Ben and Alice

Is it G-R-R-L or G-R-R-R-L?

2008-07-15T17:12:00.002-04:00

Question overheard this afternoon during a librarian's presentation about the Barnard zine collection (topics discussed: DIY culture, punk rock, librarians and zines, riot grrl and its influence, the issues of preserving and cataloging ephemera, etc.):

"Is it RIOT G-R-R-L or G-R-R-R-L?"

(I seem to remember this question being a debated issue in whatever I was reading as an Albuquerque outsider in the 1990s--like three R's were sellouts or vice versa? Or is that an imagined style guide/ anti-normalizing, anti-style guide debate? And yes, it's funny to me that style guide and distribution/preservation/cataloging issues related to riot grrl are what fascinate me now...)

Esalen in the line of fire

2008-07-01T00:15:00.002-04:00

The Esalen Institute is a difficult thing to explain: idyll in the wilderness around Big Sur, California; farm where seekers look for meaning through hard work; influential driver of innovation in psychotherapy, massage, and all things new age. Click on the image below and you can see it, stretched along the water between California's Highway 1 and the Pacific:
To the east is the great Ventana Wilderness, full of redwoods and pine and unmapped hot springs streams. Zoom out a little and you can start to see how vast it is, and how tiny Esalen and the other Big Sur settlements are in comparison:
Right now, that wilderness is on fire. The fire is moving towards Esalen. And my father, one of the people who helps run the place, has no plans to leave.

Over the past few days he's sent out updates; they're not quite public, but I hope he won't mind my sharing excerpts here. I need to, out of worry.

Not that I should be worried. There's a rich tradition of the Esalen community rallying to keep forest fires at bay; when the "big one", a fire in 1985 that destroyed tens of thousands of acres, came right down to the highway, close enough for a few stray embers to fly across and catch on Esalen property, Esalen folks formed bucket brigades and cleared brush like mad, and outlasted the fire in an epic slugfest. (They'd had practice during the 1977 Marble Cone fire in Big Sur.)

What I love most about my father's dispatches is that in this crisis, like in those before, the Esalen spirit -- enormous concern for people's balance and well-being, repeating your guiding values to make sure that you are following them, the wellspring of acupuncture for firemen -- comes through so clearly:

Friday, June 27

We are in no immediate danger here, for say the next 48 hours, while the fire works its way slowly, under these conditions, westward down the canyons toward the coast. A change in winds can of course change this at any time.
...
Western fire defense perimeter is Highway One itself. In the very best outcome, the marine cover remains in place for some days, moistening the canyons at low altitudes, the two fires meet and extinguish along the southern boundary.
...
Meanwhile, Esalen is located exactly between the two advancing firelines...

The best map I could find; Esalen is located right above the Highway 1 sign. As of this writing, the Basin Complex Fire is moving south; the Indians Fire is moving west. If the map is accurate, it puts the Indians Fire at about 10 miles wide.

Our Esalen team of designated firefighters will work with and in support of [the] primary professional force. Our primary team consists of a crew of 19 training now to work together in defense of South Coast [Esalen cabins] and/or our first Esalen vulnerable sites.
...
Our priorities continue to be: 1) safety of people first; 2) protecting the Esalen property wherever possible without compromising #1; and 3) ongoing management.
…
Currently about 95 staff and others are choosing to remain on property, both to defend the campus itself when and if the fire does come down to the coast here, and also to support our primary team of firefighters... everyone currently still here is choosing to be here. Anyone with respiratory distress or any respiratory/circulatory disease is being specifically asked to leave now...

Spirits are tense but high here, with everyone stepping up, student massage practitioners offering free sessions under the coordination of displaced refugees [names omitted] -- today [name omitted] made it down from Coastlands to show support at our daily community meeting and also to offer free acupuncture to those suffering from respiratory or other stress.
...
We continue to provide refuge for about 8 neighbors who have been evacuated from their houses...

Thanks to all for all your messages and good wishes. With gratefulness and with prayers for all those suffering loss or danger - Gordon

Saturday, June 28

Last night around nine fire was sighted in many places coming over the [nearby ridge], moving in a transverse line slowly down the hill toward South Coast [Esalen cabins]...

Meanwhile we could see the truth of what Division Chief Brian Savage had told us yesterday morning -- that the fog blanket would stop the advance of the flames, or at least slow it drastically. [Two Big Sur residents] told me early this morning that they had watched the flames die to an invisible smolder as the moist blanket rolled back up. The fire is still there of course, and once the day warms up and the fog lifts (as it looks like it will in a few hours), the flames will resume advancing down the hill, in both Burns Creek and Hot Springs Canyon.

Everything now depends on the weather...

Spirits are good, [Esalen CEO] Harry plans to encourage all, especially the first responder team, to take as much time off today as possible, to be rested and ready to go tonight or more likely tomorrow.

Sunday, June 29:

With clearing skies this afternoon we can see smoke coming over the ridge in Hot Springs Canyon, as well as plumes of smoke on this side of the top of the canyon -- still quite high up.
…
At some 35,000 acres and growing, the fire has at last been declared a Federal Emergency, triggering more federal resources and FEMA funds. Over 1000 firefighters are now in the area, with more than 50 big rigs, countless other vehicles, and now some air support.

To the south, word today is that the Fire Service has abandoned their firebreak at Dolan Canyon as either unsustainable or already breached (we're not certain which)...

Esalen continues to be on "pre-evacuation alert." If mandatory evacuation is ordered, there are some 60 of us who are committed to stay here no matter what, either to fight the fire or to support the teams who do. Air masks presumably arrive tomorrow.
…
Spirits continue to be high and determined here on the campus. Young people not having changed in the past 40 years that I know of, the main complaint I hear out of management is that some people do not seem to be necessarily sleeping in their newly assigned rooms, but are rather elsewhere and thus not easily accountable in a nighttime emergency.... [A staff member] promises a veil of absolute confidentiality if people will divulge to her where they are actually overnighting, in case of an all-property alert during the night. Meantime, we trust in the deafening alarm signal we have here on double electrical backup... Two blasts for first responders; three for everyone on property to go to the oval for instructions.

Today a team of our clearing crew was scheduled to be up on the Hudson Ranch foaming houses there (again, it's not something we can do here ahead of time, as the foam has a limited effective life once it's sprayed on -- so they're learning the process up there, while helping neighbors at the same time)…

Enough for now! appreciation and regards to all, and endless kudos to the dedicated core team remaining here on property. - Gordon

That is the last I have heard from him. My sister called just now, a little after midnight, to say that the authorities have ordered mandatory evacuation of Esalen and other nearby areas, and that he has decided to stay. It's especially alarming because at the time of his last email he didn't seem to think an evac was likely, so I wonder what changed and how much worse the outlook has gotten.

Dad, I wish I were there with you. Everyone at Esalen, stay safe, and keep being ridiculously supportive of those around you while you fight the fire! Or rather, as my father would emphasize, in order to fight the fire. (My sister would add: but don't be supportive of the fire. At least not now. Admire its primal wisdom later.)

Taught me to sing the notes of woe

2008-06-30T11:45:00.000-04:00

Ben's wife Kate asked her friends to send her favorite poems she could share with her students in the literature class she's teaching. More than one person sent in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." When I read that poem, I always think of how my tenth grade math teacher told us he was going to record a country & western version of it. His slow, twangy version of it is the default voice (with dobro backing) I always hear when I read it: "let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky..."

My math teacher that year was a cool guy who didn't seem to mind that I was a terrible math student. He was very into lateral thinking as a way of life--he was also an inventor and a Buddhist and an outdoorsman--so he had us do writing assignments sometimes to show the different ways that math can work. Inspired by his C&W Eliot, I created a recurring character of a country chanteuse who was very good at intuiting scale problems; obviously, the country chanteuse part of it soon took up more effort than the actual solving math problems part...

For some other assignment, I created an imaginary metal band: Metal William Blake. From the band's grunge period, "The Sick Rose" (in the promo materials I created, Mark Romanek did the music video for this one. It was 1996 and Chris Carter's follow-up to The X-Files, Millennium, had just premiered with an episode about William Butler Yeats and strippers [of course]... I feel like the aesthetic was all over the place in the '90s):

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

And "London" fits into that period, too:

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Given the band members' introduction to Blake via Huxley, there's obviously a few psychedelic experiments in the band's catalog.

Then they made a questionable swerve into emo with "The Chimney-Sweeper":

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying! 'weep! weep!' in notes of woe!
'Where are thy father and mother? Say!' -
'They are both gone up to the church to pray.

'Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

'And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and His priest and king,
Who made up a heaven of our misery.'

(Really, "they clothed me in the clothes of death, / And taught me to sing the notes of woe" is as good as an encapsulation of metal as there could possibly be. Or emo. Yuck.)

A wink amidst Turkmenistan's madness

2008-06-26T21:52:00.000-04:00

Saparmurat Niyazov, aka "Turkmenbashi" ("Leader of Turkmens"), is the former dictator of Turkmenistan who died two years ago of natural causes (to everyone's surprise). His rule was characterized by autocratic decrees so ludicrous (banning opera, long beards and lip-synching) that they would be laughable, if he hadn't been simultaneously filling secret prisons and unmarked graves with journalists, aid workers and members of his own party who displeased him.

I think enough time has passed that I may share the following anecdote without stepping on any toes. When I worked as a consultant to the Presidential Administration of Georgia (the country), I organized a conference on energy policy. I invited energy ministers from dozens of nearby nations in Europe and Asia: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, etc. But there was a problem when it came to Turkmenistan: no sooner would I identify a minister to invite than we would get word that he, along with other cabinet members, had recently been arrested and never heard from again. I finally couldn't invite anyone but Niyazov himself (who tended to shun conferences) because mailing a new invitation to Turkmenistan was so sure to take longer than a minister's posting would last--and, as you can imagine, Niyazov was having a hard time finding anybody left to promote.

Now, I understand that realpolitik require cordial and friendly outward relations between diplomatic corps, and I don't argue with the United States having embassies staffed with friendly ambassadors all over the place. Which is why I am surprised to see, on the website of the US Embassy in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, the following street address:

Street Address:
American Embassy
9 1984 Street (formerly Pushkin Street)
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
744000

It's a nugget of wit implanted in a mountain of intentional (and generally well-advised) blandness. To whoever is responsible, bravo.

New York Review of Books: no other personal ads compare

2008-06-24T20:53:00.001-04:00

Reason number one to subscribe to the New York Review of Books: the personals, which hide out on the last two pages but deserve to be read first.

Examples, all taken from a single recent issue:

Pleasure loving writer and intellectual; dark hair, nice slender shape. Academic with no time for the academic hooey; immoderately literary, unexpectedly sexy. Ardent, if unsophisticated, observer of rivers, trees, and tides.

As a friend pointed out when we were reading these, there are more semicolons in the New York Review of Books personals than balls in a gay bar.

Then there's this stunner:

UNUSUAL EUROPEAN

Scholar-adventurer, 60, former revolutionary, published author, fit, polyglot, lives half in Africa, half in Europe, married, seeks long term mistress or full second wife in complete agreement with first (an African academic). Requirements: 30-45, independent, adventurous, witty. Strong preference for dark lady (BLACK/ARAB/LATINA).

I'm speechless. After this personals ad, writing poetry is barbaric.

Finally, just after "SMART AND BEAUTIFUL. Yet unequivocally cute.", there is:

BRIGHT, BEAUTIFUL. Passionate, intellectual. Slender, adventurous, fun--full of happy surprises and delightful unexpected contrasts. Quietly confident with upbeat spirit and true heart. People person par excellence, anthropologist at heart. Cultured, sophisticated, yet down to earth--humanitarian, international change agent.

As my wife Kate points out, who doesn't want an international change agent full of happy surprises? Who is, I add, an anthropologist at heart, unlike all you superficial anthropologists.

She's not done, either:

...drawn to Positano, Lake Sevan, Kyoto, MoMA, Bilbao, Guggenheim. Loves film, theater, NGOs, papadums, fresh lichees....

More from Kate: "This woman sounds like she was born from that stuff white people love website." After all, that website is basically just a list of topics in The NYRB and The New Yorker.

My favorite run of adverb-adjective pairings, however, is the following:

sexually active, psychologically stable, politically informed, not religious or "spiritual."

Amen.

But the gem among gems is this one. Which word is not like the others?

soft-spoken, widow, spontaneous, and easy-going.

I hope she finds someone looking for an easy-going widow. Smart, easy-going widows everywhere truly deserve love, and for all my laughing I'm glad there's an cloyingly intellectual classifieds page where they can announce themselves.

The disuse seems a worse evil

2008-06-23T19:15:00.003-04:00

Paul Collins is my favorite skeptic of the decline narrative, and he's in good form in this Slate article about the decline of the semicolon:

Yet in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe declared himself "mortified" by printers once again using too many semicolons. Poe may have the distinction of being the last writer to complain of the semicolon's popularity. By 1865, grammarian Justin Brenan could boast of "The rejection of the eternal semicolons of our ancestors. ... The semicolon has been gradually disappearing, not only from newspapers, but from books—insomuch that I believe instances could now be produced, of entire pages without a single semicolon."

1865? But surely that's a century off: Isn't modern life to blame?

One of my favorite lesson plans for University Writing is to have the students diagnose their "compulsive sentences": what's the sentence structure that you over-use because you've gotten good results from it in the past? Everyone has to find an example of the structure which works well in a paper and an example of where it works less well. They also have to explain why they use it--not in some Freudian way, but just in a 'this is how my syntax reflects my thinking' kind of way.

The lesson always gets wonderful, rich results at all levels of sentence complexity. We've discussed the over-use of "in effect," "indeed," and "thus" as transition words which fake the work of actually explaining the connection between ideas. "Furthermore" is another usual suspect. One student noticed that she often began sentences in her conclusions with the phrase, "it is impossible to say" because she wasn't sure what types of statements actually belonged in conclusions. I asked another student why he joined unconnected clauses with semicolons in every paragraph. He said he had heard the semicolon was the way to look smart.

I like to tell them about my compulsive sentence from high school. My friend Paige and I were enamored of the 'clause; rather, clause' structure and tried to fit into all the papers we wrote. When we had to co-author a policy paper for Model UN, we labored over where to best set our jewel. In an inspired moment, we changed the font size for that single sentence to 12.5.

"I don't even know why we did that," I say, "because the sentence was so awesome that they would have noticed it anyway."

Slanting waves of optic horror

2008-06-20T16:45:00.000-04:00

Tove's comment about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" inspired me to check around to see how book jacket illustrators have rendered the "sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin." I did a Google image search and found these examples:

"It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

"The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-burning sunlight.

"It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others."

It looks like most of the illustrators have picked up on the "sickly sulphur tint" rather than the "lurid orange"--the main color choice seems to be mustard or related hues. Gilman's short story is a good one for English classes because the examples of figurative language are plentiful--almost too plentiful, like the fungus that the pattern gets compared to in the second half of the story. You can do some good stuff with synesthesia (the "yellow smell") and even historical context (I heard a good lecture in college about Gilman's connection to the Yellow Peril discourse that was popular at the time).

"This paper looks to me as if it knew what vicious influence it had!

"There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck, and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

"I get positively angry with the impertinence of it, and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where the two breadths didn't match; and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression inanimate things have!"

I'm looking at a copy from the Barnard library--one of the few that's not in course reserves, which gives some indication of how popular the book is for classes--and it's funny to see so many different people's handwriting in the margins for so many different types of readings of the story. For example: feminist declaration... Freud's talking cure... bloat & addiction... *!!... wise... fat and blood... wise... Mitchell thought it was all physical as opp. to Freud's mental. "We all know how much expression inanimate things have" indeed!

"This wallpaper has a kind of subpattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I can see a strange provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design."

You know that question about writing descriptively--why is it that we reach for metaphors so often in description? And the answer is hard to articulate: because we worry that we can't approach accurate portrayal in plain language and so resort to approximations, which take the form of similes. Because it's easier to compare than to explain, because the brain likes comparisons in order to make sense of things. This story in some ways presents the opposite problem for portraying the wallpaper: you can't draw all the weird stuff that the narrator thinks she sees in it because it's in her head, but you have to be able to suggest that it could be there "skulk[ing] behind that silly and conspicuous front design." Is that why so many of these designs from different eras look similar?

"I know a little of the principles of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that i ever heard of.

"It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.

"Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of 'debased Romanesque' with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

"But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase."

The exception to the diagonal patterns are these lovely limited edition collapgraph prints by Crystal Cawley, which I found on antiquarian book site. From the catalog description: "The frontispiece paste paper and 3 collagraphs are in yellow, the first two on acrylic-stained paper and the third on tracing paper collaged with acrylic medium, representing the narrator’s descent in madness. This is a handsome edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic – the first fictional treatment of post-partum depression."

It looks like the Feminist Press editions from different years (the ones with the afterword by Elaine R. Hedges) take two approaches: pattern vs. no pattern. The narrator has trouble following the pattern in the paper as she sees so many things in it, so any visual rendering of it would make some interpretation of where the paranoid pattern recognition stops and interior design begins:

"The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

"They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.

"There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,--the interminable grotesque seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction."

In the end, trying to determine whether there's a pattern leads to my favorite metaphor for being out of control, the comparison to fungus. Not only does it represent prodigious growth, it inspires more and more metaphors, so that the metaphor becomes like a fungus itself:

"In a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a certain lack of sequence, a defiance of law that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

"The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

"You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following it, turns back somersault and there you are! It slaps you in the face, knocks you down and tramples on you. It is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions--why that is something like it."

For good measure, the metaphor is repeated at the end, but even peeling away the wallpaper won't work:

"Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly. And the pattern just enjoys it. All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!"

The unbelievable Celtics

2008-06-18T00:36:00.002-04:00

Teary, ecstatic Kevin Garnett said it from a place that transcends the physical realm: "Anything is possible. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLLLLLEEEEE!!!!!!!!"

By the Celtics as a team, one of the greatest basketball performances of all time. I've never seen half as many steals in any game. By Kevin Garnett, one of the greatest post-game freakouts of all time, complete with kissing strangers and the floor and hopping around like a madman 15 minutes after his teammates calmed down, and he's just getting started.

Plus they stopped Phil Jackson from passing Red Auerbach.I'm so happy I was wrong about Doc Rivers.

Plus a performance by Rajon Rondo that put to rest all doubt about who this championship team's point guard is. My sister texted me after his bajillionth steal and Kobe-esque layup, "How do you say 'Can I be your baby mama' in Elvish?"

Lorrie Moore: Clinton campaign obit

2008-06-16T07:04:00.000-04:00

Lorrie Moore, writing in New York magazine at the end of Hillary Clinton's campaign, confesses her obsession with watching Hillary:

In the animated Disney movie of Snow White it is the evil queen, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who has all the screen presence. I once watched the film in a Greenwich Village art house in the seventies, and although Snow White wasn’t actually hissed, the jealous older queen got all the applause and cheers and audible moral support.
...
How does she do it? she perhaps was asked a lot.

And the answer, of course, is with mirrors.

Don't be koi

2008-06-15T21:21:00.000-04:00

It's a design trend I'll never have enough wherewithal to manage, but I'm delighted by bizarre wallpaper and textile patterns. Mark Mothersbaugh, formerly of Devo, has turned his eye to designing wallpaper patterns (from LA Weekly, link via boing boing):

Mark Mothersbaugh wants to put snakes on your wall. Now that the Devo lead singer and composer of film, television and commercial soundtracks has conquered the world of fine rugs, he’s set his designs, literally, on wallpaper. One pattern he’s calling “Black Forest” is a mutated collage of a 19th-century image of a bird. Those who recoil at the idea of reptiles splayed 24/7 across the walls of their kitchen should steer clear of “Snakes in a Tree,” a pattern of snakes, in trees. The unenlightened might find this one creepy, but Mothersbaugh’s wife, Anita, pictures it in a kids’ playroom, to enhance a safari-adventure theme. On the other hand, “Don’t Be Koi,” with its cheerful orange fish patterns, would be lovely even in Martha Stewart’s bathroom.

The NY Times did a brief feature on Richard Saja, who embroiders extra details onto eighteenth-century textiles. His blog has some great examples, including a werewolf explorer and a bird-man (from the same pattern).

I loved Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik books when I was little--it's a great series for obsessive list-makers and systematizers--and one of the details that stands out in my memory is that she wanted the wallpaper in her bedroom hung upside-down. From Anastasia Krupnik:

And she missed her old wallpaper. She had gotten to know the funny-looking bicycle riders on her old wallpaper quite well. She had given them names. The lady in the long skirt who rode a unicycle and played a violin was named Sibyl. The man on an old-fashioned racing bike who rode no-hands and played a flute was Stanley. Stanley had chased Sibyl around the walls of her old bedroom for years. She wanted them back.

When she tells her mother that she misses them, her mother remembers Stanley's "sexy little mustache." The upside is that in her new larger house, her bedroom is in a turret. Both wallpaper and turrets seemed so exotic to me as a young reader.

I was trying to make a list of other good children's book characters who had cool wallpaper--any ideas from older children's books when wallpaper was fashionable? For example, I did a Google search for references to wallpaper in Elizabeth Enright's books because I remember wishing that I could live among so many architectural and design quirks as her characters did. She describes wallpaper designs as "bunches of broccoli" in Gone-Away Lake and has the Melendy children peel away old wallpaper to find secrets in The Four-Story Mistake. The title house in that book had another detail I admired without quite knowing what one looked like in real life, a cupola. Google Books' list of keywords for Doublefields, a collection of short stories with lots of descriptions of old furniture and heavy draperies, gives some indication of Enright's taste for wonderful nouns: Place des Vosges, Woodmere, galoshes, parcheesi, gorgon, caterpillar, Mary Pickford, governess cart, Rupert Brooke, kobolds, Avalon, arpeggios, scrod, Bordighera, cocoon, moths, intaglio. And now I find that she was Frank Lloyd Wright's niece and that Thimble Summer was inspired by her trips to Taliesin. So that explains a lot!

Deborah Solomon makes good

2008-06-10T06:51:00.003-04:00

If you point out when they suck, you gotta point out when they do well. On Sunday, Deborah Solomon's weekly NY Times Magazine interview was an excellent talk with Wnrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota known for his ~~Susan Jacobs~~ Jane Jacobs/Scandinavian vision of urban planning. Solomon's old method, of inserting snide remarks and different questions after the fact, is gone; we can thank Ira Glass and Amy Dickinson (Ann Landers's successor) for that, since they complained when she did it to them. But beyond that change, Solomon here just asks good, sensible questions of an interesting subject. If the interview is going to run 500-600 words, I'd much rather it be with someone I've never heard of than with Henry Kissinger or Al Gore.

I wouldn’t think that sidewalks are a top priority in developing countries. The last priority. Because the priority is to make highways and roads. We are designing cities for cars, cars, cars, cars, cars... We were building much more for cars’ mobility than children’s happiness.
...
As mayor of Bogotá, you reclaimed the sidewalks for pedestrians by banning sidewalk parking, your most famous achievement. The most famous and the most controversial. But we started by building bicycle paths, and now 5 percent of the population, more than 350,000 people, go to work by bicycle.

Why do you think you lost your most recent bid for mayor last year? I had some huge fights when I was mayor. I was almost impeached for getting the cars off the sidewalk.
...
Do you see yourself as a city planner or a politician? At heart what I really am is a Colombian politician, but a bad one because I lose elections.

Flopahedron

2008-06-07T14:04:00.003-04:00

Best detail ever in the NY Times story on the two men who scaled Renzo Piano's Times building on Thursday to raise awareness about global warming and malaria:

“He’s disrupting the city,” said Zee Mosher, 33, a graphic designer with a portrait of Buckminster Fuller tattooed on his neck. “He’s endangering his own life and the lives of other people.”

Really? You'd think a guy with a tattoo of Buckminster Fuller on his neck would be at least sort of OK with someone taking advantage of an architectural quirk.

I liked Elizabeth Kolbert's story in this week's New Yorker about Fuller's follies; it all seemed of a piece with the Times-scalers:

In “Bucky,” a biography-cum-meditation, published in 1973, the critic Hugh Kenner observed, “One of the ways I could arrange this book would make Fuller’s talk seem systematic. I could also make it look like a string of platitudes, or like a set of notions never entertained before, or like a delirium.” On the one hand, Fuller insisted that all the world’s problems—-from hunger and illiteracy to war-—could be solved by technology. “You may . . . want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-accelerating dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas,” he observed at one point. “I answer, it will be resolved by the computer.” On the other hand, he rejected fundamental tenets of modern science, most notably evolution. “We arrived from elsewhere in Universe as complete human beings,” he maintained. He further insisted that humans had spread not from Africa but from Polynesia, and that dolphins were descended from these early, seafaring earthlings.

Electoral vote breakdown, and the swift-boating of Obama

2008-06-07T12:27:00.005-04:00

Take a look at this fascinating map from the New York Times, an excellent application of Edward Tufte's principles of the visual display of quantitative information (click to enlarge):

The map makes clear what Obama's electoral strengths and weaknesses are: he does well in the traditional liberal strongholds, cities and coasts, save Boston (for reasons I don't understand), LA (Latino-black division, we're told) and Clinton's New York. Look at Texas, for example: Dems have more or less won Austin, Dallas and Houston in the last few presidential elections, and lost the rural areas and the more conservative San Antonio; this mirrors the Obama-Clinton split shown on this map.

Obama does have some loyalty in the Chicago-orbiting Midwest, which means his chances of carrying swing states Iowa and Michigan are good, but it's going to be tough in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Florida, and without two of these he's likely to lose.

On the other hand, his enormous support in the black-heavy South, together with the new Democratic registrations all over the country thanks to the hotly contested primary, might allow him to put some states in play that Bush won handily in 2000 and 2004.

Here's my electoral vote analysis, based on polling data from RealClearPolitics.com, electoral-vote.com, and intrade.com:

Obama very likely to win: 200 electoral votes

California: 55
Connecticut: 7
Delaware: 3
Hawaii: 4
Illinois: 21
Maine at large:* 2
Maine 1st district:* 1
Maine 2nd district:* 1
Maryland: 10
Massachusetts: 12
Minnesota: 10
New Jersey: 15
New York: 31
Oregon: 7
Rhode Island: 4
Vermont: 3
Washington: 11
Washington DC: 3

Swing states likely to go to Obama: 38

Iowa: 7
Pennsylvania: 21
Wisconsin: 10

McCain very likely to win: 149

Alabama 9
Alaska 3
Arizona 10
Georgia 15
Idaho 4
Kansas 6
Kentucky 8
Louisiana 9
Mississippi 6
Montana 3
Nebraska at large* 2
Nebraska 1st district* 1
Nebraska 2nd district* 1
Nebraska 3rd district* 1
North Dakota 3
Oklahoma 7
South Dakota 3
Tennessee 11
Texas 34
Utah 5
West Virginia: 5
Wyoming 3

Swing, likely McCain: 67 total

Arkansas: 6
Florida: 27
Indiana 11
North Carolina 15
South Carolina 8

* Maine and Nebraska give 2 votes to the statewide winner, and allow each congressional district to choose its elector independently. Nebraska is heavy Republican country, but Maine is mixed and may give 3 of its electoral votes to the statewide winner, and 1 to the loser.

Here's where it gets interesting:

Swing states impossible to call at this point: 84 votes total

Colorado: 9
Obama leads by the margin of error right now, but state went Republican in the last 3 elections, and Bush won by 5% in 2004.

Michigan: 17
Dems usually win here, but McCain leads in the polls by a hair.

Missouri: 11
Polls are a dead heat; Bush won in 2004 and 2008, but Clinton won in 1996 ('92, a three-way race with the conservative vote split, doesn't count for much), and Obama's Midwest credentials and Repub unpopularity this year puts it on the fence.

Nevada: 5
McCain leads in polls, and Repubs usually win, but Vegas has it at a dead heat.

New Hampshire: 4
Vote is extremely close here historically. Obama leads in polls by a hair.

New Mexico: 5
Same as NH.

Ohio: 20
Polls are a dead heat, and vote is extremely close historically. Vegas likes Obama, but there is a large undecided contingent in the polls, which may work in McCain's favor because Obama is more of an unknown.

Virginia 13
Republicans usually win handily here, but polls are a dead heat, though there is a large undecided contingent.

If you award each candidate all of the electoral votes from their likely states, plus an estimated half of the swing states' electoral votes:

Obama’s predicted total: 280
McCain’s predicted total: 258

Now let's look at a few scenarios. If 2/3 of the swing state votes go to Obama, he wins handily:

Obama’s predicted total: 294
McCain’s predicted total: 244

But if 2/3 of the swing state votes go to McCain (say, roughly, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Virginia), he wins by a hair:

Obama’s predicted total: 266
McCain’s predicted total: 272

So the election looks to be very close, with the advantage very slightly in Obama's favor. The question, in my opinion, is whether Obama can convince undecided voters that his promise outweighs their uncertainty about him due to his youth, inexperience, blackness, and liberalness. I think the much-vaunted conservative dislike for McCain will not play such a big role; he'll get slightly more votes then Bush in 2004 (which would indicate an even showing, since the number of voters has grown).

Meanwhile, there has been a huge increase in Democratic voter registration. I predict 68 million votes for Obama, 66 million votes for McCain, with Obama winning the electoral college 284-254.

Note that McCain needs at least 270 votes to win, while Obama only needs 269, because in a 269-269 tie (or any other situation in which no candidate gets a majority of the 538-member electoral college), the (Democratic) Congress resolves the dispute in a vote, and Obama wins.

With that optimistically said, my big fear as the general election campaign begins is an ad, run by a well-funded conservative group that's ostensibly independent of the McCain campaign, that would go like this:

[White woman in driver's seat of minivan; a daughter and son, 10 and 8 years old, in soccer uniforms, run away from minivan]

Kids: Bye, mom!

[She begins to drive away; camera shot is from passenger's seat, cinema verite-style, looking up from lap height]

Mom: [chuckles] Look at 'em go. You know, I have to keep reminding myself, this election isn't really about me. It's about them.

I like a charismatic speaker as much as anybody, and I like hearing Obama speak. But when it comes down to it, what do I really know about the guy? I never heard his name until last year. His campaign says it's no big deal that he went to a Muslim school. [Winces and shrugs] If they say so!

His minister, saying all those crazy, awful things? For years, and I'm supposed to believe Obama doesn't agree with any of it?

And the drugs... I thought that one was just a rumor. But I looked into it. I don't know how they hushed this up, but he's--he's admitted he used to do cocaine. Cocaine!

Look, [raises eyebrows and nods, forgiving viewers' guilt] I believe in giving people a chance, but I'm not gambling with my kids' future. Neither guy is perfect, but I need to know what I'm getting. For them.

[Fades out. Text: Paid for by The Veterans' Committee for Public Discourse.]

It's one of the most effective strategies for incumbents and conservatives in business and politics: exploit your image of being bland but reliable by sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt about your upstart competition. (That phrase comes from a leaked Microsoft memo outlining a strategy for defeating the Linux operating system.)

Hillary tried this kind of thing, of course, but her attacks--while despicable--were milder than the Karl Rove generation of Republican ops, and part of why they didn't erode Obama's support more was that their audience was already committed Democrats.

Predictions: VP edition

2008-06-05T18:09:00.000-04:00

My intrade.com bets:

Bought Jim Webb for Dem VP (5:1 odds; bought at 20:1)
Shorting Hillary for Dem VP (she is at 6:1 odds, but I think even that is too high)
Buying Al Gore for Dem VP (20:1)
Buying Joe Biden for Dem VP (20:1)
Bought McCain for Pres (3:1 odds, way lower than his real chances I'm afraid)

Obama is the nominee. The armies of fear, uncertainty and doubt will now start their march.

Also - Lakers in six.

Ninja turtle theory

2008-06-01T14:13:00.002-04:00

I forgot that there's a male corollary to Little Women Syndrome: Ninja Turtle Theory, in which every man secretly identifies with Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, or Michaelangelo. I met the voice of Leonardo from the animated series at a party a few months ago and asked him what he thought of the idea. He either had given his character motivation a great deal of thought or was humoring me because we talked for some time about the theory and its practitioners. Inside every man there is a ninja turtle but there are also ambiguities. For instance, Leonardo expends a lot of emotional energy convincing the others (and himself) that he is a great leader because he is insecure about his fighting skills. Maybe Donatello has similar worries, which he tries to fend off with his brilliance. Michaelangelo has no demons.

I called my brother the next day to tell him about it. He was five at the height of ninja turtle mania and the source of much of my information about the gang. "Aren't you excited? Do you remember which ninja turtle you are?" I asked. He didn't say anything. "You're Raphael! Raphael!" I shouted into the phone. "You're the entire basis of Ninja Turtle Theory: you thought you were Raphael. You wanted us to call you Raphael."

In true Raphael fashion, he is a man of few words. "You weren't supposed to remember that," he said.

Little Women syndrome

2008-05-31T14:30:00.003-04:00

Of course there's a Sex and the City promotional campaign by a vodka company that features designer mixed drinks themed to each character, so if you're a Charlotte you can have this obnoxiously sweet mixed drink, and if you're a Carrie you can have that obnoxiously sweet mixed drink. If you're a Miranda you can have this slightly less sweet mixed drink. I knew plenty of people in college who identified with one of the four characters on the show; I once insisted to one my students who asked that everyone at Barnard identified most with Miranda, even though both of us knew that was a lie. I didn't watch the show until after college and find it irredeemably sad unless I'm watching it with other people... other Mirandas, I guess. She's the only one I find sympathetic. And actually I enjoy the show sometimes.

I had my own 19th-century version of the which-character-are-you game: Little Women Syndrome, in which every time I'm in a group of four women, I cast us into the roles of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The affliction struck me when I was fourteen and saw the amazing Gillian Armstrong film with my three cousins, and the four of us fit pretty well into the four characters. I'm always Jo. There can be more than one of each character present.

My college roommate, who remains one of my closest friends, was a Beth. In a good way. She got really mad when she found out--or as mad as a Beth can get--and retaliated by coming up with The Robber Bride game, in which she cast us into the roles of the wronged women of Margaret Atwood's novel. She got to be the shy, brilliant war historian Tony and made me Roz, the blowzy businesswoman. We knew a Zenia and a Charis, too. I was kind of bitter about it until I realized that Roz and I had more in common than I thought. There's a funny scene in the novel where Roz hears Tony use the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" and imagines a lipstick line based on names for rivers:

Then it comes to Roz in a flash of light--what a great lipstick name! A great series of names, names of rivers that have been crossed, crossed fatefully; a mix of the forbidden, and of courage, of daring, a dash of karma. Rubicon, a bright holly-berry. Jordan, a rich grape-tinged red. Delaware, a cerise with a hint of blue--though perhaps the word itself is too prissy. Saint Lawrence--a fire-and-ice hot pink--no, no, out of the question, saints won't do. Ganges, a blazing orange. Zambezi, a succulent maroon. Volga, that eerie purple that was the only shade of lipstick those poor deprived Russian women could lay their hands on for decades,--but Roz can see a future for it now, it will become avant-retro, a collector's item, like the statues of Stalin.

Roz carries on with the conversation, but in her head she's furiously planning. She can see the shots of the models, how she wants them to be seductive, naturally, but challenging too, a sort of meet-your-destiny stare. What was it Napoleon crossed? Only the Alps, no memorable rivers, worse luck. Maybe a few snippets from historical paintings in the background, someone waving a gusty, shredded flag, on a hill--it's always a hill, never for instance a swamp--with smoke and flames boiling around. Yes! It's right! This will go like hotcakes! And there's one final shade needed, to complete the palette: a sultry, brown, with a smouldering, roiling undernote. What's the right river for that?

Styx. It couldn't be anything else.

I have two eyeliners, black and brown, and am tearfully inept when it comes to any other makeup--which ruins the eyeliner--but I do love to look at the names of the lipsticks at Duane Reade. I found a whole lip gloss line based around islands (Bali, Curacao, Madeira) one day, and dances (cha cha, foxtrot, salsa) another time. Then I found out something even more important: lip gloss is vile.

I love how Atwood kicks up the 1980s feminist critique of the L'Oreal intersection of consumerism and imperialism to the satire of imagining a campaign based on full-fledged military battles: We are trafficking in exoticism; the colonial past is the present in the names of all the reds such as Indochine Red and Caribbean Pink. What's the relationship between quashing Third World revolutions and the militaristic language of skincare "regimes" and eliminating "free radicals"? OMG this stuff is amazing and I used believe all of it. If you gave Tyra Banks The Robber Bride, she'd do Rubicon-Delaware-Styx as an ANTM photo shoot in a second.

The architecture of Santiago Calatrava

2008-05-29T19:49:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I visited Chicago for the first time, and loved its variety of architecture and the ease of viewing the city from its branching river. (You can take an excellent boat tour with an architecture historian.)

Apparently the big story in Chicago architecture now is Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire, which will be North America's tallest building at 150 floors -- almost all of them residential.

The design follows most closely Calatrava's "Turning Torso" tower in Malmo, Sweden, so-called because he based it on his abstract sculptures of twisting male torsos. (Read the always-excellent architecture critic Paul Goldberger's piece on the building.)

The sculpture:

The tower:

The lower section of the Chicago Spire will resemble the Turning Torso very closely:

...while the top, originally designed with a separate, thin spire...

...will instead come to a twisting point reminiscent of fractals or occurrences of Fibonacci sequence in natural forms like pine cones:

The tower also, unmistakably and unfortunately (fortunately?) resembles a giant dildo, and 10,000+ Google results think so too:

He's also at work on another apartment building based on another of his sculptures of a torso:

Note the sculpture's clear suggestion of genetalia at the bottom, which was omitted from the tower's design:

This building will be in lower Manhattan, and I bet it'll become iconic -- I hope more so than the disappointingly dull Freedom Tower.

Let's keep going.

In the early 1990s Calatrava designed the "City of Arts and Sciences" in Valencia, Spain. (I've written before that Valencia is one of my favorite places on earth, not least of all because its dry riverbed has been turned into a miles-long park filled with soccer fields, Calatrava's museums, and a playground where kids climb all over a giant, tied-down Lemuel Gulliver.)

Calatrava's eye-shaped building houses the Planetarium for the Museum of Science. This iconic building is called L'Hemisfèric (if that sounds more French than Spanish to you, remember that this the official local language is Valenciano, aka Catalan):

Looking up from the nearby walkway, L'Umbracle (which, like the english umbrella, means something like "provider of shade"), a tree-lined promenade which nicely covers and hides the parking lot beneath it.

As I discovered when I stumbled onto them while chain-smoking my way through Valencia, this building and its environs make for magical strolling. It's hard to get a sense of how nicely the complex nestles in the city's riverbed from all the side view photos. This aerial view from Google Maps gives you some sense of the project's large size, yet perfect fit within the riverbed (the light blue parts are reflecting pools):

Close up, the buildings have design details that surprise me, because they shift at times from the sort of clean utopian industrial look that Calatrava has been making so popular to other, very different forms. For instance, this photo of Calatrava's main museum building reminds me strongly of Gaudi, whose effort to create a Catalunyan style I imagine Calatrava meant to pay homage to:

But not all Calatrava work fits its environment so well. A very recent His Milwaukee Art Museum design is, in my opinion, just the sort of design that looks light and new in renderings but heavy and overwrought and cumbersome in reality, like much of the 1970s architecture scattered around Cambridge, Mass, my hometown.

Inside the building, though, the architecture creates some magical spaces:

I'm also not so hot for the overall look of hisTenerife Opera House in the Canary Islands:

I appreciate the echoing of Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, but that overhanging leaf (or helmet plume, or Darth Vader chamber hatch) feels forced to me. (Then again, maybe I should shut up until I have the chance to see these in person.)

Whether or not the outside works, again, there is undeniable beauty inside. Here is a shot of the auditorium:

The curtain that is folded above the stage is a semi-solid wall; it borrows on his design eight years earlier of loading doors at the Ernsting Warehouse in Coesfeld, Germany. Here is one of those doors, in three stages of opening:

I appreciate about this, among much of Calatrava's work, that its brilliance is an accessible one that a child could understand, not one that requires justification with theory and verbiage. You can imagine, for example, a child's imagination lighting up at Calatrava's forthcoming (I believe) Woodall Rodgers Extension Bridge in Dallas:

Even when the structure's form is not so easily digestible, this playfulness is present. Below are shots of the Calatrava's Bodegas Ysios in Laguardia, Spain. This is a building about which I cannot pretend to form an opinion without seeing firsthand, which is exciting:

His Oriente Station in Lisbon is thematically similar to the City of Arts and Sciences:

Of his design tropes, I am least interested in the style he used for the Milwaukee Museum, but I think it succeeds in his design of three similar bridges near each other that pass over the Hoofdvaart river in the Netherlands (one is shown here):

He is also using a blend of this sort of spiny motif and the steel arches from the City of Arts and Sciences in his design for the new World Trade Center transportation hub entrance. Mockups make it seem it won't look as good as his signature ribbing at the BCE Place Galeria in Toronto:

If you're interested in seeing other contemporary designs of completed buildings, take a quick look at the excellent page of important new works in architecture put together by Triton College architecture prof Frank Heitzman.

And I can't help but include this design of a Volkswagon prototype, the "Viseo", by Marc Kirsch, which he says was inspired by Calatrava's designs:

Frankly, if a few ripples frozen in aluminum are all it takes to make something an homage to Calatrava, make mine the much-maligned BMW Z4:

Mysterious manuscrpts, vol. 3: Riverside relics

2008-05-29T19:33:00.002-04:00

My Barnard classmate, Lily Koppel, published a book this spring called The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life through the Pages of a Lost Journal. I've only met Lily once, at the English majors reception at graduation, but I was surprised to find out in the preface to this book that, for our first apartments after college, we both rented rooms from eccentric older women on Riverside Drive. She lived at Riverside and 82nd in a fabulous old building famed for its literary occupants. Her elderly roommate greeted her with Brie, crackers, and grapes, which she served with silver Victorian grape scissors. I had no idea such things ever existed until I read the book yesterday--now I can't think of any kitchen utensil I want more in the entire world. And don't need. One day, she walked out of the marble lobby of the building to find that the building was throwing out several old steamer trunks which had been left in storage for many years. She opened the trunks to find old flapper dresses, men's hats, delicate antique purses, and other amazing items. She retrieved an old diary from the trunks and began to investigate the life of its author, a young woman who had recorded all the important details of her life as a teenager and young adult in 1930s New York. The Red Leather Diary is part detective story of how Koppel tracked down the author, Florence Wolfson, but it is mostly a retelling of the entries in the diary with details added in to make a biography of Florence's early life.

I'm kind of jealous. The only things ever harvested from the trash at my apartment building on Riverside and 137th were the wine bottles and other large glass containers that my elderly landlady collected, cleaned, and filled with boiling water every single day. She stockpiled them in the living room. She killed mice by pouring boiling water on them. She collected clown dolls. She had a crush on Howard Hughes (they had the same birthday and a shared obsession with cleaning, not that pouring water and bleach on every surface every day is a good method...) and Muammar al-Qaddafi ("he's a very handsome man").

Oh, those 82nd Street Victorian grape scissors. It's not impossible that Alba had such a thing amid the clutter of old bottles and clowns. Koppel has a nice eye not only for saving wonderful relics from the trash, but also for writing about them. I was especially taken with the description of the "tangerine boucle coat with a flared skirt and single Bakelite button. 'Bergdorf Goodman on the Plaza' read the label sewn into its iridescent lining." She sends the coat to the cleaners and wears it out to 21st-century society events she attends as a gossip writer for the New York Times. She notes wryly that she and the diary's author are not so far apart in wearing the same items to the same sorts of parties seventy years apart.

Nevertheless, Koppel's ability to pick out these evocative small details isn't always matched with a consistently sure narrative mode and tone. Florence's diary is a catalog of a young woman's social calendar and emotional "firsts"--crushes, obsessions, disappointments, desires--told in wonderfully dashed out sentence fragments. Koppel quotes from the diary extensively, but she surrounds them with narrative descriptions of those events. Sometimes these scenes feel more like summaries of events than compelling stories about them, as though the diary were expanded but not selectively edited. The result is that the narration is like a video on fast-forward of all the events of a particular season, but then it's occasionally paused at a particular moment, and sometimes it seems like the pauses are chosen less for the necessity of illuminating a telling moment and more because that's where she has the most information.

The seams show when she has to integrate individual memories of events with contextualizing details. Florence's salon with New York literati sounds amazing: as a graduate student at Columbia, she hung out with Mark Van Doren, Delmore Schwartz, and various other writers, playwrights, and essayists. But the description of the evenings doesn't do a good job of moving between narration, description, and context:

As Florence bent to light the fire in the fireplace, she unpinned her long hair and let it cascade seductively onto her shoulders as her guests pondered Aristotle's Art of Poetry and the life of Sir Thomas Aquinas.
...
The twenty-one year-old poet Delmore Schwartz was the golden boy of the circle. Gesturing wildly in front of the fireplace, his dark blond hair damp with perspiration, Delmore preached the relevance of the classical philosophers to their own lives. Equally at home with baseball stats and the canon, he was the group's orator. Florence leaned against the mantel, mesmerized by his torrent of words. Looking around the room, sketching her friends in her mind, Florence wondered about each one's fate.

In paragraphs like these, the biographical conventions of telling about someone's life doesn't mix very well with a narration of imagining a particular scene (hence the cliched language of hair cascading and sketching her friends in her mind), which in turn doesn't mix well with biographical information about Delmore Schwartz.

This problem interests me more than it bothers me. These seams are where you see the writing problem of working in multiple forms of storytelling. The Red Leather Diary becomes an interesting example of an attempt to work in the self-conscious style of contemporary personal memoir (of Koppel's investigation and work at the New York Times) while at the same time deploying some of the conventions (often in cliched language) of traditional biographies which are less self-conscious about the author's relationship with source materials and explaining research methods. I kept thinking of Paul Collins' book The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine because he does a delightful job of moving between descriptions of historical events and contemporary discussions of why he's obsessed with the subject, the books he's reading to help him find out about side projects semi-related to the subject, the problems he runs into as he's working out the narration or the research. The book is a compelling set of digressions about the nature of historical research itself. Collins noted this problem of narrating source material on his blog:

This actually goes to the heart of the reductionism and the deterministic interpretation of source material -- this is the material I have, therefore this is what my subject must have been like -- that I fear in biographical writing. (And not least, I might add, in my own.) ... The longer I write biography, the more hesitant I become to use standard bio segues like "He was a broken man now." Broken to who?... To you? ... To him? Is he broken every minute of the day? The formulation is a specious one.

The other thing I wanted to do when I read The Red Leather Diary was to imagine what the stories would look like if they were cast as fiction by Francesca Lia Block. I've written before that I suffer from some combination of candy-stomachache and nostalgia when I read her books now (you can get a sense of this feeling with the Statistically Improbable Phrases from the books: witch baby, slinkster dog, niña bruja, lanky lizards, goat pants, tilty eyes, goat guys, toenail scissors, curly toes, fur pants, globe lamp, witch babies, witch child, genie lamp). I'm sure Block would love the details about the tangerine boucle coat, the pink flapper dress Koppel wears to a top-secret Matthew Barney Cremaster party, and the crumbling diary's sentence fragment lists of obsessions, purchases, and emotions. It's like a mixture of Weetzie Bat's fashion sense and Witch Baby's obsession with archives--set in New York, not LA, but Block switched coasts well in Missing Angel Juan.

I think Block actually addressed the candy-stomachache-nostalgia problem in her 2006 book Necklace of Kisses, in which Weetzie Bat takes stock of her life and wonders if all her passions have been worthwhile; the book is genuinely sad in many parts as she tries to do all the things that would have worked in previous books (go shopping, kiss a mermaid, eat umeboshi plums, kiss a drag queen...) only to find that they don't work anymore. One of the last chapters is a wonderful history of fashion, according to Weetzie Bat, about all the Vivienne Westwood and Pucci and Salvation Army and home-sewn clothes she's ever worn. I think Block is really in her element in lists of items like these, and she manages to imbue this particular list with a moving sense of belatedness, nostalgia, and forward-looking creativity.

I wonder what the Block treatment could do for Koppel's narration when the sense of belatedness sets in and she uses too many cliches of nostalgic writing:

A diary is about change. Florence's New York and mine couldn't be more night and day. Florence's metropolis was a vast theater, like one of the lost wonders of the world. It was alive with writers, painters, playwrights, and jazz. Ideas and art mattered. People rushed to the city because the mere thought of it burned a hole in their souls. My New York seemed out of tune, on its way to becoming a strip mall filled with Paris Hilton lookalikes.

The island of Manhattan sinks a foot every thousand years. We are sinking now. Who will one day swim through the Washington Square Arch and around the silver Chrysler Building? What will they think as they circle the Empire State Building, that once fearful mass of steel and hard-edged stone weathered to blond? Our colossal spires are no longer seen as great lighthouses for the triumph of the human spirit but as dusty old stage sets, the backdrop of chain stores.

Maybe this is self-conscious excess, but it doesn't work for me--especially if it's self-conscious because that would be a cheap trick. I think Koppel corrects herself when she discusses all the amazing stories she reported for the New York Times about mysterious Manhattan literary societies, the zine library at Barnard, an antique typewriter store, and so on (many of which are right up Collins' alley). Clearly there are plenty of ways to exercise the mind in New York, so are there ways to write about nostalgia or belatedness that don't look so hoary? It's another mixed-genre problem, perhaps, of moving between biography of Florence and personal memoir. That's why I think a shot of Block would be interesting as an alternative style that would work well with (forgive me, one last time) those amazing silver Victorian grape scissors and that coat with an iridescent lining.

"Why I'm going to kill the president" *

2008-05-27T18:49:00.001-04:00

I am Richard III of England, and the president killed my father. I was drunk and it seemed so easy to hit him with a stone. He vetoed the bill to establish the Second Bank of the United States. He attacked the South, ended slavery and gave the vote to blacks. He ignored my crucial campaign pamphlet and would not grant me an ambassadorship to Paris, and then God commanded me to kill him. I wanted to follow the lead of Gaetano Bresci, an anarchist who took matters into his own hands by killing King Umberto I of Italy. The ghost of William McKinley told me to do it, but I had nothing against the president--it was a warning to any president who seeks a third term. The president supernaturally caused my gall bladder adhesions, appendicitis and farting, so I vow to kill all kings, presidents, and capitalists. Killing him will draw world attention to the subjugation of Puerto Rico. His family bought their way into the presidency. He's a fascist, leftists don't want anything to do with me, and the Cubans and Russians won't take me back. He betrayed me by backing Israel in the Six-Day War--at least I think that's why. I want to do something bold and dramatic, a statement of my manhood for the world to see. I will be a hero for destroying the master conspirator against the poor. He doesn't understand the plight of the redwoods. He's continuing Nixon's war against the left, and killing him will spark the chaos we need. I am the Messiah. I was shot before anyone could learn what I planned to do at the White House with a lead pipe. I was hired to shoot blanks to create a distraction while Mexicans shot him. It is blasphemous to place 'In God We Trust' on currency. I will impress Jodie Foster like Travis Bickle did. Our president ordered us to kill him. I have emotional problems. My wife just died of cancer and I don't want to live. He restricted assault weapons, and also there's a dangerous alien mist at the White House connected by an umbilical cord to an alien in the Colorado mountains. I have never revealed my motives.

* In case there's any confusion, this is a restatement of why other people wanted to kill various presidents and presidential candidates. I wish the president a long, happy life.

The Phantom of Justice

2008-05-26T22:09:00.000-04:00

Last week I had the kind of experience that can only happen in New York.

I was leaving a doctor's appointment in the fashion district at 6:30 in the evening and I was to meet my stepmother at 7:45 in Times Square to see the musical Gypsy, which we'd both wanted to see for some time. That left me much more than the twenty minutes it would take to walk uptown, so I was thinking of stopping into a bar wait out the downtime. Passing by Madison Square Garden on my way to one of its nearby sports bars, I saw twenty or so black men and women standing vigil for Sean Bell.

I won't get into the details of the Sean Bell case here. Let me just say that I'd been going through it in my mind and I couldn't see the difference between the reckless endangerment by Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, the reckless endangerment by John White on Long Island (instead of calling the police, he brought a loaded gun out to confront a car full of boys who came to harass or beat up his son, and shot a boy when he swatted at the gun), and the reckless endangerment by police officers in Queens whose first response was to start shooting and who even, in the face of no return fire, reloaded and keep shooting dozens more bullets, putting one in a nearby living room, and one in a nearby monorail station. None of these people got up in the morning saying "why not shoot someone innocent today", and I hope I never have to face the wrenching momentum of a violent, life-or-death situation, but each was ready to use deadly force before employing a modicum of caution, and none granted their victims any benefit of the doubt before putting them in harm's way.

At the same time, I have my reservations. I can't say confidently that I would act differently than those police did. I hope I would, but what do I know about that level of violence, that place of tension and panic? And while that's not enough to absolve a private citizen who kills after being unnecessarily confrontative, it may be enough to absolve police. After all, we ask police to enter harm's way and to perform a duty that our society needs fundamentally, but which few of us are willing to do. If, having been asked by us to stand in our place, to be the ones who face bullets and must dispense justice, they prove not malicious but maybe irresponsible or negligent, how thoroughly can we blame them? My answer is: a little, not a lot.

That little bit, on the great scale of so brutal and ceaseless and haphazard a failure, is large enough for me to joined a protest. So I did, noticing that I was the only white person in it. We each held a sign with a different number between one and fifty, representing the number of bullets the police fired at Sean Bell and friends.

After ten minutes or so of this the organizers announced that we would be walking up Eighth Avenue. I didn't realize until we turned up Eighth that this meant not the sidewalk but the street itself. So we walked uptown, a very loose five abreast, occupying one lane of traffic during rush hour while people on the sidewalks stopped and stared, sometimes cheered (especially workers in the stores we passed), and occasionally joined us, and plain-clothes police officers shouted in alarm into their walkie-talkies. I didn't have work the next day so the thought crossed my mind that being arrested wouldn't be so bad, though I realized with alarm that it would mean I'd miss Gypsy. (It's Tony Awards season, when all the good tickets go to Tony voters, so finding tickets to the hottest show on Broadway is like finding a Knicks fan who still likes Isiah Thomas.)

But arrest was unlikely; I don't think the police were interested in exacerbating the city-wide tension by arresting black protesters, and besides, I didn't want the only white guy in the march to duck out as soon as things got serious. So, surprised to find myself in this situation, I marched up Eighth Avenue with the other protesters, blocking traffic, trying to stand between the passing buses and a woman with two small children who had stepped out from the crowd to join us.

Finally we reached the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, and the the organizers at the head turned as if we were going to walk West down 42nd Street. Suddenly I realized we were instead being formed into a big circle and -- good God -- we were blocking 42nd Street and Eighth, one of the busiest intersections in the city. This was something I had hardly thought possible, but there I was blocking traffic in front of Port Authority, listening to the maddest cabbies I've ever heard lean on a horn, and feeling relief that no public buses were trying to get through (civil disobedience in New York City always sucks the worst for people on the buses).

After standing and listening to the increasing chatter coming out of the police walkie-talkies for a several minutes, we finally picked up and resumed our march northward on Eighth Avenue, and I finally exhaled. After a few blocks we started to turn east, and what did I see but the very block I'd been heading for in the first place, the block where Gypsy was playing. This being prime Broadway real estate, the show right across from Gypsy is Phantom of the Opera, and in fact the organizers stopped right between Gypsy and Phantom, blocked one of the street's two lanes and called for all of us to face the theater showing Phantom of the Opera.

Several hundred European and American tourists and what seemed like a few dozen New Yorkers were already crowded on either side of the block, waiting for the shows to open, and with nothing else at all to do, all of them fixed their eyes on us and gaped. This, it would turn out, was precisely what the organizers had anticipated, and the lead organizer took the bullhorn and began a very unlikely prepared address -- not only an address to the tourists, but an address to the Phantom.

"Oh great Phantom of the Opera," he began, "you who call so many to travel far to visit our city, tonight you give us the gift of your famous entertainment."

At this point I glanced around, to see if anyone else felt this had been an extraordinary opening, but the mouths didn't seem to be gaping any differently than before.

"But I ask you, before you begin your amazing show, please give your theatergoers a moment to learn about a grave injustice, about a young man who was shot and killed by the police on his wedding day. Yes, on his wedding day. All you who have a great treat in store for you tonight at this great Phantom of the Opera, when you go home to your loved ones, and tell them about this wonderful Phantom of the Opera, tell them also that before the show began, you had a moment of conscious, a moment when you said, 'I learned that a man was killed, and I learned that that man could have been me. And I want to know, who was this man, Sean Bell?' Because it isn't about race. This young man, Sean Bell, could have been any of us -- white or black, rich or poor. So look up his story on the internet. Read about Sean Bell. Now enjoy this amazing Phantom of the Opera show, but don't forget that an innocent young man is dead and that when there's no justice there's no peace. Thank you."

He put down the bullhorn and I suddenly realized that after the protest broke up, I would be stepping right into line behind the people who had been staring at me for fifteen minutes. And after we formed a quick prayer circle and were instructed to disperse, that's exactly what I did. With many eyes on me, I took my place outside the entrance of Gypsy, nodded to staring people standing on either side of me, and waited for my stepmother to arrive with the tickets. I had walked precisely the route I would have walked anyways, and I had found a very unexpected way to make it last just long enough.