(Display Name not set)September 2003 Archives

So everybody's suddenly catching up with our remarks a week ago about Harold Bloom's fit of horror over Stephen King's elevation into the ranks of the "distinguished" by the National Book Foundation. Here's Steve Almond on the subject, yesterday in Mobylives. And here's Our Girl in Chicago, filling in for fellow Arts Journal blogger Terry Teachout, today in "About Last Night."

What nobody seems to have picked up on, however, is the salient point that the National Book Foundation is being taken much too seriously. Everybody has overlooked my lovely little anecdote about Nelson Algren, who won the foundation's highest honor, the National Book Award, and discovered when he tried to hock the medal it came with that he couldn't get five bucks for it.

It seems to me Algren's perspective is the one to take. I realize of course that the tale sounds too good to be true and that Algren was not above embroidering the truth at times to make a point. But I checked with an old friend of Algren's, Roger Groening, and he assured me Algren also told him that story. And while Groening had no way of knowing whether it was accurate, it was a story Algren told with the sort of relish that made him believe it, too.

The death of Elia Kazan at 94 calls up memories of political controversy, along with some of Hollywood's greatest movies and Broadway's greatest plays: "On the Waterfront," "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Death of a Salesman," to cite just three. Kazan's detractors despised him as a man for "naming names" of alleged Communists in testimony before the House Committee on Unamerican Activities in 1952. His admirers regarded him as, among other things, "the best actor's director there ever was," according to his obituary in this morning's New York Times. (Free registration required.) The obit puts the icing on the cake: "In his films, he guided his performers to 21 Academy Award nominations -- and 9 Oscars."

Now everybody knows that Academy Awards, while they have often honored excellence, are hardly a true measure of artistic distinction. But if you want to guage whether a director has done well with actors by counting Oscars and Oscar nominations, then Kazan is not "the best actor's director there ever was." To set the record straight, that honor would have to go to Willy Wyler, who "guided more actors to Academy Awards than anyone by far: 14 out of 35 nominations," as noted in Wyler's biography "A Talent for Trouble." Of course, I carry a special brief for Wyler, having written that biography out of admiration for him -- both as a man and as a director.

I won't go into their politics, except to note they were altogether different. It's enough to recall that Wyler co-founded the Committee for the First Amendment (with John Huston, screenwriter Philip Dunne, both close friends of his, and character actor Alexander Knox) to defend the right of witnesses summoned by HUAC from having to testify at all, let alone name names, based on the fundamental privilege of free speech and not on the basis of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Kazan and Wyler's approach to directing actors was also altogether different. Kazan made a study of it, using the Stanislavsky "method" to probe the psychology of a role. Wyler never made a study of it. No director, to pinch a few more words from the biography, "had a more intuitive approach to the subtleties of acting performances or went to the extremes he did to shape them."

The late Gregory Peck, who worked for Wyler and many of Hollywood's best directors -- including Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock -- explained that Wyler "was a pragmatist. What worked worked, and he knew how to recognize it. ... He sensed the interplay between actors. There's a whole parade of moments, with nuances and subtexts. He understood them. This was 'the Wyler touch.' It's why so many actors won Oscars with Willy, because he recognized the moments that brought them alive on the screen."

Some observers have said Kazin encouraged "overacting" actors. One of them, Rod Steiger, who was not above fits of scenery-chewing, once told me that Kazan's direction of "On the Waterfront" was over-rated. It's not uncommon for an ornery actor of Steiger's rare intelligence and skill to feel that way about a director. But he was particularly exercised by the credit Kazan got for his famous "contenda" scene with Marlon Brando, whose lacerating pathos ("I coulda been a contenda. I coulda been somebody") turned "Waterfront" from melodrama into tragedy. Steiger had no more love lost for Brando than he did for Kazan, but said: "It was all Brando." He claimed the director was just an onlooker, and neither he nor Brando cared to have him looking on. In fact, that scene wasn't "all Brando." There was plenty of Steiger.

The only existing scale model of the original World Trade Center twin towers has been "painstakingly restored" and is "on view in a darkened chamber at the American Architectural Foundation's Octagon Museum" in Washington, Benjamin Forgey reports.

"The visitor turns a corner at the second-floor landing of the Octagon's elegant 18th-century stairwell, enters the room on the right and comes face to face with the spotlighted twin towers -- stark white forms on a pedestal in a plexiglass box," he writes today in The Washington Post. The sight of the model in its "shrinelike setting," strikes Forgey as "at once odd and oddly appropriate. It is strange to see an architectural model treated almost like a religious icon. Yet it feels right in the aftermath of the trade center's awful destruction two years ago."

When you look at the model -- it was created by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who won the commission to design the original towers -- what does it remind you of? (Enlarge the photo.) To me, it evokes nothing so much as the "Tribute in Light," which was installed at Ground Zero six months after 9/11 as a temporary memorial to those who died. (Here's a night shot of the tribute and here's another.) More even than those photos, a schematic 3D animation of the tribute shows a stunning similarity to Yamasaki's architectural model. (Scroll down and click on 3D animation.)

Next month, if it holds to its schedule, a jury of artists, architects, urban planners and others will choose a winner in the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition from more than 5,000 entries. Let's hope the creators of the Tribute in Light entered it. Although it was meant as a temporary memorial, many people were so moved by it they wanted it to be permanent. Now, after comparing it to Yamasaki's model, that makes more emotional sense than than ever.

Unlike 85,000 of my fellow New Yorkers, I stayed home last night to watch television instead of going to Central Park for the free concert by the Dave Mathews Band (scroll down for a video clip). I also missed the live Webcast of the concert (here's the setlist), because I was busy clicking between the season premiere of "The West Wing" and the debate among five of the candidates for governor in the California recall election, (here's a video clip). That was followed by so-called political analysis.

The most insightful remark in the matching of twits came from the debate's moderator -- "Ladies and gentlemen, this is not Comedy Central" -- as he tried and failed to put a halt to one more of the many practiced quips that dropped like marbles from Arnold Schwarzenegger's mittle-european lips. The biggest disappointment was the absence of John Goodman, who made his debut on "The West Wing" as the conservative Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who has temporarily replaced President Josiah Bartlett. Goodman would have lent true executive presence to the debate, given what even an unhappy Bartlett staffer conceded was his "presidential" aura.

But for avoiding direct answers to specific questions and for talking past, over and under each other, the candidates were no match for the political commentators on MSNBC who followed the debate with a squawking contest that sounded like the birdhouse at the Bronx Zoo. Led by blond bombshell Chris Matthews, the "analysis" featured two ex-governors -- a red-shirted baldie, Jesse Ventura, of Minnesota, and a sun-burned baldie, Jerry Brown, of California -- along with a rightwing banshee, Bob Dornan, and other assorted species of experts. None of them, with the possible exception of Brown, said anything more enlightening than the candidates themselves.

Needless to say, making sense was not the point of the debate or the analysis, despite comments I've seen claiming that Schwarenegger shined, or at a minimum did not tarnish himself; that Cruz Bustamante had more presence than people counted on, let alone a voice made for radio; that Arianne Huffington offered high-minded comic relief; that Tom McClintock held out for stiff-necked righteousness, as expected; and that Peter Camejo made a better impression than the League of Women Voters, which wants to exclude him from the next debate, would care to admit.

Now I get it. George W. Bush had a secret speech writer to help him with yesterday's address to the U.N. -- none other than the infallible, ineffable Dr. Pangloss. The New York Times suggested as much this morning in its lead editorial, describing the address on the surface at least as "a Panglossian report on how well things were going in Iraq." (Free registration required.)

Anybody mildly familiar with 18th-century French literature knows that after Candide's tutor Dr. Pangloss is left for dead  -- having been whipped, hanged and dissected -- he still believes in the chief tenet of his philosophy: "Everything in this world happens for the best." Which is pretty much what Bush wants us to believe. Taking us for Candide stand-ins, he aimed his address "more at a domestic audience than the world community," as the Times editorial put it, "given how sunny a picture he painted of a situation in which the administration is finding almost nothing as easy as it had hoped."

In my quick take yesterday on "Shrub's Folly," I noted how much time he spent on the subject of sex slavery, a subject we hadn't much heard about from him before. Here's why he did it:  "By elevating an effort to halt human trafficking to near the top of his agenda ... President Bush was trying to put a softer face on American foreign policy and emphasize his stance to a domestic coalition that includes the religious right, his advisers and other said." (Free registration required.)

It's commendable of him, don't you think? Christian organizations and conservative human rights advocates have long focused on the issue, as have liberals and feminists. Maybe with his new-found focus on the international trade in sex slavery, President Bush can bring democracy to Iraq, solve the problems of the Middle East, disarm North Korea, catch Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, find more jobs, turn around the U.S. economy, neutralize his political opposition at home and win a second term. Failing that, he can always take up "cultivating his garden," where Dr. Pangloss left off.

Shush. A minute of silence, please. President Bush is speaking at this moment to the U.N. General Assembly about the so-called liberation of Iraq, known as Shrub's Folly by many U.S. government officials who prefer to remain anonymous so as to not lose their jobs.

Postscript: His speech has just ended. "Across Iraq," he said, "life is being improved by liberty. ... Across the world, nations are more secure because an ally of terror has fallen." Really, that's what he said. He also briefly spoke about Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation and -- at what seemed like weirdly greater length to me -- the need to combat the international sex trade. Since when was that elevated to the top of the U.S. agenda? Has he been reading my favorite French novelist, Michel Houellebecq?

Harold Bloom is still fuming over the National Book Foundation's decision to bestow an award on horrormeister Stephen King for his "distinguished contribution" to letters. By that measure, Bloom harrumphs, J.K. Rowling ought to get the Nobel Prize. As far as he's concerned, "there are four living American novelists" -- and only four -- "who are still at work and who deserve our praise."

The lucky fellows are Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. (I suppose Saul Bellow isn't working any more, not that I'm such a fan.) To dispute the distinguised professor would be foolish, given his academic credentials and his way with women. But if DeLillo makes his list, I have to wonder whether Bloom's judgment hasn't cracked in his old age. And let's face it, if you want to intimidate someone, just say "Gravity's Rainbow." That is the Pynchon novel. Has anybody besides Bloom finished it?

Meantime, isn't he taking the National Book Foundation more seriously than it deserves? Nelson Algren, who won the first National Book Award for "The Man With the Golden Arm," once told me he tried to hock the medal it came with and couldn't get five bucks for it.

What can you say about awards shows that hasn't already been said? After watching part of the Emmys last night, I decided the best way to enjoy my TV was to turn it off and open a book called "The Crystal Bucket," a collection of British TV reviews of the 1970s by Clive James.

You'd think TV criticism -- from a newspaper no less -- would offer little to hold anyone's interest beyond the short lifespan, days perhaps or a week at most, of the shows under review. But then you probably haven't read James. This, for instance, is how he launched a review of a 1976 production of the Tennessee Williams play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which was part of a Granada Television series called "The Best Play of 19--":

Here was the main action, with a meaty part for Olivier as a southern fried patriarch. Southern frard patriarch. The accent gets into your head. Whether the play itself does any more than get on your nerves is another question. I can remember being young enough, long enough ago, to believe that in Tennessee Williams the giant themes of Greek tragedy had returned, all hung about with magnolias. Ignorance of Greek tragedy helped in this view. This was the 1950s, when a lot of intentions were being taken for deeds.

Which sounds strangely like the current Bush administration, but never mind. The review goes on to dissect the play and the performances, and it's hilarious. You might think you understand why just by imagining Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy, Natalie Wood as Maggie the Cat and Robert Wagner as Brick the Thick (James's mot juste for the role). But "they weren't all that bad," James says. What actually makes the review so useful and funny is its insight into the workings of a play with a reputation for exposing the wounds and torturing the nerves of its characters:

Even in this television production the actors had to shout as loudly as they would have had to do on stage, since if they lapsed even briefly into normal tones it would become apparent that every character in the play is doing all the time what normal human beings do only in rare moments of passion -- i.e., say exactly what's on their minds. The convention of raw frankness can only be sustained if all concerned are in a permanent wax. So the actors rant. Rant on stage can look like powerful acting to the uninitiated, but on TV it looks like tat even to a dunce.

To apply James's point to last night's Emmys would be cruel. I'm not thinking about the Olympian shouting match in "The Sopranos" finale, which (all the experts seem to agree) earned Edie Falco and James Gandolfini their awards for outstanding lead actress and actor in a dramatic series. I turned off the awards show before it got that far. But thank God for Ellen DeGeneres, whom I did manage to catch. Her little monologue was priceless.

Here in Gotham City, this is the weekend of The New Yorker Festival. It's been a lot of fun before, though you'd never know it from this not-very-engaging slide show of previous fests. Will somebody please clue The New Yorker folks into the technological wonders of the Web? They make the party look dull, like snapshots from a rumpus room circa 1955.

All of today's Fiction Night readings are sold out, except for three pairings -- Donald Antrim and Robert Stone's, Charles D'Ambrosio and Richard Price's, and Maile Meloy and Thomas McGuane's. Poor kids ... left at the altar. I'd bet they'll be SRO by the time the doors open. Meantime, since it's Friday, let's go out on a low note with laughs: If you haven't seen it yet, "The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus" is just the ticket.

The revised plans for "Memory Foundations" at Ground Zero are out. Architect Daniel Libeskind and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation made them public yesterday. Here's a quick news summary, and here's a more thorough report (free registration required). The plans still call for the world's tallest structure but also for slimmer office buildings and boxier designs than the angular structures Libeskind at first envisioned.

Here's what architecture critic Herbert Muschamp had to say (free registration required). He's underwhelmed. Here's what Libeskind himself had to say. He's happy. Have a look at his complete slide show and what he calls the signature images. Here's the "refined master site plan" and schematic images of both the original and revised designs, February 2003 vs. September 2003. Here, too, is a virtual tour of the train station now being built on the site.

For an official overview recapping the history of the design-selection process, < EM>go here; also have a look at an informal photo archive showing a timeline of developments in and around Ground Zero, as well as black-and-white illustrations of the "viewing wall" at the reconstruction site. (The wall images are worth seeing, but the texts are illegible.) Need to refresh your memory about the memorial itself? Here's the mission statement, and here are details about the competition.

Since Ground Zero and the surrounding neighborhood have become major tourist "attractions," it's worth having a look at some nearby points of interest, such as the National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Chinese in the Americas and the Fraunces Tavern Museum, which includes the Long Room, (a restored version of the 18th century public dining room) where George Washington made his famous farewell to his officers at the end of the Revolution; The New York City Fire Museum and The New York City Police Museum. And let's not forget the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

The bad news for anyone who followed it was that David Jiranek, founder of The Rwanda Project: Through the Eyes of Children, was only 45 when he died last month in a swimming accident. The good news has been that the Rwanda Project continues, thanks to a devoted tribe of friends and family inspired by his efforts.

As part of their fund-raising efforts, Just Books in Jiranek's hometown of Old Greenwich, Conn., will present Anita Pratap, former anchor of CNN's Southeast Asia desk, reading from her new book "Island of Blood." It explores the ethnic war in Sri Lanka, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and conflicts in India's Kashmir. The reading begins at 7 p.m., at the Just Books Too Coffeehouse at the Arcadia Coffee Company, 20 Arcadia Road. Tickets: $15. Information and reservations: 800-874-4658 or 203-637-0707. All proceeds will go to the project's Imbabazi Orphanage.

Your brain is hard wired in such a way as to recognize potential matches to familiar objects; this is how optical illusions work. But did you konw taht aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by istlef but the wrod as a wlohe. Cool eh?

In fcat, I hvae no ieda whetehr an Elingsh Uinervtisy has rllaey dnoe tihs rscheearch. But I dbuot it. So far, Herr Doktor Professor Alan M. Edelson, who knidly e-mlaied me taht praagaprh, has not dcsioveerd its ogiirn. Nor hvae the fkols who snet it to him. I ceehckd on Gglooe, aksnig tihs qstueion: Deos it mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are? Gglooe rpleid: "Did you mean: Does it matter in what order the letters in a wrod are?" and streeed me to tihs stie: marginal hacks, aonmg ohters scuh as teehs: gamez.com and antenna. Oblivousy, the praagaprh has been mkaing the rnuods on the Itnrneet. Makes me think of old-time typesetters who could read words upside down and mirror-image backwards. Some didn't even need the letters, just the serifs.

The life of David Hicks is nothing to write home about. He doesn't get to write home much anyway. He's been detained for 20 months at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the U.S. military. He used to be held in Camp X-Ray. But they closed that place down -- something to do with inhumane conditions -- and transferred all the suspected terrorists held there to Camp Delta. So I think he's in Camp Delta now, with maybe 600 or more other prisoners. I can't be sure exactly. Like I say, he doesn't get to write home much.

On Thursday, though, two days in Hicks's life at Camp X-Ray will be staged as a play in a small theater in Adelaide, Australia, his hometown. The playwright wants to show 1) what it's like living in a cage under 24-hour surveillance, and 2) what it means to be a non-person, deprived of the right of habeus corpus. The play, titled "X-Ray," will be seen by only about 180 people over a three-day run. But it's also meant to publicize Australian indifference to Hicks's treatment. (Australia is the only one of 40 countries "that has not formally objected to the U.S.'s treatment of its nationals" held at Camp Delta, the Adelaide Advertiser reports.)

I have no idea whether Hicks is guilty or innocent, whether he's a terrorist or a captured soldier or neither. Maybe he's both. The playwright, Chris Tugwell, probably doesn't know either. ("X-Ray" is fictional, but uses direct quotes from camp guards taken from statements to the media by the U.S. Army.) Hicks's father, who recently protested his son's treatment by donning a prisoner jumpsuit and standing in a cage on Broadway in the heart of Manhattan, has said: "If he's guilty, I accept that. But ... I don't believe he is guilty of anything. David's an adventurer, not a terrorist." All Terry Hicks is asking for (besides a fair shake) is that his son, who is 28, receive better treatment than a dog gets in the pound.

It won't do any good, but you can vote on whether Hicks should be returned to Australia -- where, presumably, he would face legal proceedings. So far a majority who voted here say (by 59 percent to 41 percent) that Hicks should be returned. It doesn't say how many people have voted. Nor does it say the poll accurately reflects popular opinion. I'd venture that it doesn't and that a majority of Americans would prefer to let him rot, just like the Australians.

What is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing making bigger news than ever? This guy was yesteryear. For me, he has built-in nostalgia. I recall an interview I did with him in Chicago in 1982. It began:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, budding film stars, puffs on his pipe like a banker on holiday and sends leisurely little clouds of smoke in the air. "Let me tell you something," he says. "'Conan the Barbarian' is the first movie I can watch myself in. I never could before." For a former Mr. Universe, accustomed to scrutinizing himself in mirrors with the professional vanity of a body builder, that must be an embarrassing admission -- though to judge from his most recent TV role as Mickey Hargitay in "The Jayne Mansfield Story," it is not difficult to believe. Yet Schwarzenegger tosses off the remark with a certain pride.

Now he's taken seriously as a candidate for California governor?

And what about Bill Murray? I've admired him for years, mainly for his subversive sense of humor. Now he's being touted for an Oscar nod, long denied him, for the "revelation" of his "subtle, aching, witty performance?" (Free registration required.) I recall an interview I did with him in Chicago in 1981. It began:

When George Hamilton went on a publicity tour several years ago for "Love at First  Bite," he took along his Count Dracula cape and at each stop climbed out of a coffin. Bill Murray doesn't have to go to that length for his new film "Stripes." He simply has to roll out of bed. At the Pump Room the other day, Murray looked less like he had just stepped off a plane from New York than out of his starring role as Winger, a sad sack rescued from civilian life by the Army. He was lunching at the VIP table with the white telephone and wore scuffed sneakers, creased pants and a sweater that barely hid the design on his T-shirt. Day-old stubble darkened his chin. His red-rimmed eyes were bleary from lack of sleep. When the waitress in the tuxedo jacket lit his cigarette, behind her gracious smile seemed to lurk the thought: "We're all kidding, aren't we?"

On top of that, I see < STRONG>Yoko Ono may go naked for peace today in Paris. I recall an article in an avant-garde literary magazine I edited -- this goes back to 1968 -- that led off with a photo of her in a nude happening by Jean-Jacques Lebel at an underground film festival in Belgium. There she is, unidentified and full frontal, competing for the title of "Miss Festival." It's satire, of course. One of the contestants, with a luscious body, wears a sign: "Hors concours" (meaning "Disqualified" or, more to the point, "No contest"). Yoko's sign reads: "No. 9" -- and she's holding it sideways.

All this makes me feel like Rip Van Winkle. I think I'll go take a nap.

So < FONT color=#003399>what about those acoustics? More verdicts are in, all tentative of course. "Clearly, the acoustics are excellent," writes Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News. Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times, following up his first piece, writes this morning that "the discretely amplified Kenny Barron Quintet, a jazz ensemble, sounded just  right in the new space." But Times jazz critic Ben Ratliffe agrees with Arts Journal's Terry Teachout. (Scroll down.) Ratliff reports, "a loud drum solo there sounds like an echoey pile of noise." Also like Teachout, Tommasini sometimes heard the "telltale distant rumble" of the subway that runs beneath the hall. But unlike Teachout, he writes:  "It didn't bother me a bit." Not incidentally, here's what multipurpose Zankel Hall looks like in its main concert configuration, one of a half-dozen seating deployments it can martial. (Check out the slide show, too).

Postscript: Music critic Martin Bernheimer adds his grace notes to the audio mix in today's Financial Times. He writes:

Zankel Hall offers no visual shocks. The entrance facilities are modest, the escalators narrow, the lobbies rather cramped. The auditorium adheres to old-fashioned shoebox proportions. The interior walls are lined with sweet-smelling wood, and the ceilings harbour unadorned lighting grids. The seats offer little spacious comfort, and currently there's no center aisle.

Still, this is a reasonably handsome, few-frills hall, a work still in progress. It seems to court serious danger only in its rumbling proximity to the subway system. From the side of the 10th row, downstairs, the sound at the opening concert seemed live and bright, too much so in fortissimo outbursts. We'll know more about the acoustics, of course, as time marches on, as internal tests change and mechanical variables are adjusted.

Just in case you noticed the British spelling, i.e. harbour: Bernheimer's no Brit. He's the Pulitzer Prize-winning former chief music critic of the Los Angeles Times and -- not to wave the flag -- U.S.-born and -bred.

I guess I don't have to read Paul Krugman's new book, "The Great Unraveling," a selection of his op-ed columns, to know what he's been writing. I've read him faithfully ever since his column began, and a morning doesn't go by when I don't wish he wrote daily instead of just twice a week.

If his column had appeared daily I doubt that I would have anticipated him yesterday, on the second anniversary of 9/11, when I cited a story in the Washington Post and wrote: < FONT color=#003399>"The nation mourns. Gee Dubya Shrub exploits." Today, Krugman cites the same story for a column headlined "Exploiting The Atrocity." (Free registration required.) But he goes on to say a few more things worth noting:

• "It's almost certainly wrong to think that the political exploitation of 9/11 and, more broadly, the administration's campaign to label critics unpatriotic are past their peak."
• Bush "could have governed as the uniter he claimed to be ... [but his] advisers were greedy" and "[n]ow [that] it has all gone wrong," the Bushies are again resorting to thuggish behavior. Krugman puts it euphemistically: They can't "simply lose like gentlemen," he writes. "For one thing, that's not how they operate." (Remember their style during ballot-counting in Florida?)
• For another they have to save their hides. "Everything suggests that there are major scandals -- involving energy policy, environmental policy, Iraq contracts and cooked intelligence -- that would burst into the light of day if the current management lost its grip on power. So these people must win, at any cost."
• Consequently, "if you thought the last two years were bad, just wait: it's about to get worse. A lot worse."

Against this, what have the Democrats got? Howard Dean? John Kerry?? Al Sharpton??? The American Civil Liberties Union???? And now some celebrities with (ahem) clout, who are willing to criticize Bush in an ACLU ad campaign? (Free registration required.)

So it's Richard Dreyfuss and Kristin Davis (who plays Charlotte in "Sex and the City"), Martin Sheen and Kurt Vonnegut, Samuel L. Jackson and Al Pacino, and let's not forget singer Michael Stipe of R.E.M. or Sheryl Crow, vs. the thugs???? Oh, mama. As the editor of National Review told The New York Times: Celebrities "obviously have a right to speak their minds and a right to be morons, and they usually exercise both." How do you defend against quips like that?

The nation mourns. Gee Dubya Shrub exploits. That, in so many words, is the gist of a report in today's Washington Post:

In the past six weeks, Bush has cited "9/11" or Sept. 11, 2001, in arguing for his energy policy and in response to questions about campaign fundraising, tax cuts, unemployment, the deficit, airport security, Afghanistan and the length, cost and death toll of the Iraq occupation.

Enough said.

A bit of groundling music criticism seems in order. Even if it's not a view from the Ivory Tower, it might be worth two-and-a-half cents. Frankly, Carnegie Hall's spanking new venue, the 650-seat Zankel Hall, seems like a knockout to me. Maybe I should equivocate, as the Ivory Tower boys do, by pointing out that Wednesday night's pre-opening concert was only my first time in the hall and that my judgment may be clarified by a second, third, fourth and fifth, etc. hearing.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what the music critic Terry Teachout, fellow Arts Journal blogger, and New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini are being so acoustically picky about in their commentaries. I agree with Tommasini that soft came across better than loud. But I didn't hear any of the subway rumbling that so disturbed Teachout.

I thought Renée Fleming was marvelous in the opening song, "Shatter Me, Music," an unaccompanied performance of a John Corigliano composition with words from Rilke, and especially in Richard Strauss's "Morgen," accompanied on piano by Emanuel Ax. "Morgen" was plain gorgeous, maybe the best single performance on the program. Lucky for us, too, because it was an added attraction not listed in the program notes. Fleming introduced it wryly, referring to herself in the third person, to show "what she can do."

I have to disagree with Teachout when he says the drum kit in Kenny Barron's quintet sounded boomy -- the young, female drummer Kim Thompson was a smash in my book -- though I agree the vibraphone sounded muddy, despite Stefon Harris's flashes of virtuosic playing. I wonder, too, why Teachout calls the hall "distinctly bass-shy." From where I sat, sixth row center, it didn't seem that way at all. In fact, the plucked cellos in Villa-Lobos's "Bachiana brasileria" sounded as catchy as a guilty pleasure.

I take Teachout's point about the lack of a center aisle. Having one would be a relief. But with all due respect, when he describes the hall as "attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism," I prefer to call it a good-looking hall without froufrou. It's an intimate, honest venue intended for all sorts of music rather than a dandified palazzo.

My reaction is doubtless colored by having spent too much time in Southern California's Segerstrom Hall at what used to be called the Orange County Performing Arts Center. When that cavernous pink pile opened in the mid-1980s, its arch-conservative benefactors thought it was the last word in gaga all-purpose design. If Teachout or Tommasini had ever spent any time there, they'd know how lousy acoustics can be.

In a world bent on destruction, preservationists have fought to save everything from the wilderness and natural resources to linguistic and cultural heritages.

Artistically, the "early music" movement for historically informed performance of works from the Medieval, Rennaisance and Baroque periods is probably the best-known example of the preservationist ethic. It also has a counterpart in the theater: The British troupe Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, which is about to launch a 5-city, U.S. tour of "Twelfth Night (or What You Will)," explores "original practices" from the early 1600s: an all-male, cross-dressing cast, handmade Elizabethan clothes, music performed on period instruments, and faithful recreations of Elizabethan props.

But no organization, perhaps not even the World Wildlife Fund, is as devoted to preservation as UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. Its stated intention -- "to guard against collective amnesia" -- has to be the hippest official mandate of any world body. By seeking out and registering archival holdings of historic documents and library collections, the program (and the broader idea of documentary heritage itself) "is the mirror of the world and its memory."

So what kind of stuff has made it into the Memory of the World Register? Stuff like this:

The original manuscript of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; 1,300 works on astronomy (in Turkish, Persian and Arabic) held in the Library of Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute at Bogazici University in Istanbul; an inventory of postcards from Africa covering the years 1890-1930; archives of the Warsaw Ghetto; a Uzbekistan collection of Oriental miniatures of the Middle East from the 14th to 17th centuries; a Colombian exhibition of "100 years of photography"; Copernicus' autobiography "De revolutionibus libri sex," from 1520 or so. 

Here are some previously nominated items from China, from Finland, and from the United States. As of this month, UNESCO is planning to add 23 more documentary collections from 20 countries, among them:

From France: The original Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789-1791. It's preserved at National Historical Archives Center in Paris. There are actually six versions. The one included in the Register is the first, dated Nov. 3, 1789, along with a signed note and letters patent by King Louis XVI approving the text of the Declaration and various decrees adopted by the National Assembly between August and November of that year.

From Barbados: The Documentary Heritage of Enslaved Peoples of the Caribbean. This is a unique body of evidence, including legal documents, plantation ledgers, estate and shipping inventories, rare books, original prints and paintings, relating to the lives of enslaved Caribbean people through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, preserved by the Barbados Museum & Historical Society.

From Chile: The Human Rights Archive of Chile. Originating from several collections, it includes material from human rights organizations active during the military dictatorship (1973 to 1989), notably press clippings about human rights abuses from 1974 to 1990, (arrests, political executions, banishments, torture and disappearances), and an important photo register of nearly 1,000 of the people who disappeared during the dictatorship.

From Germany: Illuminated manuscripts from the Ottonian period produced in the monastery of Reichenau (Lake Constance) for Emperor Otto III (983-1002) and for his successor Heinrich II (1002-1024). This dispersed set of 10 manuscripts, which survived the upheavals of an entire millennium, epitomizes book illustration of the Ottonian period in Germany.

From Luxembourg: The "Family of Man" photographic exhibition mounted by the photographer Edward J. Steichen in 1955 for the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It was donated by the U.S. government to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and is preserved in the Clervaux Museum.

From Mexico: The original cellulose nitrate negative of the 1950 film "Los olvidados," released in English as "The Young and the Damned," directed by Spanish-Mexican director Luis Bunuel. It had been lost for 20 years and is now preserved in Mexico City, in the vaults of Filmoteca of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

From the Netherlands: The archives of the Dutch East India Company. Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was the largest of the early modern European trading companies operating in Asia. Between 1602 and 1796, the company sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. The archive has 25 million pages of records about political, economic, cultural, religious and social circumstances produced by company officials who were stationed in outposts on the trade routes.

From Poland: The 21 Demands, which documents the birth of the Solidarity trade union. These political demands, made by the Strike Committee in August 1980, in Gdansk, led to the creation of Solidarity -- the first free trade union within the Communist bloc -- and marked a watershed in the history of the Communist bloc.

There's also a separate World Heritage List. Isn't it nice to know the United States has resumed paying its fair share of contributions to UNESCO?

The publication of Bernard-Henri Levy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" in English translation "has raised some questions about the facts surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Danny Pearl," The Wall Street Journal's managing editor, Paul Steiger, wrote today in a memo to the WSJ newsroom.

Steiger's lengthy memo, obtained by Straight Up, reports "what we know and don't know." While it takes issue with Levy, it nonetheless urges the authorities to read the book and says the Journal will examine it closely "for leads to possible further reporting" of its own. Here is the memo:

Mr. Levy offers a dramatic theory that Danny was kidnapped and murdered by a nexus of al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence officers who believed he had discovered and was going to reveal their partnership. Moreover, he hypothesizes that Danny was working on a story seeking to demonstrate that Pakistan was helping North Korea and al Qaeda produce nuclear weapons. We don't know and may never know what the kidnappers believed, so Mr. Levy could well be right on that score. We do know that Danny wasn't working on such stories, for several reasons.

First, Danny was in close contact with his editors and his colleagues while he was in Pakistan -- even on the day he was kidnapped -- and he told them what he was working on and what his proposals were for future articles. Nothing he was doing focused on Pakistan as a rogue state or on nuclear weapons. Danny knew the importance of working with his editors while overseas as well as any foreign correspondent at the Journal. Indeed, he'd written a memo after his experience covering the war in Kosovo that had stressed the importance of close contact between editors and correspondents as a way of protecting the safety of foreign correspondents. As Danny noted, reporters working in difficult places in the world would be safer if they didn't take risks for stories that editors didn't care about and if they checked in each day with their editors so that, if one of them didn't, the editors would know something was wrong.
   
Like many of the recommendations in his memo, this practice was adopted by the paper. Danny telephoned or e-mailed his lead editor, Bill Spindle, regularly while he was in Pakistan to make sure Bill knew what he was working on, and to get guidance. Danny did co-write a story in December 2001 on Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, but afterward didn't mention to Bill any plans for a follow up. In the days before he was kidnapped, Danny said he was trying to get an interview with Sheikh Mubarik Ali Gilani, who was believed to be the spiritual advisor to Richard Reid.

Reid, of course, is the infamous "shoe bomber" who allegedly tried to blow up a passenger plane heading to the United States in December 2001 by igniting explosives concealed in his shoes. Danny's messages and calls discussed other stories as well, but there is nothing to indicate that Pakistan's connections with North Korea or al Qaeda were anywhere on his story agenda, let alone that they were a focus of his work.
   
Second, the investigation into Danny's death by authorities in Pakistan and in the US has turned up no evidence supporting the notion that Danny was reporting about nuclear weapons when he was kidnapped. Obviously, we didn't run that investigation. But John Bussey and Steve LeVine were in Karachi within days of Danny's disappearance, and then spent the subsequent weeks with Mariane Pearl debriefing Pakistani and U.S. investigators working on the case. We can't say with certainty that John and Steve saw or knew of every piece of information the Pakistanis uncovered. Almost surely they didn't. But they did question the authorities thoroughly. 
   
We determined that Danny checked with several colleagues and sources about how safe it would be to meet with Sheikh Gilani and the men around him, and did not mention a story about nuclear weapons. For example, he spoke with the Regional Security Officer at the US Consulate in Karachi on the day he was kidnapped about his planned story on Sheikh Gilani and the proposed interview. Like Danny's colleagues, the security officer was concerned and advised him to meet the man only in a public place and only in one of the safer parts of Karachi. Given Danny's care in making the effort to get advice from the security officer, it seems improbable that he would have been working on a far more sensitive story about Pakistan and nuclear weapons and not have mentioned that as one of the risk factors that concerned him.

So, we firmly believe that what we published in the January 23, 2003 leder on Danny's abduction and murder was accurate:
   
"On Jan. 6 [2002], Mr. Pearl, working in Islamabad, read a story in the Boston Globe about Richard Reid, a Briton accused of trying to blow up an American Airlines jet over the Atlantic with a bomb in his shoe. The story said Mr. Reid had studied under a Pakistani Islamic leader named Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani, the reclusive head of a largely U.S.-based group called al Fuqra.
   
"Mr. Pearl began seeking an interview with Mr. Gilani to discuss Mr. Reid or, failing that, with someone who knew the cleric. A man with whom Mr. Pearl had been in contact, calling himself Arif, phoned to say he knew such a person."

This was a story idea that Danny generated himself and that he proposed to his editor. Danny was as concerned about safety as any reporter we had. He knew that no one in New York was suggesting he take special risks for this story, and in fact he, and his colleagues, had been told not to arrange risky interviews with dangerous figures. But Danny was focused on the risks posed by interviewing the man about whom he was writing, Sheikh Gilani, and not on the source who said he could introduce Danny to Gilani. That source, whose real name was Omar Saeed but who gave his name as Bashir, met with Danny and then sent e-mails over 12 days that were intended to seduce Danny into believing he had established a personal rapport with this seemingly cooperative and friendly Pakistani. In reality Omar Saeed had no connection to Sheikh Gilani, and instead was an experienced kidnapper. He has been convicted and sentenced to death for his role in Danny's murder.

Mr. Levy spent one year on his book, and he relates excerpts of many of the conversations he had with a variety of sources. There may be information in those conversations that would help the Pakistani police in their investigation, and so we would hope that at least some have read or will read the book. We will also continue to examine the book for leads to possible further reporting by us into the facts behind the tragedy of Danny's murder.

POSTSCRIPT: For another memo about Levy's book -- sort of a metamemo -- have a look at what the sympathetic but increasingly long-winded Ron Rosenbaum has to say in the New York Observer. Among many other things, he writes: "Mr. Levy maintains that Daniel Pearl was not killed as a Jew, but as a journalist who knew too much."

The nerve of them! First People magazine steals an idea from a lowly New Orleans author. Or so he alleges. And now Star magazine steals an idea from lowly me. Or so I allege.

Thanks to Jim Romenesko on Poynter.com, I learned that Abram Shalom Himelstein sent People a review copy of his book, "What the Hell Am I Doing Here? The 100 T-Shirt Project," based on his idea of having people get things off their chests by writing their feelings on blank T-shirts. The next thing he knew the magazine ran a spread called "Tee Speech" that said: "We asked celebs to tell us what their shirts would say if they let their tees do the talking."   

Now Paul Colford reports in the New York Daily News that The Star has substituted the words "All the Juice, All the Time" on its nameplate for "The #1 Celebrity News Magazine." Well, gee whiz! As the former creator of The Juice on MSNBC.com, I protest. Can you feel my anguish? Did I write what was MSNBC's most popular daily Weblog/column -- now defunct, it drew an average of 750,000 page views per month -- just to be ripped off by tab-queen Bonnie Fuller? Anyone have a spare T-shirt?

So this morning I was watching the debut of "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," and I thought: "Now I have a reason not to go to work." Actually, I can think of many reasons. But this one was dressed in pink and white and told jokes. The sensation was something like a daytime Letterman talk show for girlie girls. Well, almost. And Ellen got Jennifer Aniston to come say hello. (See the video, ignore the text.) Anyway, it was more entertaining than "Today," the morning marathon that led into it. Has anybody noticed how boring "Today" has become? If Katie Couric gets any more manicured she'll resemble the wax figure of her at Madame Tussaud on 42nd Street. (OK, they don't have a Katie effigy ... yet.)

With the second anniversary of 9/11 almost upon us, we're about to be inundated again by television documentaries on the World Trade Center, the attacks on it and the Pentagon, and even by a fictionalized replay of those events -- although public officials and the news media have made less extensive plans to mark the anniversary than last year.

I may be no one to talk, having done my share of 9/11 stories: A deadline report on the day of the attacks, another on the day after, a week later when the New York Stock Exchange reopened, and yet again on the first anniversary of 9/11. But here's the TV deluge anyway:

•  Sunday night's "Rebuilding Ground Zero: Engineering the Future,"
  "Collapse: How the Towers Fell" and "Attack on the Pentagon," all on the Discovery channel, and the Showtime movie "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis" (starring Timothy Bottoms in a heroized portrait of Gee Dubya Shrub managing events);
• Monday night's Ric Burns documentary, "The Center of the World," on PBS (with original music that sounds like a Phillip Glass rip-off); 
• Tuesday night's "Surviving September 11th: The Story of One New York Family";
• two syndicated documentaries broadcast throughout the week, "9/11: Clear the Skies" and "9/11: A Tale of Two Towers"; plus several on the History Channel, including "The World Trade Center: Rise and Fall of an American Icon";
• and on Thursday, the second anniversary itself, two documentaries: "In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01," on HBO, and Frontline's "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," on PBS.

Amid all this, perhaps we should keep in mind Jimmy Breslin's single-minded, little-publicized columns about not making martyrs of those who died at Ground Zero. Breslin argues against memorializing their deaths more than we do others who have died under ordinary circumstances. He wrote on Friday in Newsday:

[N]obody ... has exclusive ownership for memorials and the like. Since the attack, some 140,000 New Yorkers have died. ... It happened to be pretty tragic for their loved ones, too. If we have a memorial for some people, then we should have one for all.

Breslin, ever the contrarian, has been arguing for a long time against turning Ground Zero into a glorified cemetery. It's not a popular position to take. Neither is his position on future skyscrapers at Ground Zero. He sees no virtue in them because he believes they'll be flattened again. He thinks their reconstruction is a symbol of overweaning pride. Breslin has always been wary of hubris. It's one of the lessons of his streetwise education -- and he keeps reminding us that it's a lesson worth remembering, especially for those in power far above the streets.

It's not that he fails to sympathize with the families of the WTC victims. His columns have told many of their stories. Just a week ago he wrote about a mother's desperate fight for the transcripts and tapes that recorded the last words of a daughter who died on the 106th floor of the north tower.

He has criticized what he regards as empty ceremonies that do not help the grieving families and poured contempt on Rudolph Giuliani, whom he regards as a self-aggrandizing phony: "Mention the World Trade Center to Giuliani and to him that means I, me, my catastrophe, my site, my workers, my fund, my all of it." And he has railed against the lies of the Bush administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, when they assured the public it was safe to breathe air at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the attack.
 
Further, Breslin wrote about another building's collapse, a whole book in fact: "The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez." (Free registration required.) In it he memorializes a 21-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant day laborer whose death on a construction site in Brooklyn was caused not by terrorists but by the more common causes of building-code violations, corruption and greed. This is a death that implicates all of us in a tragic betrayal of America's promise, Breslin warrants, and it's no less notable than 3,016 murders by terrorists. Is he right? Make up your own mind. But Breslin has me wondering.

FROM THE MAILBAG

Straight Up reader Shane Hockin writes that he agrees with much of what Jimmy Breslin has to say about George Bush ("I agree with anyone who says he's a liar"), rebuilding skyscrapers at Ground Zero ("They should include big red targets on them to make them look appropriate") and Rudolph Giuliani ("To hear him talk you'd think he'd personally escaped the towers and carried thousands of people on his back to safety").

"But I totally disagree with Mr. Breslin's stance on the memorial," Hockin continues. "There is so much more to it than just honoring the victims and their families. This is an event that we need to remember, because it had a major impact on every single person in the country, and that impact will be felt for a long time. The memorial in no way slights everyone who has died in New York, as Mr. Breslin seems to insinuate. That is ridiculous.

"The fact of the matter is you can't erect a big memorial for every single person who dies, but you can for a group that symbolizes something that is a major part of our recent history. Besides, almost everyone else who dies under ordinary circumstances gets a memorial from their family. So I guess I just don't get his argument. I understand the protest against building towers and such, but being anti-memorial does not make any sense to me."

MORE  FROM THE MAILBAG

This e-mail comes from a Straight Up reader who prefers to remain anonymous:

"I say BRAVO, Jimmy Breslin!!! I was across the street from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 and witnessed a jetliner traveling at ground level down Columbia Pike toward the Pentagon. I'll never forget the day -- the smoke-filled air, the smell of burning diesel and charred flesh, people screaming and crying.  Confusion and chaos.  A horrible tragedy ...

"There were many acts of courage and heroism that day. The firefighters and police were awesomely brave in their dedication to helping, at terrible risk to their own lives, those in trouble. ... As a nation, we should honor them for their astounding courage. ... But were those who died martyrs? I kinda think they'd be the first to tell you they were doing what they were trained to do and what their hearts directed them to do. No one intended to die on that horrible day, their intentions were to save life, not sacrifice it.

"Another example:  I'm very happy Jessica Lynch made it home. But let's face it, she probably wasn't the bravest soldier in the conflict, she was simply someone in a terrible circumstance with a newsworthy story. Perhaps we delude ourselves into believing that if Jessica Lynch could be saved then maybe all those innocent kids dying in a strange place so far away from home could somehow be restored to us as well. But if Jessica is a hero, then every single soldier in Iraq is a national hero. Why don't we hear their stories, too?

"Sometimes, people find themselves in bad places in bad times, but this in and of itself does not make one a hero or martyr. It's as if simply being human makes us heroic these days. I don't have a problem with 9/11 remembrances so long as we use it as an opportunity for healing and not as a platform to further anyone's political agenda or help someone become famous for inappropriate reasons."

"The intelligence community has imperfect visibility." That's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assessing U.S. confusion on the terrorist threats in Iraq, as quoted today in The New York Times. Doncha love the way he slaughters the language? He doesn't just drain it of meaning, he sucks the life out of it. And how about his judgment on security in Iraq? "It seems to me that the trajectory we're on is a good one." Must we tolerate much more of his gibberish? To call it lying would be charitable. If only Evelyn Waugh were still around.

Simon Beaufoy, the British producer who wrote "The Full Monty," is bringing out his new movie "This Is Not a Love Song." The big deal about that is, it will be "the world's first Internet premiere," as the U.K. Film Council terms it. The flick, written by Beaufoy and directed by Bille Eltringham, is being screened today -- at 1 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. in London --  on the film's Web site, thisisnotalovesong.com.  

Trouble is, the site says unless you're in the United Kingdom you won't be allowed to see it. (Give it a try anyway. You never know.) If nothing else, you can see the trailer. I just did. It's very well produced, though not much help in sorting out the story. All I could tell is that it had the tempo at times of a chase flick and the look of a horror flick.

The site has a detailed plot summary, but the Reuters synopsis does just fine: "'This Is Not a Love Song' tells the tale of two bad boys on the run from vigilante farmers and has been favorably compared with hit thrillers 'Blair Witch Project' and 'Deliverance.'" It does give reason for pause, though. What couldn't be favorably compared with "Blair Witch"?

Maybe I shouldn't have doubted Tom Friedman when he claimed that "Superstar," the Arabic version of "American Idol," was a force for democracy in the Middle East. Today comes word that another reality TV show, "Big Brother Africa," has roughly 30 million viewers in across that continent. From Nigeria to Botswana, Kenya to South Africa, the show has become "a Rosrschach test of Africans' views of themselves," Marc Lacey reports. (Free registration required.)

Using a formula already familiar to American and European TV viewers, the producers intalled a group of strangers in a house in Johannesburg and televised their trials, tribulations and foibles -- including all the usual bickering and romantic liaisons, not excluding breakfast belches, kissing and "shower hour" peeking.

The Malawi parliament has banned the show. Religious leaders have denounced it. But, Lacey writes, its many fans have invoked a subtle theme in its defense: the idea of democracy. "The contestants are nominated for eviction by their housemates and then voted off by viewers on the Internet or by cellphone text messaging. The will of the people decides how the show unfolds."

In a region of the world where Big Brother is a reality and democracy a rarity, the mere display of such a social system no matter how trivial or contrived has educational value and, Lacey writes, sends a message to authoritarian rulers. This is the same argument Friedman made for "Superstar."

First thought: If they're right, will we soon see the U.S. military command in Baghdad producing reality TV shows? Second thought: Not if it requires electricity.

The Latin Grammys looked so quaint, it was < STRONG>almost endearing. Here are some photos. ... Theater producers in London are looking to do some good: They're about to put the British inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly on stage. ... Keep your shirt on, Britney: Bare midriffs are over. ... 

Is prescience in the eye of the beholder? You decide. "The Silver Castle," a novel by my favorite literary critic, Clive James, tells the story of a waif from the Bombay slums who dreams of becoming a movie star. Toward the end of the novel -- which, by the way, was published in 1996 -- there's a dinner party at the home of a ravishing actress who has reached the pinnacle of Bollywood success.

Dinner conversation among the film producers and local intelligentsia drifts from Oliver Stone's "JFK" to hero worship to Gandhi and, inevitably, focuses on the future of India. A newspaper editor, who becomes the center of this set piece, then gets into a discussion about western influence with a couple of the producers.

"Surely now we have the greatest opportunity we have ever had," said the first producer. "Secularization. A free market. At last we can grow."

"Secularization," said the editor, "will mean nothing without tolerance. What we want from the West is their tolerance for belief, not their lack of belief. Under the old Empire the British left recruitment for the army to the tribes and castes, and look what happened. The movement towards tolerance was nipped in the bud. With bayonets. And now this new secularization is the biggest threat to tolerance there has ever been."

"How is that?" said the second producer.

"Because it will leave each religion prey to its own fanatics. It will strip each religion of its reasonable people and leave only the mad bombers who really have had only one religion all along. That is fundamentalism. Whose only expression is terror. The biggest threat we face. The great world threat of the next century, and it is already here."

Seems like a bulls-eye to me. Can the paradox of the U.S. dilemma be made any clearer as we try to build a secular Iraqi democracy without unleashing the religious fanatics? Now, with the Pentagon taking lessons from reel life (so it can apply to Baghdad what it learns from a screening of "The Battle of Algiers"), anyone for setting up a Pentagon reading room? Suggestions for titles are welcome.

Few paragraphs capture what has become of the culture better than this one from the Washington Post: "Back in its heyday, Playboy ran interviews with such luminaries as Marshall McLuhan, Martin Luther King Jr. and Allen Ginsberg. Now it runs interviews with Lisa Marie Presley, Jimmy Kimmel and Tobey Maguire. [Hugh] Hefner blames this editorial devolution on the times."

Meantime, my favorite celebrity critic and tabloid connoisseur is on a run. Check Weisblogg for the last few days, and you'll see what I mean. He draws a bead on every rag from Oui magazine to The New York Times SundayStyles section. He also guages public taste by, among other things, going to the library to see what heavily hyped titles people are checking out.

This morning, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman hailed "Superstar," the Arab version of "American Idol" that aired on the satellite channel of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, as a possible stepping-stone to democracy in the Middle East three ways to Sunday -- that is, politically, culturally and technologically, no kidding. (Free registration required.) At the same time, the Latin Grammys to be broadcast tonight from Miami on CBS are once again part of the visa battles in the continuing propaganda war between Cuba and the United States and a source of conflict within Miami's Hispanic community. Maybe it's time for Tom to take a trip to Cuba.

Correction:  "Superstar" aired on Future Television, not the LBC.

A few weeks back I posted a reader's e-mail letter to Arts Journal editor Doug McLennan which objected to the "political invective" in Straight Up. That posting, "Thou Shalt Not," prompted several more e-mails from the reader, this time to me.

He explained he "did not object to [my] writing about the mixture of art and politics." He objected to "nakedly political comments disguised as arts comments, with only a thin veneer of material to disguise" them. He felt that posting the costs of war in Iraq was uncalled for because it was irrelevant to the arts. It was "partisan" rather than merely "political."

I believed the root of his objection was itself partisan. "I don't think you would have been upset had I criticized Bill Clinton," I wrote him. "Am I wrong?" He replied, "I might hate Clinton, but I hate insults more." And he admitted: "Upon further reflection ... it wasn't that you were being political or not political. ... The straw that broke the camel's back was your comment about recalling GW Bush [from office]. I thought it was a pretty unfair thing to say ..."

So why am I going over all this now? Because I promised him I would air his correspondence. He pointed out, among other things, that he's "a highly educated and cultured person" and "a little tired of hearing all the people in [his] educational class sneer at everything. Conservatives condescend, and leftists sneer."

He no more appreciated "reading the condescension in The New Criterion or The City Journal" than "reading the sneering everywhere else." He considered himself "a centrist and a utilitarian" with "a severe dislike for ideology of all kinds." He also pointed me toward "an art show that's not only political, but explicitly so." Regettably, the show -- a group exhibit called "Politics as Usual" at the Aaron Packer Gallery in Chicago -- has closed. But here it is online and very much worth seeing.
 
Finally, with all due respect, I feel compelled to say that no card-carrying centrist utilitarian would admit to knowing of, much less reading, The New Criterion or The City Journal. OK, I read The New Criterion myself sometimes. But I'd bet he is really a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with centrist utilitarian sympathies, possibly even a registered Republican, who despite being "a highly educated and cultured person," as he so modestly put it, somehow managed to vote for Gee Dubya Shrub and is miraculously not yet disillusioned by Shrub's distorted Christian ideology of spare the rich and soak the poor.

Dept. of Correction: After this item was posted, my correspondent asked that he not be identified. Accordingly, I've deleted his name. For the record, I mistook his given name for his surname. He has my apology.

He also asks that I not understand him too quickly. (His way of putting it is that he feels he's being made a straw man.) He says he's as familiar with The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, Dissent, Mother Jones, and the New Republic as he is with The New Criterion and The City Journal. He reports that his only magazine subscriptions are for arts magazines: Art in America, ArtForum, ArtNews, Modern Painters, and Art & Auction, plus Architectural Digest, and Opera News (via his long-standing membership at the Met Opera). And he reads the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, every day.

Further, he says he has never joined a political party, though he did vote in a Democrat primary, for Paul Tsongas, in 1992. As to his political tastes, he says he has bought and read more books by Christopher Hitchens (two) than by Ann Coulter (none). He says he has never purchased any other books by political or semi-political authors and prefers to read fiction.

To complete his self-profile, he says he's a big fan of painters Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jackson Pollock. In music, he enjoys the occasional Messiaen piece. His favorite authors are Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Coover. He has also written Amazon.com reviews for books by Coover, Anne Carson, Ian McEwan, André Gide, Georges Bataille and Don DeLillo. And he wonders whether a Republican would have even read any of the books he reviewed, much less given them positive notices.

Frankly, I wish he'd told me all that in the first place. He doesn't say whether he voted for Gee Dubya Shrub, though, and I'm not about to ask. Even someone who believes he's been made a straw man (though I don't believe so) has a right to privacy.