(Display Name not set)August 2003 Archives

It's time for the Labor Day Weekend. But don't leave just yet. In a minute-by-minute rundown of last night's ultraslick, ultraridiculous, ultra-important MTV Video Music Awards, Ryan McGee has again demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of, and appropriately cynical attitude to, the kulcha of pop.

His real-time review, a race "against the clock and Meta Carpal Syndrome," is a circus feat that you might think lowfalutin stuff. But I hope you notice the astute references -- clever, intricate, some more arcane than others, but all apt and insightful. It's a summa cum laude display of essential knowledge for anyone who wants to understand America, dude.
 
Fortified by a "super-sized Double Quarter Pounder" from McDonald's and "the 460-ounce cup that comes with it" (apparently for his bottle of Bacardi), McGee settled in for the show and, like a true fan, the pre-show. Here are some selected highlights:

EXCERPTS FROM THE PRE-SHOW REVIEW

6:56 pm: Sweet Mary Mother of God. Christina Aguilera killed the flamingos from "Fantasia 2000" and is wearing their skins. That ain't right.

7:14 pm: Kim Cattrall is inexplicably in this Eminem/50 Cent montage. She's like, the hottest 84-year-old ever. I can't even believe she's the girl in "Mannequin." That came out in 1926, I think.

7:20 pm: Does anyone know who actually nominates and/or votes on these awards? My theory is that MTV just goes out to an Arby's at like 3 am and finds a few drunk people. It makes as much sense as any other theory.

7:45 pm: OK, this can't be topped. John Norris just called Ludacris "Luda" without being ironic and asked him "how many G's" his coat set him back. OK, John, enough's enough. Isn't this why we have Homeland Security? To take out people who are harmful to my way of life? If John Norris has a job next year, then the terrorists have already won.

EXCERPTS FROM THE SHOW REVIEW

8:00 pm: They've recreated the original set for Madonna's 1984 "Like a Virgin" performance. A veiled woman appears atop the cake. Lessee ... amazingly off-key voice, sounds a bit like she's out of breath already ... hey, it's Britney Spears. She doesn't even have to take the veil off for me to know that.

8:02 pm: She's joined onstage by Christina Aguilera. Yes, these two are singing "Like a Virgin." The entire country shouts at their television: "How the HELL would you know?"

8:03 pm: Madonna appears. Furthering understanding and smashing stereotypes, the cameras cut immediately to the cast of "Queer Eye." I'm watching Jai's temple burst from excitement on live television.

8:04 pm: So let me get this straight: Madonna co-opted these two girls, put them in skanky wedding dresses, and then MAKES OUT with them? Whew. For a second I thought Madonna was doing all this as a desperate attempt at relevance, clinging to her last 5 minutes of fame like a wounded tiger, but I was wrong.

8:05 pm: History may shed light on what Missy was doing out there, but personally, I'm at a loss.

8:06 pm: Well, that was weird. Kinda like MTV's version of "The Balcony."

MOVING RIGHT ALONG

8:21 pm: Missy Elliot's "Work It" wins. Excellent. It's good to see proper recognition for a song that deals with one of the most pressing problems today: the economy. Missy's cry for job creation and economic stimulus packages is to be commended. What? It's not about that? What is it about? Oh. Um. Nevermind then.

8:41 pm: More awards that were announced during the pre-show: "Best Use of An Artist Currently in Prison," "Best Jailbait Video," and "The Only Five Songs in Rotation Not Produced by Timbaland or The Neptunes."

8:49 pm: Wait, Christina AGAIN? Didn't we already fulfill our community service requirement during the first number? ...

9:10 pm: P. Diddy wants us to pay respect to the memory of Barry White and Gregory Hines. He also announces that his next single will feature Barry White singing over Hines' tapdancing featuring a special verse from Notorious B.I.G. and a guitar solo from Robert Johnson.

9:18 pm: Whoa. Watching 50 Cent try to make an acceptance speech is a little like watching a 2nd grader freeze up in his/her first school play. Only the 2nd grader in this case is completely high.

THERE'S MORE

9:21 pm: We're nearly 90 minutes into the show, and no Enrique sightings yet. So far, so good.

9:50 pm: OK, I'm just gonna say this and move on: Jack Black is the guy that everyone pretended Chris Farley was. Man's just amazing. Can't wait for "The School of Rock." I'd pay $10 to watch this guy read the phone book.

9:51 pm: If you can watch the video for "Seven Nation Army" and not vomit, you're got a better stomach than I do.

9:53 pm: Linkin Park stuns the crowd and wins "Best Rock Video." Stuns them because everyone appears to have assumed they had already disbanded. (My only guess here is that the same demographic that eats at Arby's also likes Linkin Park.) Our attention spans are so short that MTV has planned to do the intro number as the closing one and is counting on no one noticing.

10:00 pm: Duran Duran, Kelly Osbourne, and Avril Lavinge. Or, as I like to call them, "The Supergroup That Nobody Asked For, Nobody Wants, and Really, It Would Make Most People More Comfortable If You Just Left Quickly."

WE'RE ALMOST HOME

10:35 pm: Beyonce accidentally has wandered into a bad college modern dance piece and is now surrounded by a bunch of dudes who are covered head to toe in black. More than a bit odd. Next up: girls dancing around in pillowcases, just watch.

10:37 pm: So, lemmee get this straight: They bleep out the word "blunt" but do a loving, up-close-and-personal, 25-girl, ass-shaking pan with the camera, so close I know what kind of wax they got this morning? American morals, people. They're faaaaaaaaaantastic.

10:45 pm: Anyone else think that Britney Spears and Madonna have just been making out backstage for the last 3 hours, hoping someone would notice? Just me then? OK.

11:01 pm: Metallica just played 30-second instrumental versions of Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way?," Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," and Michael Jackson's "Beat It." I don't even need to put a joke here, do I? Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Let it not be said that this column ignored the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic "I have a dream" speech. About 200,000 people assembled at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear King and other civil rights leaders on Aug. 28, 1963. If you have Real Player, you can listen to King's speech in full on the History Channel Web site. The speech lasted only 16 minutes, but it will resonate for as long as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. 

The Associated press reported that Chris Rock, host of the 20th MTV Video Music Awards, didn't forget about it. "Isn't it nice to see that his dream has finally come true?" he wisecracked, after the rapper 50 Cent put in a performance of "P.I.M.P.," along with Snoop Dogg, the ubiquitous former pimp Bishop Don Magic Juan, members of his G-Unit posse -- and a bevy of half-naked women.

Now for really serious things: a magazine swimsuit issue starring Albert Einstein, which needs no further comment, and tonight's broadcast of the 20th MTV Video Music Awards, which has starred so many media-made creatures that the ever-reliable celebrity site MSNBC.com insists on offering them more free publicity.

Ryan McGee, a former Harvard man with a beautifully named Weblog, Wading in The Velvet Sea, has followed the MTV Awards for a long time -- maybe too long. It seems to have  infected his brain with fame fever. The other day, he had this to say:

Roughly a year ago, I "hit it big" with a rundown of the Video Music Awards. It was my first taste of widespread readership, and the positive feedback I received basically transformed my blog into what it is today. So I know all too well, even in my miniscule version of celebrity, how intoxicating it can be, and why you strive towards it.

Without question, McGee feels the pulse of pop culture in his finger tips. But attentive, earnest musings on celebrity such as his -- though honest, smart and often funny -- make you wonder about the value of a Harvard education.

What are they thinking? It has me flummoxed. Four out of five Americans disapprove of removing the Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of Alabama's state judicial building. I know America is populated by weirdos. How else do you explain TV shows like Fox's "Miss Dog Beauty Pageant"? But have we gone so completely nuts that we want to install a theocracy? Have we learned nothing from the Ayatollahs? Take a look at walking man. Anyone for putting him in the rotunda?

Postscript: Leave it to Christopher Hitchens for the punchline: "Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it."

Still, Arts Journal reader Shane Hockin has a point:

Both sides are totally overreacting. On one side, one hunk of concrete in a courthouse does not mean the Bible is going to become America's lawbook just because it has religious jargon on it. On the other side, one hunk of concrete taken out of a courthouse does not mean that everyone's religious rights are going to be taken away from them next week.

If we take a single step right or left, everyone gets all up in a hissy fit. Nine times out of ten the hissy fit is unwarranted and we soon step back in the middle again. The whole thing has been blown out of proportion. ... In the end I blame Judge Moore. To make himself look like a martyr he has made a mockery of our judicial system. At least someone had the sense to suspend him. Hopefully soon we can all get on with our lives and worry about important things like ending war, fixing the economy, and getting some tacos for lunch.

Somebody must have turned back the clock. The iconic image of Allen Ginsberg, recalling his "Pentagon Exorcism" days circa 1967 (stars-and-striped stovepipe hat, black-framed eyeglasses, full beard and riveting, innocent eyes), stares at me from corner newstands all over Manhattan. His face is on the cover of Time Out/New York, which dubs him "the spiritual muse" of the Howl! Festival, a weeklong celebration of the arts that just ended in the East Village.

The Fugs are back, making a splash with "The Fugs final cd, (part 1)," their first release in 17 years. (Download link to the songs.) They're wrapping up their "Last Reunion" tour with a free "Literary Concert" at the New York State Writers Institute in Albany on Sept. 16. (Download link to "The Fugs First Album." )

Meantime, Fugs leader Ed Sanders has an essay in Time Out (not online, unfortunately) recalling his Peace Eye bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an era when Life magazine put him on its cover because of his literary notoriety. In the early 1960s, he edited a mimeographed poetry journal called FUCK YOU / A Magazine of the Arts and wrote lyric poems that scandalized the literary world.

Here's the way Ed began "The Hairy Table," a story published in 1968 in a San Francisco little magazine I once edited, decades before the vernacular became acceptable in magazines like The New Yorker:

Her delicate tongue of flame slid into the crinkles of my ass, jabbing here like a sparrer, there sucking like a cuttlefish. ... I filled her snatch full of air and gently drew it out in funt-spurts, tasting the salmon moisture of the wheezes.

(The story drew the wrath of a Midwest congressman, who foamed about it on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in one of the earliest battles against the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Paul Krassner, who staked his own claim to literary notoriety in the '60s, is about to launch a weekly column, "Zen Bastard," in the alternative weekly New York Press. Just this morning there's a review of a new book going over old ground by Henry the K in The New York Times (free registration required). And now Blue Wind Press has re-issued Ted Berrigan's "So Going Around Cities," a collection of poems from 1958 to 1979.

Some day future anthropologists will thank Berrigan for his poetry. A leading figure (the father figure, really) of the second-generation New York School Poets -- what I think of as the Kitchen Sink School -- Berrigan threw everything into his poems from the hair on his face to the amphetamines he took, from the ice cream he ate to the bedsheets he slept on, from the streets he walked to the all-night raps he talked, from the boredom he felt to the sex that excited him. He pretty much left nothing out.

I could cite many beautiful poems, like this one, excerpted from "The Sonnets NYC 1963":

Sweeter than sour apples flesh to boys
The brine of brackish water pierced my hulk
Cleansing me of rot-gut wine and puke
Sweeping away my anchor in its swell
And since then I've been bathing in the poem
Of the star-steeped milky flowing mystic sea
Devouring great sweeps of azure green and
Watching flotsam, dead men, float by me
Where, dyeing all the blue, the maddened flames
And stately rhythms of the sun, stronger
Than alcohol, more great than song,
Fermented the bright red bitterness of love
I've seen skies split with light, and night,
And surfs, currents, waterspouts; I know
What evening means, and doves, and I have seen
What other men sometimes have thought they've seen

But if nothing else in "So Going Around Cities" had made the Blue Wind collection worth re-issuing, this prose stanza from "Memorial Day 1971," a long poem Berrigan wrote with Anne Waldman, would have all by itself:

I asked Tuli Kupferberg once, "Did you really jump off of The Manhattan Bridge?" "Yeah," he said, "I really did." "How come?" I said. "I thought that I had lost the ability to love," Tuli said. "So, I figured I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The Manhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off." "That's amazing," I said. "Yeah," Tuli said, "but nothing happened. I landed in the water, & I wasn't dead. So I swam ashore, & went home, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed."

Berrigan was not the first poet to write about that. Ginsberg wrote about it much earlier in "Howl" (though he got the bridge wrong). He listed Kupferberg among "the best minds of my generation" as the unnamed jumper "who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer..."

Kupferberg, now in his 80s, was not one of Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project boys, but that does not exclude him from the genius club. He did write the Fugs song "Kill for Peace," after all, along with others such as "Supergirl," "Nothing" and "CIA Man." And he still makes eminent sense, or did six years ago.

POSTSCRIPT

A friend remembers that Sander's second magazine, after Fuck You went under, was called The Dick. Issue No. 1 had a headline: Ted Berrigan Teaches Parrot to Scarf Cock. If MacArthur "genius" awards had been around then, that headline alone should have earned one.

Since this column is about the arts, as well as media and culture, may I recommend three art shows?

One, which has the advantage of being online, is "the bauhaus at the busch-reisinger." It comes to us from Harvard and offers details of Bauhaus design -- the thingness of things -- in five categories of what I would call Platonic essences: LAMP, CHAIR, HOUSE, STAGE, AUTO (as in car). Although not interactive (thank gawd!), the online program is fully engaging.

But if you're looking for the motherlode of expressionistic architecture, the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin is the place to go. Its current exhibit, "Building a New World: Architectural Visions of Expressionism," runs though Sept. 15. Overlooking the fact that "few of the buildings designed by Bauhaus architects were actually built," as it was modestly put by a report in THIS WEEK IN GERMANY (from the official German Information Center), the Bauhaus style "remains Germany's most lasting contribution to architecture."

For those who prefer less highfalutin arts, or just plain lowlife pleasures -- let's drink a stein of beer to them -- there's the current exhibit of "Pulp Art: Vamps, Villains and Victors from the Robert Lesser Collection," just extended through Oct. 19 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The gritty, lurid, fantastical pulp magazines from the '20s through the '40s had remarkable cover illustrations first created as paintings. More than 100 of these paintings are on view. For example: Amazing Stories and New Detective Magazine.

The pulps were a populist art, "literary dream machines," according to the exhibit's online notes, which take a page from the pulps' overwrought literary style itself. Especially during the Great Depression, pulp stories offered "a passport into worlds of adventure and romance," while pulp art "helped readers to visualize everything from ancient civilizations to outer space -- from faraway lands to the dark recesses of the imagination."

What I'd like to know is, were there any Bauhaus artists illustrating pulp magazines? It seems to me that the style of those existential Platonists could have lent itself mightily to the medium.

The New York Times finally caught up with us and ran its obituary (free registration required) about David Jiranek. 

The Jiranek family put on an unforgettable memorial service Sunday at Lucas Point Beach in Old Greenwich, Conn., where he grew up. Dubbed "The David Show" by Todd Hoffman, one of his four half-brothers, it was both touching and irreverent -- so much so that the speakers had more than 400 guests dabbing away tears of sadness while laughing at hilarious stories about David Jiranek's improbable perfection of life. His many good works were not glossed over, but neither were they dwelt upon.

There were several themes. The most common was the gratitude expressed by everyone who knew him for "making life more fun." (He was an inveterate practical joker and named his 32-foot sloop "Bouncing Czechs.") His brothers actually contemplated pulling off a scandalous practical joke at the service because they believed he probably would have thought one up himself to enjoy the scandal. The practical jokes they considered were not revealed -- at least not in public. To get an idea of how far "The David Show" might have gone, however, I asked Todd Hoffman what they were.

One joke was to accidentally spill David's cremated remains on the way down the aisle. Another was to toss his ashes in the air with the purposeful nonchalance of an imitation religious blessing, sort of a Don Novello number. It would have been in keeping with David's real-life antics. On his sister-in-law's wedding night, for instance, he got into her wedding dress and traipsed down the main drag of Cold Spring, N.Y., reciting Ophelia's lines from "Hamlet" in a falsetto voice. Even when the town police stopped him and asked what he thought he was doing, "he never broke character," Joe Hooper, his brother-in-law, told us.

Did I mention the gorgeous setting? The music of Miles Davis ("Kind of Blue") welcomed us as we assembled for the service on the beach under three white tents. An ocean breeze came off Long Island Sound. Beneath a vaulting blue sky, sailboats dotted the Sound out to the horizon. Jiranek's red racing bike and helmut stood near the podium, a reminder of his decade-long devotion to intense, regular bicycle trips with his closest friends.

Todd Hoffman did finally address what he called "the elephant on the beach, what we've been doing all this week, this 45-year-old crap." It was a reference to the fact that David Jiranek died so young, his premature death the result of a swimming accident. "We're using the wrong measuring stick," Hoffman said. "He did in 45 years what most of us won't do in 95 years." It didn't erase the pain of losing David. But it wasn't meant to. It recalled for  everyone the pleasure of his company.

Yesterday's item asking about the design of the granite Ten Commandments monument that was ordered removed from the rotunda of Alabama's state judicial building brought a response from blogger Mac Diva that may help clear up the mystery. He writes:

Jan, it appears the design of the monument was worked out between [Alabama Chief Justice Roy] Moore and James Kennedy, the far-right evangelist whom I suspect was a co-conspirator from the beginning.  That may be why it is unsigned. 

In addition to the commandments, the big rock features quotes from political figures dear to reactionary and neo-Confederate hearts.  I will be posting an exposé of that connection to my blog, Mac-a-ro-nies.

Meantime, here is more information from the Web site of American Atheists. (Though an admittedly partial source, it offers a straightforward report). Apparently, Moore participated in "a promotional effort with a fundamentalist Christian ministry to distribute video tapes showing the stealth placement" of the monument on the night of July 31, 2001.

Separation of church and state is at the heart of the matter, of course, not design -- and that has long been an issue for Kennedy, who would like to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy. Back in 2001, the American Jewish Congress charged that the evangelist's attack on "church-state separation as an 'anti-Christian' lie" [had set] back efforts to avoid religious divisiveness." Here is more background about Kennedy. To be fair, here is a friendlier rundown from the Web site of Evangelism Explosion.

As long as we're looking at the issue of Alabama's Ten Commandments, my staff of thousands thought you might find an old Wall Street Journal story relevant. Unfortunately, it's not online except by subscription. The headline on the story, when it ran in the print edition in April 2001, gives you the gist of it: "When Moses' Laws Run Afoul of the U.S.'s, Get Me Cecil B. deMille -- Ten Commandment Memorial Has Novel Defense In Suit: It Was a Granite Movie Poster."

The tale by reporter Jess Bravin chronicled the twisty legal debate over a 6-foot-tall, 2,500 pound granite replica of the tablets Moses received on Mount Sinai, which stood before the Municipal Building in the northern Indiana factory town of Elkhart. (The monolith was moved in 2002 to a privately owned site.)

One of the fascinating points Bravin made was that "Thanks to an alliance between the Hollywood producer and a juvenile-court judge from St. Cloud, Minn., as many as 4,000 Ten Commandments monoliths were erected in public spaces across the country, for the dual pupose of promoting [deMille's] 1956 epic ["The Ten Commandments"] and instructing the citizenry in behavior acceptable to God."

There were, in 2001, pending court cases and legislation involving displays of the law of Moses in more than a half-dozen states, Bravin reported.

Not so incidentally, today's Wall Street Journal has a piece by none other than Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy S. Moore, the man at the center of the latest controversy. The piece has to be among the stupidest op-eds ever to run in the Journal's editorial pages -- and that's no mean feat. It's called "In God I Trust" (online only for WSJ subscribers), and it's riddled with legal and factual errors, among them the false claim that God is "specifically mentioned" in the U.S. Constitution. He is not. But Justice Moore's confusion may be understandable, since He is "specifically mentioned" in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

Nobody has taken Alabama's chief justice to task for the design of his two-and-a-half ton, granite monument to the Ten Commandments. In fact, not one of the dozen or so news stories I've seen about his refusal to remove the monument from the state judicial building mentions the quality of the design or the identity of the artist who made it.

I guess it's not a question of artistic taste. The chief justice says his refusal is based on an elementary issue: "Can the state acknowledge God?" (See the videos.) Since a majority of Americans believes you can't be moral unless you believe in God, it's time for an Alabama recall of the Court of the Judiciary that suspended him -- right? Meantime, does anybody know who designed the monument? I'm all ears. And please don't say it's Moses. The man was not a Christian.

For all the artistic types who wished they were Leonardo Da Vinci, here's your chance to express yourself. Now you can Botox "The Mona Lisa." 

From the bucolic hills of Woodstock, N.Y., where I've been taking a few days' vacation at a cousin's "shack," the world looks like a dark smudge on the horizon. The distant crackle of lightning and thunder -- in reality dispiriting news of bombings, deaths and disaster -- seems part of another galaxy. I'd rather leave it that way, at least for today.

It's not possible, however, not when Americans believe you can't be moral unless you believe in God (by a margin of 58 percent to 40 percent); not when they are more likely to believe in the Virgin Birth than in evolution (by a whopping margin of 83 percent to 28 percent); not when 47 percent of U.S. non-Christians believe in the Virgin Birth, "despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of Biblical scholars," Nicholas Kristof recently wrote.

I've stolen all the numbers from a Kristof column, "Believe It or Not," in The New York Times (free registration required). He took them from several different polls, including a 1998 Harris poll, which also found that 86 percent of American adults believe in miracles, 89 percent believe in Heaven, and 73 percent believe in the Devil and in Hell.

If you missed his column, I hope you'll thank me for the theft. (The opinion, though, is my own -- and sure to generate brickbats.) And if those figures are true, you have to ask what century America is living in. The answer seems to be "sometime during the Dark Ages," even further from reality than Woodstock.

Postscript: Not to end on such a sour note, I offer "Slaughtering Cows and Popping Cherries," a reminiscence about The Realist and other unsung national treasures of a lost era, by the irrepressible Paul Krassner. His editorial brilliance and blunt courage long preceded -- in fact, made possible -- the satires of the National Lampoon, Spy, Doonesbury and "Saturday Night Live." And they never drew as much blood.

Awful news has arrived: The remarkable originator of Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project, someone whose good works were beyond admiration, is dead.

His close friend, Jenifer Howard, writes, "It is with the heaviest heart that I let you know that a terrible accident claimed the life of our friend, David Jiranek, on Saturday night. While on the last night of his vacation in Canada, he went for a swim with friends and did not surface. ... We, his friends and family, are all reeling from this shocking news and trying to cope with the loss of an amazing person. David touched so many lives during his brief time in this world and truly made a difference."

I knew David Jiranek too briefly and met him only once. But that once, a month ago, was enough to confirm the deep generosity, personal warmth and rare humanity I sensed from our e-mail exchanges. Given what I knew of the Rwanda Project, which enabled young orphans to express themselves through photography, I had expected to meet an elderly gentleman-philanthropist perhaps, possibly a Czech emigré who was a professional photographer.

Instead, David turned out to be a ruggedly handsome American in the bloom of life (he was 45), an actor-turned-writer with an amateur's interest in photography. He told me he had traveled to Africa and come upon the Imbabazi Orphanage only by chance. But he was so taken by the spirit of the place, the kindness of its founder, Rosamond Halsey Carr, and the openness of the children, that he never really left.

David came back to Connecticut, where he lived, and returned to the orphanage with a batch of disposable cameras. He set up a photography workshop and taught the children how to take pictures, the results of which can be seen here.

Then he started raising money for the orphanage. So little was needed to keep it going, he said -- perhaps $40,000 a year to finance salaries for the staff and food and clothing for the children -- that it would have been unthinkable not to devote himself to that task. 

We exchanged gifts. He gave me a print of "Gadi" by Jacqueline. I gave him a book of photographs by my old friend Steve Deutch. Neither David nor I knew the other would be bringing a gift. He invited me to the opening of "Lysistrata" in September, which he was producing Off Broadway, and told me he would be going back to Rwanda in November. We parted with the idea of getting to know each other better.

His loss makes me feel so much sadder than our brief acquaintance would seem to warrant that I can't explain it. David's untimely death is a devastating loss for the children of the Imbabazi Orphanage and a tragedy for his family and friends.

AN OBITUARY

Until moments ago, when I read an e-mailed draft of David Jiranek's obituary, written by his brother-in-law Joe Hooper, all I knew of David was what I wrote earlier today (above). I had no idea of the breadth of his accomplishments. He never gave me so much as a hint of them.  

Here is the complete obituary:

David Jiranek, a Broadway producer, a writer, a photographer, and a highly successful businessman in the field of brochure distribution, died on Sunday, August 17, 2003 in a swimming accident while vacationing with his family in the summer community of North Hatley, Quebec. He was 45 and lived in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

 

David Jiranek was a man of boundless energy and uncommon talent, making his mark in a number of fields in the course of his abbreviated life. His professional theater life began early, just after he graduated from New York University. Teaming up with his friend and colleague, Broadway producer David Weil, and with theater legend John Houseman, Mr. Jiranek served as the associate producer for the 1981 Broadway production of the William Alfred drama, "Curse of an Aching Heart." The production starred Faye Dunaway. With characteristic humor, Mr. Jiranek wrote in "Playbill," "After Miss Dunaway fired their limo driver, and the two producers froze their hands flyering the TKTS line, the show closed." In 1982, Mr. Jiranek co-produced the New York premiere of the David Mamet play, "Edmond," for the Off-Broadway Provincetown Theater which won two Obie Awards, one for best play. Persuaded that the theater world could market its product with more ingenuity, Mr. Jiranek and Mr. Weil in 1984 founded their own marketing firm, CTM Brochure Display, with Mr. Jiranek as President and Mr. Weil as CEO. In time, the company outgrew its niche in the theater business to become the second largest brochure distribution company in the nation, indeed in the world. The company, headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, with thirteen offices in the U.S. and Canada, operates brochure stands in hotel lobbies and transportation hubs, advertising Broadway shows, ski vacations and tourist attractions of every description.

 

Even before Mr. Jiranek and Mr. Weil sold CTM Brochure Display in 2000, they were directing their energies back into the theater. In 1999, the pair, with Cricket Hooper Jiranek, Mr. Jiranek's wife and business partner, formed a theater production company, CTM Productions. That year, the group co-produced the Broadway blues revue, "It 'Ain't Nothin' But the Blues," which played first at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center and then at the Ambassador Theater. Later that year, the trio produced a Broadway revival of "Fool Moon," a two-man show starring Bill Irwin and David Shine, which won a Tony Award for Special Theatrical Event. This past spring, Mr. Jiranek and company co-produced comic Bill Maher's biting and critically-praised one-man show, "Victory Begins at Home,"  at the Virginia Theater. Mr. Jiranek was slated to direct a production of "Lysistrata" from his own translation for the Off-Off-Broadway Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre Company, where he served as president of the board. He had completed a draft of the script days before his death. The production is scheduled to go forward at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre October 24, 2003, through February 5, 2004. Mr. Jiranek was also a member of the League of American Theatres and Producers. 

 

Beside his love for the theater, David Jiranek had a passion for photography, for adventure and for working with disadvantaged children. Improbably, he combined all three with his recent Project - Through the Eyes of Children.  Three years ago, he traveled to African nation of Rwanda to document in photographs the after-effects of the horrible genocide of 1994. While there, Mr. Jiranek befriended the children of the Imbabazi Orphanage and taught the children, who had never seen a camera, how to take pictures. The Imbabazi Orphanage is founded and still run by 90-year-old American matriarch Rosamond Carr, to care for the young survivors of the Hutu-Tutsi genocide. (In "Gorillas in the Mist," the film about gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, the Rosamond Carr character is played by the actress Julie Harris.) The photography experiment with the orphanage yielded a trove of astonishingly beautiful images created by the children which became the basis for a photography exhibition in Rwanda's capital city and at various galleries in the U.S., most recently this past June at the Freida and Roy Furnam Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater in the Lincoln Center. (The photographs can be seen on the Rwanda Project Web site.)

 

Mr. Jiranek took a special interest in one of the orphans, Frederick Ndabaramiye, a teenager and aspiring artist who managed to draw and take photographs without the use of hands, having lost those to a group of machete-wielding Hutus. (Frederick is himself a Hutu; he was punished for disobeying orders to help murder a busload of Tutsis.) Mr. Jiranek played an important role in surmounting political and logistical obstacles to bring Frederick to the United States last year to be outfitted with prosthetic hands. ABC News and Charles Gibson filmed a segment about Frederick and his story at that time. Mr. Jiranek had hoped to see the piece air on "20/20" to help raise awareness for the plight of these extraordinary children in Rwanda.

 

Mr. Jiranek believed so strongly in helping the Rwandan orphans achieve a better future that he subsidized the entire Rwanda Project himself. He also raised money for the children by soliciting donations, using the children's photographs as a fund-raising vehicle. It is the wish of his family and his colleagues involved with the Rwanda Project that the Project should endure, for the sake of the children and as a fitting legacy for David Jiranek.

 

David Jiranek is predeceased by his father, prominent furniture designer Leo A. Jiranek of Old Greenwich, and by his half-brother Henry Heald. He is survived by his wife Cricket Hooper Jiranek and their two daughters, Harriet Carrington "Cat" Jiranek, age 7, and Sailor Jennings Jiranek, age 4, of Old Greenwich, his mother Elaine "Jen" Jiranek, of Old Greenwich, and a large, extended family that includes four half-brothers, Theodore "Teke" Hoffman, R. Todd Hoffman, Robert H. Jiranek, and James Heald Jiranek.

 

There will be a private memorial service to be held outdoors at Lucas Point Beach in Old Greenwich this Sunday, Aug. 24 at 2 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations should be made to the Rwanda Project. To make a contribution, visit how to help on the Web site.

It had to happen. Somebody feels put out that this column has dared to invade the sacrosanct precinct of the arts with an alien subject: political opinion. I quote from a message sent yesterday to ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan: 

"Can you explain what exactly Jan Herman [is] writing about? Are you no longer running an arts site? Are you going to be hiring Ann Coulter next? After two years of reading ArtsJournal loyally, almost daily, I felt today like I had been slapped in the face. 

"I don't think political invective mixes well with the arts. But now I wonder if I haven't suddenly discovered why your site was attacked. I'd rather lock Jan Herman in a room with Ann Coulter than have either one write about the arts."

Shame on me. I plead guilty to the sin of mixing politics and the arts. How else could one ever describe "The Rwanda Project"? I've written about it before as: the children who know what they see. But it's not just a subject that pricks the conscience, like other subjects I've written about (Danny Pearl, Wal-Mart, Ground Zero), although that would be enough.

"The Rwanda Project" is an arts subject of the most stirring kind precisely because it is not a mere instance of "art for arts sake": It is art for humanity's sake. The political context is unavoidable. Merely to describe its purpose (click on the flashart intro here) is to voice a political opinion.

And now, I'm glad to say, the story continues. For those who are interested, a report is scheduled tonight on ABC at 10 about Frederick, the Imbabazi Orphanage artist and photographer whose hands were amputated during the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and who was recently given prosthetic hands here in the United States due to help provided by project supporters and orphanage board members living in Columbus, Ohio.

Here's Fredrick's biography, and here's his photo portfolio. Meantime, you can listen to a recent NPR interview of orphanage founder Rosalind Carr, who is 90 and still going strong. "She's everybody's feisty grandmother who can entertain you for hours, sitting at her knee, listening to her fabulous stories," says David Jiranek, who founded "The Rwanda Project." "She has perfectly coiffed gray hair, is a magician with gardens and plants, has tea every day at 4, and then slugs [it out] with the government, landlords, etc. fighting for her kids.

And now you can participate in a political act for art and humanity's sake. How about buying a print of one of "The Rwanda Project" artists? Hell, buy more than one. It's a tax-deductible donation. Here's how to help. And if you can't afford the price of a print, enjoy the photos on that site and forward the address to friends.

Putting it to Arnold, Slate reminds us of his inflated, risk-averse business reputation. Writer Daniel Gross recalls the bankrupt wreckage of Planet Hollywood and what a "glory hog" our celebrity of the people was as that '90s restaurant chain went belly up.

Arnold never had to put up a dime. (That was lucky, not smart.) All he had to do was publicize his involvement with the chain. As a so-called "celebrity investor," he receive "options representing 20 percent of the  company's stock" -- now worthless. 

Gross suggests that Arnold is pulling a Planet Hollywood rerun with his gubernatorial candidacy. He put up none of the capital for the recall and he's hogging the limelight. If he were to win election, why wouldn't the likely outcome for an already bankrupt California be Planet Hollywood II?
 
Another hopeful sign that Arnold's free ride might cost him is Bob Herbert's column "The Art of the False Impression" in The New York Times (free registration required). It underscores the news media's misplaced attention, pointing out that Al Gore's non-candidate attack on the "false impressions" Bush has foisted on the nation was pretty much ignored.  

"Mr. Gore has never been mistaken for an entertainer," Herbert writes. "In the superamplified media din created by the likes of Arnold and Kobe and Ben and Jen, it's very difficult for the former vice president, a certified square, to break into the national conversation."

The shame of it is, Shwarzenegger is not much of an entertainer either. He's just a shrewd Hollywood ornament.

I don't know why it took the archeologists to tell us that the Roman emperor Caligula was a maniac. Anyone who's seen John Hurt's Caligula in the 1975 British television series "I, Claudius" would have guessed. It was on cable again last week. If you haven't read the Robert Graves novel that series was based on, or the sequel "Claudius the God," you must.  We'll know things have gone too far when Gee Dubya nominates his favorite horse for a federal judgeship. (Caligula got away with that sort of thing, when he famously made his steed Incitatus a Roman senator.)

MORE STRAWS

From European Union headquarters comes word that an appeal by circus performers for an exemption from work rules for workers in hazardous trades has been denied: They must wear hard-hats and protective gear aloft. The image of trapeze flyers sporting such outfits is worthy of Chuck Jones or Jim Thurber, take your pick. (Item courtesy of Mugs McGuiness, who has joined my staff.)

A critic's value is not determined by whether he/she's right or wrong but whether he/she's a good read. That's one reason Martin Bernheimer is my favorite classical music connoisseur. (He's right most of the time, too.) His review in the Financial Times of Fabio Biondi conducting an obscure Scarlati oratorio is the sort of classical-music writing I like.

Despite Bernheimer's high-brow taste for fine music-making, which has irritated some lowlife Los Angelenos I know, his stylish prose has the common touch. He could easily write mandarin criticism. But he prefers simplicity, clarity and vigor. For all those who complain that serious music has lost its audience, I suggest that serious music critics themselves are as much to blame as anyone else. Bored readers are not about to storm the concert halls.

Here's another Bernheimer review, this one on "Pinafore!", for the less high-minded.