Straight Up |: September 2006 Archives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A friend writes:

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

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

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

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

Dear Mr. Herman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A friend writes:

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

It's up again tonight.

And it looks just like this, clouds included.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week in Mexico City: