergency' photo spread. [Photo copyright 2006 by Steven Meisel]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/meisel1.jpg)
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:
![Click to enlarge and see the entire 'State of Emergency' photo spread. [Photo copyright 2006 by Steven Meisel]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/meisel2.jpg)
![Click to enlarge and see the entire 'State of Emergency' photo spread. [Photo copyright 2006 by Steven Meisel]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/meisel3.jpg)
"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. HermanWe 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 Bullshitter-in-Chief with his nose out of joint [Gerald Herbert, AP]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/the%20jerk.jpg)
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
August 30, 2006
A BACKWARD GLANCE
Here's an amusing item posted soon after the people re-elected the Bullshitter-in-Chief, thus keeping him on as master of his very own portable Green Zone. A reader reminded us of the item's value as pure entertainment. So we're re-posting it now for laughs, 'cuz after the Labor Day weekend it's back to the grind.
November 19, 2004THE CIA PRANKSTERS
Since the Central Intelligence Agency is so much in the news these days -- what with the agency shakeup by the new CIA chief Porter Goss, his leaked "rules of the road" memo telling agency employees it's their job to "support the administration and its policies," and a possible compromise intelligence bill -- my staff of thousands thought it useful to recall some of the CIA's monumental gaffes and pranks of the past, which are either forgotten, little known, or just too weird to believe.
Let's start with the weird.
We've all heard about the CIA's failed efforts to embarrass Fidel Castro by powdering his shoes with a depilatory so his beard would fall out. But you probably haven't heard of this screwy propaganda stunt from the early days of the Cold War. One idea for the agency's "psychological warfare" campaign was to drop "extra-large condoms -- labeled 'medium' in English -- on the Soviet Union in order to make Russian women think all American men were exceptionally virile." So writes Evan Thomas in "The Very Best Men," a terrifically entertaining history of the agency's early years.The condom drop wasn't taken seriously. But how about this? To undermine the regime of Indonesian strongman Achmed Sukarno, a lascivious thug with an insatiable sexual appetite whose political "crime was neutralism," the CIA "spread the rumor that [he] had been seduced by a good-looking blond airline stewardess who worked for the KGB." Needing documentation, Thomas writes, the CIA "commissioned a blue movie to be made of a Sukarno look-alike in the amorous embrace of a porn actress posing as the Russian spy. To play Sukarno, the moviemakers (Bing Crosby and his brother) chose a bald Chicano wearing a latex face mask." Why bald? Because "Sukarno was vain about his own baldness and always wore a skullcap, except, presumably, in bed." (You read it right: Bing Crosby and his brother.)
And this: A CIA operative who ran guerrilla operations in Asia "sent back a film to Washington which, he claimed, showed his guerrillas clambering ashore behind enemy lines" in North Korea. Trouble was, when the film was screened for the Pentagon brass, to prove the value of the agency's secret operations, a CIA officer noticed "the infiltration was taking place in broad daylight." Oops. Turns out, the film showed "a training exercise, not a real operation." Add this: "A secret CIA history of [actual] operations in Korea notes that [the] guerrillas were dressed in captured army uniforms and Korean civilian clothing, but unfortunately wore self-incriminating U.S. Army issue underwear."
At one point, Thomas writes, a top agency officer dispatched to inspect the Psychological Warfare Workshop "reported back that he had found the merry pranksters shooting at balloons in their office with BB guns." The pranksters were part of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a purposely innocuous name for a branch of the CIA tasked in "the language of its secret charter" to counter "the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit the aims and activities of the U.S. and other Western powers."
Sometimes certifiable crazies joined the pranksers. According to Thomas, "when one OPCer was shipped off to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital for demonstrating a passion for farm animals," Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA director at the time, demanded, "Can't I get people who don't hire people who bugger cows?"
Is it any wonder "the CIA failed to predict the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950," just as it failed to anticipate the communist coup in Czechoslovakia two years earlier? And let's not forget the Hungarian revolution in 1956, which cost 30,000 lives. The CIA was deeply involved in pushing for the uprising, but then failed to support it with weapons and ran for cover when the Soviets sent in tanks and troops to put it down. ("Sure, we never said rise up and revolt," Thomas quotes a CIA official as saying, "but there was a lot of propaganda that led the Hungarians to believe that we would help.")
Yes, we know: The Bay of Pigs notwithstanding, the CIA has worked wonders and always meant to do noble things, such as making the world safe for democracy. But its peculiar history underscores the realization that getting things wrong in Iraq was just par for the course. And the fact that Porter Goss is goosing his troops to "support the administration and its policies" instead of offering it a dose of reality doesn't lend much hope that the agency will be getting things right in the future. (Also makes you wonder about Colin Powell's as yet unverified farewell disclosure.)
It's also no sign of hope that Goss was part of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and worked with Edward Lansdale, the model for the blundering CIA agent in Vietnam in Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." It's even more hopeless when you realize that Goss is a wealthy, patrician Yalie of the ol' boy cloak-and-dagger network that set the agency on its merry way and that earlier in his career as a clandestine CIA agent he worked with Tracy Barnes, William Harvey and Ted Shackley, all of whom had key roles in one or the other of the agency's most infamous "black ops."
In case anyone needs reminding, these black operations included the coup d'etat that overthrew the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 at the behest of the United Fruit Company, the military coup against South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 that ended in his assassination, the military coup that overthrew Salvadore Allende in Chile in 1973 that ended in his assassination, and attempted assassinations of the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Iraq's Abd al-Karim Kassem, and, of course, Cuba's Fidel Castro.
This item had pertinent links, all of which are still good. If you want them, go to the original posting.
Posted by jherman at 9:14 AM
August 29, 2006
FROM THE HOMEFRONT
Because this blog purports to bring you news of arts and culture, here's the latest: Our staff of thousands has moved from its cramped Madhattan quarters to spacious 21st-floor digs with a panoramic view of downtown. Now we have room to spread out and, like true aesthetes, hang artworks on the walls.
The abstract painting by Liam O'Gallagher, an old friend who's pushing 90 these days, was a gift. He gave it to us a couple of years ago in Santa Barbara, where he's still painting. It hangs in the livingroom. The color photo, in an adjacent hallway, shows Willy Wyler cavorting on location in the Vatican while making "Roman Holiday." You can't actually see the image from here, so you'll have to take my word for it. The photo was enlarged from a tiny stereo-opticon negative.
Posted by jherman at 9:31 AM
August 28, 2006
MOCKING THE VICTIMS
Slate points out that today's frontpager in The New York Times print edition, about the evidence collected in the British investigation of the alleged airline bombing plot in London, doesn't appear on The Times' Web site.* Neither (fortunately) does this spread, which ran in the print edition of the Sunday NYT Magazine:
On the left, above, is the first page of an essay by Jason DeParle, "Orphaned," about children victimized by Hurricane Katrina. On the right is the opposite page, the first of four luxurious pages advertising Eileen Fisher "Alive in the World" clothing that were sandwiched inside DeParle's piece.
"New Orleans was always a place of unsettling juxtapositions," DeParle writes. So, apparently, is the print edition of the magazine. You'd think the editors would have noticed this one, though, and done something to separate the editorial content from an ad that mocks DeParle's entire piece, let alone the photos of the children. Unless, of course, they did notice and could do nothing or, worse, didn't notice at all.
But how could they not? Viz., the double-truck photo by Brenda Ann Keneally, below (one of four, among many other photos that show the destitution):
![V. Michaela's crowd [Photo, taken in July 2006, by Brenda Ann Keneally for The New York Times]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/%20V%20Michaea%27s%20Crowd%20left%20200.jpg)
![V. Michaela's crowd [Photo, taken in July 2006, by Brenda Ann Keneally for The New York Times]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/V%20Michaella%27s%20crowd%20right%20200.jpg)
And how about the ad execs for Eileen Fisher? Wouldn't it have made sense for them to notice and object?
*Aug. 29 -- The story about evidence in the airline bomb-plot investigation, "Details Emerge in British Terror Case," was posted late yesterday after being withheld from the NYT Web site "on the advice of legal counsel," The Times reports today.
Posted by jherman at 12:34 PM
August 25, 2006
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
From long ago ...
... but peculiar to these times.
(Originally published by Something Else Press in 1974 in a Fluxus anthology edited by Yours Truly. Contributors included Charles Bukowski, Dick Higgins, Pauline Oliveros, Wolf Vostell, Alison Knowles, Boris Lurie, Norman O. Mustill, Carl Weissner, Dan Georgakas, William S. Burroughs and many others. I plead guilty to these contributions.)
Posted by jherman at 12:43 PM
August 1, 2006
VACATION INTERRUPTUS
![Fidel Castro with his brother, Raul [Alejandro Ernesto/European Pressphoto Agency]](http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/01/world/01castroC_337.jpg)
The news from Havana brings to mind Verging on Cuba, an item posted way back on Nov. 10, 2003, about a panel discussion of what might happen after Fidel Castro dies. The panelists included Russell Banks, the novelist, who had recently spent an unusual amount time with Castro.
Asked why the U.S. embargo has failed after 40 years to accomplish its goal of forcing Castro from power, Banks said the single, most important factor was the creation of a proud, unshakable national mythology equalled by that of only two other nations in post-colonial history: the United States and Israel.The national mythology developed in Cuba since the Revolution was and still is such a cohering force that despite any and all the disappointments, setbacks, miscalculations and brutalities visited upon them by Castro, by the Soviet Union's ill-fated support and by U.S. antagonism, Cubans believe in themselves as an identifiable people with an ingrained independence of spirit sturdier than any acquired ideology.
For anyone half familiar with Cuba, that's not a revelation perhaps, but it does crystalize an idea worth remembering. Banks pointed out that without the national mythology formed in the 40 years following the American Revolution -- much of it having coalesced around the heroic figure of George Washington before and after his death -- the U.S. might have been forced back under the rule of England or possibly come under the sway of France. The symbolic role of Che Guevera, especially since his martyrdom, has played out in a similar way in Cuba.
Some of the other panelists had equally interesting things to say, especially Achy Obejas, a Cuban-American author and journalist living in Chicago. She pointed out that regardless of who takes over from Castro ...
the single, most important factor will be what the U.S. government does. A Cuban government recognized by the United States would be much different from one that is not, whether it's headed by Fidel's designated successor, Raul Castro, or by someone else. The greatest influence on daily life in Cuba, therefore, will depend on American politics more than its own.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. I've been waiting for Robert Fiske's comments on the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah.
Posted by jherman at 8:36 AM
July 17, 2006
AS THE WORLD BURNS
Just so you know, the last line here explains why there haven't been any postings lately.
Posted by jherman at 8:33 AM
July 5, 2006
HASTA LA BYE-BYE
As they say in New Mexico. Or, as the Marines say in Ramadi, where an old idea is being replayed: "Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet." Viz.:
In three years here the Marine Corps and the Army have tried nearly everything to bring this provincial capital of 400,000 under control. Nothing has worked.Now American commanders are trying something new.
Instead of continuing to fight for the downtown, or rebuild it, they are going to get rid of it, or at least a very large part of it.
Yessir: We had to destroy the village to save the village. Which takes me back to VDRSVP, a leetle sumzing Norman O. Mustill and I put together nearly 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, in 1969 to be precise:
![VDRSVP (An investment in the smell of rotten eggs.) [Nova Broadcast Press, 1969]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/VDRSVP%202%20%28400%20pixels%29.jpg){kind=tracking}
Prompted by bibliographer Jed Birmingham, who was asking about VDRSVP, I sent him photos of the three issues we did. You can see from the front page of the second one (above) that we took a jaundiced view of things: "NEXT!"
"When you made these items what influences were going through your minds," Birmingham asked. "I have flashes of the Sigma Project, the underground Newspaper foldout and inserts, as well as the photomontage of the German Dadaists. ... Were you thinking of any established tradition?"
The truth is, we were flying blind. Although Mustill and I were aware of various art movements like Dada, or techniques like photomontage, and avant-garde publications like the little magazines of the '20s and the underground press of the '60s, none were our particular visual models beyond the general idea of doing a newsprint broadsheet that played with and played off a journalistic look.
The texts, however, definitely were influenced by specific antecedents, although some were contemporaneous: cut-ups, Fluxus, Beat poetry, happenings, conceptual art, political anarchism, the underground press, the radical atmosphere of the counterculture itself. We were outraged by the Vietnam War, from the racist atrocities and other war crimes committed by the U.S. military to the complicity of the American public, which embraced the Nixon regime and its dictatorial policies. Above all, we had a sense of the ridiculous.
Articles on the front page of the second VDRSVP (above) included "War" and "Ho Hum" by Carl Solomon; "Professor Joe: A Candidate for the Presidency" by Alan Ansen; "Four Instant Happenings (Saigon 1 and 2)" by Wolf Vostell, and "Genocide" by Allen Ginsberg. Since you can't read them from the photo, here's a sample text ("Collectors Corner" by Annie Rooney and Sinclair Beiles, an arts column of sorts that also appeared on the front page):
It has long been a maxim of the very rich that when you have everything else you then start collecting dead Vietnamese. The trouble is that it is so hard to tell the genuine from the 'modern' reproduction that probably not more than half a dozen people in the world are qualified to do so:Mr. Snowman of Wartski's of Regent Street announced that a 'search and destroy' operation on Quang Ngai City would bring in a further two hundred genuine dead Vietnamese. An aged Russian in Paris who can sometimes be seen conducting discreet negotiations in the Bristol Hotel with the world's top dealers is reported to have slammed rockets into a school on the outskirts of Saigon making a big haul of the genuine article.
There are a number of continental craftsmen who manufacture fakes out of old Chinese and they find their way into genuine private collections. A manager of a Chinese restaurant in Paris said that since this faking technique had been initiated none of his family or staff felt safe anymore:
One of the most colourful 'dead Vietnamese' enthusiasts is a Mr. Calo of Brighton -- a cigar-chewing Rolls-driving entrepreneur whose wife's business 'The House of Dead Vietnamese' sells part or whole Chinese models called 'modern' as well as the genuine article.
Some fifty pieces owned by General 'Big Minh' will be auctioned next Wednesday at Hill House, Cowfold, Sussex. Brisk bidding is expected.
Yeah, I've gone from mining the past (not once but twice) to strip-mining it. Time to take a vacation.
Posted by jherman at 9:15 AM
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.)
![The Bullshitter-in-Chief cuts and runs [Courtesy Buck Fush]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/bush%20cut%20and%20run.jpg)
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, IraqThis 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?
![The New Yorker [June 19, 2006]](https://subscribe.condenet.com/images_covers/cover_newyorker_190.jpg)
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.
![THE CAMERAMAN by Hilton Als [The New Yorker, June 19, 2006]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/camerman200.jpg)
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
![Unidentified chained slave [From 'Rough Crossings' (Hulton/getty)] CLICK TO ENLARGE](http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2006/05/25/PH2006052501206.jpg)
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.
![Illustration by Viktor Koen [NYT]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/29/books/stap190.jpg)
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
![Copycats, or Inspired by Nature? Glass Artists Face Off in Court [from the NYT front page, print edition June 1, 2006]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/copycat220-thumb.jpg)
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
May 31, 2006
MORE PROGRESS
Per Haditha, where this photo was taken "in what appears to be a morgue":
![Dead bodies in Haditha, where 24 Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. Marines [AP photo, taken by a journalism student]](http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2006/WORLD/meast/05/31/haditha/story.haditha.killing.ap.jpg)
A friend asks: "So what's next, another Lidice?"
Where this photo was taken:
Posted by jherman at 10:52 AM
May 29, 2006
WHAT WOULD BRAVE OLAF SAY?
To the Bullshitter-in-Chief, who pressed the case for war today at Arlington National Cemetery, just a short time after signing into law a bill that restricts protests at military funerals, he would have said two things.
The first, according to e.e. cummings: "I will not kiss your fucking flag." The second, after he's been beaten, then reamed by hot bayonets: "there is some shit I will not eat." Here's the whole glorious poem:
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelovéd colonel (trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms (first knocking on the head
him) do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf (being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds, without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"
straightaway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but-though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skillfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"
our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died
Christ (of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you
© by e. e. cummings
in Complete Poems: 1913-1962
Posted by jherman at 2:18 PM
May 25, 2006
THE MORE BETTER AMERICAN IDOL
![The Bullshitter-in-Chief as Mickeyfied pop-cult idol [portrait by Bill Mitchell]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/bmitchellbush.jpg)
Unlike 30 million others, I didn't watch last night's "American Idol" finale. I'm not proud of that. It's just a fact. I realize this calls my patriotism into question. So I offer the Bullshitter-in-Chief as the true pop-cult idol of our time. Here's his portrait, right, a study in heroic banality concocted by editorial cartoonist Bill Mitchell, who 'toons for CNN.com.
The truth is I haven't watched "American Idol" in three years, ever since leaving MSNBC.com, where I had to write about it as part of my job. But I did read about it this morning in Alessandra Stanley's commentary, which compensates for all the years I missed. I get the impression she didn't like the finale ("a supersize letdown") or the show in general ("a monster-size celebration of mediocrity that, astonishingly, has not lost its hold on viewers even in its fifth season"). Stanley is very smart. That's why I've added the italics. I'm astonished that she's astonished. I don't think she really is. And here's the Lisa de Moraes blow-by-blow, which says pretty much what Stanley says but in too many words.
Just for the record: Mitchell gave me the Bullshitter's portrait to illustrate "creative plagiarism," per Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, by way of the Mustill/Muniz flap. My Q to Mitchell: "So tell me, did Muniz rip off Mustill?" His A to me: "Does the Pope dress like a silly little girl?"
Posted by jherman at 9:11 AM
May 24, 2006
ONWARD AND UPWARD
![Source: U.S. Defense Department [graphic by NYT]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/24/world/0524-for-SECURITY_190x419.gif)
Dexter Filkins's huge piece this morning, "Armed Groups Propel Iraq Toward Chaos," follows up on his colleague Sabrina Tavernise's recent report and fleshes out what Nir Rosen and Ahmed Hashim had to say a couple of weeks ago at the Council on Foreign Relations. Just thought you might like to know, if you didn't already.
Filkins is well worth reading. Like Rosen, Hashim, and Tavernise, he gives the lie to relentless claims of progress in Iraq offered by the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his regime. Whether it's beginning a new chapter or turning a corner, when it comes to reining in the death squads, one candid American official in Baghdad said there's been no action by Iraq's new so-called unity government. "None," the official told Filkins. "Zero." Given this and this and this and this and this, and any number of other items I could cite, that should come as no surprise.
Posted by jherman at 10:18 AM
May 22, 2006
NAILED IT
Back from four great days in Philly and recovering from trainlag (the ride took only 90 minutes, but Amtrak does that to me), I see the Metropolitan Opera's bye-bye party for Joseph Volpe over the weekend lived up to Martin Bernheimer's billing for it in the Financial Times:
The valedictory exercise promises to be the most momentous event at Lincoln Center since the stuntmaster David Blaine, drippy but undrowned, forsook his fishbowl on the plaza last week. Volpe has assembled a gaggle of stars -- would-be, has-been and bona-fide -- to deliver characteristic pomp if limited circumstance. The gala should represent a fitting tribute to, and from, a man who has often been accused of being obnoxious and power-hungry and who, like Jesus, began his career as a carpenter.
That paragraph is hard to beat. I still can't stop smiling. It's one more reason Bernheimer continues to be my favorite daily music critic.
Posted by jherman at 2:32 PM
May 13, 2006
ANOTHER COMPLETE SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
"Sir! No Sir!" Click dat thang:
Remember the underground GI press?
Postscript: "Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators." So sayeth Jason Leopold, whose report -- if true -- is fondly to be wished. There's been no confirmation, official or unofficial.
PPS: The Wall Street Journal has a story today (May 16) that Rove has not been indicted, according to his attorney, and that Leopold's reporting is flat wrong:
Here's Truthout.com's rundown of Leopold's reports on Fitzgerald, Rove, Libby et al, "Mr. Fitzgerald Calling." (It includes stories by several other reporters.)
I've written about Leopold before, in ON THE RECORD (my gut reaction to his memoir, "Off The Record," which I didn't like), and in AN EXCHANGE WITH JASON LEOPOLD (his response to my reaction).
Leopold's contracted publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, ultimately did not bring out "On the Record," as originally announced. He has since published the memoir himself under a different title, "News Junkie." I haven't read the published version, but I presume he's made minor revisions to deal with the legal issue that may have led to the publisher's withdrawal. (One of the people Leopold wrote about threatened a defamation suit.)
What must be said in Leopold's favor is that major investigative journalists and authors -- especially Greg Palast -- have praised his bare-knuckles style both as reporter and writer. And I wouldn't bet against him on the Rove indictment, my objections to his memoir notwithstanding.
PPPS: And now, May 22, comes the Howard Kurtz iteration in The Washington Post.
PPPPS: This is what happens when I take time off. Uh-oh. Which means having to play catch-up (via Eric Umansky). I may yet have to eat those betting words.
Posted by jherman at 11:34 AM
May 12, 2006
PRESIDENT NEUMAN
![Front page of The New York Times [Friday, May 12, 2006]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/TIMES%20frontpage280.jpg)
The mugshot of the Bullshitter-in-Chief on the front page of this morning's New York Times caught him just right. Here's the caption that went with it:
"We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."
Here's what he meant:
"We'renotmining or trolling through the personal lives of millions ofinnocentguilty Americans."
Our thanks to AP photographer Ron Edmonds, who took the Bullshitter's picture, and to the front-page layout editor who cropped it to perfection. Photo and caption together are the latest reminder that Alfred E. Neuman is running the country.
Posted by jherman at 9:08 AM
May 11, 2006
DEJA PREVU, OR JUST THE FACTS
Nir Rosen and Ahmed Hashim told what they knew.
"I think there is absolutely no hope that things will get better in Iraq," said Rosen, who was last in Baghdad three weeks ago. "The civil war will get worse." What's more, he added, "the government of Iraq, if it has a role, it's a negative one." He was referring to the various ministries with their respective militias. Meantime, "if you're young and poor and Shia, you're Mahdi Army."
Hashim agreed. "Iraq is in the midst of civil war, insurgency, organized crime and massive state failure," he said. "The U.S. military isn't shaping events. It's reacting to them." U.S. forces are "just one more militia" among many. He added, "We have a civil war right now. A low level civil war. Anybody who says different" has no idea of the reality in Iraq.
They were speaking Tuesday evening at the Council on Foreign Relations. The event was dubbed "Insurgents, Martyrs, and Militias: The Ongoing Violence in Iraq."
Rosen, who grew up in New York, spent 14 months in Baghdad as bureau chief for Asia Times. He is the author of "In the Belly of the Green Bird," and his reports have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine and The New Republic.
Hashim, an officer in the U.S. Army, served in Iraq in 2005 and specializes in security policies of the Middle East. He teaches at the U.S. Naval War College (where he's an Associate Professor of Strategic Studies) and at Harvard's Kennedy School (where he's an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy). Hashim said he was speaking as a private citizen and was not representing the Army in his opinions.
So I open the paper on Wednesday, and what do I see? A front-page story by Sabrina Tavernise, "Alarmed by Raids, Neighbors Stand Guard in Iraq," about civilian watch groups forming in Baghdad to protect their neighborhoods from the nighttime "secret killings" being carried out by the roving death squads of the various militias. Later that day CNN.com had a report, "Morgue's toll for April in Baghdad: 1,091 victims," noting "the upsurge in sectarian violence" (which Tavernise's describes in far greater detail; go read her).
Now comes this morning's front-pager, "Iraq Set to Unify Security Forces to Battle Chaos," as if in repy to Rosen and Hashim.
Dexter Filkins reports:
The centerpiece of the plan calls for consolidating the multitude of security agencies under a single command, with one easily identifiable uniform. Iraqi officials say that would give them greater flexibility to combat the insurgency and identify rogue elements within their ranks.
Uh-huh. Sounds more like wishful thinking than a plan.
Not least, the Bullshitter-in-Chief's confidante Karen Hughes showed up Wednesday at the furrin council and put on a star performance in her official capacity as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Fizzier than a bottle of Perrier, she expressed confidence that "over the long run, as we begin to see Iraq building its democracy," history will bear out the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. [Italics added to cfr.org's accurate staff report.]
Given what Rosen and Hashim had said the night before, methinks Karen's confidence is misplaced. "Well, clearly they don't have Karen's grasp of historical perspective," one furrin council official joked.
Mind you, neither Rosen nor Hashim were expressing radical views.
Incidental intelligence: George Packer and Frances FitzGerald were among the notable journalists and Iraq experts who showed up to hear them.
Posted by jherman at 9:42 AM
May 9, 2006
INNOCENT FOREIGN POLICY
What's wrong with Nicholas Kristof? In his column this morning, "Bush Takes On The Brothels," the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for commentary writes this lede:
I'm guessing that President Bush's foreign policy will stand up about as well to the assessments of future historians as a baby gazelle to a pack of cheetahs.
To compare pre-emptive war, alienation of allies, nuclear sabre-rattling, disregard for international treaties and destabilizing the U.N. to a baby gazelle is beyond ludicrous. Bad analogy, Mr. Kristof. If you want to claim the Bullshitter-in-Chief "hasn't gotten much credit" for his stand against sex trafficking, fine. But please don't turn reality inside out while doing it.
Posted by jherman at 9:22 AM
May 8, 2006
UNMERRY-GO-ROUND
History doesn't repeat, but does it go round and round? Consider these words, posted on May 17, 2004, in "Report From the Land of Is":
If "regime change" comes in November, [Paul] Krugman said, he hoped the next administration would "throw open the records" and not be "too magnanimous" to this one. "I believe the sunshine is going to be quite deadly," he said. It is precisely because the Bush regime has so much to hide, Krugman added, that the upcoming "election campaign is going to be so bitter."
The campaign was bitter. Regime change not only didn't happen, the Bullshitter-in-Chief's regime took over totally. Sunshine -- that is, Congressional inquiries with Democrat-controlled subpoena power -- hid behind Republican clouds in both the House and Senate.
Now consider these words, reported today on the front page of The New York Times, in "Rove Is Using Threat of Loss to Stir G.O.P."
The prospect of the administration spending its last two years being grilled by angry Democrats under the heat of partisan spotlights has added urgency to the efforts by Karl Rove and Mr. Bush's political team to hang on to the Republican majorities in Congress.
The American electorate didn't give enough of a shit to let the sunshine in last time. We'll see, come November 2006, if it gives a shit this time around.
Postscript: Is the unspeakable murder of Atwar Bahjat what's called "progress" in Iraq?
Posted by jherman at 9:47 AM
MICK JAGGER, HE AIN'T
Word comes that a collection of 570 Joseph Beuys "multiples," made from "materials as diverse as gray felt, bottles, reels of film or fish bones," was purchased by billionaire art collecter Eli Broad. Describing Beuys, left, the monochrome painter Joseph Marioni told bloomberg.com, "He's a German Andy Warhol," except that his work "has no decorative quality whatsoever.'' Now have a look at Beuys the rock singer. He's a German Mick Jagger without the rhythm, eh?
Posted by jherman at 8:57 AM
May 7, 2006
OLD GUESSES
Some good, some bad. Take this post from two years ago, for example. It mocked the proliferation of blogs. I claimed that "like much else on the Web, blogs would dry up if readers had to pay for them."
Bad guess. Blogs are more popular than ever, paid and unpaid. Rabbits are less prolific.
April 12, 2004BLOGGER STARDUST
A friend asked (this is true): "How's the blogging life?" My reply: "Underpaid and overrated." The overraters tend to be johnnys-come-lately who believe they've had a revelation when, in fact, all they've done is plugged in.
The underpayers are everyone else -- in other words, the readers. The truth is that, like much else on the Web, blogs would dry up if readers had to pay for them.
They might dry up anyway. Blogs are said to be proliferating and their influence spreading. Yeah, like stardust. I've noticed lately that even at no charge some of the best blogs have already gone silent. For instance, the literary MobyLives went into hibernation many months ago. Earlier this year, on Jan. 5, readers were told that "Moby is almost done resting." It's still not back.
That was another bad guess, sort of. MobyLives eventually came back in different form. Now it sounds off as a literary podcast, MobyLivesRadio.
Moving right along:
One of the savviest and earliest of the personal culture commentators was Marc Weisblott. His Weisblogg always seemed to me ahead of the curve in style and subject. Then he quit. Why? "I gave up the blog with grander heights in mind," he says, "specifically a project where the blog will be sponsored and have a print mag affiliation -- and, of course, those have been slow to reveal themselves ... a meeting a month ago and then ... well, waiting."My question prompted him to bring back his URL, I'm glad to report. Weisblott says he's "dipping back into the action, but meanwhile reconstituting some of [his] past efforts." So go look. ...
Bad guess again. (Here's why.) But Weisblott is nothing if not persistent. Which makes it a good guess. He's back once more, this time in total gossip mode with the longed-for print affiliation.
Finally, an unmitigated good guess (although not mine):
Postscript: From a reader: "Golly, a man in a snit -- and Goddamit!, well done & good for you and whatever slim justice there is in these mean times! But I feel exempt from the general firestorm, as you're the only blogger I read. Still, a little inconsistency in the argument -- Paul Krugman is nothing more than a paid blogger, as was Edmund Wilson, or Malcolm Cowley, or Mencken and other assorted smarties. You guys do the work for us dummies. I mean, I didn't have to be a whale to get a fix on 'Moby Dick,' but I do praise Big Herm for the effort in my behalf, and he helped a lot."Furthermore, as an advocate of Chaos Theory, these are glad and pleasurable days. The disintegration of the Bush cheap-jack-C.B-DeMille-plaster-board-and-plastic-executive stockade is lousy special effects but wonderful spectacle. May it prevail, although instead of Vic Mature and Hedy Lemarr we have a cast from Todd Browning's 'Freaks.' Strictly Republic Studios, but great entertainment. He Is Risen!"
The reader signs himself "The Baptist John" to distinguish himself no doubt from the Bible guy.
Posted by jherman at 11:07 AM
May 6, 2006
JOHN CAGE TAKES IT SLOW, NYT TAKES IT SLOWER
Are the front-page editors of The New York Times embarrassed that it took them so long to catch up with The Wall Street Journal, which front-paged the same story three years ago? Probably not. But maybe they should be.
Way back on Aug. 11, 2003, under the subhead "Music for the Ages," yours truly blogged about the Journal tale of the stretched-out John Cage composition that will take, if all goes well, 639 years to perform.
The basics of the story about "ORGAN²/ASLSP," as I retold it for readers who lacked a print or online WSJ subscription, went like this:
The performance actually began a few days before 9/11 in "the forlorn eastern German city of Halberstadt ... in a crumbling medieval church," the Journal reported. "Each movement lasts 71 years. The shortest notes last six or seven months, the longest about 35 years. There's an intermission in 2319."
I then noted:
If you missed the opening, you didn't miss much because the music "begins with a rest, or silence," that lasted for the first 17 months ...
Anyway, yesterday The Times front-paged Daniel Wakin's story, "An Organ Recital for the Very, Very Patient." This was the lede (which I admire for its flattering similarity of expression):
If you miss Friday's musical happening at St. Burchardi Church in this eastern German town, no worries. There is always 2008. And the next year. And the one after that.
Today, Wakin's follow-up, "John Cage's Long Music Composition in Germany Changes a Note," ran on an inside arts page. One aspect of The Times coverage that lends value is the Audio Slide Show that accompanies the stories. You can actually hear what's being played, however briefly -- about 13 seconds' worth. (The rest is voiceover and testimonial.) Whether you like what you hear is something else.
ASLSP stands for the composer's tempo marking "as slow as possible." Cage wrote the work for a German organist, Gerd Zacher, who premiered it at a music festival in France. His performance lasted only 29 minutes, as the Journal reported. "So it's no surprise that Zacher disagrees with the tempo being used in Halberstadt," I figured. Besides:
It's not unusual for musicians to disagree about tempo markings. To this day, the greatest maestros haven't definitively settled what tempi Mozart or Beethoven wanted for some of their works. But the friendly disagreeement over "Organ²/ASLSP" has to be the most staggering conceivable.
The reasons for stretching out the performance have less to do with music than with reconstructing an ancient organ to play it on and creating a tourist attraction in Halberstadt to help revive its economy. Whatever the reasons, who but a bunch of Cageans would have thought of a concert lasting six centuries?
I myself relish the idea. But it's funny how serious composers turned music into a philosophical game in a way that visual artists have only recently come to emulate (thanks to the minimalists and other postmodernists) and writers and dramatists never really did (Dadaists and Surrealists notwithstanding). Funny, and for most listeners, unfortunate.
Posted by jherman at 12:40 PM
May 5, 2006
JUST BECAUSE
Nostalgia sets in:
The next day:
Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM
May 2, 2006
FRANKLY, HE'S A TOAD
They've been around the block several times promoting their book, "Cobra II." What more could they have to say that they hadn't said already?
Still, it was worth witnessing Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor this morning at the Council on Foreign Relations if only for the frisson of hearing a former three-star Marine general describe Tommy Franks, the four-star Army general who led the invasion of Iraq, as not just "foulmouthed" and "uncouth" but, much worse for a "muddy boots" soldier, one who became "puffed up like a toad."
Those terms are not the sort usually heard within the walls of the council's august townhouse headquarters at the corner of Park Avenue and East 68th Street in Manhattan. And you're not likely to hear Trainor use them on the network news shows, either.
What else did long-retired Lt. Gen. Trainor say? Nothing as pungent as that. But he did point out, probably for the umpeenth time, that during the invasion "field commanders were dealing with reality," while Franks at Central Command and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon back in Washington "were dealing with assumptions" -- most if not all of them wrong.
Gordon, the chief military correspondent for The New York Times, was less irritated. But he made most of the essential points. One of them, the key to everything, is that three people and only three -- the Bullshitter-in-Chief, the Shooter-in-Chief and Rummy Boy (my terms, not Gordon's) -- were the critical decision-makers as to "when, why, and how" the United States went to war. The implication, left hanging of course, was that if anyone is to be held accountable, it is that triumvirate.
Rumsfeld came in for the most discussion, naturally, given that he decided the "how" of things -- particularly on the issue of insufficient troops both to quell the Iraqi insurgency before it spread and to manage the occupation. He treated troop deployment as a matter of "excess inventory" in "a kind of businessman's model" for the war, Gordon said. I didn't see anyone flinch at the remark, even though the audience was made up largely of corporate chieftains, consultants and other business types. Which may be one more measure of how low the bullshitter's regime has sunk in public opinion.
Posted by jherman at 11:46 AM
April 29, 2006
COPYCAT REDUX
What's the difference between a plagiarist and a copycat? Nothing really -- except one admitted it and the other didn't, one is a writer and the other is an artist, one had her novel withdrawn by the publisher and the other had his layout in The New York Times Style Magazine defended by a Times editor as a case of copycat "coincidence."
Consider Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism vs. Vik Muniz's copycatting.
Here's a widely cited example, one of many borrowed passages in Viswanathan's recently published novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life": "He had too-long shaggy brown hair that fell into his eyes, which were always half shut. His mouth was always curled into a half smile, like he knew about some big joke that was about to be played on you."
Which bears a striking similarity to this passage in Megan McCafferty's 2001 novel, "Sloppy Firsts": "He’s got dusty reddish dreads that a girl could never run her hands through. His eyes are always half-shut. His lips are usually curled in a semi-smile, like he’s in on a big joke that’s being played on you but you don’t know it yet."
Here's an example, on the right, of what Muniz produced last December for a NYT Style Magazine fashion spread.
Which bears a striking resemblance to Norman O. Mustill's image, on the left, from his 1969 book of collages, "Flypaper":
Although the copied visual image is not exact, it bears as much similarity to Mustill's original as the plagiarized verbal passage bears to McCafferty's, and there's enough exact material -- tree branches within a human form in the context of a fashion statement and the referential hand -- to draw the appropriate conclusion.
As for the notion that Viswanathan's plagiarism is of a different order from Muniz's copycatting if only because of sheer numbers -- she apparently copied dozens of passages from two McAfferty novels -- it doesn't hold up unless 1) you fail to see the similarity between Muniz's borrowed technique of combining newsprint and human figure cutouts in the image on the right with Mustill's image from his 1971 pamphlet "Twinpak," on the left, or 2) you fail to compare percentages..
Viswanathan plagiarized roughly 40 passages (a sentence or paragraph each) in a book that comes to 320 pages. As blatant as that is, the total percentage of borrowed words comes to very little compared with the two Muniz copycat images, above, and a less obvious third borrowing (scroll down), which is 50 percent of the six-image Times spread.
Posted by jherman at 8:58 AM
April 28, 2006
GREG'S PALASTERIN'
The latest comes in a new book, "Armed Madhouse," a five-part investigation of the "global economic piggery" that starts at home in the good ol' U.S. of A.
To borrow a friend's coinage for one of Greg Palast's typical columns, Zounds! What a palasterin'! This time it goes like so:
Here is our new world of militarized greed, where America's panic over lunatics with box-cutters has metastasized into a billion-dollar fear industry; where Republicans sucking on Super-sized Slurpies® are hunting dark-skinned voters to eliminate their rights; where James Baker's fixer in alligator boots sets up the grab for Iraq's oil on her way to the rodeo; where miners are suffocated by the same investment bankers who are siphoning off auto workers' pensions.
Palast is ornery and relentless and right. He's also a bitchin' writer whose take on things can surprise you. For example, have a look at his recent piece in The Guardian on why Rummy Boy -- "a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chicken-hawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and Tinker-Toy Napoleon," to quote his lovely description -- should not resign. Palast has no use for the "wannabe Rommels," now "safely retired," who are calling for Rummy Boy's ouster. They're not only "four years too late," he points out, they're going after "the puppet instead of the puppeteers."
"Armed Madhouse" is divided into five sections:
THE NETWORK: The World as a Company Town. The weird and frightening facts about the tidal flow of international currency -- the real story of China's rise and the death of Detroit. Plus a report from the future on the assassination of Hugo Chavez -- [which] explains why it had to be done.THE CON: Kerry won. But two million of his votes were never counted. They can't take away your Social Security until they take away your vote. In the 2008 race, four million ballots will go missing. Here's how it will be done.
THE FEAR: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? Turning Ground Zero into a Profit Center. Why does Southold, New York, have machine guns on SUVs at the casino ferry? Investigations of health insurance and suicide bombings -- in other words, the fun chapter.
THE FLOW: Trillion Dollar Babies. If you thought George Bush had a secret plan to seize Iraq's oil -- you're wrong. He had TWO plans, and Armed Madhouse has both of them.
THE CLASS WAR: I go deeper into George Bush's crude system of educational terror ("No Child's Behind Left"), Ken Lay's REAL crimes for which he won't be tried, and the story of New Orleans you won't get on Fox Snews. Here you'll get some complex economics and a free ticket to the circus -- and the core issue of the book: the war of the movers and shakers against the moved and shaken.
Palast is going on a book tour. Here's the sked.
And here in reverse order, in case you missed them, are previous items about Palast: Ahead of the Curve; The Gun That Smokes; Big Oil vs. the Neocons; Oh, Those Kooks and Crazies; Saint Ronald Gets the Heave Ho, and Stiffing Culifornia
Posted by jherman at 10:05 AM
April 26, 2006
BETTER THAN LE PETOMANE?
Here's one fer da books: "Ever Seen an Asshole Talk?" It brings back memories of "Naked Lunch" and tales of Joseph Pujol at the Moulin Rouge.
Postscript from a friend: "And here's one to make your hair stand on end. Remember Karl Böhm, beloved German maestro at the Met?"
PPS from another friend: "A little something to rival old Joe Pujol."
Posted by jherman at 10:12 AM
April 24, 2006
MUSIC TO MY EARS
Have you heard the song, "Let's Impeach the President," on the new Neil Young album (due out in May)? I haven't. But the song title sounds catchy.
[April 28: Click to listen to the album's songs. They're being streamed in sequence. "Impeach" comes seventh.]
Young has a better opinion of the American people than I do. He says, "I think there's a conscience in the country, and I don't think it's being spoken. Only a part of it is being spoken." Yeah, well. As written here, during the 2004 election campaign:
On the third anniversary of 9/11, the best way for Americans to honor the dead is to look to the future by realizing that the upcoming presidential election will be a referendum not on the candidates for the White House but on the conscience and convictions of the electorate itself.
After the election, there were signs of conscience. Remember the truly sorry hit magnet? Sincere but powerless. Come the November mid-term elections, we'll find out whether that has changed. Maybe the price of gasoline will strengthen America's conscience. In the meantime I'm joining Young's army. This is my enlistment form. Click the album cover. It will take you to the video clip of a great CNN interview with Young. (Just ignore the "ShowBiz Tonight" intro blather.)
Postscript: Could impeachment happen? Not likely. But "the Illinois State Legislature is preparing to drop a bombshell," blogger Steve Leser reports. Apparently, "a little known and never utilized rule" of the U.S. House of Representatives "allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature." Voilà: Illinois House Joint Resolution 125. We'll see if it passes.
Posted by jherman at 8:34 AM
April 21, 2006
'I AM ME AND RUMMY'S HE ...'
Brazen arrogance + abysmal incompetence = "I'm the decider." An old story by now. But the koo-koo-ka-choo of it is worth repeating. So click dat thang.
Posted by jherman at 9:12 AM
April 18, 2006
BIT OF NEPOTISM
Taking a break from da blog. But before I go, figured I'd mention a cousin o' mine -- Carol Edelson -- cuz she's got a show of recent work goin' up soon at the Martucci Gallery in Irvington, N.Y. Actually, this bit of nepotism is just an excuse to post an image of her "Summer Blooms and Reflections," which looks pretty sweet to me. The piece itself, painted in 2004, is a large oil on linen (24" x 60"). It's featured in the show. The image looks even sweeter on the postcard she sent.
![SUMMER BOOMS AND REFLECTIONS [2004, oil on linen, 24 x 60 inches], by Carol Edelson](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/CAROL%20EDELSON%20Summer%20Blooms.jpg)
You mean you wanna know more? OK, since you insist, here's the lowdown: The show runs from May 2 to June 3 at the Martucci Gallery, Irvington Public Library, 12 Astor St. (across from Metro North) in Irvington. Gallery hours are Mon., Wed., Fri. and Sat. (10 a.m.-5 p.m); Tues. and Thurs. (10 a.m.-9 p.m.). There will be a reception for the artist May 6 (Sat.), 3-5 p.m. Tel: (914) 591-7840.
Posted by jherman at 12:06 PM
April 14, 2006
ARTIST AND REVOLUTIONARY
Now that Repulski has his answer, the real question is: Where did Hemingway publish his comment about taxing the use of the word revolution?
And the answer is: In a 1934 catalogue for a show of etchings of Madrid street scenes by the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
The artist's son writes that his father "started out as a Cubist under the influence of his friend, Juan Gris." Quintanilla was reluctant to engage in politics, but in 1934 he hosted a committee of the October revolution in his studio and was arrested for it. Besides contributing to the catalogue for the show in New York, Hemingway and John Dos Passos circulated a petition and organized protests to free him from prison. Ditto André Malraux in France and others elsewhere.
Quintanilla later played a prominent role during the Spanish Civil War, both as a military commander and as an artist. When the Republicans lost the war, in 1939, he went into exile for 37 years. His war drawings, including Andalucia: "Why do they kill us?" (1937), right, were shown first in 1938 at the Barcelona Ritz and then at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (with a catalogue by Hemingway).
Paul Quintanilla notes that "Why do they kill us?" was "an important drawing, one that Hemingway liked very much and wanted." He never got it. The drawing "was stolen, by a distant relative, of all people, from my collection," the artist's son writes.
A copy of the petition to free his father from prison turned up, however, in the archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Here it is, signed by Henri Matisse:
Incidentally, Hemingway's commentary on Quintanilla can be found in a recently published book, "Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame," a collection of his statements, public letters, introductions, forewords, prefaces, blurbs, reviews, and endorsements, edited by Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman.
Posted by jherman at 8:51 AM
April 13, 2006
REPULSKI'S REVENGE
Apparently prompted by yesterday's potboiler item, a regular reader named Repulski sent a message that I'm guessing was intended as a rebuke for overusing, or not fully appreciating, the term revolutionary.
"As a man with a keen eye for prose style and history, not to mention other ineffable insights," he writes, "see if, out of your huge imagining, you can identify the author of this":
Now this may possibly be a good time to suggest that a small tax be levied on the use of the word revolution, the proceeds to be given to the defence of ... any of your friends who are in jail, by all those who write the word and never have shot nor been shot at; who never have stored arms nor filled a bomb, nor have discovered arms nor had a bomb burst among them; who never have gone hungry in a general strike, nor have manned streetcars when the tracks are dynamited; who never have sought cover in a street trying to get their heads behind a gutter; who never have seen a woman shot in the head, in the breast or in the buttocks; who never have seen an old man with the top of his head off; who never have walked with their hands up; who never have shot a horse or seen hooves smash a head; who never have sat a horse and been shot at or stoned; who never have been cracked on the head with a club nor have thrown a brick; who never have seen a scab's forearms broken with a crow-bar, or an agitator filled up with compressed air with an air hose; who, now it gets more serious -- that is, the penalty is more severe -- have never moved a load of arms at night in a big city; nor standing, seeing it moved, knowing what it was and afraid to denounce it because they did not want to die later; nor (let's end it, it could go on too long) stood on a roof trying to urinate on their hands to wash off the black in the fork between finger and thumb from the back-spit of a Thompson gun, the gun thrown in a cistern and the troops coming up the stairs: the hands are what they judge you by -- the hands are all the evidence they need ...
Repulski's message continues: "I, of course, know the answer to this riddle -- to me it's a no-brainer. It shouldn't be to you. And your huge staff can't Google this one. But it might be a pleasing problem for your readers. Naturally, I will send you the answer if I hear you smashing your shrunken brows in the agony of mindlessness."
Well!
Dear Repulski -- You are a man of strong intuition or ESP, maybe both, because I just re-read "Notes From a Sea Diary," Nelson Algren's riveting defense of Ernest Hemingway against critics like Leslie Fiedler, Norman Podhoretz, Leon Edel, and (especially) Dwight Macdonald, who accused Hemingway of being a puffed-up, bushy-bearded, celebrity-mongering phony who wrote (to cite Norman Mailer's word for it) "babytalk." Which leads me to believe it is Hemingway you are quoting. I'm not certain of this, but that's my guess -- not from the style so much as from the tone and content. And from Algren's assessment of him:
Had Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair died the same day as Ernest Hemingway, it would have been difficult to distinguish her work from his by some of the summaries."Hemingway's prose was as chaste as a mountain stream," one Magoo claimed of a stream bearing mules with their forelegs broken, stiffs floating bottoms-up and the results of several abortions.
"He was dedicated to Truth and Beauty," another mad groundskeeper claimed of a man who had always disposed of both abstractions in his "built-in shockproof shit-detector,'' as he described it.
The overpraisers were judges as useless after his death as had been the begrudgers before. ...
Algren continues:
Ernest Hemingway's need was not to write declarative sentences with a beautiful absence of subordinate clauses. It was not to meet celebrities: he was on speaking terms with Georges Clemenceau, Benito Mussolini and Mustapha Kemal before he had heard of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was one of the most highly paid correspondents in Europe.Therefore the man had at his disposal a lifetime of meeting celebrities, while living comfortably with his wife and children in the capitals of the world; enjoying that degree of fame a foreign correspondent earns.
It was a lucky way of living -- but he didn't want it. He didn't want it because, to him, it wasn't living at all. To Dwight Macdonald it would have been living. To have a respectable name with the Establishment and be a dissenter too! What more could a man ask than to have it both ways?
Hemingway didn't care for it either way. He wasn't an athletic young man from Oak Park. He was a soldier whose life had been broken in two. He didn't come to The Moveable Feast as a picnic begun in Kansas City now being continued in the Bois de Boulogne. He had seen the faces of calm daylight looking ashen as faces in a bombardment. He had been the man who did not know where he went each night nor what was the peril there; nor why he should waken in a sweat more frightened than he'd been in the bombardment ...
Hemingway had felt his life fluttered like a pocket-handkerchief by the wind of death. In the watches of the night he had heard retreat beaten. Out of dreams like Dostoevsky's, endured in nights wherein he had lost his life yet had not died. Hemingway forged an ancestral wisdom in terms usable by modern man: that he who gains his life shall lose it and he who loses it shall save it; into a prose magically woven between sleep and waking.
Algren's admiration for Hemingway was an artist's belief. It was more thorough, more receptive, the product of a literary intellect more powerful than a mere scholar's or critic's. He writes:
It wasn't his syntax, but the man inside the prose, that makes Macdonald struggle and fret to secure a hold on [Hemingway]. For, to one so devoid of inner sinew as Macdonald, literature is explainable only in terms of syntax. He must of necessity assume that Hemingway's style was a matter of being an athletic youth sufficiently clever to pick up some tricks from Gertrude Stein to serve his ambition.Hemingway's emulators thought so too. For his art was so hidden it seemed easily imitated: one had only to talk tough and cut it short. Some imitated him boldly, some secretly, some mockingly and some slavishly. But what they wrote had no tension: his prose was invulnerable.
Though his prose was invulnerable, his life was not. He flaunted a personality as poetic as Byron's and as challenging as Teddy Roosevelt's; before timorous men whose lives were prosaic. It was necessary, no, absolutely essential to get his number.
"He thinks like a child," someone remembered Goethe saying of Byron. So Norman Mailer said "Hemingway has never written anything that would disturb an eight-year-old." So Professor Fiedler said it and Professor Podhoretz said it and Professor Edel said it and Professor Macdonald said it. First they said it one by one. Then, gathering courage, they all said it together in chorus. Now we have his number: Now we really have his number.
And of all our thinkers from Paul Goodman to Ronald Reagan, who has given us a passage so certain not to disturb an eight-year-old as this:
"If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comfortable stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot define completely but the feeling comes ... when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it had flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of government, the richness, the poverty, martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all one as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm-fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light-globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-long-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream with no visible flow, takes fives loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm-fronds of our victories, the worn light-bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against the one single lasting thing -- the stream."
Call that babytalk.
Posted by jherman at 9:38 AM
April 12, 2006
ANCIENT PAPYRUS SPEAKS
Mining the files has uncovered a text from Sept. 23, 1971. The original, typed out on seven pages of orange graph paper with photo illustrations, includes this little potboiler:
A LIBERATIONIST PLOT
The Pacific Railroad Station was marked for destruction. It sat between two hills adjacent to an old farm. The morning was cool and the sun rose between the hills, casting an orange transparency over the valley.
Tommy Fast gazed through the quiet, unsuspecting atmosphere and adjusted his binoculars. There was nobody to be seen on the station platform or further up the tracks -- they gleamed like two silver solitary threads that disappeared from his line of sight where the valley took a turn to the left.
Tommy descended into the valley from a northeasterly direction. The air caught his breath and left him with a sharp, almost hungry pang in the pit of his stomach. In his pocket he held two sticks of nitroglycerine and two separate fuses. His eyes searched the deserted station. It was built of ancient redwood and seemed more than sturdy. Two empty wooden benches provided for passengers were bare except for some folded newspapers, the only evidence that the station was in use.
![A LIBERATIONIST PLOT [Text from 1971]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/HermanTEXTcollage3%20295%20long.jpg)
Tommy Fast's connection with various revolutionary groups which had sprung up all over the world was more or less accidental. He rarely made inquiries about others in the same line of work. This complemented his desire for security and an anxious need to maintain secret operations. He did not even bother keeping up with news since he found the habit of reading the daily papers strangely treacherous to his motivation.
He'd once been told by an ancient gentleman who, it was rumored, had been part of a group of pre-revolutionary Russian anarchists, that the greatest danger to a revolutionary consisted in the ease by which various distractions could slow the momentum of revolutionary ambition. Distractions inevitably led to the commission of small errors of detail -- errors which the police would capitalize on swiftly and without mercy. Tommy found news distracting.
He made certain thorough calculations in a small pocket notebook kept for the purpose. He noted the time it had taken him to cross the ridge which marked the beginning of the valley and the farthest edge of the farm which bordered on the station. Fifteen minutes to descend to a small clearing in a slanting meadow just below the tree line. He drew a quick sketch of this distance with arrows marking the line of descent. From the meadow to the tracks there was not more than another twenty yards.
DISTRACTIONS
Dateline Moscow: Authorities announced, in response to what are termed "rising Zionist demands," that 10,000 Jews daily will be allowed to emigrate to Israel -- on condition they are shipped in simple pinewood boxes. When asked if there are any other conditions that might have remained unsaid, a government spokesman claimed: "None whatsover. They need only apply."
Dateline Paris: Preparing for an official state visit by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, ventriloquist dummies poured out of CRS vans in search of "undesirables" on order of the Russian Embassy. French spokesmen described their internment on Corsica as "a paid vacation." Brezhnev arrived aboard a prototype Concorde in the glare of Orly Airport kleiglights in time to see them off: "Bon voyage."
Dateline Vienna: A group of happeners freaked out local cops by smearing ox brains mixed with cat shit on their genitals. At private showings, valkerie amazons sucked them off and puked stillborn rabbits. They were all marched off to a nuthouse under police surveillance, but not without a final act of defiance: They went, singing "Nuthin' could be finer than to be in Carolina in the maw-aw-awh-ning ..."
Dateline New York: American painter Andrew Wyeth was commissioned to do the unofficial Nixon portrait. At a press conference, the painter was quoted as saying: "I think he is a handsome president. The man has very fine features."
Posted by jherman at 10:58 AM
April 5, 2006
MINING THE PAST, AGAIN
Came across this: An essay by Raphael Sorin, "Le mouvement 'Cut-Up,'" in Le Monde, 25 fevrier 1972, about The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE little magazine, Nova Broadcast Press, "Cut Up or Shut Up," "The Braille Film," "Twinpak" (with an illustration), "la poésie visuelle politique," and so on. Sorin's article is part of a two-page spread, "LA 'LITTÉRATURE' SAUVAGE," which also includes Jean-Michel Palmier's essay, "Quand Lénine devient Mickey," about Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Ain't dat a kick in da head?
Posted by jherman at 11:03 AM
April 4, 2006
BLOWIN' IN THE WIND
First he made "Old Glory" condoms that came in red, white and blue. Then he got them patented as a patriotic anti-AIDS device after a fight with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Now he's submitted a formal proposal to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a Disneyfied Vegas-style Resort & Theme Park in Nantucket Sound called ''Martucket Eyeland.'' It's an award-winning commentary on an actual plan to install a controversial wind farm of 130 turbines in the Sound.
![Artist's rendering of Martucket Eyeland [Illustration by JeanPaul Raymond]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/Martucketone-1%20300.jpg)
Trouble is, according to the Cape Cod Times, the proposal could land its creator, Jay Critchley, in jail. "By submitting the proposal to the Army Corps" for a development permit, "he triggered a federal review" -- and if it's judged a hoax, "Critchley could face five years in prison and fines up to $10,000."
An artist's rendering of the resort-cum-theme park, above, shows a nuclear power plant, a shopping center called Meltdown Mall, a replica of the Pilgrim monument, a casino for family-friendly gambling, and a ferris wheel that turns on a wind turbine. Doesn't the Army Corps realize Critchley's proposal is satire? A Corps spokesman told the Cape Cod Times it's not his agency's responsibility to determine intent, so it will begin the preliminary process of determining what federal agencies should be involved. Hello?
Postscript: Looks like Critchley's been saved by the U.S. Senate. His proposal won't need to be reviewed. Nor will any others.
Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM
April 3, 2006
QUARTERBACK MORNING
Several points to make before signing off for a while:
1) Dontcha just love Paul Krugman's anti-McCain columns? "The Right's Man" on March 13 was tasty. "It's time for some straight talk about John McCain," Krugman began. "He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be." Conclusion:
Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party. And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.
This morning's, "John and Jerry," was especially delicious. It takes McCain apart for playing kissy face with religious extremist Jerry Falwell. But for the first time in as long as I can remember, I hafta disagree with Krugman, who sums up his opinion of McCain this way:
[H]is denunciation of Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson six years ago helped give him a reputation as a moderate on social issues. Now that he has made up with Mr. Falwell and endorsed South Dakota's ban on abortion even in the case of rape or incest, only two conclusions are possible: either he isn't a social moderate after all, or he's a cynical political opportunist.Uh, Paul, how about sticking to your guns: McCain isn't a social moderate in the first place, and he's a cynical political opportunist, which you've been getting at all along.
2) Noam Chomsky laid it out nicely this morning when he pointed out, among some other salient observations about the current state of our American democracy, what consumer advertising and U.S. election campaigns share in common: "The purpose is to delude and deceive by imagery."
Ah, images. That brings up issue No. 3:
3) Byron ("Barney") Calame, the public editor of The New York Times, is so earnest about editorial transparency that he wrote half of a whole column a couple of weeks ago about "improving openness to reader feedback" and how to reach Times reporters and editors by e-mail. But he still hasn't replied to me about The Copycat and the Original Cat.
I messaged Calame on March 13, alerting him to the 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 guess he thinks it's inappropriate to bring up the issue of exploitation verging on plagiarism, let alone stonewalling by the Times. Or maybe he's just overwhelmed by a busy schedule, unlike the foreign desk and Jeffrey Gettleman, the Times reporter who recently returned to Iraq and is putting out jolting front-page features like this morning's on gun sales in Baghdad, which offers the real lowdown on life in the Wild East.
Last week I messaged the Times's foreign desk asking about the slight difference between the print and online versions of a key paragraph in Gettleman's Sunday story of March 26, "Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad."
This appeared in print:
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, is now saying that militias are Iraq's No. 1 security threat. But he has been careful to paint the problem in broad strokes, implying both sides are at fault.
This appeared on the Web site:
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, has expressed increasing alarm about militia violence, saying it is a bigger killer than car bombs, the former No. 1 security threat. But he has been careful to paint the problem in broad strokes, implying both sides are at fault.
A minor difference, to be sure. My message went to the foreign desk on March 27, at 9:29 a.m. The foreign desk forwarded my message to Gettleman, and at 10:42 a.m. he replied:
hi jan.glad to help.
often, for space reasons, we have to trim stories that run on the web at a longer length.
in this case, to fit additional information in, we made the decision to cut out the mention of car bombs and rewrite the sentence the way it appeared in print.
jeffrey
Now that's not only editorial transparency but service way above and beyond the call of duty from a war correspondent busy dodging bullets. It's the kind you'd expect, however, from a public editor busy being earnest about transparency.
Posted by jherman at 10:49 AM
March 31, 2006
MINING THE PAST
Looking through my files, I see more than a dozen videotapes hidden away in the dark recess of a book shelf. Off the top of my head, I didn't recall making as many. But there they are, most of them dating from 1971 and 1972. They document the works and views of a handful of writers and artists, among them William S. Burroughs and filmmaker Antony Balch in London; Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco; action-sound poet Bernard Heidsieck and critic/journalist Rafael Sorin in Paris; Fluxus artist Alison Knowles in Vermont; even one of my own video pieces.
To be looking back like this must be a sign of age or dementia, or both. Anyway, here's what I found:
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Four videos.
Burroughs/Balch Experiment
Recorded live at WSB's London flat (8 Duke St., St. James, London) on Dec. 21, 1971. Approx. 10 minutes.
Burroughs's face is transformed via Balch's film projection of other faces on his. The result is seen and heard with a live soundtrack in the video recording by Herman as an illustration of propaganda techniques. Antony Balch was an experimental filmmaker ("Towers Open Fire," etc.) who often collaborated with Burroughs.
WSB talked about this video with Robert Palmer in "Rolling Stone Interviews William Burroughs." It was published in Rolling Stone (108: 34-39) on May 11, 1972. This is what he said:
"Jan Herman was here with his little video camera outfit and we did quite a precise experiment, which was: Antony brought up the Bill and Tony film, I sat there, and he projected it onto my face, which was re-photographed on the video camera, but that faded in and out so that it would be that face, then fade back to the now face, so that you got a real time section. We wanted to project it onto the television screen from the camera, but we couldn't because the cycles were different; Antony and Jan Herman were fooling around and they managed to suck up the television. But even seeing it on a little view screen, it was something quite extraordinary."
I don't recall screwing up Uncle Bill's TV, but maybe we did. Palmer's interview is reprinted in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997.
Burroughs/Sommerville/Mottram /Herman Discussion
Recorded live at WSB's London flat (8 Duke St., St. James, London) on Dec. 18, 1971.
Three tapes: 1) approx. 15 minutes; 2) approx. 20 minutes; 3) approx. 20 minutes.
Combination of discussions and interviews among Burroughs, Ian Sommerville (WSB's longtime companion and, with Brion Gysin, creator of "the dream machine"); Eric Mottram (British literary scholar, critic, poet, and professor of English and American Literature at King's College London); and Herman. Live recording includes slices of TV and images of Sommerville's own apartment. The conversations range widely about Burroughs's theories and includes some discussion of "subliminal" propaganda.
ALLEN GINSBERG
Two videos.
"Holy Thursday" and "Infant Joy"
Recorded live at Pacific High Studio (60 Bradey St., San Francisco) on Aug. 21, 1971.
Two tapes: 1) approx. 20 minutes; 2) approx. 20 minutes.
Work sessions for Fantasy recording of Blake songs put to music by Allen Ginsberg with the help of fellow artists who recorded with him. I don't think Fantasy ever released these.
Voice: Allen Ginsberg
Madolin: Alan Senauke
Guitar: John Sholle
Bass: Charlie Russell
Viola: Peter Hornbeck
JAN HERMAN
One video.
"Notre Dame de Video"
Recorded live at Herman's Paris flat (16 rue Cels, Paris 14e) in March, 1972. Approx. 20 minutes.
I made this video piece for the group show "Trois Soirs Parmi" at 19 Quai Bourbon, Paris 4e, on March 17, 1972. The show included live performances by Jochen Gerz, Françoise Janicot, and others.
BERNARD HEIDSIECK
One video.
Heidsieck performing his sound/action poetry.
Recorded live at Heidsieck's Paris flat (19 Quai Bourbon, Paris 4e) in March, 1972. Approx. 20 minutes.
ALISON KNOWLES
One video.
Knowles performing "The Identical Lunch"
Recorded live at Goddard College (Vermont) in March, 1973. Approx. 20 minutes.
GROUPE DZIGA VERTOV
One video.
Groupe Dziga Vertov Notebooks
Recorded live at Herman's Paris flat (16 rue Cels, Paris 14e) on Nov. 30, 1971. Approx. 20 minutes.
A documentation of notebooks that were written in collaboration with Jean-Luc Goddard, preparatory to making several films in 1968. Rafael Sorin, a member of GDV and a literary critic/journalist, provided the notebooks for documentation. He narrates the video. Background music is by James Moody and Co.
POP SAMPLER
One video.
Recorded live at the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne on Sept. 19, 1971. Approx. 20 minutes.
From the collection of Ludwig Sammlung, works by various artists such as Lichtenstein, Warhol, Vostell, Rauschenberg, Wesselman, Indiana, Spoerri, Tinguely, others. Narrated by Herman.
DANIEL SPOERRI
One video
Spoerri performing "Eat Art" (with Richard Lindner).
Recorded on Oct. 3, 1971, from a program entitled "Changes" on German Southwest Radio (3rd Programme). Approx. 15 minutes.
Postscript: All of these tapes are now on file here at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library, in Evanston, Illinois.
Posted by jherman at 10:15 AM
March 28, 2006
FOREVER AND A DAY
Today is Nelson Algren's birthday. A writer of genius, he died on May 9, 1981, at the age of 72. The Algren I knew late in his life was brave, big-hearted, and staunch in his beliefs. We had become friends after I interviewed him for a piece that ran in the Sunday magazine of the Chicago Sun-Times. By the time he died I had joined the Sun-Times staff as an arts reporter and critic. This story ran in the paper eight days after his death.
'In' at last: Nelson Algren's final happy days
Multitudes have mounted this midnight stair ... all come in search of love with money in their pockets.
--from The Devil’s Stocking
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- Nelson Algren had given up on the literary establishment so long ago -- and it so clearly had given up on him -- that he was dumbfounded to learn of his election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
"I thought it was something like the Mark Twain Society where you had to pay to get in," he kidded me recently.
His first impulse was to scan the Academy membership list for the name of a well-known critic he loved to hate.
"I figured if he was in, it had to be a fraud," said Algren. "But there were some names I respected. So I asked Gloria Jones (widow of novelist James Jones) what it was and she said, 'Hell, it's like the French Legion of Honor. You're in.'"
For Algren there were few things worse than being "in." Buying your way in was one. Not getting what you deserved for your writing was another. Better to be "out" and to let your work go unpublished. Still, Algren was pleased by the surprise. He had done nothing wrong he could think of that had got him in. More important, it might help him launch his first novel in 25 years, The Devil's Stocking, which had just made the rounds of American publishers and had brought insultingly small offers.
![The Devil's Stocking [Seven Stories Press]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/The%20Devil%27s%20Stocking125-thumb.gif)
"No," he said. "I will be required to wear a leotard and play a flute. They do this every year in a sort of garden."
"You're going to have a hard time getting the leotard over that belly of yours," I said.
He chortled.
When I asked if he would sit for an interview, and put me in touch with the friends he'd made since moving to Sag Harbor a year ago, he went one better.
"I'll make a party," he said.
Piece of cake. Quotes would fly through his house, freshly minted by Kurt Vonnegut and Peter Mathiessen and Irwin Shaw and Betty Friedan. I flew to New York and drove three hours out to Sag Harbor near the tip of Long Island. The party was set for 2 p.m. Algren was expecting me at 1.
I called from a phone booth a few blocks from his small saltbox house. No answer. When Algren threw a party, he usually piled on the chips and Fritos. He was out buying them now, I thought. I bought a bottle of Chivas Regal. Then I called again. Roy Finer answered.
"Don't come," Finer said. "He's gone."
Whenever Algren threw a party, he invited Finer, a New York City homicide detective he affectionately called "The Big Cop."
"I walked in the door less than five minutes ago," said Finer. "He's cold."
Suddenly understanding, I hung up and jumped into the car.
"We won’t see Nelson?" asked my six-year-old daughter, Olivia, whom Algren had dubbed "my fiancée" when she began sending him drawings, which he framed for his wall.
Nobody will ever see Nelson Algren again. I felt as if I'd been swept off a cliff. I couldn't believe he was dead until I saw for myself. In the bathroom Algren had collapsed of a heart attack. The smashed dial of his wristwatch was stopped at 6:05. When I came out, Finer was slumped on the living room couch. He looked very tired.
"It's over," he said.
The words were an epitaph, simple and terrible and true. Life had gone out of the house. Time might as well have stopped in each room, which brimmed with reminders of Algren's insomniac energy.
Every corner was filled, every wall covered, with mementos he made or gathered: collages of Simone de Beauvoir's letters and book jackets; photos of Algren in Army uniform; pictures of his girl friends, of prizefighters, drawings and art posters; shelves filled with books he wrote, those he read and those he wrote about; the complete works of Dickens and a portrait of Dostoevsky (his two favorite writers); the works of George Orwell; news clippings framed and yellowing with age.
![The saltbox house Nelson rented in Sag Harbor, L.I. [photo: Jan Herman]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/Nelsonhouse_3.jpg293.jpg)
The Sag Harbor police chief, John Harrington, took off his gold-braided cap and stared in awe at the hundreds of books. "I used to know John Steinbeck, who lived around here," he said. "You'd never know the guy could write from talking to him. I never heard of this guy Algren. I saw him around, though, down at the grocery. He was always buying saltines. You work in New York?"
"Yes," said Finer. "Where's the medical examiner? I came from the city to get away from the bodies."
I remembered driving with Algren in Hackensack, N.J., not long after we'd first met in September, 1978. He told me he was fed up with people asking to write his biography. "I've got 10 good years of writing left," he said.
And I'm certain he believe it. He always told me he was "a glorified reporter." He had to observe real life before he could fictionalize. So he was writing in his head, even when he wasn't.
His ex-wife, Betty Algren, an actress living in New York and to whom I had to break the news, remembered he wrote 24 hours a day.
"He had no schedule," she said. "He'd wake up in the middle of the night and go to the typewriter for three minutes, then go back to bed. We had separate bedrooms right from the beginning, which took me by surprise. Of course, I always knew that Nelson valued his independence."
That dovetailed with what Nelson had told me of his work habits. Writing and marriage just couldn't mix, because if a writer is any good, he's always in training. So he preferred the bachelor's life.
![Galley page of Algren's first novel, SOMEBODY IN BOOTS (1935) [The Ohio State University Libraries]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/Somebody%20in%20Boots%20manuscript%20page240.jpg)
Nevertheless, for years he avoided writing "the big book." He didn't need much money to live, and he'd already had plenty of glory. Why put in the rounds religiously?
But he kept at it anyway, returning to the typewriter as though he were "on a long chain." During the past few years, to fill in the night hours when he couldn't sleep, he wrote a 465-page manuscript called Chinatown. When it was still unfinished, he gave it to me to read. I thought the title a problem and told him so. Where did it come from?
"One morning I woke up, and there it was in the typewriter," he said, scratching his head. "It was the only word on the page. That had to mean something. So I thought I should set the book in Chinatown. Now I've got to find a Chinese prostitute. The book needs a love story to round it out."
New York's Chinatown created problems for him. He couldn't find the right prostitute for a model, and the locale was too unfamiliar to master quickly. So the novel began to shift to Times Square, which he knew better. He began calling it "my Times Square novel," though much of it also takes place in New Jersey, where he had moved from Chicago in 1975 to cover the murder trial of former middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.
On weekends, Algren would take a cheap hotel room and spend his time roaming 42nd Street looking for a prostitute he could talk to. One thing that complicated his search was New York mayor Ed Koch's bright idea of publicizing a citywide "john list" to discourage prostitution. The mayor guessed that customers would be frightened off by the prospect of having their names broadcast on the air.
Outraged by this cynical exploitation of middle-class fears, Algren volunteered to head the list. He dashed off letters to the mayor, the newspapers and radio stations. No answer.
Worse, the "john list" forced his Japanese girlfriend, a prostitute he saw regularly in Manhattan, to leave the city because of increased raids and lack of customers. Algren never forgave the mayor for that.
In the end, Algren succeeded in his search. He found "a brown-skin girl" who worked in a cheap midtown whorehouse and talked to her at length for the going rate. She became Dovie-Jean Dawkins, who "had a broad face with high cheekbones, which lent her an Oriental aspect. She looked to be 18 at most." In fact, the novel took its final title from her phrase for her boyfriend. "You're like the devil's stocking, Tiger," she tells him. "You're knitted backwards."
![The German edition of Nelson Algren's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM [DER MANN MIT DEM GOLDENEN ARM, translated by Carl Weissner]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/GoldenArmGERMANedition220.jpg)
I liked the book so much that I got in touch with my friend Carl Weissner, a leading German translator who specialized in non-mainstream American literature. In no time Weissner interested a West German publisher in bringing out this fall not only The Devil's Stocking [it was published in Germany with the title Calhoun], but in following up with a complete retrospective of Algren's works in new translations.
"Why did we ever go to war with the Krauts?" Algren would joke after hearing from Weissner, whose good news buoyed him as nothing else had in months. He hoped the German interest would rekindle sales of his Italian editions, which paid small but steady royalties.
As for his own countrymen, Algren said: "The Americans will have to pay a hundred thousand, or they won't get it."
This was not just sheer bravado, though Algren had his fair share of that. He wanted the money to buy a house on the beach. He was tired of tramping around with cardboard boxes of books and pictures. In Hackensack, neighbors once called the police to have him clear his porch of what they called "an unsightly mess."
Later in Southampton, a posh resort near Sag Harbor, he unwisely chose a place so small and dainty that when he tried to move his boxes in it gave his landlady fits. She had him evicted in a week.
I wired him $500 so he could rent an attic in Sag Harbor while he dickered with his landlady, her real estate agent and their banker over the security deposit. It was a point of pride with Algren that he repaid his loans in full, and quickly [when he had the money]. Often he would spend $25 on a meal for you without blinking an eye, though he'd go home with $2 in his pocket.
The first place he moved to in Sag Harbor also would not hold all of his belongings. He had to leave them in storage. When he finally moved last September to his place on Glover Street, he unpacked at last and settled in like a squire on his estate. He loved the place, and it loved him back.
And for the first time in years he acquired a social life among literary friends, among them Gloria Jones, Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Vonnegut, Joe Pintauro, William Gaddis, Betty Friedan, Robert Parrish and Irwin Shaw.
He was happier in Sag Harbor, where he now lies buried in a whaler's grave, than he probably had been for a decade. Maybe Shaw, on learning of Algren’s death, said it best: "It's not so bad. He'd just won a big award and he was about to mix drinks at a party. Now he won't have to wash the glasses."
Algren would have been tickled.
Posted by jherman at 9:05 AM
March 27, 2006
NO. 1 WITH A BULLET
The American viceroy in Iraq has changed his tune about the death squads. Zalmay Khalilzad "is now saying that militias are Iraq's No. 1 security threat," Jeffrey Gettleman reported in his striking front-page story on Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times, "Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad."
![Mutilated bodies seen on Iraqi television after an attack by a death squad in Baghdad. [Reuters Television]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/03/27/international/27iraq.1841.jpg)
And again in another front-pager this morning, "Shiite Fighters Clash With G.I.'s and Iraqi Forces," Gettleman reports: "American officials are now saying that Shiite militias are the No. 1 problem in Iraq, more dangerous than the Sunni-led insurgents who for nearly the past three years have been branded the gravest security threat."
Golly gee willikers, as Rummy Boy might say. Wasn't it Khalilzad, widely hailed in press reports as the U.S. diplomatic genius of last resort, who not so long ago showed less than urgent concern for the problem of the death squads? According to Jon Lee Anderson's lengthy New Yorker profile of him in December, as reported here:
When a Sunni politician came to his office in the Green Zone and told him the Shiite militias "were a greater problem than the insurgency ... Khalilzad raised his eyebrows with interest ... acknowledged that militias were a problem." But, hélas, he had another, more "immediate concern" (terrorists from Syria, who are actually a small fraction of the insurgents according to the U.S. military's own estimate).
Need we be reminded yet again of "the Salvador option" hidden in plain sight? Or the bold-faced contradictions of the American 'ganda machine? Or the Bullshitter-in-Chief's latest phony claims of progress?
If Gettleman needed a reminder, he got one on his return to Iraq two weeks ago after being away for more than a year.
In a third stunning report published over the weekend, he noted: "The first story I covered began with a tip that vigilantes had hanged four suspected terrorists from lamp posts in Sadr City, a Shiite slum. The minute I got to the scene, I realized I was stepping into a new Iraq."
What made it "new" was that the death squads now have free reign, unfettered by governmental restraints and encouraged more than ever by religious and sectarian differences. He writes:
The day after that mob scene in Sadr City, bodies started showing up, first a couple and then dozens. By conservative counts, nearly 200 civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on Baghdad's streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes.Granted, Baghdad is no stranger to the corpse. There were assassinations two years ago, when an entire intellectual class was being wiped out.
But this new wave of executions was different. It was more sadistic and less selective. These people weren't rounded up because they were important. They were tortured and killed simply because of their religion. And because most of them were Sunni Muslim Arabs, there was no response from the Shiite-led government.
Mass murder used to provoke some form of official reaction, however feeble. I remember seeing the Iraqi police seal off areas after big bomb attacks and poke around for evidence. Now, there are major crimes with no crime scenes. Very few of these mystery killings have been investigated, and it isn't for lack of witnesses. Many of these men were abducted in daylight, in public, in front of crowds.
Gettleman is not the first or the only reporter to describe what's been happening, of course. But his reports, which offer unusual intimacy and insight, drive home the criminal reality of the Iraq war. If Americans are finally turning against the war, it's because reports like his have exposed its moral bankruptcy.
Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM
March 26, 2006
GROCK!
Ever hear of Grock, the Swiss circus clown? I never did, until composer friend Bill Osborne filled me in. As another friend of mine says, "Swiss clown? Normally a contradiction in terms, like Swiss Navy. But this guy's brilliant." 
Have a look. Here are some short, terrifically entertaining video clips of Grock, beautifully reproduced and posted by Osborne on his and musician-actor-artist Abbie Conant's Web site. You won't be sorry -- and you don't even have to know about "Sequenza V," Luciano Berio's trombone tribute to Grock, which is their reason for posting the videos.
By the way, Conant and Osborne are in the midst of a tour of U.S. universities in the Northeast and Midwest. They're performing two of their multimedia works, "Cybeline" and "Music for the End of Time." This week they'll be in Ohio at Kenyon College (Tuesday) and Miami University (Wednesday). In case you didn't know, Malcolm Gladwell summarized the story of Conant's Munich Philharmonic audition to wrap up his latest best seller, "Blink." Conant herself didn't know he'd written it up until a friend told her. Here's the complete version of the story, which Gladwell cites -- how she won a blind audition for principle trombonist (besting 32 male trombonists) and how she then had to confront the orchestra's entrenched sexism.
Posted by jherman at 10:41 AM
March 19, 2006
EHRENSTEIN SINGS OUT
I shoulda known not to recommend "The Stuff That Happened" as a righteously wicked NYT editorial on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Even with its MSM waffling ("For the present, our goal must be to minimize the damage ..."), I thought he'd go for it. Boy, was I wrong.
Here's what came back from my comrade in blogs. Citation and verse:
"In their wishful thinking, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld undoubtedly tell themselves what they tell us: that the Iraqi people are better off than they were under the brutal dictator, that the Iraqi security forces are gradually learning how to take over defense of their own country and that a unified government is still a good possibility."That's the NYT's wishful thinking too. But Unindicted Co-Conspirators always move to cover their own asses first.
"The Iraq debacle ought to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of American leaders -- although, if our leaders were capable of being humbled, they could have simply looked back to Vietnam."
YA THINK?
Gee, Why didn't the NYT do that? Why didn't the NYT tell Judy Chalabi to go fuck her smug little self?
(Crickets chirping)
Yeah, Rose, he's singin' out.
Posted by jherman at 2:04 PM
March 15, 2006
THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS
Long ago in San Francisco -- the year was 1969 -- John Bryan and I put together an issue of Notes From Underground³. As you can see, it had a self-mocking cartoon cover (by Gary Grimshaw, our "art director"), which showed a newsie shouting, "REVO LOO-SHUN!!" while hawking the Daily Grind. I don't know if you can make it out, but the front page of the Daily Grind is illustrated by a pig-faced plainclothes cop in a pork pie hat offering the peace sign. The news stories above the fold are headlined "OINK" and "BLAH BLAH."
The issue led off with an article by Jerry Rubin (in his anarcho-leftist phase), "The Thoughts of Chairman Jerry," which began:
We of the white middle class are not children of violence. But increasingly, day by day, we are becoming enemies of a system whose basic means of control is violence, or the threat of violence. One never knows if he is going to return from a demonstration anymore with his precious head in one piece.
Rubin's article was illustrated by another Grimshaw cartoon, which showed what the demonstrations were about and again mocked the contradictory nature of the times.
A middle-class shopper in the supermarket is staggered by the produce in the meat department. "OMYGOD!!!" She can take her pick of fresh Dead Vietnam Babies 29¢ lb. and U.S. Choice Ground Pigburger 89¢ lb. Her shopping cart is filled with goods, one of them brand-named Junk. The shelves behind her are stocked with Goo, Zip, Fuz and Poo.
The second article, by Charles Bukowski, was called "Should We Burn Uncle Sam's Ass?" It began:
Or will he burn ours? I'll be 50 in August so don't trust me. That's 20 years over 30, and I wonder who the boys under 30 are going to trust when they are over 30? But maybe you ought to trust me a little ...
We were self-mocking but serious. Bukowski's piece was followed by Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Violence," which was followed by White Panther Party founder John Sinclair's "Letters from Prison," then by "Student Revolutionary Poems" written during the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State.
And we were arty.
We printed Fluxus writer Dick Higgins's letter to French "happener" Jean-Jacques Lebel, "On the Artist as Revolutionary"; Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, "In a Time of Revolution, For Instance"; Harold Norse's article, "Cyanide Genocide"; a Lenore Kandel poem, which began: "I offer you one hundred ways of love"; an illustrated game of revolution, "Us & Them"; two poems by Nanos Valaoritis; Jack Micheline's poem, "Five Generations of Freaks"; a cutup by Carl Weissner and yours truly, "If the Revolution Fails"; a reprint of William S. Burroughs's "After the Inauguration," and Sinclair Beiles's comical tales from a mental ward:
In the washroom I reckoned the specific gravity of my fellow inmates' urine by floating bottles of it in a washbasin alongside bottles holding the same quantity of water. The nurses were suitably impressed. From then on I was Dr. Beiles who had taken his medical degree in Cairo.
And, because we were also psychedelic, we featured the Notes from Underground "Psychedelic Cookbook," which provided formulas for synthesizing mescaline and LSD. Oh yeah. And what have we got to show for it? The bad old new days. Oh yeah.
Postscript: If you think Grimshaw's supermarket cartoon is overstated, Bob Herbert has news for you about "an ocean of blood" in Iraq.
Posted by jherman at 12:28 PM
March 13, 2006
THE COPYCAT AND THE ORIGINAL CAT
Is there a difference between appropriation and exploitation? Interpretation and imitation? Real live originality and gold-plated copycatting? Even in a postmodern world where the difference is sometimes hard to figure, I'd say there is.
![FLYPAPER [Beach Books, 1967]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/FLYPAPERcover.jpg)
Do you see any similarities in the images below? Three are by Norman O. Mustill, from "Flypaper" (1967) and "Twinpak" (1969). Three are by Vik Muniz, from a fashion spread that appeared in The New York Times Style Magazine (Dec. 5, 2005).
The similarities, though not exact, are so striking when taken together that if Muniz's images and techniques are not plagiarized from Mustill's, they bear what Martin Fuller calls in the context of architecture "the onus of plagiarism." That is, they are imitations, whether acknowledged or not. And they can't be claimed as postmodern appropriations because by definition appropriation art is intended to deconstruct, parody or otherwise comment on well-known cultural icons -- Mickey Mouse, for instance, or the Mona Lisa.
Shortly after The Times fashion spread appeared, I raised this issue with the editors of the magazine. After three months of stonewalling, they finally got back to me. The magazine's photography director, Kathy Ryan, who worked on the spread with Muniz, a currently "hot" self-described copycatter, said: "The similarities are a coincidence." She said Muniz told her he doesn't know Mustill's work.
OK, they're a coincidence. But to be fair to Mustill, a currently "not hot" original cat, how about allowing a letter to be published in the magazine noting the similarities with matching illustrations? Can't be done, she said. So much time has passed, it wouldn't make sense. (Blame the victim, anyone?) I guess I'll have to blog about this, I said. Fine, she said, no problem.
So have a look at the evidence.
Exhibit A: On the left, Mustill (from 39 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the exact material: tree branches within a human form in the context of a fashion statement and the referential hand.
Speaking of coincidence, here's what Muniz writes in "Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer" (2005), a book that serves as his manifesto: "Copying has been an extensive part of my work as an artist …"
Mustill comments: "Ape artist perhaps. D'ya think he believes this admission gives him carte blanche to rip off anyone and anything he surveys?"
Exhibit B: On the left, Mustill (from 37 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the technique combining newsprint and human figure cutouts.
Muniz writes: "I have always believed individuality to be more important than originality in art making. … When I worked in advertising, the rule was not to use any new idea that hadn't been tested by an artist before. Everything was borrowed or stolen."
Mustill comments: "So much for originalité artistique. Puts the whole fucking rumble into its proper perspective. He's still working in advertising."
Exhibit C: On the left, Mustill (from 39 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the reversal of imagery: the house as background vs. the house within the figure. (And how about the thematic reversal: ludicrous preening vs. fashionable tailoring?)
Muniz writes: "I guess that's how creativity develops: whenever you are doing something good, first people ignore you, then they antagonize you, and finally they copy you. …"
Mustill comments: "'cept to have my work morphed, reinterpreted, redeployed, and included (anonymously) among the famous, is no comfort at all.”
Incidental intelligence: The "O" in Norman O. Mustill stands for "Ogue," a single-word manifesto. When he took the middle name years ago, by dropping the "V" from Vogue, it made the point that ... oh, never mind, if you don't get it, there's no point explaining it ... Suffice to say, it underscores a special irony of the Muniz "coincidence."
Posted by jherman at 8:23 AM
March 10, 2006
HERE'S A STRETCH
Almost forgot about The Armory Show 2006, which steams into New York with a flotilla of international art galleries and thousands of artworks (purported and otherwise).
As Holland Cotter reports in this morning's New York Times, there will be a boatload of special events, like Critical Conversations in a Limo, a series of "intimate chats between V.I.P.'s and critics and curators for hire held in cars zipping between the Armory Show and DIVA, the Digital and Video Art Fair, one of several concurrent fairs in the city."
One of those critical conversationalists in the white stretch limo will be yours truly, thanks to an invitation from Holly Crawford, who organized the event. I don't know her, never met her. But she invited me, gawd help her. I'll letcha know what happens.
Posted by jherman at 9:32 AM
DEAR DIARY
Three days away from the blog means so little in the scheme of things that I'm betting you didn't notice. Anyway, Paul Krugman's column caught my attention this morning. Headlined "The Conservative Epiphany," it talks about "conservative commentators who have finally realized that [the Bullshitter-in-Chief's] administration isn't trustworthy." But, it adds,
we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says that there's something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by [the Bullshitter-in-Chief's] deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the beginning.
My ears perks up at the word "mendacity."
Need I say it reminded me of TED SORENSEN'S ITALICS? ("I have lived a long time," he said, "and I have seen a lot of administrations. But I have never seen an administration as incompetent -- and as mendacious -- as this one.")
Since Krugman's column is unavailable to the unwashed unsubscribed, I thought I'd mention the salient passages. According to the conventional wisdom,
if you're a former [Bullshitter-in-Chief] supporter who now says, as [Bruce] Bartlett did at the Cato [Institute], that "the administration lies about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that since the early days of the [Bullshitter's] administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of [the Bullshitter] who now says, as [Andrew] Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when [the Bullshitter] had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.
And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.
The truth is that everything the new wave of [the Bullshitter's] critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.
Amen to that, not for the first time, a'course, as subsequently amended.
Posted by jherman at 8:53 AM
March 7, 2006
FOR THE LOVE OF ALGREN
Nelson Algren's "A Walk on the Wild Side" is one of the great American novels of the 20th century. The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Ave (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.
When "Walk" first appeared, in 1956, the literary critics pretty much told Algren to take a hike, and for the many years since, they've pretty much ignored him and it. ![A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, new British paperback [Canongate Books Ltd]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/BRITISH%20WALK%20.jpg)
Now the British have brought out a 50th anniversary edition. Richard Flanagan, writing in The Telegraph, notes that the novel "made a mockery of the American dream. Set among the pimps, whores and con men of New Orleans, it was a brave -- and prescient -- exposé of the nation's contempt for its own people." Small wonder the lit crits of the '50s dismissed it.
Last year the Brits also brought out a new edition of an earlier novel, "The Man With the Golden Arm," the one that made Algren famous for a while. Apparently Brits who like to read the real thing, not to mention Aussies (Flanagan is one), have a history of appreciating him.
But so do savvy Americans. Although "Walk" and "Arm" have both been out of print from time to time on this side of the pond, they're available again in trade paperback editions ("Walk" with a remarkable appreciation by Russell Banks, "Arm" with memoirs by Studs Terkel and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as essays and appreciations by Mike Royko, John Clellon Holmes and Maxwell Geismar). Seven Stories Press has also re-issued a handful of other titles.
Flanagan's take on Algren's life and work is exactly right. Go read it. Before you do, though, have a look at a personal reminiscence of the man himself by Roger Groening, an old friend of Algren's, who writes that "if he'd never written a word, he would have been a spectacular human being." Which is not to suggest anything remotely saccharine.
AMATEUR NIGHT WAY OUT EAST
By Roger Groening
"It's a mean, sick city," Nelson Algren wrote me after arriving as a correspondent for the Atlantic in Saigon late in 1968. "Poverty, pimpery, parades, Col. Ky, thousands of cowboys on Hondas with nothing to do all day and night but race the streets. And the American GI's who want to go home. And the people wishing the hell they would go home. The Americans are definitely not liked here.
"What the war is about isn't what the papers say it's about. It's not about freedom, love of country, national pride, or democracy. It's about the Vietnamese, American, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Australian, and Indian businessmen making a very fast, fat buck and wanting it to last and last."
![NELSON ALGREN, 1962 [Photo: Stephen Deutch], Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/ALGREN%20FOTO%2C%201962%20%5BStephen%20Deutch%5D.jpg)
And always dreaming of the fast buck himself -- having seen writers not good enough to write his laundry lists make millions -- it was only days before the old blackmarketeer, the nylon, cigarette and Eisenhower jacket king of Marseilles found his chance.
"Meanwhile," he continued, "I want to get hold of a few American C-notes. Do you have any? A C is worth about $190 in piasters. More if you risk going into the streets after it. I'm not quite out of C-notes, and also have Traveler's Checks -- highly negotiable -- but am holding them out of circulation so as to have something to get out of town with in a hurry, if need be.
"If you have a C -- one -- and have it to spare, you might do this: slip it -- WITHOUT FOLDING -- into a sheet of carbon paper with the inky side out. Then scratch some words of wisdom, in that fine Italian hand, onto a letter and send the whole mess to me at the above address."
The Eric Ambler tone was new and so was the hint of complicity, but the request for a loan came as no surprise. I'd lent Nelson money a few times before, and when he was flush he always repaid me promptly. I couldn't have guessed that this loan would take him years to pay back, or that those years would be so filled with disappointment and hard, unforgiving times.
"Another helpful item would be a little book of UN repeat UN-personalized checks. I have the personalized kind myself but there might be a kickback there. Send them separately, if you have any handy."
![Algren passport, travel brochures from the '60s [Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/Algren%20passport%2C%20travel%20brochures%20from%2060s.jpg)
Obviously, this Algren was preparing to engage in some serious action, knew the nature of the task ahead and the tools required. "He's come to the right man," I said to my wife. "The guy's a criminal wizard." She didn't agree, I remember. In fact, she threatened to cut me up small, real small, she said, like a boarding-house pie, when I announced I was going to the bank. But the intrigue, the possibility of sure-fire second-hand adventure, the very idea of the thing, the daring of the concept, was irresistible. With clandestine delight, I followed my confederate's instructions. Fingers crossed, my wife's eyes hooded, I set myself to wait patiently, bravely, come what may.
I didn't have to wait long.
"The C-note came through!" shouted the news from Saigon. "The carbon paper tip, which an Australian hustler gave me, actually works. There is no such think as putting a trailer on a letter here -- if, when held up to the light, a check, money order or cash shows through, you don't get it, and that's it.
"I'm highly pleased at my ingenuity and at your recklessness."
So was I.
"Anyhow," he calculated, "I'll get 20,000 Vietnamese dollars with your C. With the V money I'll buy MPC (Military Payment Certificates), paying 17,000 for a hundred in MPC." Master of his subject and even its lingo, Nelson A. was expert and clearly at ease in the shadow world. "MPC is the real money here because it is the only money negotiable in the American PX's. And the American PX's, of course, are the source of everything the blackmarket requires: cameras, typewriters, tape recorders, record players, etc. These sell cheap in the PX and sell dear on the market.
"Can you spare some more C's?"
So, along with what at the time I believed to be a half-dozen or so others, I cast my vote for the free enterprise system and became an investor in one dandy small businessman. Nelson stopped covering the war. He left Saigon only once to observe troop activities in the jungle by air. Some shots were fired and his plane damaged. Convinced that there was a real enemy out there intent on killing him, he retreated, permanently. "I'm living in Cholon, which is poorer and more colorful than Saigon. It's where the hoods operate. The real war is being fought around the Cholon PX," he announced.
![Algren paperbacks, including A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, NEVER COME MORNING, THE JUNGLE, NEON WILDERNESS, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM and WHO LOST An AMERICAN [Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/Algren%20paperbacks.jpg)
I really didn't know Nelson Algren very well in 1968, not as I was to later. We'd corresponded for a few years, talked frequently on the telephone, and met half-a-dozen times in New York and Chicago, where I'd stayed with him for a few days the year before. I was amazed by the speed and ferocity of his intelligence and his wild uncontrolled humor and enthusiasm, and touched by his warm interest in someone who was little more than a kid, and by his kindness. Having listened to him recall his adventures in Marseilles after the war [WWII], I thought it very unlikely he'd be outsmarted in this new scheme, but I did warn him to be wary, for surely there were dangerous factors at play in that midnight city. After all, it didn't take any great perception to conclude that whoever his associates were, they operated not for a brief triumphant score, a substantial grubstake, but to survive in a vicious and wasted, thoroughly amoral, almost anarchic country. Nelson wanted only to out-guile the Orient and raise money to buy a not so little house somewhere by the ocean, a wish he frequently expressed, and which he innocently believed this opportunity in Vietnam was heaven-sent to make concrete. They had to be playing strictly for keeps and a single day. Smug and intrepid, he wrote back to reassure me:
I fear no oriental scamp. I learned how to handle them watching Wallace Reid handle Dr. Fu Manchu. Later I found certain flaws in Warner Oland and Roland Winters. Thanks for the C's and your confidence.Do you have anymore? There's a deal I hate to pass up on electric typewriters.
And so on.
What he did, of course, was reinvest whatever I sent him and the considerable profits of up to a thousand percent and maybe even more per item back into the enterprise. At the end he must have been dealing with a classical American buck and certainly a fortune in piasters.
We can consider, then, the bizarre spectacle of Nelson Algren, the first National Book Award winner, Hemingway's best bet for the future of American letters, skulking every day in the streets of Cholon, Major Algren (his official press identity, and it pleased him greatly), hawking his various PX-purchased wares, buttonholing strangers, cajoling them with unforgotten carny rhapsodies of Sony and Ampex, Leica and Nicon, Olivetti and Remington, Webcor and Magnavox, Kool's, Winston's, Salem's, Zenith! Then, having snared his wide-eyed, unsuspecting mark, guiding hand on the buyer's elbow, quickly up to his living quarters and storeroom for the exchange.
(Having failed over the course of three years to make PFC in WWII, due, he claimed, to his unwillingness to assume the responsibility, his sudden leap in rank reflected careful study and analysis of Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest's Civil War campaigns.)
The scheme sounded too good, too easy, much too risky to possibly last. The Vietnam experience, looking back, seems to be prophetically emblematic of the years to come. The childlike credulity that made him accept some ludicrous tales, the strange savvy innocence and unquestioning openness to experience that was his great gift as a writer, his dreaming longing, didn't serve him well in Vietnam. (We had a furious argument in 1970 when I questioned his assertion that Mike Nichols was making $1,000,000 a day. He also believed that the Chicago heavyweight who was KO'd in 1940 by Joe Louis and the current country and western singer Johnny Paycheck were the same man.) He was, as it turned out, dealing with folks who would reflexively kill, if other measures failed. They didn't fail with Nelson. Details are sketchy, but after what appears to have been a contest of wits about price in a dispute with a particularly greedy and nasty duo, he was savagely beaten and robbed, and he left Saigon broke and in need of dentures.
Still, he wouldn't or couldn't entertain the notion that he wasn’t a natural, high-style criminal, the hustler's hypnotic hustler. Failure in Cholon was the fault of the Vietnamese. From Hong Kong: "Finally surfaced after those months under the stagnant waters of Saigon," he wrote. "Coming up on the Kowloon side is like returning to the living. O those Vietnamese! I guess my basic gripe about them -- beyond the slyness, the mischievousness, the abject servility, the listlessness and the dispirited air -- is really that they're so goddam unoriginal. They just keep saying 'Numba one, Give me kendy, numba ten, Zippo lighter, give cigarette, Coca-Cola, me wuv you too much ...' and on and on."
Years later I found out there were no other backers. Perhaps he was refused, or simply knew no one else would support, even encourage him in such a venture.
Putting notes on Saigon together, it simmers down to very little for five months' work. You never realize how little you have, or how close you came, till after you've left a place. But I sure as hell ain't going back.
![Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter [Cover of German magazine TIP]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/hurricane%20literatur%20TIP.jpg)
And he didn't. He came back to Chicago, and that was no longer the place for him to be. An assignment from Esquire and his own restlessness brought him to New Jersey and the sad, unproductive involvement with Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and one of the most complex, baffling, infuriating homicide cases of the decade. He carried with him from Chicago that same wounded innocence, that same naive conviction that, yes, everything is going to be fine. But nothing would ever be really fine again. Nelson Algren was truly a Thurber man. Few things ever went right for him; still, he never stopped trying. He rarely owned anything, from a toaster to a T.V. that worked or, if it did, and he hadn't been overcharged for it, that he could operate. He was also the target of improbable accusations. A lunatic landlady ejected him from his Paterson, N.J., apartment for, she claimed, running a karate school in his living room.
(The same woman persuaded the gullible and superstitious Nelson that her late husband had been driven mad by the installation of a coronary pacemaker and had perished as a result. Nelson's absolute and unquestioning belief in her story, even after she'd proven herself to be a fantasist of the first rank, and fear of consequent insanity, led him to refuse a pacemaker after a first heart attack, a decision that probably led to his death.)
Next he found a place in Hackensack and was briefly happy there, when suddenly the owner sold that building and it was eviction time again. It took him months of living amid packed corrugated cartons before he found another suitable apartment, this time in Bethpage, L.I. The moving men came and he arrived only to find the landlady there had changed her mind, and denied him entrance. This time he stayed with the movers, who compassionately took him in for over a month. And on and on.
Finally, after further bizarre comic-tragic misadventures, Nelson settled in Sag Harbor, which he loved, where nothing went smoothly either, and in which he had less than a year to live. Still, I never saw him depressed, though I knew he had to be or heard him complain without joking, and it was a rare event that didn't release an unusual observation.
Amazing weather phenomenon: a blizzard came up and, as it blizzarded, it began getting colder and colder and colder -- until the blizzard itself froze, I was looking out the window when it happened -- the snowflakes stopped in mid-air, stippling the whole city with white dots! The fire department had to come out and chop the flakes down individually, so the blizzard could get started again. Next morning I found a wolf frozen to death on the back porch. I sold the head to a friendly eskimo, who gets a bounty for it.
Or, after a good day at the races, remembering a teaching stint at the U. of Florida: "Unhappy, there's no horse track in Gainesville. They play dogs chasing a mechanical rabbit down there. No thank you -- not unless they have cats for jockeys."
And then he was dead.
![Nelson Algren [Photo by Stephen Deutch], from the cover of the catalogue for the 1988 exhibit of Algren manuscripts and memorabilia at The Chicago Public Library Cultural Center [Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/Algren%20Catalogue%20%5BPhoto%20by%20Stephen%20Deutch%5D.jpg)
With him American naturalism had its final, golden moment; his work was both poetic and hilarious in the tradition of Mark Twain, deeply disturbing and heartbreakingly beautiful. But forget the writing. Far greater than Nelson's talent was his heart, and if he'd never written a word he would have been a spectacular human being. His death was a tragic loss to the world of laughter, to the spirit and example of generosity and courage, and an irremediable aching blow to the friends who loved Nelson Algren and will miss him as long as they live.
In Notes From A Sea Diary, he posed the question: "And of the American writers of our time, which one, given a single choice, would you bring back to life?," and answered that for him it would have to be Hemingway.
Well, for me the choice is much simpler. Of all the men I've known, now gone, if I could select one to re-animate, to once again, a little grumpily, answer the phone or open the door when I rang, that would have to be Nelson Algren.
Nelson Algren all the way.
© 1988 by Roger Groening. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the Chicago Public Library, Special Collections Division, from the pamphlet "Writing in the First Person: Nelson Algren 1909-1981," which accompanied a 1988 exhibit of Algren manuscripts and memorabilia at The Chicago Public Library Cultural Center. It was organized by Laura Linard and curated by Catherine Ingraham.
Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM
March 6, 2006
JEWISH CARTOON (LAFF) RIOT
The Muslim cartoon furor just won't go away. "About 50,000 people, many chanting 'Hang those who insulted the prophet,' rallied Sunday in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi," AP reports. Another 20,000 in the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum chanted anti-Danish slogans and shouted "Allah is Great."
We've all heard about the Al Qaeda video that denounced the Mohammed cartoons. The Pakistani press has stories like this one, "Cartoons rile U.S. college." And today's Wall Street Journal front-pages the latest absurdity headlined, "Blame It on Voltaire: Muslims Ask French To Cancel 1741 Play." (No link for the unwashed unsubscribed.)
To all the rioters: Enough already! Does that sound too Jewish? Too New York? Too reasonable? How 'bout a coupla Jewish cartoons that won't cause any riots 'cept, to quote a friend, mebbe a laff riot:
Posted by jherman at 9:14 AM
March 5, 2006
THE LITTLE THINGS THAT NIGGLE
The fine art of the meaningless gesture and the empty symbol was honed to perfection with a combined "symbolic gesture" when the Bullshitter-in-Chief arrived in Pakistan the other day.
![The Bullshitter-in-Chief with First Lady: 'Hi y'all!' Now duck. [AP photo]](http://www.firstcoastnews.com/assetpool/images/0633115232_bush.jpg)
A front-page story in The New York Times on Saturday reported that he "flew directly to Islamabad aboard Air Force One," as "a symbolic gesture that he considered the country safe enough for a presidential welcome on an open tarmac, and an overnight stay."
How safe was it and how meaningful the symbolic gesture? You decide. Here was the very next paragraph:
The capital was virtually sealed for his arrival. Concrete barriers and police squads blocked off the main avenues running to Parliament, the presidential palace and the diplomatic enclave where the president stayed, leaving the streets from the airport dark and deserted.
Further down in the story (12th graf), the meaning of that symbolic gesture is more fully developed: "Air Force One approached Islamabad with its running lights off and interior shades drawn, a precaution that would make it harder for anyone trying to aim a missile at the plane." Then:
After his airport arrival was covered by local television crews, [the Bullshitter] slipped away from public view, and reporters traveling with him could not tell whether he even rode with the presidential motorcade, or in an unmarked Black Hawk helicopter, to the heavily fortified residence of the American ambassador. ...
Since everything is relative in the bizarro world of White House PR, you could call the arrival a "public landing," because unlike Clinton's flight into Islamabad six years ago, as also reported in the story, the Bullshitter was not delivered in an "unmarked military jet accompanied by a decoy plane with the familiar blue and white of Air Force One and 'United States of America' on its side."
Meanwhile, over in Iraq ...
It was reported today, also in The Times, that "units of the American-trained Iraqi Army stood aside," according to U.S. commanders, "clearing the way" for the recent Shiite reprisals against Sunnis "carried out by the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr," and other militia fighters (a k a death squads).
But y'know what?
Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, who has been accused by Sunnis of allowing Shiite death squads to operate within police ranks, said he had sent a letter to all militia groups asking them to disband, as required by the new Iraqi Constitution.
How nice of him. And better than that, according to the report,
Mr. Jabr said that he had allocated $10 million to a fund to help militia members find new jobs, including positions in the new army and police forces.
That way the army and police won't even have to stand aside to carry out reprisals. They can do it themselves with their death squads fully authorized.
![Oscar countdown: The really important stuff [Ethan Miller / Getty Images]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/Oscars%20countdown.jpg)
Need I remind you of "the Salvador option" hidden in plain sight? Or the American general leading the multibillion-dollar effort to train and equip Iraq's police forces, who said he was heartened by Jabr's pledge to fully investigate the death squads?
Nah. These are just niggles. Why bother? Let's get to the really important stuff, like the countdown to the Oscars .
Posted by jherman at 10:17 AM
March 3, 2006
STARRY REARVIEW MIRROR
Refighting the Vietnam War is not an option. Rethinking it is. That's what they'll be doing in a star-studded, two-day conference to rival Sunday's Oscars. (Well, almost.) It's called "Vietnam and the Presidency" and will be held March 10-11 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Who are "they"? Oh, just a few policymakers of the Vietnam era (like Kissinger and Haig), along with journalists (like Halberstam and Frances Fitzgerald), and historians (like David Kaiser and Jeffrey Kimball). Others expected to be there include Jack Valenti, Wesley Clark, Dan Rather, Bob Herbert. Even Jimmy Carter will put in an appearance (via video). And, yes, Theodore Sorensen.
You may recall Sorensen's comment the other day about the mendacity of the current U.S. regime. (How could you not?) Well, that was only part of my brief conversation with him. What I didn't mention was this exchange:
Me: Do you know Gareth Porter's book, "Perils of Dominance"?
Sorensen: No. What's it about?
Me: I think you might be interested. It's a revisionist history of the Vietnam era. It talks about President Kennedy and Vietnam. Perhaps you could read it.
Sorensen: I'm sorry. I'm unable to read.
Me: Then I'll just tell you. The major theme is that a huge imbalance of power during the Cold War, not fear of communism, led us into Vietnam.
Sorensen: That's exactly right.
Me: It says that America had "decisive military dominance" over the Soviet Union and China, and that Kennedy didn't believe in the domino theory. Not in private anyway. And he was formulating a strategic policy to keep us out of Vietnam.
Sorensen: That's exactly what I'm going to say at the conference.
So folks, you read it here first.
The conference is being sponsored by the National Archives and the nation’s Presidential Libraries. NBC's Brian Williams will moderate all the sessions on Saturday, March 11. I said it was star-studded, dint I? Don't bother showing up if you don't already have a ticket. The organizers have posted this notice: "Due to the overwhelming public response, the conference is now closed as we have reached capacity."
Postscript: Will someone please ask Brian Williams to ask NBC to stop embarrassing him? This morning the network aired this TV commercial: "Ask not what this appliance can do for you. Ask what your appliance can do for your home." C'mon.
Posted by jherman at 8:57 AM
March 2, 2006
THE LIES WITHIN
So the New York Public Library bought the William S. Burroughs archive, with "11,000 pages of manuscript and typescript material," most of it from the 1960s and '70s, and never seen by scholars. The purchase likely cost millions. The report doesn't mention the price. It does mention Burroughs's cut-up experiments and his sense of humor. I wonder whether the collection includes the manuscript for this tasty morsel from HARD/1, a little mimeo mag that appeared in the summer of 1972, which I have in my files.
Lie Lie LieBy William Burroughs
Xolotl and Ouab are organizing guerrilla resistance in South America. First step is to weed out the proliferating CIA infiltrators ...
A jungle camp. The CIA volunteer with a dead man's cover story is escorted into a thatched hut by two guerrillas.
Xolotl is sitting on a stool the shrunken heads of other CIA agents on shelf behind him a tiny American flag at half mast planted by each head. The CIA man's cover story stirs queasily. Xolotl is a black salamander boy with yellow electric eyes. A Ouab bird is perched on his shoulder. He motions the CIA man to a stainless steel stool in front of him. The two escorts stand in the doorway of the hut machine guns cradled chewing coca juice.
"Welcome friend if you are one. Sit here and hold my hands ..."
Ouab the cat boy with quick precise fingers is making adjustments on an improvised switchboard. A dome-shaped metal reflector descends from the ceiling and stops two feet above the CIA man's head. He looks up nervously.
Xolotl: "Are you connected with the CIA or any related intelligence service?"
"No senor. Those cabrones killed my brother ..."
"Lie Lie Lie" screams the Ouab bird. Ouab electrocutes the CIA man with a blast of DC.
"That's the way they should have made electric chairs in the first place. DC not AC."
Ouab perfects a small portable lie detector that can be used by anyone after a few weeks training.
"Are you connected to the CIA? That reads. What do you consider this could mean?"
The CIA man's head shrinks to the size of an orange. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz holds the head in his hand as he addresses intelligence agents.
"So a stupid head ... We can inflitrate as well and better ..."
Here is the seedy generalissimo in a Miami cocktail lounge with two CIA men.
"Yes I will have another double whisky. Yes we will resist the slave driver Mao and his gang of cut throats with the help of our American FRIENDS" ...
And here is a top-level defector with his brief case. Hot biological weapon. Just one little piece of misdirection ...
PS from Herr Doktor von Steinplatz: "We are on course so using the cold war nonsense for our own purposes."
Which is a lie within a lie within a lie.
Burroughs always said real events do not occur until a writer writes them. Curveball, anyone? ("Top-level defector with his brief case. Hot biological weapon. Just one little piece of misdirection.") To say nothing of the Viet-'Raq connection ("... dishonesty and deception ..." etc.) Furthermore, I normally wouldn't think of yoking Bill Burroughs and Ted Sorenson in the same sentence. But given Sorensen's emphatic remark yesterday about the mendacity of the current U.S. regime and this old Burroughs satire in my files, I think their names fit well together.
Posted by jherman at 9:47 AM
March 1, 2006
TED SORENSEN'S ITALICS
Grim and getting grimmer -- that's my "take away" from this afternoon's roundtable discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations about the situation in Iraq three years after the invasion (per yesterday's item, now with Gareth Porter's "Lessons of Vietnam" appended).
Asked by Jane Arraf (former CNN Baghdad Bureau Chief) whether the latest violence in Iraq is a turning point in the war there, Stephen Biddle (senior fellow for defense policy at the council) replied: "It's an acceleration of what we've seen before rather than a fundamental break. What's changed is the intensity of the fighting."
In other words, the brink of civil war is, in fact, a civil war. And here was the topper from Steven Simon (senior fellow in Middle Eastern studies and co-author of "The Next Attack: the Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right"): "I'm in my usual state of suppressed panic." Which got a laugh.
Since the council will be posting a transcript and audio of the roundtable, probably by tomorrow, I'll link when it goes up rather than report a summary of what was said by a lot of well-informed people, including the fourth roundtabler, Noah Feldman (a professor at New York University School of Law and a former senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq).
I'd rather describe my short conversation with Theodore Sorensen, right -- JFK's great speechwriter, close friend, special counsel, and biographer -- whom I buttonholed after the roundtable to get his take on the Bullshitter-in-Chief and the cronies of his regime. Out of politeness -- we were within earshot of diplomats and other high-minded types -- I didn't characterize the Bullshitter et al that way. But if I had, I don't think Sorensen would have minded.
"I have lived a long time," he said, "and I have seen a lot of administrations. But I have never seen an administration as incompetent -- and as mendacious -- as this one."
The emphasis was his. I asked Sorensen, who will be 78 in May, if I could quote him. He asked, "Who are you with?" I told him I'm a freelance journalist and blogger, and that I'd be posting his comment on my blog. He smiled. "Yes," he said, "of course." He could have backed off, but he didn't. Now that's menschy.
Posted by jherman at 4:54 PM
February 27, 2006
THE VIET-'RAQ CONNECTION
Not too long ago the idea of comparing the American misadventure in Iraq with the Vietnam War was strictly limited to anti-war activists. To mention Iraq and Vietnam in the same breath made neocons roll their eyes, and even pro-war establishment liberals wouldn't hear of it. How things have changed.
"Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon" is the title of an essay by Stephen Biddle in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, which will be out on newsstands today. "Contentious as the current debate over Iraq is," he writes, "all sides seem to make the crucial assumption that to succeed there the United States must fight the Vietnam War again -- but this time the right way. The Bush administration is relying on an updated playbook from the Nixon administration."
Biddle notes that "U.S. strategy in Iraq today is remarkably similar" to the plan for withdrawing from Vietnam that Nixon outlined in 1969. "Even the rhetoric surrounding the two plans is strikingly similar," he reminds us. "Bush's claim that 'as the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down' parallels Nixon's hope that 'as South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.' "
The trouble is there's a difference between "a people's war" (Vietnam) and "a communal one" (Iraq), Biddle contends, and "Iraqization" -- which is "the main component of the current U.S. military strategy" -- will have the opposite of the intended effect:
In a people's war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire.
Let's ignore the fact that Vietnamization did NOT make sense in Vietnam, either (when you look at that outcome), which Biddle somehow fails to address in his essay. Presumably, someone will bring that up on Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations, where Biddle (a senior fellow in defense policy) will participate in a roundtable to discuss the situation in Iraq three years after the invasion.
More important is whether the roundtable will address what independent historian and national security policy analyst Gareth Porter explains in his recently published revisionist history of the Vietnam War, "Perils of Dominance." To put it country simple, a superpower facing weak opponents can be too strong for its own good. Porter argues with persuasive lucidity that America's "decisive military dominance" over the Soviet Union and China -- "not Cold War ideology or exaggerated notions of the threat from communism in Southeast Asia," the commonly accepted reasons -- led the United States down the blinkered path to a debacle.
I see a hand going up in the back row. The Soviet Union doesn't exist today, and communism has been routed. So what's the relevance now? Let's see. You remember all those assurances by the White House, and the Defense Department, and the CIA? The invasion would be a cakewalk? The occupation would be flowers of gratitude? The weapons of mass destruction would be a slam dunk? Of course you do. Well, here's Porter on Vietnam:
The extremely high level of confidence on the part of national security officials that the United States could assert its power in Vietnam without the risk of either a major war or a military confrontation with another major power conditioned the series of decisions that finally led to war. To put it another way, the imbalance of power so constrained the policies of Moscow and Beijing toward Vietnam (and toward the peripheral countries more generally) that it created incentives for ambitious U.S. objectives in that country.
Porter offers chapter and verse, laying out his argument with unassailable facts as "evidence for the critical influence of unequal power relations" on crucial Vietnam policy decisions. He examines the implications of his revisionist history "for understanding the nature of national security policy making in a state with dominant power in the international system." His account, he argues, "definitively contradicts the comforting view that 'the system worked' in making policy on Vietnam."
Further, he discusses "the emergence of a 'dysfunctional' process of national security policy making accompanied by unprecedented political tensions and a pattern of dishonesty and deception within the executive branch in the struggle over Vietnam policy." And finally, he provides "the lessons to be gleaned, in the present 'unipolar moment' in global politics and U.S. foreign policy," from U.S. involvement in Vietnam "in a Cold War era that was" -- contrary to the conventional wisdom -- "also effectively unipolar."
Current events in Iraq have been moving so fast that even day-old commentaries can seem outdated. But Porter, whose analysis is not limited to historical retrospectives or to books with long lead times, cuts to the heart of new developments in commentaries for the global, multilingual Inter Press Service that have lasting value. See, for instance, "US Realignment With Sunnis Is Far Advanced," which dissects the apparent willingness of the U.S. regime "to make some kind of deal with all the major insurgent groups" in Iraq, a signal "that the United States is no longer wedded to the option of supporting Shiite military and police." Although already a month old, Porter's analysis seems as fresh as if it were written yesterday in both its diagnosis and prognosis.
Still earlier, his piece "How to End the Occupation of Iraq: Outmaneuver the War Proponents," for Foreign Policy in Focus ("a think tank without walls") in April, 2005, offered antiwar activists advice on strategy and tactics about developing a proposal for the negotiated withdrawal of U.S. troops and, at the same time, anticipated the commentaries of other, better-known pundits -- Fareed Zakaria, for example.
Here's what Zakaria wrote in his column in Newsweek on Aug. 8, 2005, "Talking With the Enemy":
America's goal must be to split the insurgency, which can be done only by co-opting some important elements of the Baathist movement. A senior non-U.S. diplomat, who has spoken to all the key figures in Iraq over the past two years, tells me that for months leaders of the insurgency have been putting out feelers that they would like to talk with the United States about a settlement. ... Salih al-Mutlaq, whose National Dialogue Council has links to the insurgents, argues that negotiating with them would cripple the jihadists. "If the Americans reach an agreement with the local [Baathist] resistance, there won't be any room for foreign fighters," he says.
And here's what Porter wrote five months earlier:
A negotiated settlement need not have the participation of every nationalist group to serve the interests of peace. The foreign terrorists in Iraq aligned with al-Qaida are certainly not going to be part of any peace settlement, but relations between the nationalist resistance leaders and their followers, on one hand, and the foreign terrorists who bomb Shiite mosques and behead foreigners, on the other, quickly became very tense last year. It seems likely that most of those in the resistance would be unwilling to tolerate the presence of foreign jihadists in the country once the American troops have departed. Turning those nationalist against their erstwhile foreign allies through a peace settlement, therefore, is the surest way to end the recruitment and training program of the terrorists in Iraq.
Both columns continue to make sense.
No armchair analyst, Porter travels widely in third-world countries and writes for other outlets such as tompaine.org and mediachannel.org. On Friday he arrived in Manila just as Philippine President Gloria Arroyo announced a State of Emergency. His comment? "A kind of Martial Law Lite declaration," he said in an e-mail.
With his permission and the publisher's, here's a special offering:
LESSONS OF VIETNAM FOR THE UNIPOLAR ERA
excerpted from "Perils of Dominance" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)
© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California
By Gareth Porter
Since the end of the Cold War, it has been universally agreed that the international system is "unipolar," meaning that no other state or possible combination of states can counterbalance the power of the United States. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the new century, students of international relations and international security have carried on a heated debate over whether the new situation of clear-cut U.S. dominance is likely to endure and whether it is desirable in terms of international peace and stability. Defenders of policies aimed at exploiting the "unipolar moment" have argued that the present structure is likely to be enduring, and that it is more likely than a balance of power to preserve peace, because it minimizes uncertainty. They assert that U.S. dominance ensures that weaker states will not be tempted to challenge even an expansive definition of U.S. security interests around the globe.
Opponents of policies based on unipolarity, on the other hand, argue that a policy aimed at preserving and exploiting U.S. dominance is both futile, because of the fundamental tendency of states to balance against a dominant power, and dangerous, because the exploitation of dominance is likely to be seen as provocative by other states. Paralleling these academic arguments over the unipolar system, of course, are sharp differences of view over the practice of unilateralism in the use of military power by the United States against a weaker "rogue" state in the absence of a consensus of the international community. The Bush administration justified the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as minimizing the likelihood of serious threats to U.S. and international security. Opponents saw the unilateral use of force in Iraq as more likely to increase regional instability and the dangers to U.S. and global security.
These debates on the advantages and disadvantages of unipolarity and of policies that exploit it have assumed that there has never before been anything in the modern state system even remotely similar to the present global structure of power. This assumption reflects the conventional view that there was a rough bipolar balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. The reinterpretation of the period between the Korean and Vietnam wars offered in this study suggests, however, that the dominance of U.S. power over that period was roughly equivalent to the unipolarity of the post-Cold War period. In the earlier period, U.S. power could not be balanced by that of the Soviet Union and China. By 1964, U.S. officials had begun to view the Soviet Union less as a Cold War rival for power than as a potentially useful adjunct to U.S. efforts to impose a settlement in Vietnam at some future date. Several major states today arguably occupy analogous political roles in relation to the issue of unilateral U.S. use of military force.
The insights that can be gleaned from reassessing the dynamics of the political system and of U.S. policy making toward Vietnam during that period are highly relevant, therefore, to the present "unipolar moment." In particular, the U.S. experience on the road to war in Vietnam offers useful lessons about the ways in which the United States is most likely to become involved in wars in a unipolar system. The question is whether wars are more likely to arise from states that seek to make a significant change in the international balance of power, or even to disturb a regional status quo, or from the tendency of the United States to extend its power and influence too far and to provoke greater resistance and hostility to U.S. power.
In retrospect, it is clear that the U.S. dominance during the interwar period of the Cold War reduced to virtually nil the possibility of wars involving the Soviet Union or China -- the only second- or even third-level states in the power hierarchy who at least in theory were hostile to U.S. power interests. Neither Communist great power was willing to taken even minimal risks of a military clash with the United States. The extreme imbalance of power ruled out even the encouragement by the USSR or the PRC of a direct challenge by local Communists to U.S. power interests. It is no accident that the Soviet Union and China, whose internal organization and ideology inclined them toward support for such challenges to the existing international order, both gave up their previous policy of backing revolutionary struggles just as the new power configuration emerged at the end of the Korean War. Those effects of the unipolarity of that interwar period can be counted as positive for preventing war.
The lesson of this study of the impact of unbalanced power on the Vietnam issue, however, is that the absence of challenge from second-rank or third-rank states in terms of power does not prevent the occurrence of war on the periphery. The initiative in challenging the U.S. power position in South Vietnam in 1959-60 did not come from either of the major Communist powers, after all, but from the Vietnamese Communists themselves. It was not the North Vietnamese regime, moreover, that initially pushed for an armed uprising aimed at upending the Saigon regime. The party leadership in Hanoi, under pressure from their Communist patrons and cautious in the face of the ever-present threat of U.S. military force, had been prepared to continue to support the Soviet-Chinese strategy of waging only political struggle in South Vietnam. The initiative came from the South Vietnamese victims of the Diemist repression, for many of whom the issue of armed struggle was literally one of life or death. Their motivation in taking up arms had nothing to do with Cold War politics between the two blocs. These southern communists and former Viet Minh forced the hand of the North Vietnamese regime by threatening Hanoi with a loss of control over its followers in the South.
In the earlier unipolar power era, then, it was those with the least power who were willing to take the initiative to challenge U.S. power, rather than those who were closest to the United States in power capabilities. Although seemingly paradoxical, this historical fact reflected an elementary reality: these local resistance forces had the least to lose and the most to gain from challenging the status quo established by U.S. power. Furthermore, they were the least knowledgeable about U.S. power capabilities. This fact suggests that the debate over the present unipolar power structure has been too narrow in its focus on whether other major powers or potential major powers are likely to challenge U.S. dominance. The previous experience with unipolarity indicates that the United States can probably intimidate second- and third-level states, because the risks of even slight over resistance to U.S. assertion of power beyond their borders are simply too great. One lesson of the path to war in Vietnam, however, is that war is much more likely to arise, not from a decision by those with the most to lose but from conflicts involving the vigorous assertion by the United States of its power interests abroad, even in the absence of an overt challenge by another state.
A second lesson from the path to war in Vietnam has to do with the roles of force and diplomacy in the ability of the dominant power to exert influence on potential foes. The dominance of the United States in the international politics of the interwar period was based primarily on its ability to manipulate the implicit or explicit threat to use U.S. air and naval power -- including the ultimate sanction of the use of nuclear weapons -- without having to actually use that power. We now know just how strongly the existence of strategic asymmetry impressed on the Soviet Union and China, as well as North Vietnam, the risks and costs of war with the United States. During the entire period between the Geneva Accords and the major U.S. combat intervention in Vietnam in 1965, the North Vietnamese leaders were ready to make far-reaching compromises on the length of time that an independent non-Communist regime could remain in the South, provided that it was buffered from U.S. political-military power. That position was a direct consequence of the ability of the United States to threaten wholesale destruction of North Vietnamese society. For the same reasons, the North Vietnamese also limited participation in the armed struggle to native southerners for the first four years of the war.
Despite genuine fear of U.S. attack, however, the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] became increasingly committed to the struggle in the South from 1961 on. Its gradual assumption of increasingly greater risk reflects two factors working in tandem. The first was the fact that the outcome of the struggle in the South bore on the primordial interest of the regime in national independence. The more direct reason for the escalation of North Vietnamese involvement, however, was that the United States completely shut the door on any compromise that could have allowed North Vietnam to end the war honorably.
By rejecting diplomatic negotiation, the United States threw away most of its actual ability to shape the political outcome in South Vietnam through a combination of threat, restraint, and knowing what concessions it could extract from Hanoi, short of giving up the ultimate possibility of reunification. Paradoxically, by attempting to press its advantage too far -- and especially by engaging in systematic bombing of North Vietnam while blocking the possibility of diplomatic overtures -- the United States sacrificed its considerable influence over Hanoi's choices.
I have argued above that the outcome of U.S. policy can be traced to the reading of power relationships by the national security bureaucracy. In opting to put in a large ground contingent and postponing any diplomatic probe of Hanoi in 1965, Johnson's national security advisers were basing their recommendations on the incentives that they presumed to be inherent in the overwhelming U.S. dominance in the power relationship with Hanoi. In doing so, they completely ignored the much more complex set of actual incentives facing Hanoi.
This episode illustrates the broader problem of the reliance by the national security bureaucracy on the absence of any external countervailing power in using force. It suggests that national security officials in the dominant state are incapable of going beyond crude signals of hierarchical power in thinking about going to war against a weaker state or sociopolitical movement in conflict with U.S. policy. The record of policy deliberations on Vietnam suggests that the advisers were simply unable to recognize that they were pressing their power advantage too far in South Vietnam in that crucial March-May 1965 period. The fateful decisions to deploy more troops and to forgo genuine negotiations were only possible because of the engrained habit of relying too heavily on the U.S. power advantage in Vietnam over a period of years. This is obviously not a tendency that is exclusive to the U.S. Vietnam policy in the first half of the 1960s, moreover. It is likely that it is endemic to policy making over a prolonged period of unbalanced power and conflicts with much weaker adversaries.
In documenting the effect of the imbalance of power on U.S. policy toward Vietnam, this study illustrates the most fundamental insight of realist international relations theory: that a rough balance of power is necessary to curb the tendency of the strongest state to exploit its power advantage to the maximum at the expense of weaker states. "Unbalanced power is a danger to weak states," Kenneth Waltz once observed, adding, "It may also be a danger to strong ones." Realist theory generally asserts that the tendency of the strongest state to extend its power and influence continues until it is checked by external forces or by sociopolitical forces at home that weaken its ability to do so.
Until the end of the Cold War, realists generally did not apply this general principle to the United States, but in the present "unipolar moment," the issue of how to restrain excessive use of U.S. power is unavoidable. It has now become part of the debate over the advantages and disadvantages to the United States and to the world of U.S. dominance of the international system. Waltz, for one, has suggested that peace will require not only external constraints on U.S. power but internal restraints as well. Students of unipolar politics and foreign policy looking at the questions of domestic restraint on the deployment of U.S. power abroad would do well to take account of the political dynamics of policy making on the road to war in Vietnam.
A recurrent theme of this study has been that the impetus for the assertive use of U.S. military power in Vietnam came overwhelmingly from the national security bureaucracy itself, rather than from the presidency. The previous section discusses the ways in which the policy-making process on Vietnam because dysfunctional because of the refusal of national security advisers to accept a presidential policy that rejected the use of military force in defense of national security interests. That earlier unipolar experience suggests that the problem of inadequate domestic restrains may be exacerbated by the tendency of the national security bureaucracy to assert itself in policy making.
Alongside these parallels between the present unipolar moment and the one that existed for at least twelve years in the 1950s and 1960s, there are obvious differences as well. Perhaps the main one is a far greater pluralism of sociopolitical and intellectual views of national security in the current phase of unipolar power than existed in the earlier period. As long as the unipolar moment persists, however, the political power of the national security bureaucracy, both within the executive branch and in the larger society, will certainly remain a challenge to domestic efforts to restrain the use of military power by the United States.
Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM
February 23, 2006
OH YEAH
A friend writes, "Ya gotta love Lina":
The ones who don't enjoy themselves, even when they laugh. Oh yeah. The ones who worship the corporate image, not knowing that they work for someone else. Oh yeah. The ones who should have been shot in the cradle... Pow! Oh yeah. The ones who say "Follow me to success, but kill me if I fail... so to speak." Oh yeah. The ones who say we Italians are the greatest he-men on earth. Oh yeah. The ones who are noble Romans, the ones who say "That's for me," the ones who say "You know what I mean." Oh yeah. The ones who vote for the right because they're fed up with strikes. Oh yeah. The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty. The ones who never get involved with politics. Oh yeah. The ones who say "Be calm, calm." The ones who still support the king. The ones who say "Yes, sir." Oh yeah. The ones who make love standing in their boots, and imagine they're in a luxurious bed. The ones who believe Christ is Santa Claus as a young man. Oh yeah. The ones who say 'Oh, what the hell.' The ones who were there. The ones who believe in everything, even in God. The ones who listen to the national anthem. Oh yeah. The ones who love their country.The ones who keep going, just to see how it will end. Oh yeah. The ones who are in garbage up to here. Oh yeah. The ones who sleep soundly, even with cancer. Oh yeah. The ones who, even now, don't believe the world is round. Oh yeah, oh yeah. The ones who are afraid of flying. Oh yeah. The ones who have never had a fatal accident. Oh yeah. The ones who have had one. The ones who, at a certain point in their lives, create a secret weapon, Christ. Oh yeah. The ones who are always standing at the bar. The ones who are always in Switzerland. The ones who started early, haven't arrived, and don't know they're not going to. Oh yeah. The ones who lose wars by the skin of their teeth. Oh yeah. The ones who say "Everything is wrong here." The ones who say "Now let's all have a good laugh." Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Posted by jherman at 9:47 PM
February 21, 2006
BOLD, RED-FACED CONTRADICTIONS
Iraqi death squads doing America's dirty work? Why would you think that? The U.S. regime has distanced itself from the Sunni genocide, hasn't it? In public, of course. But yesterday's story in the Los Angeles Times, "Police Tied to Death Squads" shows, possibly without meaning to, how contradictory and difficult the distancing is:
![Next to an empty casquet an Iraqi waits for the body of his brother, killed by a death squad. [AP photo]](http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/2_17w.jpg)
A 1,500-member Iraqi police force [the highway patrol] with close ties to Shiite militia groups has emerged as a focus of investigations into suspected death squads working within the country's Interior Ministry. ..."We don't train them, we don't give them equipment, we don't conduct site visits over there. They are just bad, criminal people," said a high-ranking U.S. military officer who advises the Interior Ministry. [But now hear this:] The officer was one of three who each spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they wanted to maintain relationships with Iraqi police officials and avoid retaliation by U.S. military superiors. ...
"Who knows who they all are? Nobody controls them but the minister," the officer said, referring to Interior Minister Bayan Jabr.
Jabr, a Shiite with close ties to the Badr Brigade, a paramilitary group, has been at the center of allegations of abuse at the hands of Iraqi security forces. The minister's notoriety rose last year as the bodies of hundreds of men -- mostly Sunni Arabs -- started appearing in sewage treatment plants, garbage dumps and desert ravines. ...
Leading Sunni figures have blamed the reprisals on Jabr. ...
In a recent interview, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who is leading the multibillion-dollar effort to train and equip Iraq's police forces, vigorously defended the minister and said he was heartened by Jabr's pledge to investigate the abuse fully.
"Death squads -- they're a real issue," said Peterson. "I can tell you, we caught our first death squad," he said, referring to the unit that was apprehended last month. "The minister of Interior is elated that we caught them," he added. ...
Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch [above], a U.S. military spokesman, said that the Interior Ministry was leading the investigation into the suspected death squad.
Ali Hussein Kamal, the Interior Ministry's intelligence chief, said, in an interview Sunday that investigators were also trying to determine whether the Iraqi general in charge of the highway patrol was linked to the squad.
"If we find that these allegations that he is involved are true, we will be taking very firm measures against him," Kamal said. "But generally speaking, high-ranking officers are usually ignorant of what their lower-ranking officers are doing."
By golly, you betcha. That's just what Rummy said about Abu Ghraib: The torturers were a bunch of low-ranking bad apples, thass all.
Posted by jherman at 8:24 PM
February 20, 2006
TORTURE: THE REAL McCOY
The subject of torture is back with a vengeance not only in the latest Abu Ghraib photos obtained by Salon, but in "The Memo," Jane Mayer's latest exposé, which pins the blame on a gang of war criminals running the U.S. government.
So before it disappears into the past, here's a must-see: Alfred McCoy speaking with Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview that aired on Friday. He is the author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror," published last month by Metropolitan Books. McCoy, who is also a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gives an absolutely riveting account of the history of torture techniques perfected by the CIA over the past 50 years.
Some of it may surprise you. For instance, McCoy says that all the CIA's research with electroshock, hallucinogens, and other drugs came to nothing as interrogation tools. LSD, mescaline, and sodium pentathol, the so-called truth serum, simply did not produce useful results.
Instead the agency discovered that the two principal tools that worked were simple, even boring techniques: 1) sensory deprivation, and 2) self-inflicted pain. With these two techniques alone CIA researchers were able to induce psychosis in research subjects, he says. Since then the CIA has added sensory overload (such as loud music) and two more techniques, perfected at Guantanamo and later brought to Abu Ghraib: 3) cultural sensitivity ("particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity"), and 4) individual fears and phobia.
McCoy's presentation is far more striking and detailed than you get from my outline. He also traces the development of Army and CIA interrogation manuals, actual practices, and Congressional legislation regulating them. And much of what he says may be confirmed with ease, he adds, by typing KUBARK into the Google search engine. (Or just click the link.) This will get you to a list of relevant documents, including the formerly secret 1963 CIA counterintelligence interrogation manual. McCoy suggests reading the manual footnotes because that's where some of the most interesting information is. If you click on this, you can see the actual training manual documents, which illustrate the linkage at key points from 1963 to 1983 to 1992. And don't forget to have fun.
Now read this from Bob Herbert's column on Monday, "The Torturers Win." Herbert describes what he calls "the quintessential example" of extraordinary rendition -- the CIA's "reprehensible practice" of outsourcing torture, i.e., kidnapping suspected terrorists and secretly packing them off, drugged, hooded and shackled, to foreign countries for interrogation -- along with proof that the U.S. regime's war criminals have already subverted the American justice system.
Terrible things were done to Maher Arar, and his extreme suffering was set in motion by the United States government. With the awful facts of his case carefully documented, he tried to sue for damages. But last week a federal judge waved the facts aside and told Mr. Arar, in effect, to get lost.
What were those terrible things? Just this: Arar, right -- "a 35-year-old software engineer who lives in Ottawa, [Canada], with his wife and their two young children [and had] never been in any kind of trouble" -- was subjected to extraordinary rendition. In other words, he was "seized and shackled by U.S. authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, and then shipped off to Syria, his native country, where he was held in a dungeon for the better part of a year."
His guards beat him with electrical cable. Cats pissed on him. He himself had no place to piss or shit except in his unheated, rat-infested cell, which was the size of a grave and just as dark, Herbert writes. After 10 months, "when even Syria's torture professionals could elicit no evidence that he was in any way involved in terrorism," he was released and no charges were ever filed against him.
The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf, seeking damages from the U.S. government for his ordeal. The government said the case could not even be dealt with because the litigation would involve the revelation of state secrets. ...... U.S. District Judge David Trager dismissed Mr. Arar's lawsuit last Thursday [and] wrote in his opinion that "Arar's claim that he faced a likelihood of torture in Syria is supported by U.S. State Department reports on Syria's human rights practices."
But in dismissing the suit, he said that the foreign policy and national security issues raised by the government were "compelling" and that such matters were the purview of the executive branch and Congress, not the courts.
He also said that "the need for secrecy can hardly be doubted." ... As an example of the kind of foreign policy problems that might arise if Mr. Arar were given his day in court, Judge Trager wrote:
"One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."Oh yes, by all means, we need the federal courts to fully protect the right of public officials to lie to their constituents.
Sidenote: A front-page article in today's New York Times says another case "has come to symbolize the C.I.A. practice known as extraordinary rendition" -- that of Khaled el-Masri, "a German citizen of Arab descent who was arrested Dec. 31, 2003, in Macedonia before being flown to [a] Kabul prison." Well, takes yer cherce: Arar or Masri. And doncha just love that description, "arrested" and "flown"? Soooooo travel agent.
Postscript: Speaking of terminology, a friend messages: "Contemporary, uh, 'book burning'?"
Posted by jherman at 9:45 AM
February 19, 2006
DEAD RECKONING
It was 59 years ago that Richard Nixon made his first speech before the House of Representatives:
I think that every Member of the House is in substantial agreement with the Attorney General in his recent statements on the necessity of rooting out Communist sympathizers from our American institutions.
"Meanwhile in Look magazine, Eleanor Roosevelt observed The Russians Are Tough," says David Ehrenstein, who will doubtless appreciate Nelson Algren's remarks, also from that golden age of snoops and dupes when the late, great novelist's life was turned inside out and upside down by the FBI and other Red hunters.
"Say I'm standing knee-deep, and sinking, in the muddy waters of the Little Calumet, " Algren wrote.
![Nelson Algren reading a letter from Simone de Beauvoir, ca. 1950 [Photo: Art Shay]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/NELSON%20reading%20SIMONE%20letter.jpg)
Some anxious-looking patriot paddles up, identifying himself as the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker bringing tidings of comfort and joy: namely, that if the Little Calumet were the Volga I'd be up to my ears. And paddles away as contentedly as if he'd really done something for me.He hasn't done a thing, this roving mercenary with the shaky gerund. Not even when he warns me that I better stop saying Ouch when McCarthy gives the screw another turn -- lest the Kremlin overhear my yip and tape record it for rebroadcasting to Europe. Who's paying him for God's sake?
The insistence of these long-remaindered intellectuals on short leashes that, compared to the drive for conformity in the USSR, we don't have any notion as yet of what the real thing can be like, reveals loyalty to nobody save Henry Luce. Whose dangerous dictum it is that it is now America's part "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." ...
When we can make a half-hero out of a subaqueous growth like Whittaker Chambers, and a half-heroine out of a broomstick crackpot like Hester McCullough, and then place a government employee under charges because unidentified informants alleged that "his convictions on the question of civil rights extended slightly beyond that of the average individual," it is time to call a halt.
Prescient words from "Nonconformity," a booklength essay Algren wrote between 1950 and 1953. It was published for the first time in 1996 by Seven Stories Press, with an afterword by Daniel Simon, who rescued the mansucript from oblivion.
Some presidents don't deserve to be honored, not on President's Day or ever. Nixon is one. The Bullshitter-in-Chief is another.
Posted by jherman at 11:52 AM
February 18, 2006
WHAT HARRY DINT SAY
Cheney Boy's 78-year-old shooting victim, Harry Whittington, spoke out after being released from the hospital. As reported by the Associated Press, "His voice was a bit raspy, but strong, and he had what appeared to be a line of scarring on his upper right eyelid and scrapes on his neck." This is what he said: "I regret that I couldn’t have been here earlier so you could see what a lucky person I am." This is what he dint say:
Posted by jherman at 11:28 AM
February 17, 2006
DEEP FOCUS, ES CLARO?
Before the week is out I want to clarify an issue of burning interest to film hogs, critics, scholars and other lower forms of life. There seems to be a sudden interest in "deep focus" and its original Hollywood practitioners. It's a simple cinematic technique, and yet its history and meaning are somewhat misunderstood even by such cinephiles as The New Yorker's film critic, David Denby.
Writing in the current New Yorker about "how clear and sharply focussed the wide-screen image was" in Steven Soderbergh's new, low-budget picture "Bubble," Denby marvels that the "focus is not only sharp; it's sharp deep into the shot, at distances of thirty feet or more from the camera." And then he gets into a discussion of the French film theorist André Bazin, whose influential writings in the 1950s assigned "an almost moral importance" to "the commonplace photographic measure of depth of field." Denby points out:
In the Russian silent movies, and in the American cinema of the thirties, depth of field -- the amount of the frame that was in sharp focus -- was generally shallow, and filmmakers used lighting and editing to direct our attention to the most significant part of the action; the rest was blurry, mere background. As Bazin noted, however, such directors as Orson Welles, in "Citizen Kane," and William Wyler, in "The Little Foxes," both working with the cinematographer Gregg Toland, greatly expanded depth of field -- expanded it so much that the audience was suddenly free to direct its gaze to the foreground or the middle distance. It could follow an actor as he moved through the set or not. Deep focus, Bazin said, liberated the spectator from the coercion of montage.
All true, but -- and there are several "buts" -- Welles and Wyler used deep focus in opposite ways. Bazin stated this himself in a seminal essay in 1948. He recognized that Wyler exploited deep focus to achieve an "invisible" style that prized realism. By "invisible," as I wrote in my Wyler biography "A Talent for Trouble,"
![Biography of William Wyler [Da Capo paperback edition]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/COVERjacket%20A%20TALENT%20FOR%20TROUBLE.JPG)
Bazin meant his signature was honest, democratic and stripped down, in contrast to that of Orson Welles, which he regarded as mannered, even sadistic. Wyler's point, Bazin wrote, "is not to provoke the spectator, not to put him on the rack and torture him. All [he] wants is that the spectator can (1) see everything; and (2) choose as he pleases. It's an act of loyalty to the spectator, an attempt at dramatic honesty." Bazin compares the neutrality and transparency of Wyler's staging -- "un style sans style" -- with Andé Gide's literary technique, which maximized clarity, immediacy and directness. ... [L]onger, therefore less deceptive, shots ... allow the audience to choose what it sees. Unlike Welles's use of "deep focus" to create effects (such as foreshortening perspective or heightening suspense), Wyler makes functional use of the technique. ... [H]is first and only worry is to make the audience understand ..."
Welles wants to dazzle -- and he does, of course -- as often as not with exotic effects that give the viewer no choice but to submit to their impact. You can prefer Welles or Wyler, but you can't put them in the same bag just because they both worked with the same cinematographer whose technical and artistic skills helped them perfect the use of deep focus.
Bazin went to the trouble of counting the number of shots in Wyler's most famous deep-focus picture, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), to prove how streamlined his style was. (He noted that Best Years used roughly 190 shots per hour, compared with 300 to 400 for the average picture.) But for all Bazin's theorizing, which remains the essential analysis of Wyler's body of work, he was basically echoing and elaborating on Wyler's own intentions as expressed in an essay, "Magic Wand," which was published in 1947 in Screen Writer magazine. Referring to his collaboration with Toland, Wyler wrote:
We decided to try for as much simple realism as possible. We had a clear-cut understanding that we would avoid glamour close-ups and soft, diffused backgrounds. ... [And] since Gregg intended to carry his focus to the extreme background of each set, detail in set designing, construction and dressing became very important.
But more important, "carrying focus" in black-and-white cinematography provided crisp images with "good contrasts and texture ... establishing a mood of realism." Also -- and this was paramount -- it not only allowed Wyler greater freedom in staging his scenes but imposed a more rigorous, fluid and involving aesthetic.
I can have action and reaction in the same shot without having to cut back and forth from individual cuts of the characters. This makes for smooth continuity, an almost effortless flow of the scene, for much more interesting composition in each shot, and lets the spectator look from one to the other character at his own will, do his own cutting.
As useful as the technique was, however, Wyler's concern really lay elsewhere. "I have never been as interested in the externals of presenting a scene," he pointed out, "as I have been in the inner workings of the people the scene is about."
Something else I'd like to clarify. Whenever The Little Foxes (1941) is mentioned in the context of deep focus, per Denby, the scene usually cited as the perfect example of the technique is the so-called "staircase scene." In fact, that scene -- with Bette Davis as Regina, and Herbert Marshall as her ailing husband Horace -- was purposely NOT shot in deep focus most of the way through. As I noted (bear with me), here's why:
[The scene] begins with Regina telling Horace, who is sitting in his wheelchair, that she never loved him but married him only for material gain. What she cannot see, but we can, is the pained expression on Horace's face, as her remarks precipitate a heart attack. He tries to take his medication, but the bottle drops and breaks. ...When he pleads for her help, she recognizes an opportunity and sits stock still not lifting a finger or blinking an eye. Horace staggers out of his wheelchair toward the staircase behind her. He struggles up toward the bedroom where he has more medication. But the camera doesn't follow him. It remains fixed on Regina's stony face, which is rigid with anticipation in the foreground. She listens keenly for his collapse in the background.
Instead of using deep focus in this scene, which could have kept both planes of action sharply etched, Wyler chose to blur the focus on Horace in the background, where the external drama is. The camera keeps Regina in sharp focus, where the internal drama is, both to draw attention to her cruelty and to underscore her steel will.
"What is interesting here is the wife," Wyler explained. "The scene is her face, what is going on inside her. You could have him out of the frame completely, just hear him stagger upstairs. ... Gregg said, 'I can have him sharp, or both of them sharp.' I said no, because I wanted audiences to feel they were seeing something they were not supposed to. Seeing the husband in the background made you squint, but what you were seeing was her face."
As long as I'm clarifying things, I might as well go all the way. Have a look at the Turner Classic Movie commentary⊗ for a recent presentation of Wyler's Dodsworth (1936):
Wyler, for his part, was a known perfectionist in his approach to filming. One cast member recalled "one entire afternoon spent shooting a scene of a crumpled letter being blown gently along the length of a terrace. He wanted it to go slowly for a way, then stop, and then flutter along a little further." (From A Talent For Trouble by Jan Herman). Luckily, he had Gregg Toland -- whom he considered a technical genius -- as his cinematographer and Dodsworth is full of stunning, deep focus compositions such as the scene where Sam and Edith accidentally meet in Naples at an American Express office.
The commentary gets it wrong when it cites Toland's contribution to the film, and wrongly reinforces the widespread notion that Wyler was dependent on Toland's eye for pictorial composition. Here's the relevant passage from the book:
The cinematographer for Dodsworth was Rudolph Maté not Gregg Toland, who was working for Howard Hawks on Come and Get It. ...[Maté] was a fine craftsman, in Wyler's opinion, but no Toland. Still, if proof were needed that Wyler did not depend on Toland's eye for mastery of the screen -- pictorially or dramatically -- Dodsworth provides it. Even more than These Three, it shows the spare elegance of his fluid style, balanced compositions and steady takes.Wyler always credited Toland with being a technical genius. But his own concern with spatial arrangement of characters in a scene to tell a story or create an effect -- whether psychological or symbolic -- predated his work with Toland. In Dodsworth, moreover, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that Wyler conceived of 'deep focus' shots, even without the technological means to perfect them.
A case in point is his treatment of the accidental meeting of Sam and Edith in the American Express office in Naples. The two characters, each unaware of the other, shift back and forth between foreground and background. Wyler's pictorial division of the scene develops a sense of expectation in the viewer. Visually, if not dramatically, the configuration foreshadows the sort of pattern Wyler would use again, most notably in The Little Foxes and The Best Years of Our Lives, which were benchmarks of the Toland-perfected 'deep focus' technique.
Es claro? I hope so, 'cuz just typing all of this has tuckered me out.
⊗This item originally cited Rob Nixon as the author of TCM's "Dodsworth" commentary. Not so Nixon informs me. In an email sent today (Dec. 17, 2006), he says, "i do write for tcm's website and recently contributed an article about dodsworth for the essentials series, in which i was well aware that gregg toland was not the cinematographer. but this is not the article posted on line that you refer to (especially since your article is dated last february, months before i even wrote the new piece). i don't know who wrote the piece you refer to, but it wasn't me. i've sent a message to the person who edits and compiles the tcm website to have my name removed from it."
My apology to Nixon for repeating the error. TCM has swiftly updated the "Dodsworth" commentary I cited, eliminating both the Toland mistake and Nixon's name as author. Another thing ought to be said: the TCM site is really pretty great. It offers movie fans lots of terrific info.
Postscript: David Ehrenstein writes:
Excellent points.
Jean Renoir's use of depth of field in "Boudu Saved From Drowning" (1932) should also be cited in any discussion of this aspect of film style. And Renoir didn't have Gregg Toland or the sort of sharp-focussed cinematography that arrived in the '40s.
Alan Edelson writes:
This is an interesting topic. I too believed the story that the famous staircase scene in "The Little Foxes" involved deep focus, even though I have seen the film several times.From what rudimentary optics I know, increasing the depth of focus of a lens depends on increasing the "f" stop (i.e., closing down the iris), which requires boosting the lighting of the scene to compensate for darkening the exposure. Wide-angle lenses inherently have an increased depth of focus, but may not be appropriate for many movie scenes. Of course, the development of improved lens designs helped. These were greatly aided by the use of computers in lens design from the late '50s on, as well as by the use of compound lenses and glass of different optical qualities.
It must have required technical ingenuity of a high order for cinematographers to achieve increased depth of focus in the "old days." And artistic judgment by the director. I recall that a common alternative device when directing the viewer's attention from a close up actor to one in the background was to employ a cam that was timed to switch the focus of a camera lens from near to far, or vice versa, but I was always uncomfortably aware of this artificial gimmick. Anyway, I enjoyed reading your discussion. It reminded me of the range of skills required of a really great film director like William Wyler.
Yes, Toland was regarded at the time as something of a mechanical genius. He experimented with coated lenses, high-speed film stock, Waterhouse stops, and even got into sound-deadening with a camera "blimp." He was also very quick on the set. What took some cinematographers four hours to light took him 30 minutes, according to Wyler, who was driven to distraction by the slow ones.
Posted by jherman at 4:03 PM
February 16, 2006
CHENEY BOY'S NURSERY RHYME
From his interview with Brit Hume:
I'm the guy
who pulled the trigger
that fired the round that hit Harry.
From Mother Goose:
This is the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
Postscript: And now for the topper: Mother Abu Ghraib.
Posted by jherman at 8:53 AM
February 15, 2006
DA CHENEY FUNNIES
The stuff coming out of the White House is too funny to stop. Coupla hunnerd proof at least. Can't help it. Here's more:
And don't forget, he loves the smell of gunpowder.
Posted by jherman at 12:50 PM
PREYTORIAN GUARD RIDES AGAIN
I dunno who Don Krupp is, but I say give him an op-ed column. His letter to the editor in this morning's New York Times works for me.
To the Editor:Re "No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident" (front page, Feb. 14):
The debacle of Vice President Dick Cheney's misfire while quail hunting in Texas is a sad caricature of what the whole Bush administration is about: make an error in judgment, try to keep a lid on it, and then blame everyone else when the story inevitably becomes public.
When confronted with questions, the Bush White House tried to blame Mr. Cheney's hapless hunting partner for getting in the way. These, of course, are the people leading this country. Remember, these are the same people who misled the country about mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
If we can't trust Mr. Cheney and company with a simple shotgun, why should we trust them with this nation's Defense Department?
Don Krupp
Olympia, Wash., Feb. 14, 2006
I suppose Don Krupp would have to be vetted before being given a column. Unfortunately, he shares a name with Alfried Krupp, patriarch of the infamous German armaments family, a k a the Krupp conglomerate. But from the tone of his letter I doubt that he's related. Nicht wahr?
Postscript: This arrived last night, Feb. 20, validating my belief in DK and, not incidentally, the wonders of the Web:
Dear Jan,I just stumbled across your blog and your kind remarks about my recent letter to the editor in The New York Times.
As for being "vetted before given a column," I can assure you that I have no family relation to the Krupps of Germany. I am Polish and my surname is a shortened derivation of a much longer, less pronounceable name than the one my father was christened with - Krupowicz.
Thanks for taking notice of my letter. I had fun writing it and was thoroughly surprised when The Times accepted it for publication.
Regards,Don
Posted by jherman at 9:54 AM
February 14, 2006
TRICKLE, TRICKLE
![HOW THE NEWS TRICKLED DOWN [Timeline by The New York Times]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/02/13/politics/14cheney.large.gif)
Not to jump the gun, so to speak -- but if Cheney Boy's 78-year-old shooting victim were to die from the "minor heart attack" he suffered or from any other injuries he sustained as a result of being accidentally shot, can Cheney Boy be charged with negligent homicide?
If so, will he be?
And if that were possible, would it be too much to ask Cheney Boy's victim to give his life for the good of the Republic? The question is fraught with moral implications but worth asking, methinks.
Postscript: A reader writes: "How many more revelations will it take before people realize this is a crime family? A hunting accident (even if lethal) is nothing compared to the fraudulent push into war. Nothing."
Another writes: "I asked that same question myself. I would think that at the very least a grand jury should be called. Who ruled it accidental?"
Ah. Good point. And here's the funky answer: The local Texas sheriff, Ramon Salinas III of Kenedy County, said an investigation had concluded that the episode was "no more than an accident." As reported by The New York Times, Salinas said he sent his chief deputy, Gilbert Sanmiguel, to the Armstrong Ranch (where the shooting took place) on Saturday night. He said Sanmiguel interviewed Cheney Boy and reported that the shooting was an accident.
By Sunday, however, the sheriff's department had yet to speak to Cheney Boy's victim, Harry Whittington. "But you could say it's closed," Salinas said of the case. Then, on Monday, the sheriff's office issued a press release that said "Mr. Whittington's interview collaborated [sic] Vice President Cheney's statement" and that the department was "fully satisfied that this was no more than a hunting accident."
Yes, you read that right. The interview was a collaboration. Presumably, the sheriff's department meant a corroboration. You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to draw a suspicious collusion -- sorry -- conclusion.
Posted by jherman at 4:49 PM
DA BIG BLOW
Before the record blizzard of '06 disappears into the murk of history, I want to let everyone know that I'm alive and well. One friend out West, hearing about "da big blow," messaged me: "I hope you're comfortably dug in for the duration. Thass lotsa white stuff. Coraggio!"
Yes, it took lotsa coraggio to survive without a dent. But I was so dug in I hadda watch the Weather Channel to find out it was snowing. And then I saw this day-after photo of Times Square, left.
Well, I thought it was Times Square until another friend who lives in Brooklyn messaged that he'd taken it last night at 6:15 p.m. in Prospect Park, not far from his Park Slope apartment. When I asked him, "Where are the crowds?," he admitted he hadn't taken the picture himself, but had grabbed it from an online source.
"It's not actually Times Square," he said. "But it does show a park, out West somewhere. In this age of memoirs that's close enough, isn't it?" And anyway, he'd been over to Prospect Park to witness the scene. "It was quite manageable," he said. "I saw a few sledders and a handful of skiers."
In fact, there were more than a few cross-country skiers out on the street, like the one, below, on First Avenue in Manhattan's East Village. Yesterday I saw a skier myself. Not on the slopes. On the subway. Not on skis, but in full regalia carrying her skis. Apparently she was on her way to Central Park.
![Cross-country skiing on First Avenue [Photo: Chang W. Lee, The New York Times]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives/skiing%20in%20the%20street.jpg)
By the way, everybody noticed how manageable the blizzard of '06 has been. "Even as the snow fell, and fell and fell, late Saturday and throughout Sunday, it never felt like the end of the world," Andy Newman wrote in this morning's front-page story, "As Monsters Go, This Storm Had a Lighter Tread."
Unlike the blizzard of '47, which held the city's snowfall record of 26.4 inches until this weekend's blow topped out at 26.9 inches.
"In those days many one- and two-story houses were heated with fuel oil," another friend recalled, describing his childhood experience in '47. "They still are. In our case it was Paragon that supplied us. Well, it turned out the oil was low."
My grandfather usually took care of that sort of thing. But suddenly on this day there was no fuel, no oil, no heat. Somehow my grandparents took off for my aunt and uncle's apartment a few miles away; a place with HEAT in a large apartment complex. My Dad went to stay with his cousins so that he could get to work early in the morning. The rest of us -- mother, brother and little me, we intrepid few -- bundled up and went to sleep with the last dregs of some warmth still in the house.Morning was cold, really cold, not merely "really" cold but so cold that getting out of bed was entirely out of the question -- till force overcame my resolve (or inertia, which may be the same thing). Ultimately, bundled and freezing, we set forth for the main street, Morris Avenue, and started looking for transportation, indeed, even a cab. (You needed to be dying before you took a cab!)
I was about to lie down and face the big sleep. But 5 or 6 blocks later, a miracle! A cab! It stopped and took us past Yankee Stadium, up the big hill to my Dad's cousins who had another miracle waiting for us. Three miracles, in fact: Shelter! Warmth! Food!
This friend of mine no longer lives in New York City. He has chosen to live where snow is not allowed and where miracles are a daily occurence. "As Scarlett once said," he says, "I'll never, never, freeze my butt off again!" He lives in Beverly Hills.
Posted by jherman at 9:54 AM
February 12, 2006
MASTER OF THE COSMODEMONIC
Somehow in all the reports I've seen about Western Union's last telegram (sent on Jan. 27) and the end of an era, there was the usual nostalgia for a bygone technology and the usual chronicle of Samuel Morse and the invention of the telegraph, an