Ad-hocitecture

Boingboing.net links to a story that Tacoma's wacky St. Irene Office Condominium Complex will be torn down (link to photo set).

At least we still have Brooklyn's Broken Angel building, left (photo by bitnoots).

Broken Angel sits on an L-shaped street in Clinton Hill/Bed Stuy, near a Salvation Army warehouse. The street was the site of Dave Chappelle's summer 2004 block party, filmed by Michel Gondry for an upcoming documentary.

And there's always the East Village public garden tower of found art, right.

Trash talkin' nerd

I got 11 out of 29 on The Guardian's World Book Day 2005 quiz. (Depending on how you look at it, that's either almost half, or barely better than random guessing... though I think one of the Guardian's answers is now wrong.) What'choo got, Alice?

New Mexico hurricanes?

Ben tells me that we've made twelve cents or so off the Google ads on the blog. I've added to the pot by clicking on this ad about preparing for New Mexico Hurricanes. The flood risk in Albuquerque is currently unavailable. Thanks, FEMA.

Doorstops

I haven't read Infinite Jest, but I do know a little something about dual-purpose book/doorstops. My Labyrinth bag broke in the middle of the semester because I was carrying three 1000-page books at once: the Major Works of John Milton, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the Infinite Jest for the Restoration cool kids.

My dad read Infinite Jest while he was on a dig in Portugal this summer. Every week or so I'd get an e-mail about his progress. He was sharing the book with a grad student on the dig, and the two of them apparently became intolerable in their DFW worship. First they were banned from talking about the book at the campfire. Then the ban was extended to daytime hours. My dad's correspondence also included such comments as, "Have you seen Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle? It's awesome! I also liked Old School." Infinite Jest? Old School? I was suspicious: it seemed entirely possible that he had farmed out his father-daughter e-mail correspondence to one of his grad students.

Before I started it, I had figured that reading Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa would be a supposedly fun thing I'd never do again. The eighteenth-centuryists at Columbia formed a Clarissa reading/support group this fall. Three of us were reading Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy at the same time, so we spent a lot of time discussing how authors of epistolary novels manipulate the technological gap between the hand-written correspondence that makes up the story and the printed text in which the story appears to the reader. Adela wrote about it here. Anyway, it was fun and I think I'll have to do it again next year for my oral exams.

Graham and I have formed a Quicksilver reading group so that we both might finish the Baroque Cycle. I finished Quicksilver and half of The Confusion this summer, but I'm starting over again because I've become obsessed with the philosophical language projects in the Royal Society during the seventeenth century. If I could understand a little more about programming code in Cryptonomicon (the future version of the Baroque Cycle; the ancestors of the seventeenth-century natural philosophers become twentieth-century Enigma coders and programmers), I'd be all set. Quicksilver is both awesome and frustrating. For example, I don't believe that this sentence ever should have been written: "Word arrived that Fermat had died, leaving behind a theorem or two that still needed proving."

Infinite reluctance

I am grading my students' papers on whether or not The Great Gatsby should be considered a great American novel.

In the course of copying and pasting long sections of every website that mentions Gatsby, several of my more derelict students have turned me on to some interesting (though completely irrelevant to the paper assignment) essays, including this endorsement of Infinite Jest. The last time I was in Georgia, a friend was reading it, and halfway through he could not decide if he regretted ever beginning it.

1079 pages is a deterrent, but my girlfriend Kate just finished Vikram Seth's 1349-page A Suitable Boy (statistically improbable phrases: lipstick girl, bathing day, great pipal tree, brainfever bird), the longest novel written in English since Samuel Richardson's 1748 million-word book Clarissa.

What's this all mean? It's a chance to play my favorite game: try to find books Alice hasn't read!

Alice, have you read Infinite Jest? Should I read it? And have you read Clarissa? Are you still stopped at 2/3 of the way through Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle?

Provost pooh-pooh

The spineless dismissals of Gary Webb's CIA/Crack stories I mentioned in previous posts (1, 2) remind me of another such dismissal: Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley's 1997 trashing in TIME of Seymour Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot.

The review is titled "One Historian's View: Shoddy Work", but the shoddiness is hard for Brinkley to explain. In the book, Hersh describes evidence that Kennedy colluded in election fraud, plotted to assassinate foreign leaders, supported anticommunist leaders he knew were cruel tyrants, etc. But this material apparently passes muster, because Brinkley doesn't mention it. Instead, he fixes on a far greater fault: that many of the unsavory facts Hersh collects are substantiated have been reported before!

Finally, he finds an error--sort of. We learn that while Brinkley does not dispute Hersh's description of Kennedy's personal life, he feels Hersh "fails most conspicuously" to support his conclusion that this put the nation at any risk.

Some readers might agree with Hersh that a president occupied with frequent, surreptitious marital cheating, aided by government security staff and mob connections, might create an environment where dishonesty and inattention were encouraged and give criminals influence in American politics. But thanks to Brinkley, who doesn't bother to mention Hersh's explanation, these readers won't read the shoddy book at all and won't have to decide for themselves.

(Not that I think sex is bad for presidents. The Israel-Palestine conflict would probably be in a better place if even more world leaders had oral sex while talking on the phone about the conflict.)

Too bad provost Brinkley didn't have a chance to read Columbia alum Charles Kaiser's brilliant book The Gay Metropolis, in which Kaiser quotes a friend of Kennedy's from the 1950s who talks of a particularly enjoyable three-person yacht ride in the Meditterranean with Jackie and then-senator Jack.

Should NYTimes have helped child pornographer come clean?

Following up on the story of the NY Times journalist getting a child pornographer (of himself and others) to quit his career, get off drugs, use an NYT-connected lawyer, and help prosecute other pornographers he knew:

Slate's editor, Jack Schafer, wrote a story criticizing the NYT and Kurt Eichenwald, the journalist in question; Eichenwald replied, Schaffer countered, and it has turned into a great, heated debate, with replies by Eichenwald, counters by Schafer, and readers weighing in.

Shafer: ...imagine a Times reporter encountering an 18-year-old who had been thrust into the illicit drug business at 13 as a consequence of his neglectful family and unscrupulous dealers? Would he help the young man leave the drug trade and find him a lawyer at a Washington firm who is "a former federal prosecutor," as Eichenwald did Berry? Not likely. Would a Times reporter extend similar assistance to an 18-year-old female prostitute?

Eichenwald: Of course, we could have reported these crimes to the government ourselves—but I thought that crossed a line from reporter to witness. Plus, there were source confidentiality issues in play at that point—how do I reveal this, without revealing the source?

Elevated hyperbole

Writer Sam Anderson on the NYC MTA strike:

Over the course of the three days of the strike, I walked barefoot through all five boroughs and urinated powerfully in every major waterway in the tri-state area. I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge nine times, often with a German shepherd sitting on my shoulders. At a bus terminal in Maine, where I was waiting for a shuttle back to Times Square, I lost six teeth to a gypsy cab driver in an illicit game of chance. I rode from Staten Island to Queens on a tandem bicycle with a paraplegic homeless man. I watched a group of rats—forced out of the subways by the sudden lack of fresh garbage—pile themselves into a 6-foot mound, put on a police uniform, and direct pedestrians into a manhole.

... Every New Yorker I spoke with, including myself, agreed that our tremendous spirit is a heartwarming beacon of inspiration to humanity. I am only glad that our suffering, like Christ's, could coincide with the holidays.

Free fireworks!

Light bulbs in Georgia explode when they burn out, lighting up the room and showering glass everywhere.

That's useful, because then you know when they need to be replaced.

When is a story not a story?

When is a story not a story? When the mainstream media does not care to cover it.

My girlfriend Kate points out that I shouldn't assume other people know the historical context of the Gary Webb saga. Nutshell: in 1996, Webb wrote a series of articles connecting the CIA, via the Contras, to crack sales in the 1980s. There was a storm of negative press criticizing Webb for shoddy journalism (which I think was unfair) and saying the story was unsubstantiated (which I think was wrong).

Then came the government denials. From a December 2004 Alexander Cockburn piece about the case:

True to form, after Webb's series raised a storm, particularly on black radio, the CIA issued categorical denials. Then came the solemn pledges of an intense and far-reaching investigation by the CIA's Inspector General, Fred Hitz. On December 18, 1997, stories in the Washington Post by Walter Pincus and in the New York Times by Tim Weiner appeared simultaneously, both saying the same thing: Inspector General Hitz had finished his investigation. He had found "no direct or indirect" links between the CIA and the cocaine traffickers. As both Pincus and Weiner admitted in their stories, neither of the two journalists had actually seen the report.

The classified, 361-page report was later released, censored down to 149 pages. Cockburn again:

The actual report itself, so loudly heralded, received almost no examination. But those who took the time to examine the 149-page document--the first of two volumes--found Inspector General Hitz making one damning admission after another.

Webb wrote in a November 1998 story about these CIA admissions:

Among other things, the declassified cables reveal:

The CIA knew from the very beginning of the war that the men it had hired to run its main contra army were narco-terrorists, but it continued to finance and protect them. In September 1981, just as the CIA was becoming formally involved with the contras, the agency learned that a faction called the Legion of September 15 "had made a decision to engage in drug smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations." ...

A few months after discovering the Legion's involvement with drugs, the CIA put the group's senior commanders in charge of the agency's newly formed contra organization, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN). "No information has been found to indicate any action to follow up or corroborate the allegations concerning 15th of September Legion drug smuggling into the United States," the CIA report states.

That would prove to be no small oversight. According to the testimony of former LA drug kingpin Danilo Blandon, the contra middleman who sold Norwin Meneses' cocaine to South-Central's crack dealers, it was the Legion's commander in chief, Enrique Bermudez, who recruited him and Meneses in late 1981 to raise money for the contras in California. As part of their fund-raising efforts, they began selling cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central and, in the process, helped touch off the crack-cocaine explosion there....

CIA agent Felipe Vidal, a Cuban the CIA says "served as a logistics coordinator for the contras" in Costa Rica, was a convicted drug dealer and was working for a Miami company that was importing cocaine into the U.S. from Costa Rica. Top CIA officials knew of Vidal's drug-dealing associations... In the midst of the Iran-contra probe, the CIA shut down an internal investigation of Vidal because "narcotics trafficking relative to contra-related activities is exactly the sort of thing that the U.S. attorney's office will be investigating." The CIA's lawyers fretted that any information the internal probe turned up "could be exposed during any future litigation."

How much more of a smoking gun could the CIA possibly release? (Though I would like to see the context of those short, unspecific quotes.)

Between September 1996 and October 1998, the NY Times ran 14 articles that countered Webb's view of the evidence, including one staff editorial, six stories on the Mercury News's retraction and Webb's fall, five stories about agencies exonerating themselves, and one particularly slimy story of 2393 words headlined "Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. and Drugs Has a Life of Its Own" (October 21, 1996) which compared the popularity of the Webb series among blacks with groundless paranoia such as the belief that AIDS was created to target blacks. Other headlines included "C.I.A. Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade" and "C.I.A. Report Concludes Agency Knew Nothing of Drug Dealers' Ties to Rebels".

Together, the Times's 14 pieces which maintained a stance critical of Webb or reported the self-proclaimed innocence of government agencies he mentions ran 15,026 words.

When the report was actually released in 1998--heavily redacted and shortened by half, but still filled with shocking revelations the CIA hadn't mentioned the previous December--the Times coverage showed far less gusto than the paper's prior coverage. The headlines were "C.I.A. Says It Used Nicaraguan Rebels Accused of Drug Tie" and "C.I.A. Reportedly Ignored Charges of Contra Drug Dealing in '80's". While these headlines do mention that CIA beneficiaries are being accused of drug ties, and that someone is reporting that the CIA ignored contra drug dealing, they fail to make clear that the group doing this accusing and reporting is the CIA itself.

Combined word count for the CIA mea culpa? 1479 words. That's about 10% of the size of the coverage that had maintained the opposite was true--that the CIA had not ignored Contra drug dealing, and that Webb had been wrong and was disgraced. This time there was no staff editorial. When volume II of the CIA's report was released, the Times didn't even bother to cover it.

Similarly, the LA Times first ran "CIA Probe Absolves Agency on L.A. Crack" on page 1, and then later ran the shorter "CIA Admits to Using Nicaraguan Rebels With Drug Ties" on page 3. Who would view the second story as the less newsworthy of the two?

The NY Times did print an excellent letter in October 1998 from one James Lafferty, who laid it down:

"One need only look back to the C.I.A.'s role in Cuba or Vietnam or Chile or Afghanistan or dozens of other countries over the years to understand how truth is discovered in such matters. At first, the C.I.A. always denies the sordid charges. Then, after the passage of many years, investigations are reopened in the light of 'new evidence.' Finally, the truth comes out and is printed on the back pages of the same newspapers that, when the charges were first denied, carried the denials on their front pages. I would suggest that [Times writer] Adams and the rest of the nation stay tuned."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(But you're right, Alice, he is sexy.)

A Johnny Damon memory: my friend Nick's girlfriend Amy, who is half-Thai, was Johnny Damon for Halloween last year. Another 100 memories: his goofy lobs from center field.

What an awful feeling. I feel like watching baseball next season will be like running into an old friend who I heard talk about me my behind my back, and we both know it, and then trying to go about my day like nothing happened. (That actually happened to me in August and it pretty much felt just like this.) It's enough to make me want to just give up altogether on sports, cheering for stuff, believing in stuff, being happy, etc. I predict that the economy of Boston will drop 10% in the next week and never recover.

The Turquoise Terror

The University of New Mexico Lobos hosted "Throwback Night" at the Pit on Tuesday night, where they played in throwback jerseys inspired by the team's turquoise uniforms from the late 1970s. I can't decide whether the throwbacks are awesome or hideous or both.

I'm not as obsessed with throwback jerseys as the guys at Society for Sports Uniforms Research, but I do like to read Paul Lukas's Uni Watch (see here for more recent colums from ESPN)

The only UNM throwback jersey enjoying success in any sport is Brian Urlacher's, though this record of a small-town boy's corruption in the big leagues probably fetches more. But look for Danny Grainger to do well on the Pacers this year. He scored a career-high 16 points in last night's game. And he never had to play in a turquoise jersey.

Dirty deeds done less cheap

If the director of The Revenger's Tragedy (see previous post) would like to add any more contemporary references to the play, I suggest a flaying of Johnny Damon for turning traitor and moving to the Yankees. A sexy, sexy flaying.

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap

The other night I went to see a production of The Revenger's Tragedy playing at the Culture Project. I hear it's been extended, so I recommend seeing it. Jacobean drama is already awesome; Jacobean drama done in leather pants, gold thongs, and floor length fur coats is a pretty fantastic Saturday night.

The Revenger's Tragedy is a meta-revenge tragedy that consciously comments on the features of other revenge tragedies and morality plays of the period. The genre of revenge tragedy is already about cramming as much sin and death into one play as possible and makes use of such conventions as: elaborate revenge plots, characters whose names reveal their traits (the revenger is named Vindice; extravagant Lussurioso and saintly Castiza are imports from another play from the period, The Phoenix), characters who take on multiple identities, meta-theatricality and presentations of masques and skits within the play, and a fascination with skulls and severed heads. The author of the play is disputed; Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur are often cited as possibilities. Anyone who saw the play in the early seventeenth century would have recognized elements from Hamlet and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. John Webster's The White Devil is my favorite Jacobean play (see Georges de la Tour's painting Magdalen with the Lamp on the cover of the Oxford edition to see the Jacobean fascination with skulls rendered visually). The Revenger's Tragedy takes these features a step further when, say, the multiple identities of characters are paid to kill one another, which requires at the very least exhuming dead bodies of those already killed so that there will be enough bodies to suffer all the carnage. The whole play is meta-theatrical in its delight in transgressing those boundaries that revenge tragedies already transgress.

Consider: Hamlet finds Yorick's skull and soliloquizes.

Vindice dresses his fiancee's skull up as a whore (see it to believe it), spreads a topical poison on the skull's grimace, and forces the man he believes responsible for her death to kiss the poisoned skull. The duke is too drunk to figure it out; Vindice and his partner in crime tease him for using too much tongue when the duke begins to foam at the mouth. Then they stomp on him, make him watch his whore of a wife commit incest with his son from a previous marriage, pluck out his eyeballs, and stab him to death. His body is disinterred for more abuse in the second act.

The director of this production, Jesse Berger, makes the Hamlet-Vindice comparison explicit in his notes; Vindice is what Hamlet would have been if he had acted instead of deliberated. Everything is explicit in this production--there's lots of crotch-grabbing and thrusting--of an already excessive play. The costumes are beautiful takes on punk, 90s club kid, and disco fashion. I half-expected Vindice to be carrying a rattlesnake suitcase under his arm.

Complaining that there's some over-the-top stuff in the production may be beside the point, though I share the Voice reviewer's distaste for a particularly gruesome suicide early in the play. Berger adds in a few lines, notably a paraphrase-in-couplets of Dick Cheney's comments about having to give up some freedoms in an age of terror. That addition in the final lines of the play struck me as obvious. But then the last explicit act of the play occurred--a terrible, terrible surprise but foreseeable given that everyone else is dead, also a Berger innovation--and a sly paraphrase became the least excessive transgression in the performance.

Alex Cockburn can turn a phrase

Two great passages by Cockburn, the "last Stalinist":

Another New York Times reporter, Keith Schneider was asked by In These Times back in 1987 why he had devoted a three-part series in the New York Times to attacks on the Contra hearings chaired by Senator John Kerry. Schneider said such a story could "shatter the Republic. I think it is so damaging, the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass." Kerry did uncover mountains of evidence. So did [Gary] Webb [in his 1996 series on the CIA's connections to the crack trade]. But neither of them got the only thing that would have satisfied Schneider, Pincus and all the other critics: a signed confession of CIA complicity by the DCI himself. Short of that, I'm afraid we're left with "innuendo", "conspiracy mongering" and "old stories".

And:

...the oddest of all reviews of Whiteout [Cockburn and Jeffry St. Clair's very entertaining book about the CIA's relationship with drug traffickers through history] was one in The Nation, a multi-page screed... She flayed us for giving aid and comfort to the war on drugs and not addressing the truly important question, Why do people take drugs. As I said at the time, to get high, stupid!