Vaarwel Aan Dat Alle

Every week I check Time and Newsweek's websites, though I don't know why. It's rare that there's anything I want to read, and the websites, much like their parent magazines, are Weekly Reader For Adults: "We'll tell you news that flatters your mainstream middle-class self-image, and if by chance the news does not, we'll sugarcoat it as much as possible so as not to upset you."

So I was fairly surprised when I saw the following on Newsweek.com:

Turn Out the Red Light?
Amsterdam plans to close down its most famous district, citing sleaze, criminal activity and human trafficking. Not everybody is happy about it.

(story below, copied for archives sake)

They're closing down Amsterdam's Red Light District? Or rather, kicking out all the prostitutes to make way for little shops? Never thought I'd see the day. Not only am I surprised that it is happening, I'm surprised I haven't heard about it elsewhere. I would have thought it would have merited some mention in the current issue of Whore Monthly, to which I have a subscription (it was a gift). I guess not.

However, I don't think anyone who doesn't live in Amsterdam deserves to have an opinion about this. Entitlement at its most arrogant expects others to deal with the downside of a situation just so it can have what it wants. Since I don't have to deal with the side effects of legalized prostitution, it's wrong to bemoan losing its benefits, some of which are more symbolic than actual. Considering my experience in the Red Light District consisted of getting so stoned I felt like I was trapped in a maze from which I could not escape (partly due to the fact that I couldn't handle crossing the street) I'll excuse myself from the debate.

In theory, I think prostitution should be legal. If a woman (or man) wants to charge for sex, fine. But in actuality, legalizing prostitution wouldn't benefit the whores as much as it would the pimps, to whom it would offer protection and confer legitimacy. Prostitutes seem to be a mixed bag, but there's one overriding trait that all pimps share: they're all assholes. So I have very mixed feelings about the issue.

In any case, here is the article from Newsweek.com, copyright 2008, etc etc.

Turn Out the Red Light?
Amsterdam plans to close down its most famous district, citing sleaze, criminal activity and human trafficking. Not everybody is happy about it.

By Thijs Niemantsverdriet
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 2:50 PM ET Feb 8, 2008
Two weeks ago a young Dutch fashion designer named Bas Kosters opened a new store. His colorful and sumptuous creations—skirts, handbags, sweatshirts—merit attention. But the most striking aspect of his new venue is the location. Kosters's work is on display in Amsterdam's Red Light District behind two tall windows that until recently were used as a brothel. The ladies have vanished. The red lights and curtains have been removed and replaced by Kosters's hyperfashionable clothes.

Kosters found this studio thanks to an ambitious plan by the Amsterdam city government. Arguing that too many brothels and sex bars are linked to criminality, the authorities plan to all but erase the Red Light District. If the plan goes through, the peep shows, sex shops and prostitute windows that line the small alleys and canals will have to go, giving way to galleries, boutiques and upscale restaurants and bars. Goodbye to the big neon signs advertising every possible form of sexual indulgence.

Amsterdam without the Red Light District? Wouldn't that be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower? Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, and his aldermen have demonstrated little nostalgia for the district, which has been the world's most famous home of sexual permissiveness since the 15th century. They first unveiled the plan to close it in December; last month they revoked the licenses of two widely known sex venues, the Casa Rosso and the Banana Bar. The next step is to buy out the real estate owners. Last fall the city struck a deal with a powerful brothel owner, Charles Geerts (known as "Fat Charlie"), to buy 20 buildings.

The driving force behind the cleanup is Lodewijk Asscher. A young star of the Dutch Labour Party and deputy mayor of Amsterdam, Asscher believes it's time to deliver his hometown from sleaze—even if he's scuppering a $100 million-a-year industry in the process. He is pleasantly surprised, he says, by the public support he's gotten for the plan. "Every day I get e-mails," he says. A recent survey confirms the sentiment: the city administration's polling agency found that 67 percent of Amsterdam's population supports a clampdown on sketchy business. The Amsterdam City Council approved the plan about two weeks ago by an overwhelming 43-2 majority.

But not everybody is happy about the change. Jan Broers, owner of Royal Taste, a hotel in the heart of the Red Light District, and eight prostitute windows, has formed a protest committee called Platform 1012 (named after the area's ZIP code). He claims to have collected thousands of signatures. This week the group staged a protest march, starting in front of the Casa Rosso and ending in Dam Square, where thousands of people shared a minute of silence. They carried pink balloons and signs saying "Hands off the Red Light District" and a poster of Asscher doctored to look as if he was with a street hooker.

Broers is afraid that fewer tourists will come to a sexless Amsterdam, harming legitimate, legal businesses. Most of all, he says, he feels "stigmatized" by the city government. "With all his rhetoric, deputy mayor Asscher is giving the district a bad name throughout the world," he says. "People phone me up from abroad every day, worried we might be gone already." Broers questions the city's premise that prostitution leads to criminal activities in the area. Indeed, the city, which is acting under laws that require only a suspicion of criminal activity, can point only to studies from the mid-1990s. "It's a shield. The city just wants to gentrify the neighborhood, so they can make some good money. And they're using public funds to buy all the real estate."

And what about the ladies? The Red Light District has about 450 windows where women offer their services. The majority of those will be closed down. Where will the inhabitants go, once they're forced out of work? Asscher says most of the prostitutes are part of international human-trafficking networks that draw on women from Eastern Europe, and they will most likely move on to Antwerp, Hamburg and other European cities. For those that remain, the city administration may start certifying pimps and require that prostitutes who work for them to be 21 years old.

The Dutch Sex Workers Union fears that many women and girls will be forced to start walking the streets. On its Web site the union calls the city's plans to certify pimps "bizarre." Since prostitution has been legal in the Netherlands since 2000, it argues, sex workers don't need pimps to find a place to work. Ruth Hopkins, a Dutch-English investigative journalist who has written extensively on prostitution in Amsterdam, says the city government overstates the extent of involuntary prostitution. "Even though there are gangs of pimps, a lot of women, mostly Africans and Latinos, do their work in complete independence," she says. Hopkins fears that a cleaned-up Amsterdam will be a boring city.

The crackdown fits into a nationwide backlash against the excesses of 1960s "happy-clappy" liberalism, as a conservative Dutch member of parliament recently put it. Over the last few years the Netherlands has adopted a stricter policy on selling marijuana, and a ban on hallucinogenic mushrooms is slated to go into effect later this year. "People in Amsterdam and the rest of the country are starting to discern real tolerance from bogus tolerance," says Asscher. "When Rudy Giuliani started to clean up Times Square in the mid-'90s, some people were warning that no one would ever again want to come to New York City. But as far as I know, it has had record tourist numbers each year since." Perhaps Giuliani, who this week dropped out of the U.S. presidential race, should run for office in the Netherlands.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/109373

That Old House

After living there for over 30 years, my mother has sold her house, the house I grew up in. These are some photos I took this past Christmas Eve.

The New Superba, and Other Little-Known Adventures Undertaken With My Family

And to think there are people today who don't know what a Superba is...

Pretty Ladies Making Planes

These photos come from the Library of Congress' collection of photos from the Office of War Information. Thanks to Joculum's livejournal page for posting the original link. There's over 1600 incredible color photos from the 1930's - 40's, and if you have a couple hours to spare, they're well worth checking out.

If I Only...

Last year at this time, I posted my 2007 New Year’s resolution, which was to finish 42 books by year’s end. How did I do? I think the proper term is “failure.” I only managed to finish 28. Halfway through the year I realized I was behind schedule and planned a huge push to meet my goal. A few months later, when I realized I still wasn’t going to finish the fabled 42, I said “screw it” and stopped worrying about it.

On the one hand, this isn’t too disappointing. One of the reasons for the exercise was to read more than I normally do, which I accomplished. The other reason was to have something to write about in this online journal. However I stalled after writing about book #8, a collection of Brecht’s plays, even though there are things I wanted to say about each book. I will eventually post about each of the books; if not a full essay, then at least a paragraph.

Why didn’t I manage to finish 42 books? I’m too easily distracted by other media, of which I have plenty. Those who have been to my apartment know I have piles of dvds, cds, comics, magazines, and a dvr that’s always filled with movies and tv shows to watch. I’m also lucky enough to live in a city of perpetual distraction, a land where there’s always a band playing, an art gallery opening, or a walk to be taken. Like a child at school who’s always up from his desk, it takes effort for me to sit and concentrate and I’m not big with the self-discipline. Once I do manage to sit and read for more than a few minutes, I’m hooked and I don’t want anything else. It’s just getting over that small roadbump that’s the trouble. It’s the same with my meditation.

The 28 Books I Finished Last Year:
1. Bottomfeeder by B. Fingerman
2. Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
3. What If Our World Is Their Heaven? Edited by Gwen Lee and Doris Elaine Sauter
4. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
5. Not God but God by Reza Aslan
6. The Baron In The Trees by Italo Calvino
7. A Void by George Perec
8. Brecht: Collected Plays Vol. 2
9. The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
10. Endless Things by John Crowley
11. Hatchet Jobs by Dale Peck
12. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Froer
13. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
14. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
15. Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
16. Mischevious Art of Jim Flora
17. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
18. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
19. Heroes & Villains by Angela Carter
20. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
21. Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
22. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
23. Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years by Michael Palin
24. How to Read by Harold Bloom
25. As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem
26. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
27. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
28. I Am Legend and other Stories by Richard Matheson

Favorite Non-fiction: The Nuture Assumption (runner up: Untold Stories)
Favorite Fiction: Endless Things (runner up: Life of Pi)
Biggest Surprise: how much I liked Franny and Zooey
Biggest Disappointment: how much I was bored by Michael Palin’s diaries

So what’s my New Year’s resolution for 2008?

To read 43 books. By God, I’m going to keep trying this until I accomplish it.

Hope everyone has a good year.

Boxing Day

I had to work the day after Christmas, and after work, I decided to treat myself to the yummy Chicken Curry - half on french fries, half on rice - at Kinsale Tavern.

Kinsale is a neighborhood Irish bar on the Upper East Side, a few blocks away from the lower lip of Spanish Harlem. Despite the fact that I moved to Brooklyn three years ago, I occasionally make the trek because it's that kind of warm neighborhood bar. Most nights, that is.

It wasn't particularly crowded the day after Christmas. I was eating my dinner when I began to overhear the conversation at the end of the bar. The reason I could overhear it is because the people were screaming at each other. "I think you are a Nazi pig!" a lady screeched. She didn't mean this rhetorically, but literally. A German gentleman at the bar was trying to explain why his countrymen got a bad rap for WWII, and the lady, whose family had to emigrate from Europe to Puerto Rico to avoid Hitler's armies, was having none of it. Loudly having none of it. The German gentleman tried the emotional appeal, saying that his father was killed fighting the communists and that he's tired of Germans getting blamed for everything.

As both the pitch and the volume of their argument grew, I thought: is this still controversial? Isn't it a given that the Third Reich was, you know, wrong? Not just misunderstood, not an example of relative ethics, but genuinely bad. It's not like the man was denying the Holocaust - their argument hadn't even gotten that far. Did he really expect to get a sympathetic hearing in an Irish bar in New York City?

The fact that his argument's thesis was the emotional and personal (father killed not only needlessly, but fighting for the wrong side) pretty much guarantees that shouting would eventually play a part in the debate. Still, despite the fact that I probably disagree with everything he would say, I can't help but be touched by the fact that this old man is still upset at the death of his father more than 60 years ago. Old grudges never die, in which case I guess he does make sense that he was in an Irish bar. My friend Tammy worked with Bosnian refugees and discovered that people are still angry about wrongs committed before World War I.

I found it interesting that the gentleman kept mentioning that his father and the Germans were fighting "the communists." Not the Russians or Soviets, mind you, but the communists. Every other group in the discussion was referred to by their nationality: Germans, Americans, the French. But the Russians were only referred to by their economic system, a propagandist play for sympathy. Had there been any Russians present, I'm sure the argument would have been even louder, and I certainly wouldn't have blamed them. I wouldn't want to be referred to as a capitalist rather than as an American.

So the yelling went on and the bartender didn't step in until people began cursing. Then "enough" was declared and everyone took their last cheap shots ("I should know better than to ever discuss politics with a woman"). Old nationalist resentments continue on.

What was I doing while all this was this was going on? I was reading all about "The Carol Burnett Show" in TV's Grooviest Variety Shows Of The 60s And 70s because I'm an American.

That Was Then, This Is Now

A true story

Yesterday I was waiting to cross the street when I overheard a father say to his two young daughters "Hey, do you see what's on the third floor of that building?" I looked up and saw the ballet school he was referring to. The daughters made an uncommitted acknowledgement, but then got excited when they saw what was on the second floor.

"Oooh, a DJ scratch academy!"

Oh, Damn...

One of the project ideas I've had for a while, which I started but planned to get back to just as soon as I had the time (along with my other various projects), was to cut up old illustrated books, encyclopedias mainly, to reveal the various images inside. It would be a way of creating a collage by revealing what was there but hidden, rather than pasting elements together. It was an idea that interested me and not something I had seen before.

Last night I received an email from my friend Stacey:

"These are pretty cool and for some reason I thought of you
http://centripetalnotion.com/2007/09/13/13:26:26/#more-550"

And there it was: my idea, but done by someone else and much better than I could have done it. I particularly like the pieces featuring colorful abstract shapes. The whole thing depresses me despite how much I like the work.

I know that there is nothing new under the sun and that there is nothing stopping me from going ahead and trying it myself. But my enthusiasm for the whole idea is gone. Why bother?

One point of interest: in the comments section, a Jonathan says

"Hey, did you read Italo Calvino’s “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler?” If not, you should, because there’s a character in there who does exactly this…"

Well, I have read If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. It's one of my favorite books, but I have to admit that I don't recall the character who does this. But knowing this reminds me of two years ago when I was in Venice and found myself inexplicably thinking of Calvino's Invisible Cities, only to discover that that book is indeed about Venice. It's odd that Calvino's work seems to plant seeds that later bear fruit, albeit bitter fruit in this case.

A Real Letter to a Celebrity Magazine

I know someone who works at a well-known national celebrity magazine. Below is one of the many unsolicited letters the magazine has received. I have removed some of the identifying info from the letter.

I am not making this up.

Dear Sirs:

I am writing tonight to follow up on a tip I submitted a week ago, and will go into more detail about a possible connection between the fall that actor Christopher Reeve had from a horse, and the fall from a horse that recording artist Madonna had more recently.

My feeling is that there was a conspiracy of white supremacists, rather than one weirdo acting alone.

I feel that the white supremacists are killers, rapists, perverts , and domestic terrorists.

They are organized in a fashion that you might expect of something such as a secret society of Hate like the Ku Klux Klan.

I live in Texas, and they enjoy flaunting symbols to display their beliefs, such as the Confederate flag. They also get kicks from using terms like "nigger" or "greaser" in public places where they know the minorities can overhear them.

I will begin with five examples of domestic terrorism that are not in chronological order:

In 1996, I had a part-time job as a substitute teacher for the [XX] School District.

I happened to mention to a class of elementary school children that I had worked at WFAA in Dallas. One of the children, 9 year old Amber Hagerman, wanted the address to write to WFAA to suggest a story about her mom, Donna Norris.

WFAA is the ABC affiliate locally, and was preparing a story about Amber, when she was abducted in broad daylight by a man described by a witness as a Hispanic in a late model black pickup truck.

Amber Hagerman was brutally raped and murdered, and her body was found in a cement ditch behind the [XX] apartment complex where I was living with my wife and child at the time.

I will now follow up with another example of a brutal rape and murder to terrorize elementary school children:

In August 1982, the month that I graduated from college, the actress Jane Seymour visited my apartment in [XX].

That evening four visitors came by in an effort to meet Jane Seymour: [AA], [BB], [CC], and a young female student from the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine (TCOM) that used to be in Fort Worth, Texas. I don't recall the name of the young woman.

At about 7:30 a.m., the following morning, the body of the young female TCOM student was found in a Fort Worth elementary school playground. She had been brutally raped and murdered. The Fort Worth police did a high profile house to house search looking for evidence.

My point here is that an elementary school playground had been chosen by the conspirators on purpose in an effort to make children afraid to go to school.

In the mid-1970s, when I was still in junior high school in [XX], a female student from Sam Houston High School was brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight in front of a Montgomery Wards that had been at what used to be called the Forum 303 Mall located at Pioneer Parkway and Highway 360. A witness to that one said that the killer had been a black man who escaped across a nearby field.

Again, what we see here is an effort to terrorize the local school children.

In 1974 or 1975, when I was still to[o] young to have a drivers license, one of my friends from junior high was struck by an [XX] Police car right before my eyes, and dragged hundreds of yards down the street and back.

A witness to this is:

[name and address of DD]

[DD] was also standing right there. The three of us were the same age.

The incident took place in [XX] at the intersection of Park Row Drive and Sherry Street.

Joel Eden was on a 10 speed bicycle, when the [XX] Police car purposefully veered out of its path, and knocked him off. His bell bottom jeans caught the bumper, and he was dragged down past Thorton Elementary School and back, screaming.

Joel Eden was dead on arrival at [XX] Memorial Hospital. There was even some fake propaganda in the local newspaper the following day saying that he had been so intoxicated that the was almost unconscious, and that he had struck the police car.

This was not the case. the police car had purposefully veered out of its path to mow him down, and then disregarded his screams.

It was a hate crime, and another example of an effort to terrorize school children.

Essentially giving them the idea that it's not safe to shop at the store, play in the neighborhood, go to school, etc.

I graduated from [EE] High School in [XX] in 1977. A friend of mine who graduated the year before in 1976 was named Fred Kurz. Fred was also killed in a "freak accident" that also involved an [XX] Police car.

Fred was killed in either 1979 or 1980. He was a student at the University of Texas..., and was part of a college fraternity that had a frat house that used to be on Center Street.

Fred was in front of the frat house with his girlfriend, when he was the victim of a high speed chase. A vehicle was trying to speed away from an [XX] Police car, when it jumped the cub, and struck both Fred and his girlfriend. Fred was killed instantly, and the girlfriend was seriously injured. Please note that there were no police sirens to warn them to step out of the way. The person driving the car claimed it was an "accident," and thus got off with a light sentence.

What I have just presented here are example [sic] of young people who actually died.

I will follow up on this in a few days with reports of others who suffered some type of "medical misfortune" or had their outstanding reputations purposefully ruined.

I have seen first hand the actions of these "perverts," and they actually get sick pleasure from causing their victim's "medical misfortune" or "disability."

Today's Reading

I've begun going to church again, as my godson's Confirmation is coming up, and I need to be a Catholic in good standing in order to take part. But until then there are little rewards for going to church, such as hearing the first reading today as follows:

So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill.

So far, so good. But then:

As long as Moses held up his pants, the Israelites were winning,

What?

but whenever he lowered his pants, the Amalekites were winning.

It wasn't until I heard the following sentence ("Aaron and Hur held his pants up—one on one side, one on the other") that I realized it wasn't Moses' pants, but his hands. Completely changes the meaning of the passage.

I once asked my friend Bob which he would chose: deafness or blindness. He immediately picked deafness, not only because he is an artist, but also because loss of hearing would spare him all the annoying noises of the city. I also chose deafness: not just because the deaf have a tight-knit, insular community, but because, as today's reading shows, I would then live in a wonderfully surreal and silly world.

From Now On

I was woken Wednesday morning by the sound and cool temperature of rain. After getting up and making some water of my own, I looked out the window and saw that the rain was hard enough to flood the streets, but oddly enough was not coming in my windows. So I left the windows open and fell back asleep to the soothing sound of a summer thunderstorm.

An hour or two later I woke up and saw that my sister (she's been staying with me) was dressed and ready for a job interview. "You're heading out?" I asked. "Nope, the subway system is shut down because of the rain." As I do when anything out of the ordinary happens, I got up and watched it on tv. Indeed, so much rain had poured down in such a short period of time that the subways flooded, making the trains unable to get through.

It reminded me of a conversation/prediction I had made four years ago. In 2003, you may remember there was a blackout in New York City. Apart from the blackout itself, the main item of interest was how well people in the city dealt with the power outage. Unlike the blackout of 1977, there was little looting and a sense of society coming together rather than disintegrating into chaos. So soon after 9/11, it seemed that people wanted to be good, that people wanted to help others and meet the challenge when things went wrong, as opposed to the summer of 1977 when everyone seemed pissed off and couldn't even imagine their better natures, let alone act on them.

The '03 blackout occurred while I was at work, which meant I had to walk down 59 flights of stairs. I walked behind one of my co-workers, who was a little concerned but trying to be brave as we made our way downstairs. Being with someone more anxious than I actually had calming effect: I got to be the rational one for a change. I wasn't wearing pumps, for one thing. Preparing for the worst, I was actually surprised when we got to the street. There didn't seem to be any tension or panicking. I saw people at intersections directing traffic and the drivers obeying rather than ignoring them. Making my way home, it seemed as if the entire city had been transformed into a series of block parties. I stopped at a bar and had a Guinness (cause it tastes good warm). Outside the bar, someone blasted music from the back of their truck and everyone just hung out, listened and swapped stories.

A few days after power was restored, I was relating my experiences to my friends Troy and Andrea, particularly my realization that the blackout was an indication of things to come. Enjoyable as it was, I knew that it was also a sign of the future. American infrastructure is fairly old, and has been pushed to its limits. Unfortunately, the prevailing mood in this country is to build new rather than repair old, and, even worse, that tax monies shouldn't be wasted on such things as repairing roads or upgrading utilities. People have been feed the line (fishing metaphor implied) of "less taxes is always good!" that they've forgotten the sort of things for which taxes are meant. I believe...I hope...that I sounded more accepting and cheerful than apocalyptic when I told my friends "this is how it's going to be from now on. Things are going to fall apart and we're just going to have to deal with it. The age of progress in America is over; now comes the age of everything falling apart."

Our subway system can't withstand a lot of rain. A steam pipe explodes in mid-town this summer. A bridge collapses in Minneapolis. New Orleans. They're all part of a list of the way things will be from now on. They are not the exceptions, but the rules.

Birthday Massage

On Monday I went for my annual Birthday Massage. I was about a month late, but my schedule didn't allow for the massage any closer to the actual day. After every massage I think "I should do this more often -- at least twice a year" but never do.

On my way, I saw a typical tourist family consulting maps and trying to orient themselves. The parents were wearing matching "I [heart] New York" shirts. I thought of telling them "Thank you, but you know you don't have to wear those shirts. It's not like a law was passed." Although if Giuliani had remained mayor, I'm sure one would have been.

My massage was scheduled at a spa for men located in an old bank building. The decor is New York Chic: minimal furnishings, steel gray walls, catwalks leading to the different rooms, what I assume is good feng shui. An impressive place, the effect of which was undone by bright yellow water in the toilet I went to use. Apparently the massages are so good that you're too relaxed to flush when finished.

08:42 Brecht: Collected Plays Volume 2

Brecht: Collected Play Volume 2
Bertolt Brecht

Lead to this book because of my interest in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, I discovered it was actually my least favorite of Brecht’s plays, preferring A Man’s a Man and The Threepenny Opera. I’m rather bad at reading plays – even Shakespeare – never getting as much from the text as I do from an even halfway decent performance.

But some understanding of Mahagonny was needed as I was going to see an experimental film that used the entire opera, sung in German, as its soundtrack. The filmmaker Harry Smith was (wikipedia puts it best) “an American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, record collector, experimental filmmaker, artist, bohemian and Kabbalist.” As your grandmother might say, Harry was a “real character,” the kind that used to populate Greenwich Village and gentrification has dispersed to God-knows-where. Smith’s film of Mahagonny divided the screen into four equal quadrants, showing a variety of images in each quadrant. Often the same image would be shown in two quadrants though reversed in one, creating a mirror effect. The images were home movie quality, shots of New York as it was in the 1970’s and stop motion animation using whatever Harry happened to have in his apartment, mostly cigarettes and liquor bottles. I had seen the film several years ago and this time, read Brecht’s play beforehand, thinking that a familiarity with the opera would add to my understanding of the film.

Sadly no. I realized fairly early on that there isn’t much correspondence between Brecht’s text and Smith’s film; or rather, that like much of Smith’s work, the connections and meaning are so esoteric and personal that viewers remain outside. Brecht’s play itself is said to be a satire of America, following the experiences of immigrants to a golden city who seek only to get rich, become vulgarians when they do and eventually succumb to the city’s violence and corrupt legal system. I can see why it would appeal to a bohemian like Smith; what I can’t see is what it has to do with his film. As nostalgic as I am for the New York of 30+ years ago, my second viewing was a restless experience.

Brecht’s play features the standard Brechtian devices to remind audiences that they are not seeing reality but a play, a representation of reality. Culture, not nature. But the vaudeville-type satire is rather tiresome, despite the inventive technique involved. Again, this is as text. It’s likely that a well-staged production would reverse my opinion. Better are the two earlier plays included in this volume. The Threepenny Opera features the scheming and fighting among the criminal underclass and has better characters and a narrative drive lacking in Mahagonny.

The real surprise was A Man’s a Man. A group of soldiers, fearing the wrath of their sergeant when one of their company goes missing while drunk, convince a local dockworker to impersonate the missing man. He agrees with the ruse, thinking it to be temporary, but stays and eventually becomes a better soldier than the rest of the troop. It’s a funny take on identity as being determined more by your surroundings than anything innately personal. The military farce is silly enough to be an episode of Sgt. Bilko or a lost chapter of Catch-22 and its theme on the malleability of identity haven’t dated at all.

07:42 A Void

A Void
Georges Perec

I thought I had first learned of Perec’s A Void -- a novel in which the letter e never appears -- from The Book of Lists, which I read and re-read as a teenager. However, I just checked The Book of Lists and there is no mention of either Perec or his novel, a strange disappearance completely in synch with A Void. My interest was reawakened when I found myself constructing sentences without the letter e while half-asleep (details here). My sister Ann gave me a copy of A Void this past year for Christmas and I was off.

Reading the book, you can’t help but be aware of the game the writer is playing, and as you read, you constantly check to see if he slips up. Nope, he never does. Some stylistic indulgences are to be expected: past tense is avoided and some numbers are represented by digits rather than spelled out. Even though the book is based around a clever conceit, there is a sense of sadness and loss. Written as a mystery, it begins with the disappearance of the main character’s best friend, soon followed by the death or disappearance of others in his life. It includes the genre’s conspiracies, hair-pin turns and sudden reversals to portray a stable world sinking into chaos. It’s interesting that Perec, a life-long Parisian, wrote this, the most rule-bound of novels, during the political turmoil of the late sixties. It is anarchic in its imagination though reactionary in its respect for rules and order.

How clever is the book? Well, the second section and the fifth chapter are “missing” (because e is the second vowel and the fifth letter of the alphabet). Not content to craft his own work with one letter tied behind his back, Perec also rewrites and incorporates Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Poe’s “Black Bird” (“Quoth that Black Bird ‘Not Again’”), and, for the ultimate achievement in being a smart-ass, Shakespeare’s “To Be Or Not To Be”:

Living or not living: that is what I ask:
If ‘tis a stamp of honor to submit
To slings and arrows waft’d us by ill winds,
Or brandish arms against a flood of afflictions,
Which by our opposition is subdu’d? Dying, drowsing;
Waking not?…

I should point out that A Void is a translation, skillfully handled by Gilbert Adair from the original French, which may actually be the greater achievement. It brings to mind the old line about Ginger Rogers being a superior dancer to Fred Astaire because she had to do everything he did except backwards and in high heels.

06:42 The Baron In The Trees

The Baron In The Trees
Italo Calvino

A delight. One day in late June 1767, the young Cosimo di Rondo, first-born son of a local baron, upset at his sister Battista’s latest perverse culinary creation, climbs a tree in protest…and never comes down for the rest of his life. What begins as a child’s willful act of defiance evolves into one man’s desire to live free of earth’s constraints, even though his life is determined by the trees in which he lives.

The irony is that, even though Cosimo tries to live a solitary life, he is still connected to the lives of others. He fights in wars, meets statesmen and philosophers, battles pirates, farms, hunts, has love affairs, and all without ever setting foot on the ground. The Baron In The Trees can be read in many ways: fable, satire, ribald tale, outsider’s view of the Age of Enlightenment. Despite the eccentricity of the plot, Calvino’s language is never coy or precious. Cosimo’s younger brother narrates the tale, his bewildered yet intrigued tone prevents it from becoming an exercise in terminal whimsy.

As with any novel that records the span of a character’s life or a specific historical era, there is a sense of loss that pervades The Baron In The Trees, as in this early passage, included for verisimilitude:

I don’t know if it’s true, the story they tell in books, that in ancient days a monkey could have left Rome and skipped from tree to tree until it reached Spain, without ever touching earth. The only place so thick with trees in my day was the whole length, from end to end, of the gulf of Ombrosa and its valley right up to the mountain crests; the area was famous everywhere for this.

Nowadays these parts are very different. It was after the arrival of the French that people began chopping down trees as if they were grass which is scythed every year and grows again. They have never grown again. At first we thought it was something to do with the war, with Napoleon, with the period. But the chopping went on. Now the hillsides are so bare that when we look at them, we who knew them before, it makes us feel bad.

The abundance of life inevitably falling victim time’s sharp ax. But at least a baron in the trees (as well as The Baron In The Trees) pays tribute to the rich strangeness possible in life until the final chop.

I Believe You

On the subway this morning I spotted a fashionably dishevelled young man wearing a ball cap. On the front of the ball cap was written:

Rock and Roll Asshole

Okay...

05:42 No god But God

No god but God: The origins, evolution and future of Islam
Reza Aslan

Author Reza Aslan has always come across as one of the more reasonable, informed guests on shows like “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “The Daily Show.” I read “Imperial Life In The Emerald City” after seeing its author on “The Daily Show” so now I’m not only getting my news from Jon Stewart but also my reading list.

Aslan’s book is aimed at the Western non-Islamic reader so that s/he can understand the religion’s current conflicts and their historical origins. “What is taking place now in the Muslin world” writes Aslan “is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West. The West is merely a bystander – an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.” The conflict is basically between fundamentalists and progressives – a similar battle that rages across most religions and political systems. “Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it and it will turn against you. Try to appease it, and it will take control.”

No god But God begins in pre-Islamic Arabia, providing an overview of what Mohammed was reacting against (polytheism, mainly, but also city-state corruption) when he began reciting the word of God. It continues with an overview of Mohammed’s life and the development of the Quran, taking time to address standard complaints about Islam, notably its sexism and being a “religion of the sword.” Addressing these concerns, if Aslan sounds defensive it’s because, well, he is. He attempts to justify ideas one would think incongruous with a peaceful religion through three methods. One: “Everyone else does it, too” (ie Christianity’s history is as bloody as Islam’s). Two: “The Quran has a verse that says NOT to do that bad thing.” Which is fine as an excuse for the scripture, but doesn’t excuse what people do in its name and ignores scripture that contradicts it. The third and final excuse “you have to understand these things in historical context.” This is where my problem with Islam (and other organized religions) begins.

I can not accept any spiritual teaching that explicitly favors part of God’s creation over another, such as proscribing different laws for men and women or members of one tribe versus another. The Quran, the Torah and the Christian Bible all contain such passages. “Historical context” is usually the excuse, but a truly spiritual teaching, not to mention the Word of God, would transcend human history. What would be as true in 6000 BC would be as true in 33 AD and would still be true tomorrow morning. I accept that ideas need to be understood in context, but then I can not accept those ideas as the legitimate edicts of an all-powerful, all-benevolent, eternal God. This applies specifically to Islam, which is said to be the recitation of the Word of God by His prophet Mohammed. Without this claim as divinely inspired speech, the Quran is a nice (abeit inconsistent) book of teachings, no better than most others.

Azlan's book is a great overview of the history of the religion. Islam, like all major religions, is particularly conflicted in the face of science and rational thought. The Muslims are just as skilled as the Christians in tying themselves in theological knots when they attempt to "logically" explain the nature of God. Like all religions, it always falls back on "you just have to believe" with the hidden corollary "if you don't believe, then you have to live with the fact that I believe."

Everyone Gets Atrophy, part II

Yesterday I received the following email from my friend Andrea. The show she is referring to is an amateur art exhibition in Lancaster county, PA. I wrote about last year's edition here.

--------------------------------
Mon, 4 Jun 2007 11:42:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: Andrea Collins
Subject: titles
To: John Hanlon

I thought I would send you my favorite titles from this year's "If you pay your entry fee your painting is in" show that we took you to last year.

"Untitled Little Boy" (Not exactly untitled then, is it?)
"Lady in Cage"
"Latte Conversation" (A painting of two ladies talking, because ladies love lattes almost as much as being in cages)
"Oscar Wilde Twice"
"Nurturing Earth Mother, She's All We've Got"
"Stacking the Lobsters"
"The Nose Licker!" (My favorite)
---------------------------------
Thank you, Andrea.

It's hard to pick a favorite, but this morning I'm leaning towards "Stacking the Lobsters."

04:42 The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell

I borrowed this book – what, three years ago? – from someone at work. Then I quit my job and had no desire to see the person from whom I borrowed the book, so I kept it, unintentionally stealing. Then, as fate would have it, I ended up being rehired at my old job as a temp (I didn’t make enough to be considered a “consultant”). Earlier this year when I decided I was going to quit my job for a second time, I was determined to read and return The Tipping Point before I left. I’m a big fan of closure, though obviously not a big fan of that job.

Why do some phenomena become ubiquitous in the culture, whereas others die a quick death? This is the guiding question in The Tipping Point but you get the sense that Gladwell’s answers could fit on a PowerPoint presentation: he classifies people who carry new ideas as Connectors, Mavens, or Salesman; outlines a “Stickiness Factor,” and the “Power of Context,” all of which explain (or are imposed on) such disparate phenomena as sneaker popularity, venereal disease epidemics, and teenage smoking.

I remember the article in The New Yorker in which Gladwell first articulated his ideas. He used the example of cars parked on a street in an unsafe neighborhood. A number of cars are parked on the same street, similar with respect to price, condition, and age. But if you noticeably damage one of them (for example, cracking the windshield), then that car alone would then be preyed on and further vandalized within a few days, sometimes even hours. All factors were equal save the broken windshield, “the tipping point,” the one extra nudge that would let people in the area know that this car could be damaged without repercussions. This theory, “little things mean a lot,” was behind Giuliani’s crackdown on crime in New York City in the 1990s. Remove the atmosphere that forgives minor crimes and you’ll remove the atmosphere that permits major crime. We may not be able to prevent crimes like murder, but we can stop the small noticeable crimes (graffiti, panhandling) that let people to think they live in a society that ignores all crimes.

Like many books written by journalists, The Tipping Point reads like a series of previously published articles re-written and edited to fit a theme. Gladwell does write well and is able to discuss scientific or sociological studies without wallowing in jargon. The proof offered for his theories ranges from “Sesame Street” to Paul Revere’s ride and seems chosen less for applicability than for the fact that he finds them interesting. As did I. The “Stickiness Factor” and the Connectors aren’t as engaging as the history of “Sesame Street.” For example, before the show aired, child psychiatrists insisted that the Muppets be kept separate from the scenes with live actors because children wouldn’t accept the interaction between fantasy and realistic figures. When they tested the show with children, the kids lost interest as soon as the Muppets were off screen. The producers decided to try an episode in which Muppets and humans mixed. This time, the children’s attention rated higher than it did for either the Muppets of the humans alone, and they never had any trouble with the mixing of fantasy and realism. Makes one wonder what else child psychiatrists have gotten so wrong.

What was most satisfying about The Tipping Point was that it supported two pet theories of mine:

1. The human mind is formed and formatted by narrative, not by language.
Child development experts, psychologists and neurologists have argued that language, initially spoken, then written, is the source of connections in the human mind. Learning language is what sparks growth in our brains as children and it is how our brains are thereafter conditioned. Other factors can be important (images, music) but language is primary.

Doesn’t ring true to me and never has.

I have long believed that it is narrative, little stories, cause and effect, that structures a child’s brain, and remains the underlying way in which they think as they get older. Yes, we use language to express and understand narrative, but narrative is what’s primary, not language. Before children can understand words, they experience life as a simple story, cause and effect: I was hungry, I cried, I got fed. A story with a happy ending. As we grow, the stories become more complex as our brains develop and our understanding of the world increases. Language develops in response to our brains’ growth and its ability to handle more complex narratives.

I’ve never done the requisite research to prove this – I wouldn’t even know where to begin – and I think I’ve only discussed this idea once or twice with others (while a little drunk, no doubt). However, on page 119, Gladwell writes:

The project centered on a two-year-old girl from New Haven called Emily, whose parents – both university professors – began to notice that before their daughter went to sleep at night she talked to herself. Curious, they put a small microcassette recorder in her crib and, several nights a week, for the next fifteen months, recorded both the conversations they had with Emily as they put her to bed and the conversations she had with herself before she fell asleep. The transcripts – 122 in all – were then analyzed by a group of linguists and psychologists led by Katherine Nelson of Harvard University. What they found was that Emily’s conversations with herself were more advanced than her conversations with her parents. In fact, they were significantly more advanced. One member of the team that met to discuss the Emily tapes, Carol Fleisher Feldman, later wrote:

“In general, her speech to herself is so much richer and more complex [than her speech to adults] that it has made all of us, as students of language development, begin to wonder whether the picture of language acquisition offered in the literature to date does not underrepresent the actual patterns of the linguistic knowledge of the young child. For once the lights are out and her parents leave the room, Emily reveals a stunning mastery of language forms we would never have suspected from her [everyday] speech.”

Feldman was referring to things like vocabulary and grammar and – most important – the structure of Emily’s monologues. She was making up stories, narratives, that explained and organized the things that happened to her.

Emily is making up stories to make sense of the world around her, and to entertain herself before she goes to sleep. The story is primary; language is merely the tool to express it. This reminds me of my own experience as a child. Language and words were not that important to me or any of the children I knew. But stories were. Not only as entertainment, but as a way of processing and passing on information and solving the mystery of the world into which we are born.

2. Individual psychology is overrated; group psychology is underrated.
For a while, I’ve been interested in what I think of as group dynamics: the way that people assume roles when in a group, modifying their personalities or behavior based on how best to fit in or what they think the group needs. Consequently, I see individual psychology as only significant when an individual is alone, and how often is that? Otherwise you have to take the group dynamics into account when discussing someone’s personality or actions. In other words, personality is not fixed and rigid, but depends on context.

This idea came from observing people act differently depending on who they are with. When I was younger I judged this as hypocrisy; now I accept it as human. I recall a few years after college seeing a group of friends and being annoyed at how they kept treating me as the person I was rather than who I thought I had become. The irony was that, under their influence, I began acting like that person again, reverting to my old self. At the time I thought “This isn’t who I am anymore. Why am I behaving this way?” My answer was to attribute it to the power of group dynamics. Gladwell would call it the power of context.

To demonstrate this, Gladwell writes about a study conducted by Hugh Hartshorne and M. A. May in the 1920s to measure the honesty of children using several kinds of SAT-type tests. I won’t go into the details of the study, but the results did show consistent patterns, though not as consistent as one might think. The researchers concluded that most children

Will deceive in certain situations and not in others. Lying, cheating, and stealing as measured by the test situations used in these studies are only very loosely related. Even cheating in the classroom is rather highly specific, for a child may cheat on an arithmetic test and not on a spelling test, etc. Whether a child will practice deceit in any given situation depends in part on his intelligence, age, home background, and the like and in part on the nature of the situation itself and his particular relation to it. (from Hartshorne and May)

Gladwell continues:

This, I realize, seems wildly counterintuitive…All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what…Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior…

Character, then, isn’t what we think it is, or rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.

So it’s not just group dynamics that determines an individual’s behavior, but everything about a situation. It was acutely painful for me when I believed in consistent individual psychology because that was not how I experienced the world. In Western psychology, I thought of my personality as “fragmented.” Not dysfunctional, but without a clearly defined core “self.” I was too aware at how I would change based on the immediate situation. It was a relief when I read that in Eastern religions, not clinging to a rigid sense of “self” and being able to go with “the way” are goals that one should work towards.