The Main Point

"Live from Norfolk, England, it's The Julian Assange Show!"

2012-01-24T15:11:00.000-05:00

Julian Assange has been out of the news the last few weeks. One suspects he does not like that. And thus, this announcement:

Cyber-transparency activist Julian Assange says he’s launching a career in television, hosting what he’s billing as a new brand of talk show built around the theme of “the world tomorrow.” The show’s guests haven’t been disclosed, but Assange has promised to give viewers more of what he’s been supplying for years: Controversy.

And yet...

It’s not even clear Assange will be free to host the show. He’s currently fighting extradition to Sweden, where he’s wanted over sex crimes allegations, and U.S. officials are still weighing possible charges linked to his attention-grabbing leaks.

We don't know how he'll broadcast from his redoubt at the country home of Frontline Club owner Vaughan Smith, or from Sweden, or on the run, but we do know how each episode of his show will conclude. Like this...

Read the full story from the Washington Post HERE.

Memories of Erich Fromm by Michael Maccoby

2012-01-20T04:06:00.000-05:00

Some time ago we received this missive, a remembrance by Michael Maccoby of his mentor Erich Fromm. He has kindly allowed us to share it. - JSL / TMP

In 1959 while I was finishing my doctorate at Harvard, David Riesman, the sociologist, introduced me to Erich Fromm who was looking for a psychologist with knowledge of statistics and projective testing to work with him on his study of a Mexican village. In exchange for working with him, Fromm offered me training in psychoanalysis at the Mexican Institute he had founded and analysis with him. That year before leaving for Mexico in 1960 with my wife Sandylee, I participated with Fromm, Riesman and others in two political meetings. One focused on the dangers of nuclear war with the Soviet Union which led to establishing a group called Committees of Correspondence. Riesman published a newsletter, The Correspondent, which both Fromm and I contributed to in the years that followed. The other was a meeting to discuss revitalizing the Socialist Party in the United States. Fromm had written a manifesto which was the topic of discussion. Although I agreed with much of what Fromm had written, I wasn’t convinced that a Socialist Party had any chance in America, a country where class differences are denied. Riesman, who was also at the meeting, and I decided our best hopes were to work within the Democratic Party, and subsequently, we presented a paper to a group of progressive Democratic Congressmen which was published in a collection of essays called The Liberal Papers(1961).

From 1960 to 1970, I was Fromm’s student, analysand, apprentice, and colleague, co-author of a debate on thermonuclear war with Herman Kahn(1962) and finally the book Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970).

It is difficult to summarize a decade of profound learning and experiences with Fromm. The analysis was a deep exploration of self, rich in dreams and insights that woke up sleeping parts of the self and forced me to take full ownership of my life in making critical decisions. At one point, I had a dream of being in a Harvard examination hall with others. In front of us was a map of the world. I started to work on my map but I noticed the others just sitting there, not working. “That’s a good dream,” said Fromm, “We are all given the world as a test, but most people don’t know it’s a test they have to to take until it’s too late and they can no longer decide what they are here for.”

Fromm’s view of the self was like a mansion of many rooms in which most people lived in one or two with the others closed off. Like Freud, he agreed with Horace that “nothing human is alien to me”. One’s ability to experience and contain all the irrational as well as transcendent emotions, from the murderous to the loving and sublime, from deep despair to encompassing joy determined how deep the analysis could go. But to contain this awareness required a philosophical frame of meaning which Fromm had found first in Judaism but later in different forms of Buddhism and religious mysticism. Together with my analysis, Fromm had me read Aristotle’s and Spinoza’s Ethics, Herbert Marcuse’s study of Hegel, Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, Meister Eckhardt’s stages of development and writings in Zen and Indian Buddhism.

During the time I knew him, including periodic meetings in the 1970s, Fromm significantly changed some of his views. In the early 1960s, his outlook combined a messianic belief in humanistic socialism with a practice of Zen Buddhism, learned from D. Suzuki. He was in contact with the Yugoslavian Paxis Marxist and encouraged me to lecture in Belgrade and Zagreb in 1964 and later to attend the meetings of Praxis in Korcula.
His analytic style at this time was very influenced by Zen and he had me practice Zen meditation every day. Like a Zen master he could be punishing when he thought I was holding back or being inauthentic. When I complained that he was not being helpful, he said “I am not here to be helpful but to analyze”. He repeated the Zen story of the master who smacks his disciple with a stick. “But I haven’t even said anything,” says the student. “Why should I wait?” says the master.

After his heart attack, Fromm became gentler, more sympathetic.He said that one could believe all illness was psychosomatic until you reached your 60s, In 1968, we both were very active in the anti Viet Nam war movement and Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for president. After the election was over, Fromm expected McCarthy to join him in leading a humanistic movement based on his book The Revolution of Hope, but McCarthy let him down, even failing to show up for an agreed-on meeting. Fromm became more pessimistic. The Messiah was not going to come any time soon. The Socialist movement was being buried in the rebellious acting out of the late 1960s, more in tune with what Fromm considered Herbert Marcuse’s distortion of both Freud and Marx than with Fromm’s humanism. He became more interested in individual spiritual development, more in tune with the Buddhist vision of transcendence, of becoming one with nature. In his New York apartment, he lay on the floor and showed me how he was practicing dying. His book To Have Or To Be expressed his conviction about purpose, the aspiration to fully love life and to not be held back by greed and enslaving attachments.

Working with Fromm could be difficult but also extremely enjoyable. Even when difficult, it was stimulating. Never before had any professor ripped my drafts apart and forced me to clarify my thoughts, fully express the logic of my arguments. Fromm had no patience with unfounded disagreements, but when we wrote together, he was open to my ideas and criticisms. One of the most memorable days of my life was when he asked me to critique his manuscript of The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness and we met in his New York apartment, dialoguing and arguing from 11:00 am to 11:00 pm, getting up only to go to the bath room. Food and drink was brought in by Annis, his wife. What intensity and concentration! Yet, at 11:00pm, neither of us was at all tired. We were fully awake, full of enthusiasm from the intellectual journey we had shared.

Fromm’s tough criticism was, I believe, a compliment, for he was equally tough on himself and extremely self critical of what he considered his narcissism. Like Freud, he saw himself as a narcissistic personality. However, in retrospect, I think he overemphasized the negative aspects of this personality type and underestimated the positive side, the lack of internalization of the father, replacing the superego with an ego ideal, giving one the freedom to create, for good or evil, one’s own sense of meaning without being tied to cultural norms.

Fromm and I both loved telling each other jokes. He had a wonderful sense of humor and a joyful laugh. He believed that a sense of humor is the emotional equivalent of a cognitive sense of reality. He especially enjoyed humor that punctured self importance.

Fromm became an idolized figure in Mexico, based on appreciation of his wisdom but also strengthened by transferential idealization. His disciples lacked his knowledge and vision and few questioned anything he pronounced. I once asked him how it felt to be idealized and he answered that it was frustrating in the sense that his followers, with few exceptions, only repeated what he gave them, that there was a lack of creativity in their followership. But this is a problem with many extremely creative thinkers who never finish learning and revising their ideas. It is the reason why the Freuds, Marxes and Fromms don’t want to be Freudians, Marxists or Frommians.

Sitting at Night, by Po Chu-I

2012-01-06T11:53:00.001-05:00

Facing the courtyard at day's end, I welcome night--that dark

realm ripe for sitting at this lamp, looking into bright clarity.

No words for such depths of heart, I wonder who can share them.

That's when the moment allows a whispered howl: once, twice.

-translated by David Hinton

Is it Okay to Laugh at a Racist Video?

2012-01-05T07:13:00.005-05:00

The comedian Chescaleigh has posted her latest video, "S#!t White Girls Say... to Black Girls," and it is a mild send up of the sort of some mild racism, sometimes disguised as admiration, that a supposedly representative white girl, played in "blonde-wig" by Chescaleigh, might direct toward a black friend. Chescaleigh's sharp portrait of this representative white girl is of course itself mildly racist. Let's here go to the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of racism, which is a pretty good one: "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."

Despite the above, Chescaleigh's Blonde-Wig Comedy video is funny, and not just to me but to the diverse audience I've surveyed. A few of my best friends are blonde and yet I'm not particularly offended. This all is complex, if not downright complicated, so I certainly wouldn't encourage you to try something similar at home, or at a dinner party.

Update: I see Ricochet has linked to me, for which thanks. And it's slightly reassuring in that I'm now living in the UK, a country I love that has laws about disseminating racist material. Chescaleigh's video though, aside from being funny and astute, is also instructive about the complexities of race and the subtexts of friendships, and so it seemed notable and worth posting. And now I do wonder what she'll do next (gulp).

On Britain's "Isolation"

2011-12-20T09:16:00.008-05:00

Recently a well-known journalist friend, lamenting Britain's "isolation," commented that the "best quote" to come out of the unfortunate meeting of European leaders regarding the EU crisis was from an unnamed French diplomat, that "Britain is like a man who wants to go to a wife swapping party but refuses to bring his wife."

Given that my friend is a woman I was surprised that she was so amused that a French diplomat would make a joke about women as chattel to be used as a bargaining chip.

In any case, as to the matter of isolation, I would say that Britain is isolated in the way was the man who stood on the dock as the Titanic pulled away. The French diplomat's line is funny but rather than offering bon mots shouldn't he have been addressing the issue of French bank's low capital ratios? It was actually on just such a point that British Prime Minister David Cameron made his stand. The Eurozone is in a debt crisis, and behind that in a growth crisis, particularly along its southern rim. That a European diplomat would, at that moment, tell jokes at the expense of another EU country seems a sign of dangerous denial and that Europe has a leadership crisis.

In the conversation cited above that same journalist friend compared this moment, with Britain's perceived isolation, to 1936. Let me get this straight. We're to believe that Britain's declining to enter fiscal union with an EU dominated by Germany is akin to Britain's pre-WWII aversion to confront Germany's increasing militarism and to PM Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler? Something is wrong with that figuration but it does remind me of a recent column by NYT Op-Ed writer Roger Cohen, "The British Euro Farce," in which he similarly laments the UK's demurral from fiscal conjoining. Cohen offers no analysis of the economic issues involved, doesn't elaborate Cameron's negotiating red-line concerning controls on banks' capital ratios, but he does offer up as indicative of the tenor of the times in the UK that a British MP attended a holiday party in France during which one of his friends dressed as a Nazi, infuriating (quite rightly) some locals.

Generally, I don't like overdrawn comparisons of contemporary politicians to Nazis or fascists, but since Cohen has just made one, I ask you to consider which of these is an indication of creeping fascism / totalitarianism: 1) a single drunken idiot dressing up at a private holiday party in an exceedingly creepy uniform from seventy years ago, or 2) an op-ed demonizing policy differences and offering overdrawn and demagogic arguments rather than any examination of substance, this at a time of impending crisis.

Roger Cohen has returned to live in Britain after thirty years away. He seems to have brought with him an outmoded anti-Thatcherite rhetoric dated from the period when he left, and one inappropriate for characterizing the present leadership and for grappling with the complex issues this coalition government faces.

In the meantime, it's worth noting that in regards to the incident with the Nazi uniform, Cohen's NYT fact-checkers have failed him. There were not, as Cohen writes, "a bunch of mates dressed up in Nazi SS uniforms," but only one. I suggest that the NYT examine newspaper reporting of that incident more closely and offer a correction. Update: the British MP referred to above has been suspended from his position by the Conservative Party.

The Dark Knight Rises... and Protects the 1%?

2011-12-20T07:19:00.001-05:00

... or has Christopher Nolan crafted a movie critiquing private property and its distribution? I'm not sure how this will go over with the Occupy Wall Street crowd, but from the trailer the film looks good, and Anne Hathaway is the best Catwoman since Julie Newmar.

The Golden Ages of Travel Writing

2011-12-07T15:18:00.006-05:00

Last week I began to wonder whether we are about to enter another golden age of travel writing, which may be another way of saying that we "live in interesting times." The world is in turmoil, in fact we may be at a major inflection point. There is upheaval in the Middle East, changes that once looked promising and now look like a long, grim road to an uncertain future. This week upheaval in Russia as well, and possibly in the near future in China too. There are a number of a small wars on the verge of commencing (here's hoping they don't). Some smaller, long-running conflicts continue. Travel is cheap and, for better or worse, where it once took Patrick Leigh Fermor a year to walk from the hook of Holland to Istanbul, one can now fly there from London in a few hours for a few quid... though perhaps something may be lost in that translation of time and space. For one thing, where we come from life is not cheap, though it is in some other parts of the world. For all of us, wherever we are, it is however short, as I was reminded by a friend just today. I now recall another time when this was brought home so sharply to me, when I was traveling in La Mancha, on a plain southwest of the town of Soria. The woman I was traveling with told me to stop the car and led me on a hike up the single hill on a wide plane... a mountain it began to seem, after a half hour of walking. Atop it was a castle fortress that had crumbled half to the ground and from which one could see on that clear summer day a score of miles across the plain.

"This must be what... five hundred years old?" I'd guessed that it had been destroyed during the reconquista.

She laughed, laughed knowingly, since she'd grown up near here and had gone to university in Valladolid.

"A thousand?!" Something shifted underfoot.

She shook her head. "Older."

"Whose was it?" She shrugged her shoulders.

That was a lesson, but the real lesson she offered there I missed and did not figure for some years.

Aside from cheap airfare, travel now is however wholly different in that with smart phones and email and globalization one never wholly leaves the known world behind. That's too bad, but you can always turn it all off and tell your loved ones the reception was bad.

This month in preparation for my own travels in the new year, to Mexico and Rome and elsewhere, I've been reading "Paddy" Fermor, Robert Byron (not the lord and poet, but the writer and traveler whose rucksack Fermor borrowed when he set off on his own tramp in 1933), along with Norman Lewis and other British travel writers.

One editor, Lorin Stein, recently noted that the English tend to be good at this genre, and its true that late Victorian British travel literature, and the work of those British writers mentioned above is superb, but in fact Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," a best-seller in its time and a work to put alongside his classic "Huck Finn," is a kind of travel book, and I've just downloaded to kindle Twain's "Innocents Abroad." Hemingway's short stories and novels, though fictional, could be considered travel literature. A few years after he published the Knickerbocker Tales, his quintessential New York work, Washington Irving lived in Granada, Spain, working in the consulate there and residing in one of the apartments carved out of the ruins of the Alhambra. His account, "Tales of the Alhambra" (1832), is essential reading before visiting. Through Irving one can see that, the most beautiful palace in the world, not as it stands today, wonderfully restored, but instead lit up at night, spectral, illumined by the dozens of open-air fires that gypsies and other neighbors made and huddled around in the ruined palace's crumbling rooms left open to the sky. Oh, and then of course there is Paul Theroux, author of the classic about train travel through China is still at work today.

In future posts I'll be writing about Camilo Jose Cela, the early twentieth-century Spanish novelist and travel writer, and Cees Nooteboom, the contemporary Dutch novelist and travel writer, but for now here is a wonderful reminiscence by Josh Lieberman, from the Paris Review Daily, about a great American magazine, Holiday, that once published travel literature for a wide audience.

Here’s how it begins. You are in a bookstore on the main drag of a small town. You walk along the mystery and western paperback sections, and then you see a wicker basket overflowing with Life magazines. You idly flip through the stack because you know Life was once an important cultural force but have never seen the magazine in person. The copies of Life are musty and torn, and in the middle of the heap you come across something called Holiday. It has the same heft as Life, more than a foot tall and surprisingly heavy, but in place of a black-and-white photograph on the cover there is a colorful swirling yellow illustration of the sun and the words “California Without Cliches.” The magazine is from 1965 and you think it would look good on your coffee table. Also the ads are campy and fun (“San Diego Is a See-Do Vacationland!”), so you buy the magazine—why not, it’s only a few bucks—and take it home. You turn on the TV and half watch Seinfeld as you flip through for the ads. Then you come upon “Notes from a Native Daughter,” the Joan Didion essay you read in college but don’t really remember. You read how California is only five hours from New York by jet but really that is just a delusion: “California is somewhere else.” Now you are somewhere else. Seinfeld ends and another Seinfeld begins and you read the entire essay and then discover a piece by Ray Bradbury, your old pal from high school English. You read his rhapsodic paean to Disneyland (“No beatniks here. No Cool people with Cool faces pretending not to care, thus swindling themselves out of life or any chance for life”), and you think that’s pretty good, too. You head back to the bookstore to see if they have any more issues of Holiday.

Whenever I mention to someone that I’ve started collecting old issues of Holiday, the excellent yet forgotten monthly travel magazine that was born after World War II and lived until the late seventies, the response generally falls between bafflement and irritation. “Why would you do that?” people ask, as though I’ve just admitted to hoarding old shoehorns or something truly sinister.

Holiday was composed of almost all long-form travel essays—it was not, like many modern travel magazines, list after list of where to eat, shop, and sleep. (There would be little point or pleasure in reading a 1957 Holiday if it were just about where to get the best goulash.) A handful of the pieces are dated, but, like the greatest travel writing, many are timeless. After all, plenty of people still read The Great Railway Bazaar and Travels with Charley, not to mention the roughly 150-year-old Innocents Abroad.

The most puzzling thing about the lost history of Holiday is that the magazine published so many famous writers: Joseph Heller, Irwin Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke, E. B. White, Arthur Miller, Gay Talese, Paul Bowles, Steinbeck, Saroyan, Kerouac, Cheever, O’Hara, Bellow, Thurber, Faulkner.

But more than the essays by major writers, what I find most fascinating about Holiday is the articles by little-known, or totally unknown, authors. In my first issue of Holiday... I came upon an essay by Romain Gary.

Gary’s essay, published in 1967, is a relatively straightforward travelogue about Guadeloupe, the southernmost archipelago in the Caribbean, but it ends with one of those anecdotes you find yourself recalling at odd intervals in the following days and weeks. As part of Gary’s trip he plans to visit an old Royal Air Force buddy from whom he hasn’t heard in twenty years...

Read the rest of that tale, and the whole of Lieberman's wonderful piece HERE.

And see Paris Review editor Lorin Stein's indefensible characterization of travel writing as an English genre HERE. I encourage you to give him a piece of your mind on that score. Their comment section is open, his email address is available.

Some hot-links to the books mentioned here:

Mark Twain's LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, and INNOCENTS ABROAD.

Ernest Hemingway's Short Stories, THE SUN ALSO RISES, A MOVEABLE FEAST, and ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES.

Washington Irving's TALES OF THE ALHAMBRA.

Paul Theroux's THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR.

Camilo Jose Cela's JOURNEYS IN THE ALCARRIA.

Cees Nooteboom's ROADS TO SANTIAGO.

Oliver St. Clair Franklin on Leadership... and Jazz

2011-12-06T08:49:00.001-05:00

Jazz FM recently broadcast a show featuring my friend Oliver St. Clair Franklin O.B.E., the Vice Chairman of Electronic Ink, the Honorary British Consul for Philadelphia, a one-time investment executive instrumental in bringing growth to the new South Africa as it emerged in the 1990s, and a man deeply involved in the civic affairs of my hometown, Philadelphia. It was a jazz-centric "Desert Island Disks." The opening track is one of my old favorites by Grover Washington Jr, the Philly jazz master who also played years ago at the Main Point coffee house.

Franklin is particularly interesting on the leadership style of London mayor Boris Johnson, the eloquent, witty mayor of London, about whom you'll be hearing a great deal, given that he'll be hosting the Olympics next year.

The program is now posted HERE. The tunes are great, as are Oliver Franklin's pearls of wisdom, about leadership, and the challenges of juggling the intricacies to make a city work.

From Pakistan: A Modern and Moderate Voice

2011-12-06T08:12:00.000-05:00

In Washington, discourse has been noisy about this being the noisiest of eras. In Pakistan, the decibel level has been rising too, especially since the NATO incident, and in a place where such can have deadly consequences. It was happy therefore to come across, via a friend's facebook feed, an op-ed from such a modern, moderate voice as free-lance writer Huma Yusuf. Her piece, "In the Realm of Fear," was published this week in DAWN:

The world has heard a collective Pakistani howl, further amplified by dozens of private television channels, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates and text messages. But listen more closely, and the silence seems even more deafening than the noise. The more precarious Pakistan’s domestic and geopolitical position becomes, the longer is the list of what not to say.
You wouldn’t think it while surfing channels or the Internet, but censorship is making a major comeback — not only as a political tactic, but also as a way of life.
The decision by the All Pakistan Cable Operators Association to stop broadcasting international news channels that air ‘anti-Pakistan’ material is only the latest shenanigan in a growing list of transgressions aimed at making Pakistanis see no evil, hear no evil. In a different world, the Pakistani public would have been relieved to see the uncomfortable issue of the ‘double game’, addressed in a recent BBC documentary titled Secret Pakistan, taken out of the mouths of Washington heavyweights and placed in the realm of reliable journalism.
In that other world, Pakistanis might have used the findings of BBC journalists to trigger a reasoned national debate about why our country finds its foreign policy in such a bind. Rather than reconsider the wisdom of Pakistan’s strategic decisions, we have chosen to ban the channel, thereby taking one step closer to the deluded isolationism that states such as Iran have perfected.
...
Pakistanis may be laughing at our authorities’ clumsy attempts to censor content, but there is nothing funny about a society intent on silencing itself. Talk-show hosts banter, bloggers blog, twits tweet, but this active public discourse often seeks to silence, rather than engage, voices of dissent. More Pakistanis are making themselves heard than ever before, but this collective noise drowns out rather than develops multiple perspectives. Say something contrary on the comment thread of a blog and strident voices will rally to label you a CIA spy, Hindu or Zionist.
...
But let’s be honest: the strictest censorship is currently being enforced in our most private spaces — dining rooms, office cubicles, private cars. As Pakistani society becomes more extreme, polarised and moralistic, people are becoming equally careful about what they say in private — amongst friends, family members and colleagues — as in public, on air, or in print. Those who were appalled by Salmaan Taseer’s assassination, but couldn’t denounce Mumtaz Qadri vociferously enough; those who believe an amicable bilateral relationship with the US is to Pakistan’s benefit, but dare not praise Washington in the midst of jingoistic ire; those who think Imran Khan is dangerously soft on extremist groups, but fear being labelled cynics or traitors; those who believe Ahmadis should be allowed to practise their faith freely, but say little for fear of what might be construed as blasphemy — these Pakistanis see the BBC ban as a logical extension of a cultural characteristic. The most basic criterion for a democracy to function is that all citizens believe they have a voice.

I look forward to hearing more from Yusuf. Read the whole thing HERE.

New York City Serenade, at The Main Point (1975)

2011-12-05T14:01:00.001-05:00

Some friends have asked about the origin of this blog's name. Mostly, it's meant to suggest that this on-line journal aims to address the main point, whether a cultural or political issue, of any given day that I write... or any given week, since I've been a sporadic blogger.

That said, as one friend just noted, it also pays homage to a coffee house, called The Main Point, in Bryn Mawr, PA, that was at the center of the folk and rock scenes in the Philadelphia area in the 1970s. For such a small venue they had an extraordinary line-up of performers. I grew up nearby though I was too young to ever go, but I still listen to the music, including this bootleg of Bruce Springsteen's "New York City Serenade" from 1975.

Hey vibes man, hey jazz man play me your serenade
Any deeper blue and you're playin' in your grave

Billy, he's down by the railroad tracks, sittin' low in the back seat of his
Cadillac,
Diamond Jackie, she's so intact, she falls so softly beneath him,
Jackie's heels are stacked, Billy's got cleats on his boots,
Together they're gonna boogaloo down Broadway and come back home with the loot,
It's midnight in Manhattan, this is no time to get cute, it's a mad dog's
promenade,
So walk tall, or baby don't walk at all.
Fish lady, fish lady, fish lady she baits them tenement walls,
She won't take cornerboys, ain't got no money, and they're so easy,
I said, "Hey baby won't you take my hand, walk me down Broadway,
I'm a young man and I talk real loud, yeah, baby walk real proud for you.
So shake it away, so shake away your street life, shake away your city life,
And hook up to the train, hook up to the night train, hook it up hook up to the, hook up to the train,
But I know that she won't take the train, no she won't take the train,
No she won't take the train, no she won't take the train
She's afraid them tracks are gonna slow her down,
And when she turns this boy'll be gone
So long, sometimes you just gotta walk on.

Hey vibes man, hey jazz man play me your serenade
Any deeper blue and you're playin' in your grave
Save your notes, don't spend 'em on the blues boy,
Save your notes, don't spend 'em on the darlin' yearlin' sharp boy,
Straight for the church note ringin', vibes man sting a trash can
Listen to your junk man, listen to your junk man,
Listen to your junk man, listen to your junk man,
He's singin', singin', singin', singin'.
All dressed up in satin, walkin' past the alley.
Watch out for you junk man, watch out for your junk man,
Watch out for your junk man.

Microeconomics for Bovines

2011-12-02T06:30:00.001-05:00

Sent to me, without attribution... and I'd really like to know who authored this variation because it's my favorite.
- J

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you
want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the ** out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

Relying on the Dream World

2011-11-18T14:59:00.002-05:00

"Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen rather than what you are now seeing. You will not accept that whatever is here now IS what is, nor are you willing to go with the situation as it is. Thus, self-deception always manifests itself in terms of trying to create or recreate a dream world, the nostalgia of the dream experience."

--Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The Looming Conflict with Iran - America in Front?

2011-11-18T08:25:00.002-05:00

From where I sit, it looks as if writer Amir Oren has buried his lede.

In an otherwise interesting article about the decades of friendship between Israel and Iran that preceded the subsequent three decades of hostility, Oren concludes with an interesting analysis of America's increasing antipathy toward the Iranian regime and its maneuvers:

Even more than the Israelis, the Americans are close to the boiling point vis-a-vis Iran, more because of its actions in Iraq than its nuclear efforts. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey issued warnings in this direction this week at a congressional hearing. On that very day - which was also the day that Gantz appeared in the Knesset - the head of the ruling Military Council in Egypt, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, hosted American Gen. James Mattis, head of CENTCOM, the U.S. Central Command, which covers Egypt and Iran, Iraq and Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

It will not come as a surprise if in the coming weeks, in response to the incrimination of the Revolutionary Guards for a large attack on the American forces pulling out of Iraq, the Americans will land a warning blow on an Iranian target. The table is wobbling and some of the options are in fact under it.

Quite simply it's evident, even to the Obama administration, that the clerical regime did not respond to the president's overtures to dialogue, his "extension of an open hand," when he came into office. More and more it appears a mistake for the Obama administration not to voice support for Iran's Green movement, crushed by the regime in 2009. Secretary of State Clinton recently said, in defense of the administration's silence, that that had been according to the wishes of the Green movement's leaders. Perhaps this is so. And yet here we are.

Read the whole article HERE, and do read to the end. For Americans, Oren has buried his lede.

Update: On reflection, regarding Oren’s depiction of Americans being at the boiling point, I’m sure Martin Dempsey and Leon Panetta are people who weigh and calculate matters. US use of force is not undertaken lightly, nor without contemplation. Nonetheless, Oren’s piece makes interesting reading.

Manhattan Nocturne by Joseph Brodsky

2011-11-09T06:31:00.001-05:00

Buenos noches.
Don't mind the roaches.

G. Bruce Boyer - An Ivy Leaguer's Lament

2011-11-08T10:15:00.000-05:00

... and it's all about clothes, I'm afraid, but it's witty:

Boyer writes:

"When I was growing up back in the late 1950s, the matter of dress for young men was relatively simple. There were basically three types of clothing stores. There was of course the traditional store for the traditional American business look: conservatively cut suits, safe shirts, and discreet foulard or striped neckwear. Then there was the somewhat “sharper” store, a more courant version of the trad store. Finally there was the Ivy League shop.... For most, the subtleties of double-breasted jackets and grenadine neckwear, of suede town shoes, enameled cuff links, covert cloth chesterfields, and cashmere cabled hosiery were not imaginable. But then neither were exterior logos, Italian designers, or microfibers. There also didn’t seem to be the questions of what to wear when. We certainly knew when the occasion called for a tie, and gym clothes were confined to the gym. It was, as I say, a simpler time."

Read the whole thing at A Continuous Lean.

Pot Calls Kettle Black: Ben Bradlee on Herman Cain

2011-11-04T09:55:00.004-04:00

Oh dear.

At yesterday's book launch for Chris Matthews's new JFK biography, the Daily Caller's Michelle Fields asks former Washington Post Editor what he makes of the very murky accusation of sexual harassment directed at Herman Cain, the candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

In response, Bradlee grinned widely, placed his hand in a semi-avuncular fashion on Ms. Fields's shoulder, leaned in and said, in colloquial editor-speak, "I think he's got it coming to him, doe'n't he?"

Adding historical perspective, he ventured: "You could do that fifty years ago, but you can't do that today."

Really? I wonder if Bradlee just didn't do that (whatever "that" is) today, or, er, yesterday.

Watch the whole thing, including an interview with Bob Woodward, at this link. (See descending claw to shoulder at around 1:50. Bonus: introductory arm-around--the-far-shoulder at the one minute mark.)

More from Michelle Fields here.

UPDATE: Insta-lanche! Thank you, Sir.

NASA Closes a Chapter... while the Los Alamos Fire is Seen from Space

2011-07-07T11:30:00.000-04:00

NASA is in transition, no longer reaching for the heavens. Tomorrow's lift-off marks the last mission for the Space Shuttle program.

Meanwhile, here's a snapshot taken from the Space Station on June 28th of the wild fires encroaching on the Los Alamos nuclear lab. I'm awaiting the photographer's identification. I understand he commented: "Looks a little smokey down there."

Indeed. And we look a little tiny. Sometimes it's good we are reminded. But we also need to reach for those heavens.

More about the end of the Space Shuttle program HERE.

Game of the Lost Kingdoms - Chitral VS Gilgat

2011-06-08T07:49:00.002-04:00

The polo game between Chitral and Gilgat has been played for the centuries. Indeed Gilgate is considered the birthplace of polo. The game takes place every summer, in July, near the Shandur pass. At 3734 meters, this polo field is the highest in the world.

Hat-tip to Susanna Forrest and to W(EI)BPCT, the official website of The World (Excluding India) Bicycle Polo Championship Tournament. Follow the W(EI)BPCT here.

James Salter on Irwin Shaw

2011-04-02T18:54:00.001-04:00

David L. Ulin, musing about the happy change in the weather, was reminded of Irwin Shaw's much anthologized "Girls in Their Summer Dresses." Shaw is largely forgotten now, his literary achievements oddly overshadowed by the enormous commercial success of his late novels, and yet his short stories not only hold up but are superb. Ulin's post prompted a F'book friend to mention James Salter's remembrance of Shaw in "Burning the Days," Salter's gorgeous if pointillistic memoir. Salter is, of course, the man of the moment, or rather of the month, as elaborated here. I took his memoir down from the shelf and read:

Time with its broad thumb has blurred nothing. He was forty-eight that year and already late for a dinner he was going to on Avenue Foch. He gave me the address—come afterwards for coffee, he said. A few minutes later, paying the bill, he left. Thus I discovered that Paris. There were worlds above, I learned, but there are also worlds below. I found Avenue Foch—the name itself has only a faint resonance now, the century is ending and into its crypt all such things will vanish, marshals of France as well as unknown poilus—and I also found the Île Ste.-Louis, rue de Grenelle, Place St.-Sulpice, and apartments and restaurants as well as other towns and regions, not always in France, because of him. He was my unknowing Virgil, brief in his descriptions, irrefutable, fond of drink. Years later I heard him give some advice: never be in awe of anyone. He was not in awe of Europe. He tossed his coat on her couch.

There may be, as well, a shadow-like depiction of Shaw in "Via Doloroso," a short story in Salter's first collection, "Dusk." From that story, I suspected that Shaw, for Salter, was not so much a mentor as a representative figure of a writer, one to compare himself against, admire, and whose example and aims he would in some measure turn away from. Or perhaps he took Shaw's advice to heart, never to be in awe of anyone.

The Paris Review, who originally published another of Salter's stark classic stories, have made available on-line "Am Strand von Tangere." It shows well how in turning away from the example of Shaw, in taking another route, he become such a fascinating writer. It begins:

Barcelona at dawn. The hotels are dark. All the great avenues are pointing to the sea.

The city is empty. Nico is asleep. She is bound by twisted sheets, by her long hair, by a naked arm which falls from beneath her pillow. She lies still, she does not even breathe.

In a cage outlined beneath a square of silk that is indigo blue and black, her bird sleeps, Kalil. The cage is in an empty fireplace which has been scrubbed clean. There are flowers beside it and a bowl of fruit. Kalil is asleep, his head beneath the softness of a wing.

Malcolm is asleep. His steel-rimmed glasses which he does not need—there is no prescription in them—lie open on the table. He sleeps on his back and his nose rides the dream world like a keel. This nose, his mother’s nose or at least a replica of his mother’s, is like a theatrical device, a strange decoration that has been pasted on his face. It is the first thing one notices about him. It is the first thing one likes. The nose in a sense is a mark of commitment to life. It is a large nose which cannot be hidden. In addition, his teeth are bad.

At the very top of the four stone spires which Gaudi left unfinished the light has just begun to bring forth gold inscriptions too pale yet to read. There is no sun. There is only a white silence. Sunday morning. The early mornings of Spain. A mist covers all of the hills which surround the city. The stores are closed.

Nico has come out on the terrace after her bath. The towel is wrapped around her, water still glistens on her skin.

“It’s cloudy,” she says. “It’s not a good day for the sea.”

Malcolm looks up.

“It may clear,” he says.

Morning. Villa-Lobos is playing on the phonograph. The cage is on a stool in the doorway. Malcolm lies in a canvas chair eating an orange. He is in love with the city. He has a deep attachment to it based in part on a story by Paul Morand and also on an incident which occurred in Barcelona years before: one evening in the twilight Antonio Gaudi, mysterious, fragile, even saintlike, the city’s great architect, was hit by a streetcar as he walked to church. He was very old, white beard, white hair, dressed in the simplest of clothes. No one recognized him. He lay in the street without even a cab to drive him to the hospital. Finally he was taken to the charity ward. He died the day Malcolm was born.

Against all advice, I'm in awe. Read the whole thing here.

Read Ulin on Shaw here (hat-tip Jane Ciabattari and Anna March).

Shaw's story "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" may be read here.

The Paris Review Daily Glides into James Salter Month

2011-04-02T17:55:00.001-04:00

It's James Salter month at The Paris Review Daily, and this coincides with the magazine's blog coming into its own as the model for literary blogs, truly worth a daily read.

At the dawn of the World Wide Web, or the brower-surfable web, in 1994 or 1995, the magazine launched its first on-line incarnation, courtesy of the multi-media company Voyager/Criterion Collection. Really, I think it was simply a page with a few covers, a list of contents, and an address to send a subscription check. Nevertheless, it was chosen by WIRED magazine as one of the top ten sites on the web. Competition wasn't exactly stiff, as there were at that time only a few thousand sites on the web.

All these years after, including a period when the magazine disappeared from the web, and the recent years when there was a handsome site used only for announcements, The Paris Review Daily has become something of another order. In June, new Editor Lorin Stein's introductory note announced:

Since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has devoted itself to publishing “the good writers and good poets,” regardless of creed or school or name-recognition. In that time the Review has earned a reputation as the chief discoverer of what is newest and best in contemporary writing.

But a quarterly only comes out…well, you know. We have been looking for a way to keep in touch with our readers between issues, and to call attention to our favorite writers and artists in something close to real time. If the Review embodies a sensibility, this Daily will try, in a casual and haphazard and at times possibly frivolous way, to put that sensibility into words.

The first few months began haltingly, and frankly a bit sophomorically. Elizabeth Bowen once said the she tried to not use a word more than once on a single page. In the first few weeks of the relaunched website there was a scatological word or five in every single post... but then it was, after all, Terry Southern month.

The site, under the direction of the wonderfully-named Thessaly La Force, has since expanded to showcase original literature, commentary on design, biography, television, translation, as well as a whimsical advice column, and links to interesting articles on other sites. The sports writing has been surprisingly good... but then the magazine's Maximum Editor George Plimpton did his best writing about sports... or rather used sports to leap into his best writing, a sort of mnemonic device, as he might have said, and did whenever he asked a writer their own gateway to creativity. I especially commend to you Louisa Thomas on the US Open and Will Frears on the recent World Cup... topnotch sport reportage. I only wish there was a bit more about poetry and poets... those "unacknowledged legislators" left unacknowledged again.

But I've especially enjoyed the series of tributes to James Salter, American letters finest living stylist. Of particular note, Louisa Thomas, again, on James Salter's writing about skiing is a fitting tribute to the master. She writes... and I hope I'll be forgiven by TPR Daily for quoting at such length... but it is good:

I read There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter for the parts about skiing the way one reads A Sport and a Pastime for the sex. In fact Salter writes about skiing the way he writes about sex: as something luminous, clean, somehow moral. This was a few years ago, when I was obsessed with skiing; I thought about it all the time. In Salter I sensed a sympathetic hunger, the longing for something transcendent, pointless, permanent, and always vanishing. There aren’t many good authors who write about skiing. Hemingway does a little. Salter does it a lot, as a way of writing about something else, just as writing about sex is a way of writing about other things: beauty, courage, obsession, mastery—mostly, someone else’s mastery.

When I skied, or when I thought about skiing, a beautiful skier would stop me in my tracks. He would slide over a lip into a bowl or glade, or drop into a little chute out of bounds. His solid body would become liquid, slipping through the snow, as he found the fall line. I would watch his back and then fly after him, tracking him, fearless and afraid. “What enables you to learn?” Salter asks. “It’s simple: desire.” [...]

“There is always that lone skier,” Salter writes, “oddly dressed, off to the side past the edge of the run, going down where it is steepest and the snow untouched, in absolute grace, marking each dazzling turn with a brief jab of the pole—there is always him, the skier you cannot be.” What Salter is describing is not quite jealousy; it is awe. Awe can create a sense of obligation. In the presence of that skier you can never be, skiing becomes a devotional act. [...] To read Salter on the skiing life is to be aware of this life’s reward: the feeling of a turn, the glide and cut, the nervy edges. The speed and focus. The sun on the mountains. The feeling of being free. [...]

I read “The Skiing Life” now and I miss the skiing life. It is, of course, a life I never really had. Two years ago I did go skiing again, in Jackson Hole. On run after run, I was extraordinarily happy. On the chairlifts gliding up, I looked out for that girl, that beautiful skier. I wanted to see her very badly. I saw more patrolmen pulling stretchers than I could count.

At night I slept on a bench in a cabin in Grand Teton National Park. In the mornings we heard the avalanche warnings. I thought of Meta Burden, a beautiful skier who had died in Aspen in a flood of snow. Salter had written about her. She was a “goddess,” he said. “They dug her out in the dark and carried her body down.”

See The Paris Review Daily HERE. Consider bookmarking it, or even reading it daily.

The Arab Uprisings... Arrive in Damascus

2011-03-16T15:23:00.000-04:00

After Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the regime in Syria may be next in line. The video below is from yesterday. Weeks ago the Assad regime outlawed protests and made those arrested sign pledges not to assemble again. A very mild response compared to thirty years ago when the current president's father flattened the village of Hama and killed 20,000 to put down an Islamist uprising there.

If any of my readers understand what the protesters are saying, please translate in the comment section.

Henry Jackson... a man for this moment

2011-03-16T11:25:00.002-04:00

... who said:

"If you believe in the cause of freedom, then proclaim it, live it and protect it, for humanity's future depends on it."

Foreign Affairs

2011-03-16T11:24:00.001-04:00

Freedom is not abstraction when there is a boot stomping on your face. If you care about that cause, this is what happened today...

Middle East

Al Jazeera reports: Bahrain forces attack protesters

BBC reports: Rare Syrian protests in Damascus

The Washington Post reports: Israel intercepts ship it says carried Iranian weapons bound for Gaza

North Africa

The Telegraph reports: Libya: World Leaders reject military intervention

The New York Times reports: Libyan Oil Buys Allies for Gaddafi

The Wall Street Journal reports: Gaddafi Closes In on Rebels

Al Jazeera reports: Gaddafi tells west to stay out of Libya

UK

BBC reports: Libya: UK no-fly zone proposal to enter UN talks

US

The Telegraph reports: General Patraeus: US to begin sending troops home from Afghanistan in July

The Washington Post reports: Clinton visits Cairo’s Tahrir Square to show support for Egyptian democratic transition

Europe

BBC reports: G8 fails to agree on no-fly zone

Asia

The New York Times reports: Emperor, in Rare Address, Expresses Deep Concern Over Nuclear Crisis

BBC reports: North Korea ready to talk Nuclear

Africa

The Telegraph reports: Four killed in Ivory Coast attack

Hat-tip The Henry Jackson Society for many of these stories. About Henry Jackson HERE.

Spirit of the Times

2011-03-16T11:13:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure I agree with all of this, but it sounds familiar and there is some wisdom therein:

"The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
- Cicero (55 BC)

Haruki Murakami's NORWEGIAN WOOD... now a film

2011-03-16T10:43:00.001-04:00

Below... the trailer for Anh Hung Tran’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s coming of age novel NORWEGIAN WOOD. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, following on his eery work on THERE WILL BE BLOOD, has written the film’s score.

Can't wait for a US distributor to step up so I can see the whole thing in cinemas.

Hat tip Christine Spines.

Apropos That Metropolis's Uncovering... Donovan's ATLANTIS

2011-03-14T12:19:00.002-04:00

It's now evident that the tsunami that hit the north of Japan was immensely more destructive and deadly than the actual 8.9 earthquake that triggered the wall of water. A bow in their direction for Japan's strict building codes, careful preparedness, and fortitude in these times. It's heart-wrenching, especially when one considers what a wonderful people they are, and what a great country they've become.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, archeologists working just north of Cadiz, Spain, believe they've found, submerged in an inland marsh, the remains of another tsunami-hit land, the supposedly-mythical Kingdom of Atlantis. This time the find looks credible. Reuters reports:

A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain. "This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.... To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis. The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Plato, writing in the 4th century BC, described Atlantis as "an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules that in a single day and night disappeared into the depths of the sea."

"In front of the Pillars of Hercules," meaning (from Plato's point of view in Athens) west of Gibraltar... the Cadiz area, pretty much.

In 1965, the bardic Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan offered his own fair account of Atlantis's disappearance in the talky prologue to his classic song... which really gets going around 1:50.

Donovan's song, by the way, was memorably used to very different effect by Martin Scorcese as a flower-child counterpoint to the most violent scene in his masterpiece "Goodfellas."

The Reuters account here.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai

2011-03-14T12:07:00.000-04:00

US Secretary of State: ""The world is watching the situation in Libya with alarm."

2011-02-22T09:25:00.003-05:00

Indeed.

The mad Libyan dictator Colonel Kaddafi addresses the world thusly:

"I want to show that I'm in Tripoli and not in Venezuela. Do not believe the channels belonging to stray dogs," he said, under a large umbrella, leaning out of the front seat of a van.

The video below is in its way truly alarming.

UPDATE: Kaddafi has just pledged to "cleanse Libya house by house." This man has to be stopped NOW. Where the heck is President Obama? Liberal internationalism... is it not alive?!

UPDATE 2: As Lee Smith says in "The President's Deafening Silence on Libya":

The Obama administration would do well to exercise some moral clarity regarding a man whose personal demeanor has long symbolized the most repressively autocratic and obscurantist features of Arab political culture—a man who reportedly has now, among other things, dispatched his air force to put down the people he rules. The White House’s silence is perhaps explained by the idea that a public statement will do more harm than good....If there really is an argument in the administration about what to say and do concerning Libya, we can hope that means that there is at least one faction in the White House that sees the world, and America’s role in it, clearly. U.S. support does not undermine a cause; when it is a factor at all, it lends prestige to it. In any case, neither Qaddafi nor the opposition is waving Old Glory. It is a Libyan affair, a Libyan conflict fought over Libyan issues, with the power to rule Libya in the balance. The White House’s task is to shape events in Libya to suit U.S. interests—and silence doesn’t cut it.

Read the whole thing here.

If You Are Eating the News

2011-02-21T20:14:00.001-05:00

... some useful links for top stories of the day:

Gaddafi's son warns of civil war, video via al Jazeera.

The US accuses the UK of legitimizing Gaddafi, via the Telegraph. Seems to me a team effort, though Britain must have second thoughts about their investment in the regime, the release of the Lockerbie terrorist Megrahi.

Saudis offer Bahrain rulers support against opposition, via Jerusalem Post. (I'm astonished the Saudis are not keeping their heads down.)

If true, this is BIG... but it seems unreliable to me... US warships box in Iranian flotilla, delay Suez passage, read HERE.

EU pledges support to Arab World in Transition, via NYT.

Security forces quell opposition protests in Tehran, at the Washington Post.

Top blogger Michael Totten recounts his trip to Libya.

Israel monitoring Suez-bound Iran ships, but sees no real threat, via Haaretz.

A look at Germany's illegal sale of technology to Iran, here.

A series of excellent articles by Lee Smith at the Weekly Standard.

Stacy McCain responds to the NYT's assertion that this is "the end of blogging." The NYT are authoritative on a number of things, but not that.

Blogging During Times of Twitter

2011-02-21T19:52:00.000-05:00

Funny to return after some months away from this space only to learn that, according to the NYT, we now live in the time of Twitter. I'd been away finishing a film script and supporting the release of another movie, a truly ancient medium apparently, and suddenly now everything has changed. Frankly, I'm not buying it, and so we blog on...

The other day I was discussing electronic media with a manuscript archivist from Yale's Beinecke Library. When I assembled Paris Review's archives for sale to a research library in 1999 there were an array of artifacts: handwritten postcards and manuscripts, typed manuscripts, international cables between the NY and Paris offices, heavy-bound books recording notes from business phone calls, corrected printers' galleys, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes and so forth. At the last moment, I copied two of the hard drives form the office computers and threw those in as well. The libraries who examined the archives said it was the first time they'd had to consider handling digital archives and they had no idea how best to preserve them. Last week I asked the Beinecke curator about this and she said, "We have all sorts of files composed on processing programs that aren't available anymore. Word Star?"

Friends, in the long term the odds are on objects. In the meantime, we discourse in prose on electronic media.

Stacy McCain refutes the NYT's claim that blogging has died. (The NYT, by the way, attempt to use terms of art in suggesting that blogging on Facebook is not blogging.)

Certainly I've found some useful links on twitter, and some have been composing "six word novels" but by and large it's a river of gibberish, designed to induce ADD. Consider this twitter from a Twitterer considered by the Independent to be one of the top in the UK:

There are many leads to good information here, but there is less information here than a old fashioned news ticker would provide, and what has happened to the voice of this fine novelist? Nowhere.

Give us the blog.

The Main Point, and Its Mission

2011-02-21T17:09:00.000-05:00

When I started The Main Point blog I described its purpose as a place for observations on culture and politics, news, very short stories, poems, photos, missives from friends.

On return to the blog I notice that balance has been out of whack and that my first post is entirely consumed with current events and conflict. As a former editor of a literary magazine and an arts journalist such had not been intention at the outset, but it is perhaps a reflection of the times we live in.

With the indulgence of my few followers, and since some of you are new to TMP, I'm going to take another look back now at a few earlier posts more in line with my original intentions and with, um, my actual areas of expertise. So herewith a kind of greatest hits for TMP:

The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa is best known for his samurai epics, but in the 1950s he was fascinated by hard-boiled crime stories and noir. In Hollywood there is now a cult fascination, led by Martin Scorcese, with Kurosawa's movie "High and Low." "The Bad Sleep Well" is worth similar reverence and has Shakespearean dimensions, but my favorite from that period is "Stray Dog," thoughts on which HERE.

Andres Velasco, until recently the Chilean economics minister, spoke with me in an interview for Monocle magazine, about the proper role of stimulus spending and his notion of counter-cyclical fiscal policies, HERE.

A short story? A very short story... Ernest Hemingway wrote the saddest, and it can be read HERE.

TMP received a missive from the eminent psychoanalyst and business consultant Michael Maccoby on his mentor Erich Fromm, HERE.

Extraordinary times? This month I'm reminded of 1848. Usually though I think back to 1958 and what that must have been like.

Tony Curtis died this winter. Years ago I interviewed Billy Wilder for The Paris Review and he recounted directing Curtis in "Some Like It Hot," as recounted HERE.

A collection of memories about my old boss George Plimpton HERE.

My favorite wine critic Jay McInerney remembered a then-recent bottle HERE.

A number of fascinating missives from novelist and military historian Caleb Carr HERE. Particularly of interest... Carr's speculation on Gunter Grass's life in the 10th SS Panzer division during WWII.

An archive of contributed poetry HERE, including work by Charles Wright, Pierre Martory, and the heroic Jeannie Vanasco.

A Look Back at Hard Questions on Iraq and Afghanistan

2011-02-20T11:27:00.004-05:00

I'm back, then. Returned after an extended hiatus to finish a film adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel, and to support the release of "The Garden of Eden."

I'd like to start by taking a look back at some hard questions I rhetorically posed in July 2008, during the run-up to the presidential election, on my Standpoint magazine blog to then-Senator Obama. Time changes one's perspective. Iraq is now comparatively stable and may, with its scrappy educated population and its untapped oil wealth, have a promising economic future. Afghanistan continues to be a challenge in terms of conflict, politics and especially development. With both countries there should be no easy answers. Here are the hard questions I posed in July 2008:

1. Why does Senator Obama advocate a surge of troops in Afghanistan though he considers a surge of troops in Iraq to have been a mistake?
2. Why is a stable Afghanistan crucial to US interests while a stable Iraq is not?
3. How long does Senator Obama expect to keep troops in Afghanistan?
4. Why is an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan manageable while the same in Iraq is not?
5. How much does Senator Obama expect to spend rebuilding Afghanistan?
6. Why is rebuilding Afghanistan affordable while rebuilding Iraq is not?
7. Why does Senator Obama consider the ethno-sectarian issues in Iraq to be nearly intractable while in Afghanistan they are something we can overcome?
8. If leaving Iraq will make the Iraqi government behave more responsibly, how will an increased presence in Afghanistan affect the Afghan government?
9. Why does Senator Obama advocate a "surge in diplomacy" and multilateralism in Iraq while simultaneously advocating unilateral action in the Pakistani tribal areas?
10. How large of a "residual force" will be left in Iraq and for how long?

UPDATE: Some of these challenging questions are addressed in a new book I've just run across by Bing West entitled "The Wrong War: Strategy and Way Out of Afghanistan." A comprehensive review, admiring with caveats, is offered by Andrew Exum HERE.

"Hemingway's Garden of Eden"

2010-12-04T12:06:00.005-05:00

A bit of news... December 10th will see the US release by Roadside Attractions of "Hemingway's The Garden of Eden."

"The Garden of Eden" has long been my favorite of Hemingway's novels. Like all his best work, it gives you the look and feel of places (in this case the Cote d'azur in the 1920s), but also the sensuous thrill of what the world offers, the excitement of complex relationships, and the tension of sexual intrigue. I only hope the film lives up to this great book. (I suppose I should mention that I'm biased since I wrote the screen adaptation.)

A glimpse here:

The trailer can be seen here, or here.

And more information here. Announcement here, here with commentary here... by ace blogger Liberty London Girl here.

And The Paris Review Daily reports on a New York screening at Tribeca Grand Hotel HERE... Vanity Fair interview HERE, and another by the wonderful Christine Spines on Random House's Word & Film site HERE.

Finally my account of a fit of overwhelming insecurity, film-related, in the FT HERE.

Blogging will be light... though I remain before the fate machine

2010-11-13T09:03:00.000-05:00

Blogging has been light recently as I've been at work on a feature film adaptation of a book by the fellow who also wrote this.

So, yes, I've been away, and yet still in front of this "fate machine."

Fate machine? "Typewriter keys represent the keys of life." It is all explained in this clip...

Billy Wilder on Writing "Some Like It Hot," and Directing Tony Curtis

2010-10-01T08:29:00.015-04:00

Tony Curtis died yesterday. His career included roles in The Sweet Smell of Success, Spartacus, The Defiant Ones, and many others, but he’ll be best remembered as Joe (and Josephine) in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.
   Some years ago, when I was an editor at The Paris Review and was visiting Los Angeles, I learned that Billy Wilder went to the same office every day from ten to twelve in the morning. For two year I’d been trying to get the filmmaker to agree to an interview for the Writers at Work Series, and he’d steadfastly refused. I finally decided simply to show up and introduce myself, to “door-step him,” as he had done, years before, as a young journalist in Vienna.
   The office was a simple suite on the second floor of a low-rise office building. Mr. Wilder, a restless man, even at ninety then, taller than expected, blinked behind large black-framed glasses, and was not quite as surprised to see me as I’d expected. With wonderful Old World manners, he ushered me in, nodding as I gave my name. The mail had just arrived and with the air of a benevolent, even exuberant, dictator, he instructed me to pick it up and carry it over to his desk. He motioned to a leather chair beside it.
   On the wall across from his desk, in gilt letters eight inches high was the question "HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?" A day bed, like an analyst's couch, was set against one wall. The opposite wall was decorated with personal photos, including a number of him with some of cinema's other great writer-directors--John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini.
   When firmly settled in a large chair behind his desk, we chatted for a half hour while he sorted his mail. Finally, the mail sorted and opened, he peered over his glasses and said, "You wanted to ask me a question."
   Thus began a series of four meetings over ten days, after which we composed and, with my boss George Plimpton, edited a text that became “The Art of Screenwriting.” The edited interview can read in Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, published by Picador. I include below one of the many out-takes from the published piece that were removed due to their concern with the craft of directing, and so outside purview of the magazine’s interviews series, the craft of writing. For Wilder, of course, those two were one and the same, or rather one melded into the other. (Plimpton would have none of this argument unfortunately, and so out these anecdotes went, removed from publication, until now.)
   Sometime into our second meeting I asked Mr. Wilder what happens between the script and the filming of a script.

BILLY WILDER: You have to work with the actors to make sure the dialogue meshes, that there are no pauses. Or, if there is going to be a laugh you need to make a pause there for the audience response, some bit of action maybe.
   When the Marx Brothers were about to shoot A Night at the Opera, Irving Thalberg of MGM did something very intelligent. He had some of the brothers take routines from the movie and play them between vaudeville acts to an audience. Somebody from the studio would be there to analyze the laughter and time everything: "This is good for seven seconds." "This is only good for four." "This falls flat. That we cut."
   So, for instance, when we had the scene in Some Like it Hot where Tony Curtis after a night with Marilyn Monroe, using that Cary Grant accent on her, climbs into the window of his hotel room, where he finds lying in bed Mr. Lemmon, who had just danced the night away, the tango, everything, with Joe E. Brown.
   Curtis says, "What's new?"
   Lemmon says, "I'm engaged."
   "What do you mean you're engaged, for Christ's sake. Who's going to marry you?" In fact, this millionaire guy, Joe E. Brown, wants to marry Jack Lemmon.
   I knew it was a very funny scene and people were going to laugh at all this. There was a group of tourists on the set while we shooting who didn't know the script. As soon as they saw Curtis dressed as a Shell Oil heir-kind of yacht captain, and Lemmon in the dress with the hairdo, there was constant laughter from the sidelines. People were having to leave the stage so as not to disrupt shots. We figured that we had written in about twenty laugh lines, and I knew I would need to slow down, to retard the dialogue to give people time to recoup.
   On the stage, someone will say a straight line to set up a whallop of a joke. Right? Then you need to wait for the laughter to subside before you start in with the next straight line to feed the next joke.
   In pictures, it's almost impossible to stop the laughter, to slow things down. The next joke will come while people are still laughing. So I came up with the idea of Lemmon playing with some Cuban maracas.
   So Curtis: "Why would you want to marry a guy?"
   Lemmon: "Security!" Rum, bum, bum, bah, with the maracas.
   I spread the lines out with the maracas.
   It wasn't so easy when we first showed the guys in disguise. First you see the heels, walking, very high heels, then the legs.
   Slowly I disclose that these two are carrying instruments, and then you figure out it's our two musicians on the run, Lemmon and Curtis. On the MGM lot number three where they had the train, they only had a locomotive and three cars. We wanted to spread the walking out, so we used three takes four times--a train's a train, you can't even tell.
   The audience now has enough time to recover, we're back to a medium shot, the feet and the bottom of a dress. The feet stop walking, and Lemmon says, "It's so drafty!"

[During another meeting I asked Mr. Wilder if when he wrote something whether he could tell when he had it right. – JSL]

BILLY WILDER: Izzy Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like it Hot the week before we shot it. We'd come to the situation where Jack Lemmon tries to convince Joe E. Brown that he cannot marry him.
   "Why?" Brown says.
   "Because I smoke!"
   "That's all right as far as I'm concerned..."
   Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, "I'm a boy! Because I'm a boy!"
   Diamond and I were in our room working together waiting for the next line--Joe E. Brown's response, the final line, the curtain line of the film--to come to us.
   Then I heard Diamond say, "Nobody's perfect."
   I thought about it, and I said, "Well, let's put in 'nobody's perfect' for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole weeks to think about it." We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied.
   When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn't trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn't see it. "Nobody's perfect." The line had come too easily, just popped out.
   Now if I go to Europe or if I am in New York sometimes somebody will suddenly stare at me, and without saying my name, maybe not even knowing who I am but just that I had something to do with that movie, they'll say, "Nobody's perfect."

Economic Indicators

2010-05-08T07:16:00.000-04:00

"Nathan Rothschild famously quipped, 'Buy when there is blood in the streets,' but he never said anything about firebombs thrown at Greek riot police, a trillion dollar easing of the money supply, or synthetic collateral debt obligations."

- Andy Kessler, WSJ

Mirror, by Mark Strand

2010-04-19T05:12:00.000-04:00

A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks.
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looked up into the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me, but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.
Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

- Poem courtesy of Knopf Poetry. Listen to Strand read this poem here. Sign up for Knopf's Poem-a-Day service here. Lastly, a hat tip, and deep bow in her direction, to Andrea A. for her suggestion of the poem.

Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden"

2010-04-19T05:01:00.010-04:00

... also forthcoming... news of, and a release for, the feature film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Garden of Eden." [For update info, see recent post.]

"Garden" has long been my favorite of Hemingway's novels. Like all his best work, it gives you the look and feel of places (in this case the Cote d'azur in the 1920s), but also the sensuous thrill of what the world offers, the excitement of complex relationships, and the tension of sexual intrigue. I only hope the film lives up to this great book. (Disclosure: I wrote the film adaptation.)

The trailer can be seen here, or here.

And more information here. Announcement here, here with commentary here... by ace blogger Liberty London Girl here.

And The Paris Review Daily reports on a New York screening at Tribeca Grand Hotel here.

Main Point Pictures

2010-04-19T04:41:00.001-04:00

Main Point Pictures, coming soon, will be a site for videos associated with this blog.

Quite separately, it is also the name of my independent production company for feature films.

The Grand National Steeplechase

2010-04-10T11:43:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: Inexplicably, I have lost in betting on this race once again.

"Gambling Types #7: I don't like to talk about this lot. I'm one of them. They're simply out of their depths. They know they can't win, but they'll risk it 'just this once.' They bet beyond their means, go mad when they win and cry all the way home on the train when they lose. Their cup doth not runneth over and there's a nasty tendency toward bitterness which takes the form of swearing loudly in the Gents when it's empty. They also retreat there to have a private roll call of their rapidly dwindling wad from time to time. They gamble while under the influence of alcohol and/or the astrological columns and they're even mad enough to gamble to 'get out of trouble.' That's why they're always in it. Like most dogs they have their day. About once in a lifetime."

--Jeffrey Bernard:

"Everybody" by Bissou

2010-03-23T14:21:00.002-04:00

This video is too sweet by half... and quite wonderful. The song is "Everybody" written by Ingrid Michaelson. This interpretation is arranged and performed by the group Bissou, who are Miranda, Elodie and Mikaela.

Hat tip Chloe Bass for the suggestion.

A Hat, a Coat and a Gun

2010-03-17T07:08:00.004-04:00

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

—from Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Still Life by James Perceval, courtesy of LP.

Headline of the Week

2010-02-18T10:08:00.001-05:00

via The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"In Academic Culture, Mental-Health Problems Are Hard to Recognize..."

If you didn't know this already, the article may be read HERE.

The Ale and Quail Club

2010-02-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

The other day a correspondent mentioned in passing something called The Fellowship of Boar and Beer. When I asked to what he was referring, he clammed up.

I never considered there was particularly much relationship between boars and beer, but as the person in question knows someone in the Baker Street Irregulars, and because boars were often depicted in heraldic terms alongside warriors, I wondered if that might be a group akin to The Red-Headed League, depicted in that Sherlock Holmes tale. Probably not... or was in fact the Red-Headed League a hoax? I don't remember, but all this set me to pondering.

I'm ensconced these days in north London above an old butcher shop, 18th century by the facade, but a local historian says the foundation goes back to late 16th century. Out back even today through the fog I can still see the outline of the old stockyard, and in between a barn-like building, now an artist's loft, once for the bloody process between stockyard and counter. And, further, nearby is Bacon Lane... though I've suspected that was named after the scientist Francis Bacon, who died nearby of ague after conducting an experiment with a chicken. No matter. Across the street is a very old pub, where last month I was served a wonderful "winter warmer" cask ale. Come to think of it, across from every old butcher shop there is a pub, but... well, this is London. Of course, there there may be chapters of this group all around and I've simply never noticed?

I remembered then that some of our friends were fans of the filmmaker Preston Sturges and I recalled a group who appear early on in his movie "The Palm Beach Story." The Ale and Quail Club. Not to be confused with the stockcar racing outfit based out of upstate New York.

Yes, I suspect that the mysterious association The Fellowship of Boar and Beer, if it even exists, has something to do with Ale and Quail Club, but who knows?

I await confirmation. In the meantime I include below a relevant clip. (Please forgive Sturges his broad caricature of the waiter.)

Quote of the Week: from Lee Smith, via Michael Totten

2010-02-12T08:54:00.000-05:00

It's an interesting reading day when one of my favorite Middle East observers, Michael Totten, quotes another of my favorites, Lee Smith. Here, as posted earlier this week by Totten:

For Assad and the Alawis, the Iraqi insurgency amounted to a debate over the nature of the Middle East. The Bush administration thought that the region was ripe for democracy and pluralism, and that its furies could be tamed by giving Middle Easterners a voice in their own government. Syria countered that the Middle East could only be governed through violence. Its support for the insurgency was, at least in part, intended to give Washington no choice but to put away dangerous ideas like Arab democracy…
This is what the Syrians, and the Iranians, did in Iraq—but the Americans were also at fault, and not just because we failed to provide enough security early on. We should have given more consideration, and even respect, to the theory the Arabs had about us. While Washington may have thought it was laboring to bring democracy to the region, the Arabs believed we were on a deliberate course to set them at each other's throats, with the goal of dividing and conquering. The sectarian warfare that Zarqawi was waging there was seen as just the first of many more conflagrations to come, conflagrations that the Arabs thought would be to our benefit, and of course to that of the Israelis.

Sometimes shows of power and diplomacy are, in fact, connected aspects of one player's coherent and comprehensive Middle East policy. But often what appears to be a grand strategy is just a fantasy that Arab analysts, journalists, and cafe society have projected onto the map of the region in order to pass time and keep the mind nimble, like a narrative version of backgammon. That was the case with the Arab interpretation of U.S. policy in Iraq. We didn't want to set the Sunnis and Shias against each other—we just wanted to take a few pieces off the table. But the Arabs find it impossible to believe that we do not understand the nature of the Middle East, and they therefore assume that our guile matches our power.

The assumption that democracy was all a plan to set the Arabs at each other's throats also made sense to many Arabs because it fit the way they see their own societies. For the Americans, democracy meant investing the Arab man, woman, and child with the rights due every human being. From the Arab nationalist perspective, empowering the Arab individual would necessarily come at the expense of the Arab nation. And weakening the unity of the nation would animate the sectarian monster that has stalked the region for a millennium.

Nowhere were these fears stronger than in Damascus. For the Syrian regime, democracy would mean an end to the domestic peace cultivated through coercion and repression since the founding of the modern Syrian state, and the unleashing of violence at unprecedentedly lethal levels. Majority rule, meanwhile, would obviously not only spell the demise of the Alawi regime but also threaten the very existence of the Alawi community. As they watched what was happening in Lebanon and Iraq, it was easy for the Arabs to conclude that if representative government meant brother slaughtering brother, then the Americans could keep their precious democracy to themselves.

Hatred of America's freedoms, the Bush White House liked to say, is why jihadis commit acts of terror against the United States. The Syrian regime reminded the Arab mainstream that it wasn't American freedoms they hated, but their own. The Arabs feared each other.

From The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations by Lee Smith.

More from Totten, including about Iran on its 31st anniversary here.

Overexposed - A BBC Radio Documentary by Miles Warde

2010-01-28T15:16:00.001-05:00

Though I missed it when it was broadcast Monday on BBC Radio 4, I've since caught my friend Miles Warde's documentary on i-player (link below) where it will be available through the end of the week.

It's a riveting half hour that examines the motivation, and the fates, of a group of photojournalists starting out together twenty years ago at the London College of Printing. Above is a photo by one of this group, another friend, James Hill, Pulitzer Prize winner for his work in Afghanistan for The New York Times.

As Chris Campling writes about the documentary:

Brave - probably foolhardy - and desperately ambitious, these young men and women came out of college and into warfare, travelling to Yugoslavia, Angola, Rwanda and Iraq in search of the pictures that would make their names. They went with little more than accreditation from various newspapers and agencies, utterly exposed to the dangers they would encounter, a far cry from the embedded journalists of today. Two of them were to die within a couple of years of graduation. Some of the others went into less dangerous lines of work. All have memories to make your hair curl.

OVEREXPOSED, on BBC i-player here. (Please note this program may not be available outside the UK. If not, please request it from your local public radio station.)

More photography by James Hill may be found here.

Iran, an Anniversary, the Green Movement, and Memory

2010-01-27T09:09:00.005-05:00

February will mark the 31th Anniversary of Iran's revolution against the Shah, an event that, once the anti-Shah coalition was reduced to a single faction, became known as "The Islamic Revolution."

Will the Islamic Republic of Iran reach its thirty-first anniversary and last until March? Alone among my friends I'm not entirely sure. Or rather, I should say plainly:

I do not think the current government in Iran will survive through this spring.

The Obama administration has been attempting to engage the cleric-backed government of Ahmadinejad diplomatically, yet because of its behavior on the international stage Iran's current government should not be granted the standing as a partner for such negotiations.

Meanwhile, their government has been undergoing a crisis of legitimacy within Iran itself. A vast majority of theologians have all along been in agreement that clerical rule has no place in Shia Islam. Virtually the lone dissenters are those wielding power in Iran now. Of course, I'd counsel readers not to take my word for it, and instead refer you to authorities in Najaf.

The question within Iran of the legitimacy of their government, however, now turns not so much on theological arguments as on its pervasive and grotesque abuse of human rights. Of course, I'd counsel readers not to take my word for it, but instead to listen to what Iranian people themselves have been saying, and are saying in the streets, on twitter and sundry other media channels, even now. In the meantime, detailed and authoritative reports about these abuses have been assembled and produced by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and they are available HERE.

About February, and the coming anniversary of the Iranian revolution, this, on the persistence of memory, from Roya Hakanian:

For 30 years, Milan Kundera’s elegant formulation had been upended in Iran. Those in power insisted on remembering the past; ordinary men and women insisted on forgetting it. To remember was “revolutionary.” Not to remember was not simply counter-revolutionary, it was even blasphemous.... The tension was so palpable that even foreign reporters—clueless to language and cultural subtexts—sensed it. Report after report appeared in the English-language press about the youth’s disregard for the old totems, and their penchant for all things western, as they understood western to be—like going blonde, wearing Nikes, being sexually promiscuous, and saving money for plastic surgery. This generation that clandestinely swung its hips to the cool tunes of American pop would not be caught chanting a passé like Allahu akbar....

In the aftermath of the June presidential elections, the national dementia lifted. What was buried in the collective consciousness took hold of young and old. Everyone suddenly remembered. They climbed to the rooftops and chanted Allahu akbar just as they had in the weeks before the fall of the Shah. They took to the streets by the millions, and the image of their throngs uncannily resembled its precursor. They remembered how to build barricades, mix a Molotov cocktail, kiss the cheek of a riot policeman to pacify him, or set a tire on fire to neutralize tear gas. The regime finally got its wish. The nation proved to have been an assiduous student of history all along—and of all the detailed instructions it now regrets having passed on.

Now, in a farcical twist, the promotion of forgetting has become a governmental priority.

As Hakakian explains: "Last week, the broadcast and distribution of several images from 1978 was declared banned." [As may be seen here: http://www.ayandenews.com/news/17413/]

"The Green Movement, however, has already vowed to fight the ban by remembering."

Read Hakakian's entire article HERE.

The River-Merchant's Wife, by Li Po

2010-01-26T13:47:00.001-05:00

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you

- translation by Ezra Pound

with my thanks for the suggestion to Lawrence Osborne

Outsourcing, and the Decline of Journalism

2010-01-25T07:42:00.003-05:00

A few years ago friends at newspapers and magazines attempted to warn me off blogging with the contention that I'd be contributing to the decline of the paid-journalism model. In fact, all of us grossly underestimated the pressure that would soon be put on traditional methods of journalism production.

We all know the results.

Next cool-media newspapers like The Guardian began to cannibalize television news with their on-line documentary film series, and new media players such as PJTV and Reason TV further eroded that market.

Now we wait in hope now for the immanent arrival of The Jesus Tablet.

In the meantime, another ominous portent, or indeed competitor, has interceded:

The world's first film shot entirely by chimpanzees is to be broadcast by the BBC as part of a natural history documentary. The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists. The film-making exercise is part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other. It will be screened within the Natural World programme "Chimpcam" shown on BBC Two at 2000GMT on Wednesday 23 January.

The Horror.

Read all about it HERE.

Frank O'Hara reads "Having a Coke With You"

2010-01-25T07:07:00.002-05:00

What We'd Like to Hear President Obama Say

2010-01-22T09:36:00.000-05:00

"We won't agree on every issue... But we do agree that we love America equally, that we're concerned about the future of this country, and that we will do our very best to address big problems... The American people expect us to rise above partisan differences, and my administration will do its part...."

Hat tip Ann Althouse.

The Dancing: Jean-Luc Godard's "Bande a Part"

2010-01-21T13:56:00.001-05:00

Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG

2010-01-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

After watching some early Polanski films last week I've been thinking about pulp fictions and genre films.

Many of the finest filmmakers did their finest work in what some, incorrectly, call the lesser genres. Billy Wilder's film noir "Double Indemnity," an adaptation of the James M. Caine novel, compares well to his original "Sunset Boulevard," and in some ways paved the way for that later work. Elsewhere on this blog I've offered Wilder's account of working on that adaptation with Raymond Chandler, from a conversation I had with the director shortly before he died. (It was a contentious relationship and in the end Wilder was legally enjoined by the studio from brandishing his riding crop during working hours. A limit was also placed on the number of calls he was allowed to accept from young ladies.)

This week I've been re-watching Akira Kurosawa's film noir "Stray Dog" (1949). That film had its genesis as an unpublished police procedural novel that the great Japanese filmmaker himself wrote over a feverish two month period.

"Stray Dog" tells the story of the frantic search by a rookie cop (Toshiro Mifune) for his stolen Colt pistol, which to his shame had been lifted from him on a bus. A manhunt, lead by the rookie's mentor, begins after the stolen gun is used in a murder. The action throughout takes place during a heatwave in a bombed-out post-war Tokyo. One thing that gives the film such psychological depth is that both cop and killer are from the same background and are the same age... though it's never mentioned both must have been recently de-mobilized from the defeated Imperial Army. There's a sense of "there but for the grace of God go I."

The mini documentary in the Criterion Collection edition recounts a stir over the opening shot of a dog panting feverishly. The film premiered during the American occupation of Japan, and a busybody American woman associated with the ASPCA accused Kurosawa of having injected the dog with rabies to get that wild-eyed effect. This was in the wake of post-war revelations about "scientific" experiments performed by the Japanese imperial army. Apparently this woman was persistent, obsessed even, and brought suit. It was the one blot on an otherwise happy production.

Of course, to get the shot Kurosawa simply had his team take the dog on a run for a few minutes on a hot day.

Video: Archie, the Parsons Terrier

2010-01-21T10:44:00.001-05:00

In writing earlier about Soupy Sales, I commented that "these days with a laptop and a two hundred dollar Flip video camera, most everyone has better tools than he and his cohorts had." Not that their videos are funnier.

I offer proof on both points in this video I've just shot and edited about the training of Archie, an aspirant to the role of Sherriff of Hampstead Heath. He is a terror to squirrels and other small dogs.

There'll soon be other and better videos here and the Main Point Pictures site on Youtube, HERE.

Soupy Sales: Fang's Talent Agency

2010-01-21T10:36:00.000-05:00

Since his death late last year I've been watching clips from the Soupy Sales Show. The picture quality is not great, and the sets are homemade, but you could make a pretty funny video with a single stationary camera and a fellow in front of it who had a lot of personality. In a way his are the forebears for Saturday Night Live's videos.

I like "Fang's Talent Agency," a still from which below, but there loads of others.

These days with a laptop and a two hundred dollar Flip video camera, most everyone has better tools than he and his cohorts had.

Watch Soupy and Fang HERE.

Politics, the Way They're Supposed to Be Played

2010-01-20T13:43:00.001-05:00

Last year, at Standpoint on-line, I did a series of posts entitled "Does Anyone Know How to Drive This Thing?"

It's refreshing now to see, in contrast, when someone gets it right. This from Senator-elect Scott Brown's election victory speech:

This special election came about because we lost someone very dear to Massachusetts, and to America. Senator Ted Kennedy was a tireless and big-hearted public servant, and for most of my lifetime was a force like no other in this state. His name will always command the affection and respect by the people of Massachusetts, and the same goes for his wife Vicki. There's no replacing a man like that, but tonight I honor his memory, and I pledge my very best to be a worthy successor.

Here's hoping.

Jim Treacher, The Metrosexualization of...

2010-01-18T12:29:00.001-05:00

Heh, via TickTockBlog:

Highly-paid Beltway blogger Jim Treacher reveals that he has become a Mac user. Oh dear, this will never do for the former self-fashioned hayseed-blogger from rural Indiana. Treacher was seduced recently by Tucker Carlson to join the ranks of DC chatteratti via Carlson's Daily Caller website. In his new column Treacher has been documenting his change in latitude, attitude, and operating system: "So I’m a Mac guy now."

The whole thing is here, and fairly funny.

The latest post of the "transformed" Treacher is now here, and he's funny too, though I have a bone to pick with him, about which more soon...

Another Reason Not to Look Forward to the Trial of KSM

2010-01-15T07:02:00.001-05:00

In Manhattan federal court, jury selection has begun for the attempted murder trial of Aafia Siddiqui, the MIT and Brandeis-trained scientist. The mother of three, and the only woman accused of working with al Qaeda's leadership, she has been dubbed the "terror mom."

Yesterday Siddiqui requested "genetic testing" to weed out jurors "of Zionist or Israeli background" from the pool of New York City jurors.

No response yet from Judge Richard Berman.

Her trial brings to light a bizarre 2008 incident in an Afghanistan police station. Siddiqi had been arrested outside an Afghan government compound, allegedly carrying two pounds of cyanide, information on chemical weapons, as well as descriptions of American landmarks. While in custody, Siddiqui allegedly grabbed an American soldier's rifle and fired at soldiers and FBI agents nearby.

Siddiqi is married to the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the one-time head of al Qaeda military committee who planned the 9/11 attacks. Her husband's cousin is Ramsi Youssef.

In the courtroom, Siddiqi said, "I'm boycotting this trial," adding, in the patois of a young New Yorker, "I'm out of this," before placing her head on the table. The trial of course is not boycotting Aafia Siddiqi, and the circus will continue when the proceedings begin on Tuesday.

This does cast a certain light on Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to move the trial of KSM to Manhattan, my beloved hometown.

Thank you NOT, Mr. Holder.

Full article from the Times (UK) on-line HERE.

Lee Smith on the Clash of Arab Civilizations

2010-01-13T07:41:00.002-05:00

Tony Badran has interviewed Lee Smith, author of the just-published tome The Strong Horse, for Now Lebanon. Smith's book, excerpts of which I've read, is an essential and contrarian reading of power politics in the Middle East today.

About his book:

The title comes from Osama Bin Laden’s observation that people by nature prefer the strong horse to the weak one. I wanted to try to explain is how politics works in a region like the Middle East, where, with very few exceptions, there are no peaceful transitions of authority, and power is not shared but rather is typically passed from one family member to another, or taken in a military coup.

On power alignment in the region:

On one hand you have the Islamic Republic of Iran, which wants to rewrite the regional order to its own advantage, and on the other you have Washington and the American-backed regional order, including Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, along with Egypt, Jordan, and of course Israel, that wants to maintain its position. Tehran, at least until the June presidential elections, has been very confident in its status as a rising power, while the US is now led by a president who has expressed his discomfort with power.

On the implications for pro-democracy advocates in the region:

For pro-democracy forces in the Arab states, and perhaps Iran as well, an American loss of will amounts to an unqualified disaster. An active Iranian nuclear program would be powerful evidence that resistance works. Those publicly advocating in the region on behalf of democratic principles like rule of law are a minority as it is; but a victory for the culture of resistance would enshrine violence and vengeance as the manner in which to redress all grievances, real and imagined.

Smith's notion of a developing comity ahead between the Arab Sunni powers and Israel goes against received opinion and is, I think, quite correct.

Read the whole interview at Now Lebanon HERE.

And buy Smith's book HERE.

Oral Literature Meets Cool Media

2010-01-13T06:30:00.002-05:00

I was just searching IMDB, the movie industry data base, good for contacts, credits, etc... and came across this:

Homer

Direct Contact: (Phone) Homer has been dead for more than two thousand years.
Agent: (N/A)
Profession: Writer
Known for: Troy / O Brother, Where Art Thou? / The Odyssey
Born: c. 850 BC, Turkey
Died: c. 800 BC

Industry News:
WGA Nominees Announced (From Studio Briefing - Film News. 8 February 2001)

Waggish!!

Meant for Each Other, a story by Barry Yourgrau

2010-01-07T12:30:00.000-05:00

You make a date through the Internet. You meet the girl for the first time at a sake bar. She gulps down a whole bottle of sake by herself. “Okay,” you think. “I guess we know what sort of problem she has. But man, is she cute.”

After two more bottles, the girl falls asleep on her bar stool. “That’s our sweetheart,” grins the bartender, shaking his head at the girl’s snores.

“You mean you know her?” you inquire, uneasily.

“Sure, she’s here every night, with a different guy,” says the bartender. “Whoopee, whoopee.” He winks.

“Really,” you reply. You eye the unconscious girl slumped headfirst on the bar counter. And you decide no matter how cute she is, this first date will also be the last,thank you very much.

And this is how you two meet, you and the love of your life. Four months later you get married and move into a lovely apartment together, where you start to raise a large and happy family.

How you get from point A to point B is a long, complicated, heart-warming, and in many ways wonderfully unbelievable story. But alas it requires someone with far greater narrative powers than mine to properly relate.

Posted with permission of the author.

Absinthe Drinkers

2010-01-07T12:26:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, was simply a failure of imagination.

Must imagine better tomorrow. Tomorrow, fail again, but fail better.

Here is how, long ago, some sought to up their imagination... through the green demon, Absinthe.

Above, Viktor Oliva's painting "The Absinthe Drinker," which hangs in the Cafe Slavia, Prague.

Another absinthe drinker, Hemingway, had a favorite cocktail, Death in the Afternoon - a measure of absinthe in a champagne glass, fill to the top with Bollinger...

Al Gore Gulfstream 5 Watch in Effect

2010-01-06T10:41:00.004-05:00

This is the scene outside my window in London right now. All indications are for a visit soon by the Nobel Laureate and former Vice President. Up to eighteen inches are expected in the Southeast, the most snow in thirty years.

Hell Froze Over... and No One Even Noticed

2010-01-05T10:04:00.004-05:00

Actor Tim Robbins, the recently-separated partner of Susan Sarandon, donated money to Republican Michelle Bachmann?

According to The Daily Beast, this is so:

"If Federal Election Commission records are to be believed, Robbins has not only donated regularly to Democratic candidates over the past 18 years, he also has written checks to conservative Republicans. In the 2006 election cycle, according to public records, the actor gave $5,000 to 10 Republican candidates for the House and Senate—including, most shocking of all, Minnesota’s resident wingnut, Rep. Michele Bachmann."

More Beastliness here.

Picked-up Pieces

2010-01-05T08:28:00.009-05:00

Recently we've been obsessed by Bacon, Francis Bacon, the Jacobean-era lawyer who outlined the philosophical underpinnings of the scientific revolution, "knowledge is power," the importance of hardware (for testing purposes), trial and error. Bacon died in 1626 just over the road and across the square from where I now sit, in a house whose later incarnation has become the residence of filmmaker and Lord of Unreason Terry Gilliam.

Trial and error, especially error, has been on my mind since the start of the new year. Must do better.

Speaking of bacon, for Christmas I cooked pheasant stuffed and wrapped with the same, in a mustard cream sauce. Will be posting that recipe soon as well as ones for sea bass with capers and olives, "death pasta," and the venison we had for new year's eve.

Over the holidays I've been revisiting the short stories of James Salter, the rare writer who manages to be both exquisite and masculine. I'm now reading his volume Last Night. I meant to give this new-bought copy as a gift but couldn't let it go. Next I'll soon re-read his masterpiece A Sport and a Pastime. I would describe him as "a writers' writer" but I did this once before and he responded by asking if that was akin to "a whores' whore."

In other news of letters, we welcome the debut of Little Star magazine, edited by the estimable Ann Kjellberg.

We've been reminded that Philip Marlowe is the still the "chief of detectives," and Raymond Chandler the premiere writer of detectives novels.

We've also been pondering Apple's forthcoming itablet and wondering -- will it have a separate keyboard for scribes, for those who like to type rather than just read and watch?

Regarding current events, some items not yet on the front pages... Tigerhawk analyzes Iran and disinformation HERE. Elsewhere, a former Iranian spy chief HERE says their government is on the verge of collapse.

Victor Davis Hanson asks, regarding security matters, who is the enemy?

Edward Jay Epstein, the premiere debunker of conspiracy theories, re-investigates "Who Burned Down the Reichstag?" HERE.

Frank Schell, the Sage of Chicago, offers message advice to the president in the Chicago Tribune, here.

Archeologist Dorothy King points to Garance Dore as an alternative to the Sartorialist. (Here I am no expert.)

My favorite fashion blogger and friend LondonLibertyGirl offers a look back at her first year in Manhattan HERE.

We look forward to the launch of Big Journalism, edited by one Michael Walsh.

This year, as a little journalist, I've resolved to proofread before posting, or to do so better than last year. If I've missed something please forgive me. Trial and error. The scientific method.

Oliver Pilcher's film for D.S. Dundee

2010-01-05T07:33:00.003-05:00

It's a slow start to the new year and not much is happening in the world, eh-hem, so we're continuing to post on the fashion and film front.

Just before Christmas we visited the pop-up shop of D.S. Dundee, a neo-sahib label, and met its proprietor Oliver Pilcher, a noted photographer, and the grandson of Scottish novelist Rosamunde P.

Pilcher has made a short film to tout D.S. Dundee, inspired by Patrick Gordon Duff Pennington's poem "The Crossing of the Waters." The film, a sort of two-minute "Atonement," was done for a tuppence, and it's a testament to what you can do for that with today's machines. My screen-shot from the opening is above (apologies for the quality, and don't let that discount the foregoing).

Look for Pilcher's forthcoming editorial work on the Outer Hebrides.

See the film HERE.

Shop D.S. Dundee HERE.

Maud Yeddou - Another Excellent Thing About French Cinema

2010-01-05T07:18:00.005-05:00

She's got a great look, and wears it with attitude.

Found by New York Magazine's "Look Book," Yeddou was evidently visiting the city to perform in an experimental video by Anton Perich.

Her interview in NYM HERE.

Anton Perich's Youtube video channel HERE.

Another excellent thing about French cinema HERE.

Anthony Appiah: Liu Xiaobos Trial Expected Within Days

2009-12-23T17:32:00.003-05:00

TMP this week received from PEN President Anthony Appiah the following missive:

Dear Friends,

We're sure you've been following the news about our PEN colleague in China, Liu Xiaobo, who has been detained for over a year in Beijing and is facing subversion charges for his writings. On Friday, Liu was indicted, and we have learned that he may be tried as early as Monday, December 20. If he is convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.

Even if you have already signed our petition, or sent a letter, we are asking you now to flood the Chinese government's e-mail boxes with appeals calling for Liu Xiaobo's immediate release. You can do so by using PEN's new, user-friendly software at www.pen.org/freeliu. Just fill in the few required fields, amend the letter if you wish, and hit send.

Please also pass this on to your friends, family, and colleagues, and urge them to take action.

For more information on the latest developments in Liu's case, and to read PEN's press release about the indictment, please visit www.pen.org/liuxiaobo.

Your voice matters to the Chinese government. Please help us free Liu Xiaobo now.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Anthony Appiah
President

Top Gear - The Stig

2009-12-23T17:25:00.001-05:00

... has been revealed to be Michael Schumacher.

Harold Brodkey on Spring

2009-10-21T12:31:00.002-04:00

Some prose written after the third kiss from her (and after the doctor took three stitches in my thumb).

I sit at her desk in her office looking out her large window: Give me the huge actual clouds of the Republic and not the meagre udders of water vapor painted on the old backdrops the Republic Studio used in John Wayne's day. We like the actual big baggy clouds of a New York spring. One doesn't want to flog a transiting cloud to death, but if we are to have sentimental light, let us have it at least in its obvious local form--dry, white, sere, and, I guess, provincial. The spiritual splendor of our drizzly and slaphappy spring weather, our streets jammed with sneezing pedestrians, our skies loony with bluster are our local equivalents of lilac hedges and meadows.

Blustery, raw and rare--and more wind-of-the-sea-scoured than half-melted St. Petersburg. Yuck to cities that have an immersed-in-swamp-and-lagoon moist-air light. They are for watercolorists. Where water laps at the edges of the stones and bricks of somewhat wavery real estate is not home. Home is New York, stony and tall: its real estate is real.

So is its spring.

More from Harold Brodkey HERE.

Leroy Grannis - SURFING (1966)

2009-09-18T11:47:00.004-04:00

More about Leroy Grannis, the proto-surf photographer here, and about Taschen's republication of his work here.

Epilogue by Robert Lowell

2009-09-15T11:32:00.001-04:00

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

-- Robert Lowell

... hat tip to Miss Whistle

The Sweet Genius of Walker Percy

2009-08-11T07:09:00.001-04:00

A book I need to turn to every couple of years, for reasons like this:

"In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Weekends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."

- The Moviegoer

Kapuscinski: Revolutions

2009-07-03T13:56:00.000-04:00

"All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people. They should begin with a psychological chapter, one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process, sometimes accomplished in an instant like a shock or a lustration, demands illuminating. Man gets rid of fear and feels free. Without that there would be no revolution."

-from Ryszard Kapuscinski's "Shah of Shahs" (1982)

A Note from Tehran - "Meet Now at Afte-Tir Square"

2009-06-17T12:08:00.006-04:00

This below from a friend of a friend in Tehran. Always good to hear from those folks. By the way I understand if lots of people set their twitter account to "location: Tehran" it creates extra work for the Basij who are hunting down the people who wear green. Accordingly, I've changed my location for this blog. Right now we're standing in Afte-Tir Square.

here are my observations from last night march in Vali-Asr

1) The crowed was much younger, and less diverse, but still very very large in numbers
2) Very well organized and disciplined, no side incidents and very very silent
3) Posters appearing calling Mussavi the Ghandi of Iran and Ahmadinejad as enemy of Iran.. no mention of Mr. K or the system at all
4) Things got tense as we approached Jame-Jam (the official TV and Radio)
5) Protesters in Green headbands had formed a human chain preventing other protesters from approaching Jame-Jam main enterance
6) Riot police and Bassiji were in full force behind the fence at Jame-Jam...with people taunting them to come out
7) People started shouting that they will take revenge for the killings of the day before
8) Amazingly right in the middle of this... Charles-Junior Burger restaurant (appearing in Iran as Super Star Burger) was open and doing brisk business, (got myself a coke and and cheese burger).
9) Today the news is to convene at Afte-Tir square after the Iran-South Korea world cup game......around 17

Sent from my TehranBerry® wireless device

1700! That's now. Better hurry...

Hard Questions for President Obama

2009-06-04T08:59:00.004-04:00

Last year I posted here, and at my blog at Standpoint Magazine, a series of "hard questions" for then-Senator Obama, who had shown himself during the primaries and election campaign unusually adept at avoiding such.

Herewith a new edition of Hard Questions for President Obama.

1) What are the US goals in Afghanistan?

2) What, so far as we understand, do the Afghan people want?

Given the degree and length of US and NATO involvement, answers to these questions should be clear, as for instance they are in Iraq, yet they are not.

Readers' answers in the comments section are welcome.

My previous "hard questions" posts may be found by following the link at the tag below.

Redux: Hard Questions for Senator Obama

2009-06-04T08:36:00.003-04:00

Last year I posted, on this blog and on my blog at Standpoint magazine on-line, an occasional series, entitled “Hard Questions for Senator Obama."

Here were some I posted in July 2008:

1. Why does Senator Obama advocate a surge of troops in Afghanistan though he considers a surge of troops in Iraq to have been a mistake?
2. Why is a stable Afghanistan crucial to US interests while a stable Iraq is not?
3. How long does Senator Obama expect to keep troops in Afghanistan?
4. Why is an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan manageable while the same in Iraq is not?
5. How much does Senator Obama expect to spend rebuilding Afghanistan?
6. Why is rebuilding Afghanistan affordable while rebuilding Iraq is not?
7. Why does Senator Obama consider the ethno-sectarian issues in Iraq to be nearly intractable while in Afghanistan they are something we can overcome?
8. If leaving Iraq will make the Iraqi government behave more responsibly, how will an increased presence in Afghanistan affect the Afghan government?
9. Why does Senator Obama advocate a "surge in diplomacy" and multilateralism in Iraq while simultaneously advocating unilateral action in the Pakistani tribal areas?
10. How large of a "residual force" will be left in Iraq and for how long?

Perspectives on Race

2009-06-02T09:45:00.004-04:00

I'm constantly reminded that I give less thought to race and ethnicity than I should. Race is such a complex issue, especially, because of its history, in America.

That said, after reading the text of the 2001 Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture delivered by Judge Sonia Sotomayor (link below), I got to thinking... thinking in a whole new way.

Could it be, I wondered, that I as "a wise Cherokee" would offer better judgment on tobacco-related issues than the federal appeals justices now sitting?

Heck, "my people" invented the stuff!

Well, no, actually, I couldn't. Or not, in any case, because of my ethnicity.

Judge Sotomayor's lecture here.

Notes on Mount Parnassus

2009-06-02T09:34:00.003-04:00

Strange doings in the world of English letters. During the run up to the election this year for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry a half dozen candidates withdrew to make way for the distinguished entry of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. Then, in the face of an energetic campaign to remind the Oxford community of ancient but credible allegations that the poet from St. Lucia, now an octogenarian, had sexually harassed students at Harvard and Boston University decades ago, Walcott himself withdrew. This left two candidates, one being Ruth Padel, who was duly elected.

This week, in the wake of admitting that she’d played a role in spreading the tittle-tattle about Walcott, Padel resigned the professorship before she’d even ascended to it.

I’ve always considered poets the unacknowledged legislators of our time (as noted here). That said, poets, or those in the world of letters, apparently don’t always have their eyes on the stars.

In an earlier career I edited a literary magazine in New York. More recently, I’ve written some screenplays. Apropos the Oxford contretemps, and having spent time in both realms, I’ve often said to friends that Hollywood is much less rough-and-tumble than what Terry Southern used to call “the quality lit game.” But no one ever believes me.

Meanwhile, this correspondent is going fishin’… this very weekend, in fact, on the River Test. As someone once said, “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.”

ONN Scoops a Peabody

2009-05-26T05:56:00.002-04:00

The Onion News Network scooped a 2008 Peabody Award for electronic journalism last week.

Huzzah. We at the Main Point favor text news: newspapers, actual printed newspapers, and political blogs. The only video news we regularly watch is ONN... the key portal for understanding the world around us.

Watch the Onion News Network HERE.

Joe Boyd on Ley Lines, and John Michell's Vision of Ancient Britain

2009-05-21T08:56:00.002-04:00

In the Guardian music producer Joe Boyd remembers a 1968 road trip with the late John Michell, the founder of the earth mysteries movement.

"John came equipped with a compass and some maps and asked if we would be interested in helping him conduct an experiment. He took a map and drew the most important English ley line, connecting Glastonbury Tor with Bury St Edmunds, which passes through a remarkable number of towns named St Michael or St George. John proposed that we leave the A4 and attempt to follow this trunk route of ley lines across the Wiltshire downs towards Avebury. We followed a dirt road out on to the downs, turning on to smaller and smaller tracks and eventually continuing on foot. Then, from the top of a rise, Avebury lay below us. The line we were following cleaved the stone circle below directly in half. More remarkable still was a long barrow placed at right angles on the crest of the hill. In the centre of the barrow, exactly where the line crossed, stood a stone dolmen.... His explanation for the geometric string of St Michaels and St Georges [was that] those names indicate "dragon-slayers", John said, and saints often originate in pre-Christian mythology. The ancient Celtic word for dragon..."

Read the whole thing HERE.

Uncle Seymour Tries to Make a Picnic

2009-05-20T12:24:00.015-04:00

... but, speaking from Dubai last week, Hersh was at least one sandwich short.

Recently, New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, speaking in Minnesota, claimed that Vice President Dick Cheney had been in charge of a "secret assassination squad," and that since the change of administration this unit has been "leaderless"... like "ronin," presumably, those samurai who've lost their master... and we all know from Japanese legend how dangerous ronin can be.

Hersh was, in his clumsy and irresponsible way, trying to refer to Joint Special Operations Command, a military group tasked with hunting al Qaeda particularly in inaccessible areas of Afghanistan. The leader of the unit from 2003 to 2008 was Stanley A. McChrystal, recently named by President Obama to be commander of NATO's Af-Pak operations. The JSOC unit of course is now commanded by Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, reports to the Secretary of Defense, and (as pointed out by Bill Roggio) is subject to Congressional Oversight... so is, for one thing, not "leaderless" at all.

In Dubai, at the Arab Media Forum last week, Hersh repeated his strange allegation of a "special death squad," doubled down, and claimed that during the Bush era the American Press became irresponsible "cheerleaders."

In South Asia reports have appeared that Hersh claimed "Cheney's death squad" killed Benazir Bhutto. In Dubai, he contradicted this notion (see link below). We're relieved.

When asked whether "Cheney's death squad," meaning presumably JSOC, then under command of McChrystal, could have killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, Hersh said "I can't verify [that]," only later going on to discount this.

Would someone please bring this man home? I understand his address is pinned to his jacket.

Links:

Dubai's Gulf News, here and here.

Qatar's Gulf Times.

Bill Roggio on Hersh's earlier left-field fly HERE.

UPDATE - further dis-info and counter-dis-info at these links:

The Dawn (PK)
Daily Times (Pk)
The Nation (Pk)

Martyrs' Square, Beirut, 14 February 2009

2009-05-14T08:15:00.007-04:00

While in Beirut as part of a press delegation I attended a memorial in Place des Martyrs for Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese Prime Minister slain four years ago. The memorial became a political rally for the parties who launched the Cedar Revolution. While there I interviewed journalist Jonathan Foreman, writer-at-large for Standpoint magazine, who offered these observations, in the video above.

Over the following weeks I'll be posting here further interviews, as well as photos and diaries of my visit.

This interview, by the way, was shot on a Flip Video Recorder ($85 via Amazon) and edited on a Macintosh using iMovie software.

Kanye Blogs, But He Doesn't Twitter

2009-05-14T07:13:00.002-04:00

... apparently.

This from the blog of Kanye West:

"I DON’T HAVE A F****** TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I’M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I’M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I’M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I’M NOT AND I’M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN’T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF. THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON’T HAVE A F****** TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS. REPEAT… THE HEADS OF TWITTER KNEW I DIDN’T HAVE A TWITTER AND THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS HAVE HIGH ACTIVITY ON THEM. IT’S A F****** FARCE AND IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE. HEY TWITTER, TAKE THE SO CALLED KANYE WEST TWITTER DOWN NOW …. WHY? … BECAUSE MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS LOUD!!!!!!!!!”

link HERE... I mean here.

MEGAN MCARDLE on The Risk of Debt:

2009-05-13T07:03:00.001-04:00

'For a while now, I’ve been asking people at conferences, on and off the record, what America’s sovereign debt risk is? That is, how long until people stop treating treasuries as the “risk free” securities, and start demanding a premium for the risk that we might default.... But last Thursday, the Treasury auction was . . . well, descriptions vary from “weak” to “horrible”. This raises the unpleasant possibility that markets are, as my business school professors insisted, “forward looking”. Voters may believe that getting a bunch of special interests to agree in principal that costs should be cut is the same thing as actually cutting costs. Bond markets don’t. . . . Obama can assure voters that he inherited these deficits. But bond markets pay closer attention to the fact that Obama has already increased the projected deficit he inherited by 50%.'

Read the who thing HERE.

Ace of Spades is

2009-05-13T07:01:00.002-04:00

... as sharp as ever on Pelosi's denial of knowing water-boarding was to be employed on terror detainees. Read him HERE, and his originating piece HERE.

New Coalition Commander for Afghanistan

2009-05-12T09:40:00.002-04:00

Michael Yon comments:

"In December 2008, I saw General McKiernan briefing Secretary Gates in Afghanistan. That's as close as I've come to General McKiernan. Though I do not personally know General McKiernan, I have heard only positive reports about him. His replacement, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, has an outstanding reputation in the special operations community. McChrystal has a solid reputation for knowing the fight. Unfortunately, though our special operators are the best in the world at the fight, they only stumble and fumble with the press. With media, our special operations forces are clueless and self-defeating. This is crucial. McChrystal can win every fight on the ground and still lose the war. Time will reveal whether McChrystal can adapt and win."

Read more from Yon here.

It's Called CAPITAL-ism for a Reason

2009-05-12T07:53:00.005-04:00

... as Bainbridge writes:

"The WSJ’s "USA Inc" series continues today with detail on how the US got secured lenders to abandon their fight to get paid more than 30% of their claims, as against giving more than half [Chrysler] to unsecured workers.... The Journal report quotes one anonymous -- but asinine -- Obama administration official as opining that: 'You don't need banks and bondholders to make cars," said one administration official."

Try telling that to Chrysler when they go to capital markets for further financing down the road.

Read the whole thing HERE, and the WSJ report HERE. And a keen observation HERE.

On Wanda Sykes

2009-05-12T07:42:00.000-04:00

Regarding Wanda Sykes's jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner, in which she suggests that Rush Limbaugh was a traitor, comparable to a terrorist and mortal enemy of the US, should be water-boarded, and that she hoped he would die, Christopher Hitchens comments:

"The president should be squirming in his seat. Not smiling. The black *&#$ got it wrong. No one told her the rules."

Go to NYM for unredacted version and full account, HERE.

Dijon-gate

2009-05-11T11:23:00.000-04:00

The latest stir in the blogosphere has been Dijon-gate (see link below), in which MSNBC has hidden President Obama's request at a hamburger restaurant for some "some spicey mustard, some Dijon mustard."

Amazing really. That word... a place-name in fact in France... was right at the tip of his tongue. He didn't even have to think about it.

Odd that Professor Jacobson should make a comparison to the Watergate break-in and cover-up (ie, Water-GATE... Dijon-GATE). To me this calls to mind the airbrushing of photographs practiced by regimes behind the Iron Curtain, the ultimate totalitarian post-modern practice elaborated so brilliantly by Milan Kundera, particularly in his novel "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting."

That said, one Main Point correspondent, "Chicago Stretch," opines that both Jacobson and TMP miss the point. Chicago Stretch, who spent 35 years in our nation's capital before re-locating to Chicago not long ago, writes:

"If Barry and Joe were regular guys, they would have gone to the original Five Guys for burgers, but since it's entirely carry-out there wouldn't have been a place to sit and pose for the photographers. The original Five Guys is on Beauregard just off King Street in western Alexandria. Of course, Ray's Hellburgers is where I'd go for an Effeteburger, the sort you would put Grey Poupon on, as noted in this local review: 'A guy can spend upwards of $17.50 on the signature attraction, but choices such as "The Burger of Seville," which packs in foie gras, bordelaise sauce and white truffle oil, have nothing on the simpler models. Customers place their orders at a counter overlooking the big grill, then listen for their names to be called. The strongest brew available is root beer, but it's great, and while you might wish for french fries, Hell-Burger recently began offering sides of chunky potato salad and creamy coleslaw. The downside? We appreciate the fact that it's toasted, but the brioche bun tends to fall apart under the weight and juice of the hamburger.'"

Gosh, we'd like to try that. We'll have to pop in to Kramer's on the way to pick up the new Kundera. (Is it just me or did the quality of his work drop when he switched from writing in Czech to French?)

Legal Insurrection's revelation of Dijon-gate HERE.

Sitting at Night, by Po Chu-I

2009-05-11T11:22:00.001-04:00

Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG

2009-05-09T12:09:00.001-04:00

After watching "Marathon Man" earlier this week I've been thinking about pulp fictions and genre films.

Many of the finest filmmakers did their finest work in what some, incorrectly, call the lesser genres. Billy Wilder's film noir "Double Indemnity," an adaptation of the James M. Caine novel, compares well to his original "Sunset Boulevard," and in some ways paved the way for that later work. Elsewhere on this blog I've offered Wilder's account of working on that adaptation with Raymond Chandler, from a conversation I had with the director shortly before he died. (It was a contentious relationship and in the end Wilder was legally enjoined by the studio from brandishing his riding crop during working hours. A limit was also placed on the number of calls he was allowed to accept from young ladies.)

This week I've been re-watching Akira Kurosawa's film noir "Stray Dog" (1949). That film had its genesis as an unpublished police procedural novel that the great Japanese filmmaker himself wrote over a feverish two month period.

"Stray Dog" tells the story of the frantic search by a rookie cop (Toshiro Mifune) for his stolen Colt pistol, which to his shame had been lifted from him on a bus. A manhunt, lead by the rookie's mentor, begins after the stolen gun is used in a murder. The action throughout takes place during a heatwave in a bombed-out post-war Tokyo. One thing that gives the film such psychological depth is that both cop and killer are from the same background and are the same age... though it's never mentioned both must have been recently de-mobilized from the defeated Imperial Army. There's a sense of "there but for the grace of God go I."

The mini documentary in the Criterion Collection edition recounts a stir over the opening shot of a dog panting feverishly. The film premiered during the American occupation of Japan, and a busybody American woman associated with the ASPCA accused Kurosawa of having injected the dog with rabies to get that wild-eyed effect. This was in the wake of post-war revelations about "scientific" experiments performed by the Japanese imperial army. Apparently this woman was persistent, obsessed even, and brought suit. It was the one blot on an otherwise happy production.

Of course, to get the shot Kurosawa simply had his team take the dog on a run for a few minutes on a hot day.

Apple’s New Line of Netbooks

2009-05-09T10:20:00.000-04:00

Forgive me but I love their computers so I'm addicted to their news... late last year an Apple executive was talking down netbooks:

“They have cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience, and not something that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. And so, it’s not a space as it exists today that we are interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in. It’s a segment we would choose not to play in." (via NYT)

More recently an Apple executive responded cryptically to questions whether the company is developing a netbook. Since then there's been much speculation on the subject (see link at bottom).

Some have suggested the company will produce one in the form of a touch-tablet computer, akin to a giant I-pod touch, or a Kindle. Here's my guess what we'll see later this year:

Imagine if you had a computer as thin as the Macbook Air, with the small footprint of the discontinued Macbook Pro 10-inch, a durable solid state drive, and a glass panel below the keyboard that would act as track-pad, dock, widget-dashboard and i-pod application stable. You'd "drive" your computer from the track-pad/dock, freeing up more room on screen.

To get an idea of what this would would simply stand above a Macbook, and lay your I-phone down horizontally over the touch pad. That would be a wonderful driving experience, especially if it had built-in 3-G wireless capability.

Other more responsible though less fun speculation here.

Michael Savage, CAIR, and the UK

2009-05-08T13:45:00.000-04:00

Pity the person who rushes to the defense of Michael Savage, but one blogger has:

One O. Tockfield investigates and blogs:

"Right-wing talk radio host Michael Savage has been excluded from entering the UK by order of the Home Office. No explanation has yet been given.... I went to a complaint about him lodged by CAIR... [and] heard again that Savage is a yeller, unpleasant, offensive even, but his comments for the most part were not any more incendiary than, say, Rev. Wright, the head of the Chicago church that the family of President Obama attended for many years.... One of the text quotes they list is indeed BAD... and would possibly even be cause for exclusion from the UK... BUT DID SAVAGE ACTUALLY SAY THAT?"

The quote CAIR attributes to him is not in the audio provided.

Read Tockfield's full report HERE.

Decline of Journalism (and Math) in the Digital Information Age

2009-05-02T10:37:00.000-04:00

Homer, and The New Yorker magazine's vaunted Department of Factual Verification, nods.

In the first paragraph of the lead story of the May 4th issue, a "Comment" piece on tax increases and the prospect of Texas seceding from the union because of them, author Hendrick Hertzberg attempts some math.

He calculates that under the tax hike proposed by the Obama administration, raising the top marginal rate from 35% to 39.6%, "a fellow making, for example, three hundred grand could see his tax bill go up $34.62 per week."

Is Mr. Hertzberg missing a zero, or does he does customarily take extraordinary deductions when he files?

I'm terrible at math, and as readers of this blog know even worse at spelling, but my calculation is an increased liability of $265 per week.

That's not peanuts.

Duffer's Holiday

2009-05-02T06:37:00.000-04:00

... named for the two or three weeks in late May into early June when mayflies hatch and even the laziest and most incompetent fisherman (see figure above) can hook one.

This was part of the catch last year on the River Test. I look forward to returning shortly, to Duffer's Heaven. Perhaps I'll encounter this fish again, as I released him moments after the photo was taken.

More on the Test River here.

Mary Kinzie - OBJET

2009-05-02T06:34:00.001-04:00

Dear child, why
is it still, along the pillow
this hand of yours half
open on the brightness
thrown by the lamp
anemone in
water the current
once passed through

In sleep you answer
that life catches
against the edge of
its own likeness
vein ever blue
in the body's
marble drift

... posted with permission of the author

from Harold Brodkey

2009-05-01T07:43:00.004-04:00

"The night crept on, swept on, late minutes, powdered with darkness, in the middle of a sleeping city, spring crawling like a plague of green snakes, bits of warmth in the air, at 4am smells of leaves when the stink of automobiles died down. Dawn came, so pink, so pastel, so silly."

Yorkshire Dogs

2009-05-01T07:43:00.003-04:00

... observed by Lucy Perceval at a village fair in the North Yorkshire Moors.

Anti-Bloggists

2009-05-01T07:11:00.001-04:00

Print reporters in the White House press room have posted a sign in the desk area reading "Blog-Free Zone."

Hat tip "Page Six"... as if they need it...