Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Crown of thorns
The future of New York is pretty scary if you're to believe the magazine of the same name. In its current cover story,
The Horror, I mean Tomorrowland 2016, contributing editor Alexandra Lange posits a great big beautiful metropolis of tomorrow that is chockablock with jagged edgy sky scrapers scraping out what's left of the sky, not just in Manhattan but here in Brooklyn, where Lange, who must be some kind of expert, considers
Forest City Ratner's "Atlantic Yards" development some kind of done deal.
Consider the headline to the Downtown Brooklyn section:
Brooklyn (Like It Or Not) Will Get a Shimmering Frank Gehry Crown". Because while Lange, who has presumably been to Brooklyn, allows that locals may not like the idea of having 16 skyscrapers rammed up its collective ass when all Ratner was talking about was an arena for his basketball team, those soon-to-be-homeless choke artists, The Nets. But it will be good for us, she insists. It will provides jobs and housing and beauty for us ungrateful wretches.
"We don't want to build tall for the sake of tall," she quotes Ratner mouthpiece Jim Stuckey saying. "Frank Gehry can frame the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower”—the current tallest, at 512 feet, compared with the 620 feet of Gehry’s main tower, Miss Brooklyn—“and make it a postcard with other buildings around it.”
You read that right: a postcard. As in, Wish you were here? No wonder the arrogant Gehry, who says those protesting the development should be protesting Henry Ford for inventing the automobile, is calling his crowned jewel, the building around the proposed arena, Miss Brooklyn. You'll miss Brooklyn, too, when these carpetbaggers get done with it.
It's a pity that Lange, who is presumably a reporter, could not have found an actual opponent to the project to quote. She does allow that "there could be a kinder, gentler Brooklynized version of the titanium town" but doesn't offer much hope for one. And why should she? You can sometimes learn a lot by reading a magazine's articles online, just by looking at the URL. This one is slugged "real estate" which is all ye need to know.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Guy Goma for president
If you haven't seen the
video of Guy Goma on the BBC, you really owe it to yourself. Goma is the now-celebrated wrong man of the pundit world, a hapless job applicant (he was at the studio looking for a job in data support) who was mistaken for another guy named Guy who was supposed to comment on the verdict handed down in the Apple vs. Apple Corps case. As John Tierney and others have noted, the glory his performance comes not just in the instant, captured on camera, when he gapes at being intorduced as someone he is not, but in the follow-up. Asked by the BBC reporter if he was surprised by the verdict he answers, "I am very surprised to see this verdict becasue I was not expecting that."
What he had been expecting was a little face time with some tool from HR, no doubt, not to have a mike clipped to his jacket and be asked about a subject not in his area of expertise. And while his game, even authoritative responses, have been touted as a primer in the basics of media-training (answer your question, not theirs -- and never say "I don't know"), I see bigger things for Guy.
Why not president of the US? Sure, there's that little immigration hurdle -- the native of the French-speaking Congo is new to England, and English -- but a Constitutional amendment could take care of that. After all, our current president has no problem speaking on matters of which he knows very little indeed, lecturing scientists on science and economists on economics -- even explaining to a group of journalists the meaning of "dissemble" (which he flubbed in both pronunciation and definition). What is certain about him is his certitude, and Americans crave that. Being the star of his very own Truman Show, Bush never gets to hear any bad news about his performance because he doesn't read or channel surf. The look he gave
Stephen Colbert at the White House press dinner was not so much one of annoyance as puzzlement: what was this guy talking about?
Barring the POTUS position, I say give Goma his own show, let people bring him questions he knows little of and let him expound on each one for five minutes. Then compare his response with those of the experts and see who makes the most sense. In fact, let the first topic be the war in Iraq: they guy named Goma versus the guy in the coma.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Ayaan, I cried
The plight of Somali-born Dutch legislator
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose citizenship may be revoked by weak-kneed Netherlanders, has become an international cause celebre. Hirsi Ali has been under government protection since 2002, due to her criticism of some of the more violent, paternalitic practices of some followers of Islam, and her collaboration with Theo van Gogh on a short film about Muslim violence against women resulted in the director's murder in 2004. The killer pinned a note to van Gogh's body, saying she would be next.
I met Ayaan quite by chance last summer. She was in Manhattan, working on
her book and appeared, unannounced, at a reading by a mutual acquaintance of ours in Chelsea. She was flanked by her Dutch bodyguards (the Netherlands has since concluded she can keep the protection, for now) and blended in down in uber gay Chelsea like a giraffe at a zebra party. (Her bodyguards, on the other hand, with their military haircuts, tight pants and suit jackets concealing their sidearms, could have passed for a local.) She was soft spoken and polite, and though she has recently been embraced by the right, she was happy to have found a book on Marx in the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.
Her disdain for religion -- all religion in as much as it is used as an instrument of censorship and brutality -- will probably keep her from getting invited to speak at
Liberty University. But the fact that she is being lauded by neocons as evidence of the evils of Islamic fundamentalists does not mean they're wrong. The Dutch are clearly afraid of a Denmark situation -- days of riots and burnings and a number of deaths (all in the middle east) in reaction to the
Mohammed cartoons -- and are reacting in a somewhat craven fashion. Don't want to provoke anyone! But Ayaan does want to provoke people, provoke the citizens of western countries out of their slumber. The threat to her is like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a sign of things to come. It is quite literally a threat to us all.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
24 hour party people
I have discovered an interesting subtext to this season's 24, the addictive and insane Fox series in which superagent Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) saves the nation in a series of sleepless, danger-fraught days: It's all about the presidency.
Not just the fictional presidency of Charles Logan, a chinless wonder with a soul more duplicitous than Nixon's, but the current president and the man who would have been king. Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is probably as dismayed as every other Republican in the country over the dismal performance of GWB and in Logan the show gives us a president who is even worse: he has already killed the former president, hospitalized the First Lady when she stumbled on the truth of his villainy and sold the nation to a consortium of businessmen who seem intent to run it like Enron. Now who's the worst president of all time, huh?
Then there's the casting of William Devane as the Secretary of Defense Heller. Devane, with his lock jaw and patrician accent, is a suitable stand-in for a Kennedy -- the actor once played JFK in a TV movie (The Missles of October) -- a family that Murdoch loathes. Devane's Heller is a decent guy, though, and in one of the show's typically dramatic twists he drove his car off a cliff and into a lake to prevent bad guys from killing him to prevent him from going public with... O, I forget. Anyway he did it to save the country! And, until last week when we learned that he had somehow miraculously survived the accident, it seemed like the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Unlike, say, Chappaquiddick.
So in elevating a Kennedy manque and giving us a president worse than Bush, the Murdoch owned Fox has spun an alternate-universe presidency more satisfying (and less boring) than that of ABC's Commander-in-Chief. That show would be better if they let David Lynch direct a few episodes, IMHO. I hear he's a Republican, too.
Meanwhile, can anyone tell me what Jack Bauer is taking to stay up on days like that?
Monday, May 01, 2006
Non-Judgment Day Is Near
So read a bumper sticker I saw in the Marigny district yesterday though a lot of people in New Orleans seem good and ready to pass judgment. One popular T-shirt says Meet the Fockers and depicts Bush, Brown etc. as the people who focked the Big Easy Hard and a popular mayoral race shirt depicts Willie Nagin and the Chocolate City ("Semi-sweet and a little nuts"). The political races of the future will be won and lost on T-shirts, I fear, but there is a sense that someone should be held accountable, if not for the hurricane then for the fact that no one seems to be in a hurry to clean up the mess.
Jeffrey and I took a drive through the Ninth Ward to see the worst of it and it's a whole lot worse than it looks on television. Houses on top of cars, buildings condemned, spray paint alerting rescuers to the number of people and animals, dead or alive, who were inside nine months ago. Fats Domino's publishing business is still standing though his house is a little worse for wear. There were a few random tourists and us, taking photos of the devastation before thinking better of it.
"You would have to be crazy to want to move here," I heard the concierge in my hotel telling a guest, "especially if you have kids." Only 30% of the elementary schools are open and I suspect that Baghdad has a better record than that. And a lot more US money being poured into it. The thousands who have descended upon this city for JazzFest are leaving (some are staying for ancillary events like Piano Night at House of Blues tonight, and more will return for the second weekend) and there is a palpable desperation on the part of the store owners and many of the restaurateurs: Don't leave us!
Of course the culture we've come to partake of abides. Out at the fairground's Bell South Jazz Tent, Troy Andrews aka Trombone Shorty had the crowd in the palm of his 19-year-old hand with a jumped-up version of St. James Infirmary. It was throughline to Louis Armstrong, a new take on one of Satchmo's signature songs, but there was no pretense, no passing of the mantle stuff (in closing he introduced himself as Wynton Marsalis), just good fun(k). Allen Toussaint made a rare appearance at the Acura Arena and was treated like the royalty he is, sharp and sweat free in his linen suit, and he was joined by Elvis Costello who has a Toussaint produced CD coming out soon. Elvis was in fine form, better than I'd heard him in years -- maybe working with the master helped -- and when he sang the song Toussaint had penned for Little Feat -- "The same people you misuse on your way up/You might meet up with on your way down" -- it had a certain je ne sais quoi, as they say.
More judgments to come.
