Michael Blim

The minutes of the night tick down as I write this column. Soon I will have my morning reward. My column will come out on 3QD, and I will hear the thud of the Boston Globe against the front door.

My column will come out, but with the Boston Globe?

Ask The New York Times Company, its owner. For the past month, they have been threatening to close the Globe unless its workers give back $20 million in wages and benefits by May 1. For the past two days, the Times company has extended the deadline by one day. As I write, the Times company has put several hours back on the clock at the same time it is waving its official plant closing notice as required by the state in the faces of its employees.

The Globe, once the Sulzberger flagship for its New England media armada, and a cash cow to boot, is now losing a million dollars a week. It is the last paper of record in Boston, and has garnered dozens of national awards, including seven Pulitzer prizes since 1995. The 2007 prize was won by reporter Charlie Savage’s exposure of President Bush’s abuse of so-called signing statements, pithy bits of prose attached to his approval of laws that skewed or set aside whole provisions of legislation he could not summon the courage to veto. The 2003 prize was won the Globe’s spotlight team for their uncovering of the sex abuse scandal in the local and national Catholic churches.

These were hardly prizes awarded for art criticism, however valuable those forms of recognition may be. They were what newspapers do that no other institution or platform in America can yet do, which is to generate facts about and attention to serious, yet undiscovered problems in everyday life.

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by Colin Marshall

Though certain cultural circles customarily and wrongfully dismiss science fiction as an altogether inferior breed of narrative, the genre's bad reputation isn't wholly unearned. Just last week, I heard veteran sci-fi novelist Robert Silverberg publicly assert that, in his field, “character is necessarily subordinated to speculation”; rarely has the fatal flaw of one subset of fiction been so succinctly stated. While the disease that withers human inhabitants to ciphers is indeed widespread and devastating, it hasn't quite contaminated every crevice of the sci-fi landscape. Witness, to name one of these exotic and wonderful instances, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, a futuristic, fantastical journey into an impossible planet's orbit that nevertheless remains the most gripping cinematic narrative of the 1970s.

The film is, I would submit, Tarkovsky's finest, though the great director would have argued with me. He reportedly came to consider Solaris his least successful project, owing to what he saw as its inability to break the shackles of its genre. Though no viewer then or now would call it anything other than a science fiction film, perhaps only Tarkovsky himself, his mind's eye fixed on the less conventional visions he would later realize, could lump it with the day's rockets-and-aliens potboilers. What to him may have been a not-entirely-successful attempt to imbue relatively insubstantial material with stronger human resonances is to others a set of Tarkovskian themes brought closer and made more comprehensible by interaction with a familiar cinematic context. This is not to minimize the impact of the films that followed — the ultra-personal Mirror and The Sacrifice, the supremely textural Nostalghia, the much more distant science fiction of Stalker — but to appreciate the unexpectedly positive hybridization effects of two entirely distinct entities, a phenomenon of which almost any science fiction writer would approve.

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The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance
of philosophers and physicists.–Robert Lanza and Bob Berman


The Problem of Time
Jim Culleny

Then was now once while now always is
the train leaving the station

and Is (itself) is pretty much
a matter of interpretation
as murky as the dilemma:
to be or not to…which was
well explored long before today
(today being exactly when
Hamlet was written anyway).

Tomorrow maybe I’ll figure it all out,
though by then it’ll be almost yesterday again

which before tock has ticked will
seem like a month or two ago
or year or even an eon or so
, which it undoubtedly is

Fettuccine alla gricia, a common pasta dish in Rome, has four ingredients: the noodles, olive oil, bits of cured pig's cheek, and grated cheese. Most trattorias offer it. It's not innovative, nor is it usually presented with much elegance. It's simply an oily plate of flat, yellow noodles with some reddish brown bits of guanciale and a shower of pecorino. The pleasure it gives is hard to describe. The word delicious somehow seems too refined and cerebral, tasty insufficiently hyperbolic. Scrumptious is close, but kind of pretentious. Anyway, a good alla gricia is lipsmackingly, profoundly pleasurable to eat.

There's a difference between eating and dining. In Rome, you eat. By eating, I mean the straightforward, carnal pleasure of gnawing things that taste good. A perfect example would be another common speciality: abbacchio scottadito, which is grilled very young lamb sauced with a lemon wedge. There's usually a rib, a bit of shoulder or leg, and a chop. (Incidentally, Urdu speakers call a chop a “champ,” which has always struck me as charming, and oonomatopoetic of lipsmackingness.) Abbacchio scottadito is variously salty, gamy, fatty, and cartilagenous. It tastes extremely, intensely lambish. Impossible not to chew the bones.

Not that you can't dine in Rome: at La Rosetta, Rome's most celebrated fish restaurant, you can wear your Lanvin suit, sit with the multinational haute-bourgeoisie, and have a spaghetti with seafood that costs forty-two euros. But I had a superb (superb!) spaghetti alla vongole for eight euros at a random neighborhood restaurant. By the way, you can make this at home very easily: fry a tiny bit of minced garlic, add some white wine and the smallest clams you can find, cover till they open, and mix with some high-quality pasta (I recommend Martelli, if you can find it; I can't anymore) and a bit of chopped flat-leaf parsley. End of story. But try getting dime-sized little vongole outside of Italy that are as fresh and sweetly saline.

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[Note: Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals, especially the victims.]

Justice

There is no justice except that for which you are willing to fight. There is no freedom except that which you claim as your own, and for which you are willing to suffer and fight. There is no unalienable right except that which you can articulate, and, with others, arrive at a consensus on its value and utility. Justice is not a reality, external to the human condition, that acts upon this world, its institutions, and its inhabitants; Nor is justice a cosmic balance sheet that compensates for our losses in the world we experience by allocating credits that are redeemable upon our death. Waiting for justice to be dispensed can be a wait for an eternity. You have to seek it, fight for it, persevere, and hope there might be some measure of fairness in the end. You have to pick your fights carefully. Sometimes you find justice and feel vindicated; You may find an incomplete measure of justice and wonder if it was worth the fight; There are times when the bad guys win and you're fucked. This makes the human condition, to some extent, tragic. This can also make the human condition redemptive, if in the search for justice, regardless of the outcome, we learn important lessons about ourselves, our institutions, and the world around us.

The Case of the Predator Psychiatrist

Nathan Kossik phoned me and asked if he could come over that evening. He said he had a very serious problem, he needed to talk to me, and could use my help and advice. He didn't want to discuss anything over the phone. I told him to come over after my kids were in bed. Nate was my neighbor and one of my best friends. We both went to graduate school, married, and started a family. Nate was an aspiring architect and in his second year at a local architectural firm. His wife Gertrude did not work outside the home for pay, at that time. Gerti was pursuing a nursing degree, part-time, at a local community college.

Nate came to my house alone. I had assumed he would come with his wife, Gerti. It's hard to describe his state except to say that he was very, very upset. He was devastated, heartbroken, angry, very concerned about his two children, and worried sick over his wife. Nate and Gerti were both in psychotherapy with the same psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph R. Dorsey, of Hopewell Junction, NY. They started together in marriage counseling, but they stopped seeing Dr. Dorsey as a couple. Instead they continued with separate individual appointments. This went on for two and one-half years. Nate and Gerti came from dysfunctional working class families. They were striving for a normal, middle class life through education and pursuing decent professional jobs. Nate and Gerti had two beautiful children who were school mates and regular play mates with my own kids. Some time before, Nate confided to me that his wife's father was an abusive alcoholic, who terrorized his family and sexually abused Gerti as a child. Gerti was also sexually abused by her neighbor. She had been diagnosed by a psychiatrist about 5 years earlier as having severe mental problems. The only thing Nate remembered about the diagnosis was that it included the phrase 'schizoid tendencies'.

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Vonderwelt takes the elevator down two flights below the ground floor. In the Bemidji Room there's a man wearing a turquoise bolo tie. He has a long grey goatee and is talking to an audience of a dozen people or so about a recent summer spent arrowhead collecting with his wife. “We took the camper out near Flagstaff,” he recounts. “Great arrowhead country out there. Mitzi and I were in heaven.” Alas, Vonderwelt says to himself, I'm with my people.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

I am sitting inside a white cube, watching things familiar but different. I know this music, but there are no lyrics, nothing to anchor the sound flowing round and through me. These soldiers, their rhythms, they seem to be preparing for an event I was once at. Perhaps India's Republic Day, which I remember attending with my kid brother when he was about six, both of us sitting in grass in front of the VIP enclosure with passes that Captain Kumar had arranged for us while he was serving as ADC to the President. Perhaps the Beating of the Retreat, which is held in front of the old Viceroy's Palace, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and which ends with a spectacular drum detail, no two drummers in the same uniform or from the same regiment, North and South Block reverberating together, silhouetted by the camel brigade, whose mounted guards point submachine guns into the air as the flares come sailing down to close the ceremony. It is, of course, another country, another time, and these memories have been triggered by a haunting new video work by Shahzia Sikandar entitled Bending the Barrel (no still available).

There is something uncanny about the angle and depth of Sikandar's camera. The marching band is moving past without making much progress, as if depth had been flattened for framing the scene into a Mughal miniature painting. The music emanates from their instruments but the moment is intercut with other scenes — we are there but no longer there. Before there can be boredom there is a new anomie, introduced by Krugeresque text fragments that overlay the image plane, not with slogans, but with the impersonal and passively-voiced militarese that cannot but be recognized as the public pronouncements of the Army's leadership. This is an acute, biting piece, crafted without polemic, so much more powerful for being all quotation, all documentation, all juxtaposition.

The conductor's back is to me, his musicians stare at their sheets of music. They are seated on an elevated bandstand whose steps were coated last night in chuna, lime, to shine back in the sun a brilliant, almost blinding white, outshining the musician's spats and their neelam-washed white tunics. Framed by Sikandar, the musicians at first appear anonymous, ordered, regimented. But now and again she swoops in. At first this causes me to worry that some amateurism had caused a camera shudder. But she is neither zooming nor panning, but shifting frame, capturing in perfect detail a particular Army bandsman staring directly back at the recording lens, a new composition, a new picture within the picture. This is the delirious pleasure of experiencing cinema through the eyes of a miniaturist, who like others of her craft, can see, and can desire to see the whole as well the individual parts of creation with the same detail, the same interest. Sikandar's way of seeing is elucidated by her film-making, and newly educated, I want more of this vertigo.

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Douglas Henry Daniels, One O’clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, 274 pp.)

Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, xi + 274 pp.)

by Todd Bryant Weeks

The Oklahoma City Blue Devils, the ne plus ultra of all the territory bands, still command legendary status among generations of jazz musicians, scholars, critics, and collectors. The band’s undiminished reputation is based, in part, on the paucity of recorded evidence (a sole 78) but also on the illustrious assemblage of players who passed through the group’s ranks between 1923 and 1933. Many of these musicians (Walter Page, Buster Smith, Eddie Durham, Hot Lips Page, Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing, and Lester Young among them) were virtuosos who made definitive statements on their instruments, and in the process helped to redefine the notion of what it meant to swing. As a working big band, the Blue Devils could reputedly tackle complicated ensemble passages with the kind of precision and assurance unmatched in the highly competitive dance halls of Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and other towns from the Mexican border to Omaha. That they apparently worked from head arrangements only made them all the more remarkable. Several Blue Devils went on to become key members of the Bennie Moten Orchestra, and, in what is now the stuff of legend, Motenites went on to become Basieites. Accordingly, for those whose idea of swing begins and ends with Basie, the Blue Devils may be said to sit at the center of the big band Vorstellung. In addition, their commonwealth approach to running a band—the musicians shared equally in all profits and expenses—has long endeared them to writers who champion the notion of jazz as a democratic process.

Given the dearth of research on southwestern jazz, aficionados have long awaited the publication of these books. The more problematic of the two is One O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma Blue Devils, by Douglas Henry Daniels, a professor of history and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daniels’s narrative, interwoven with band members’ biographies, is a kind of patchwork of stories and assorted facts that occasionally cohere into a more composite picture of the Oklahoma City music world in the 1920s and 1930s. His previous jazz book, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester “Pres” Young, demonstrated his facility with obscure sources (e.g., parish records in backwater communities like Woodville, Mississippi) and this new work is equally research-intensive. His genealogical research, which unearthed new data on Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, and others, lends depth and authenticity to the book. He exhaustively plumbed the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, Kansas City Call, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and lesser-known papers such as the Sioux City Journal, the St. Louis Argus, and the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. He also interviewed Blue Devils Buster Smith, Leonard Chadwick, Le Roy “Snake” Whyte, and Abe Bolar extensively. Through this painstaking research, Daniels traces the band in its various incarnations from their early days in the dance halls and lodges of Oklahoma City to their final, infamous gig in the mountains of West Virginia. The author provides illuminating accounts of each musician’s early history, such as singer Jimmy Rushing’s 1920s Los Angeles period and his family life in the African American Oklahoma City neighborhood known as “Deep Deuce.” Here Rushing worked in a confectionary–sandwich shop operated by his father before becoming floor manager at the Blue Devils’ Oklahoma City headquarters, Slaughter’s Hall. On this gleaming dance floor, the youthful, trimmer “James” Rushing set the tempos for the musicians and demonstrated the latest steps for the dancers.

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By Maniza Naqvi

While Israeli F-18s created sonic booms and closed the open skies above; and the barbed wiring for the fences and the pre-fabricated planks for the wall surrounding Gaza steadily settled down as the facts on the ground; and while Colin Powell droned on about the “roadmap for peace” on CNN; and the searing heat of the day closed in; I made my way through the streets of the crowded city to the Arts and Crafts Village at the Gaza Municipality. It was the June of 2002.

I hated being in Gaza. Even though it was for a short time with the date for departure certain and with the ease of getting out assured, even then, I hated being there. I couldn't breath. The fear of the Israelis with their killing machines, overhead and all around, created an uncontrollable feeling of illness. I was eager and relieved to leave Gaza which I was going to do in a few hours and I was feeling guilty because my colleagues would stay on in this pressure cooker atmosphere. I was anxious about the upcoming ordeal at the check point for entering and leaving Gaza. Here insolent, battle geared and almost to the last one, oversexed and beautiful Israeli, boys and girls maybe no more then eighteen or nineteen years old, heavily armed and in military uniforms did mandatory time in the Israeli Defense Force as prison guards of the concentration camp of Gaza. Every young Israeli citizen does service in the military. This is how Israel has raised and trained its young. It has made them golden, muscular and cruel. Their job it seemed was to insult, humiliate, harass and terrorize anyone going in or out of Gaza. Any reference or suggestion to their being prison guards of a concentration camp with one and a half million inmates was only met with a cold almost vacant eyed stare of contempt, guffaws and a longer wait.

Weary, sweat soaked Palestinian men, women, the elderly, the sick, and children all waited outside in long lines of desperate people making futile attempts at getting out to their menial jobs as farm hands and construction workers on the now Israel owned land and settlements. They waited alongside the checkpoint barricades and in the crosshair of sharp shooters’ weapons trained on them. The foreigners, like me, trying to get in and who waited inside the checkpoint seemed merely to be essential menial workers too, who were part of a bigger more complex establishment which enabled the occupation to continue. Officials, bureaucrats, aid workers of international agencies took on the task and responsibility from the occupier of feeding and keeping alive an interned population of over 1.5 million people.

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Edward B. Rackley

Even the most subtle and complex artists can’t escape the crudity of synopsis. Grazing the critical literature surrounding Herzog’s films and career, two stock phrases repeat incessantly: ‘man vs. nature’ and ‘Heart of Darkness parable’. These signposts may guide the uninitiated, but as always the map is never the terrain.

Generically speaking, Herzog explores the complexity of man/nature relations in dozens of films and documentaries; his antipathy towards romanticism and Cinema Verité is well known. To reject both fantasy and empiricism as story telling vehicles, where does that leave a director? Because it blurs fact and fiction, Herzog’s method of documentary cinema is rogue. To contrast his approach with Cinema Verité, in interviews he cites the Heideggerian concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ (remember ‘unconcealment’, fellow philosophers?). The work of the author lies in finding friction between the facts, enough to create light or 'illumination' according to Herzog.

‘The truth of accountants’

In 1999 Herzog released a twelve-point manifesto called ‘Lessons of Darkness’, borrowing the title of his silent recording of devastated oil fields in Kuwait following the first Iraq war. Much of the manifesto is tongue in cheek, Point Three captures Herzog’s balancing act between fact and insight, where fact is a “rock beneath which greater truths hide.” Facts are superficial truths, the “truth of accountants,” the snapshots of tourists. To film facts and reject fabrication is to confuse fact for truth; such orthodoxies “plow only stones.” Illumination, the goal of successful cinema, happens because “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

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by Morgan Meis

A friend put his finger on it exactly. You want the older trains, the trains with the compartments enclosing six or eight seats. You want the trains with the sun-washed drapes and the yellow-tinged headrest, marked by decades of not-so-recently-washed hair. You want the train with the sliding glass door that lets you into a narrow hallway along the left side of the train car. You would prefer the train with a rudimentary toilet that flushes by means of a foot pedal, in which, as a man, you can watch yourself pee straight down through the rusty tube onto the track rushing by in a ruffle of wooden slats below. Clickety-clak, clickety-clak. “Do not use the toilet while the train is in or near the station,” says the sign.

Europe is a train. The countries are all so close together, train close. A plane won’t do it, the fly by is too fast. You must fly over vast quantities of land or sea to get something out of an airplane ride. You have to stare out the window for hours at the unchanging surface of the ocean or the mesmerizing openness of the American plains. That’s when the immensity of it gets to you, that’s when you understand something about space. To understand space in Europe you have to be on a train.

You sit near the window in your compartment. There are the forward-sitters and the backward-sitters. Both have their logic. Forward-sitters like to see what is coming, they tend to feel positive about the European Union. Backward-sitters are a more melancholy lot. Benjaminian in temperament, they think of Europe as something you grab glimpses of after the fact, after it has already passed us by. Thus we see that space has something to do with time. Thomas Mann said it like this, “All good things take time; so do all great things. In other words, space will have its time. It is a familiar feeling with me that there is a sort of hubris, and a great superficiality, in those who would take away from space or stint it of the time naturally bound up with it.” That’s an extremely European thought. I’m not sure it’s even true, but I like that fact that he said it. Of course, Thomas Mann was Europe. I suppose then, by logical extension, that Mann was a train.

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Part Two: The Data Deluge
(Link to Part One)

By Daniel Rourke

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability…

But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment…

A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed. I am fairly glad to be living in the information age, since in it speed becomes once again a fundamental category of intelligence.

Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

Human beings are often described as the great imitators:

We perceive the ant and the termite as part of nature. Their nests and mounds grow out of the Earth. Their actions are indicative of a hidden pattern being woven by natural forces from which we are separated. The termite mound is natural, and we, the eternal outsiders, sitting in our cottages, our apartments and our skyscrapers, are somehow not. Through religion, poetry, or the swift skill of the craftsman smearing pigment onto canvas, humans aim to encapsulate that quality of existence that defies simple description. The best art, or so it is said, brings us closer to attaining a higher truth about the world that remains elusive from language, that perhaps the termite itself embodies as part of its nature. Termite mounds are beautiful, but were built without a concept of beauty. Termite mounds are mathematically precise, yet crawling through their intricate catacombs cannot be found one termite in comprehension of even the simplest mathematical constituent. In short, humans imitate and termites merely are.

This extraordinary idea is partly responsible for what I referred to in Part One of this article as The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It leads us to consider not only the human organism as distinct from its surroundings, but it also forces us to separate human nature from its material artefacts. We understand the termite mound as integral to termite nature, but are quick to distinguish the axe, the wheel, the book, the skyscraper and the computer network from the human nature that bore them.

When we act, through art, religion or with the rational structures of science, to interface with the world our imitative (mimetic) capacity has both subjective and objective consequence. Our revelations, our ideas, stories and models have life only insofar as they have a material to become invested through. The religion of the dance, the stone circle and the summer solstice is mimetically different to the religion of the sermon and the scripture because the way it interfaces with the world is different.

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“I’d like piano lessons,” said my daughter, and, yes, of course, I said, that would be terrific. She was only six. How could she know that she was giving me permission to relapse into yet another time-wasting obsession, with the possibility of acquiring yet another library on a subject? Now, under cover of being a good parent, I could once again dive into a literature, slip off to internet chat rooms late at night, wander into stores that had been around forever but that I had never had an excuse to explore, and contemplate an expensive purchase. But mainly I like to read about that kind of thing.

“Of course,” I said, benevolently, the noble father. But I was thrilled; such interests had been largely off limits since donning the responsible hoodie of the parent. In earlier years, I had been there with photography, wooden boats, ice hockey, tube amplifiers, all pursuits offering a deep literature, and the chance to spend money. Right away, I knew full well where I was headed: Worst of all are the Internet forums, where I will undoubtedly cruise late at night, recklessly picking up useful-seeming advice from strangers hiding behind screen names. (Why does Dennis care quite so much about the grey market, one must wonder?)

Not all interests spawn literature of equal quality. The literature of the tube amplifier and the literature of hockey are as one in their paucity. Tube amplifiers are lacking an oeuvre, certainly, because, well, they just kind of sit there. The dearth of good hockey writing is a little more mysterious, but it may be a sport that knocks the lyricism out of people.

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Gambling and science and story-telling have a complicated relationship. I have to admit upfront I’m biased: In my science days, I picked up some statistical reasoning skills, and even those modest skills were enough to more or less murder my fascination with gambling, a fascination tangled up with my (former) ability to fashion stories around winning gamblers. I’m a little bitter.

I had always vaguely known that red and black don’t politely take turns on the roulette wheel (“You go.” “I insist.”), and that aces and face cards had no choice but to be dealt out of the deck randomly; but I’d also been pretty good at pooh-poohing the word randomly. I’d written it off with a sort of anthropomorphic bluster, as if good old comfortable human order was winking at me beneath the gamblers’ binary gibberish of red-black-black-red-black, etc. If I just looked harder—why right there, a pattern! I suppose it’s the same rage for order that makes people hear voices in radio static and see the Virgin Mary ex nihilo in macaroni.

Honestly, I never gambled much, and only infrequently, but like many males I thought I would have been a pretty cool gambler, and successful. I like to stay up late and have drinks in disreputable places, after all. It didn’t help my career as a gambler that I’m not hard-wired for the neurological jolt that gamblers get when they win money, the maladaptive endorphin rush that wipes out the memory of their losses, even if the winnings don’t come close to covering. (A gambling joke: “I hope like hell I break even tonight. I can’t afford to lose any more money.”)

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“Hitler remained a serious reader all his life, spending much of his disposable income
on books during the 1920s and regularly passing quiet evenings in his library during
the 1930s and '40s, no matter how dreadful the orders he'd been giving during the day.”
–Michael Dirda’s review of “Hitler’s Private Library” by Timothy W. Ryback

Bibliophile

Jim Culleny

They say Hitler housed 16,000 books
in Berlin and Obersalzburg—
his dark jewels.

High over Berchtesgaden and in Berlin
his books did nothing for his soul
but drag it through the muck of his mind
so that in the end he became as much a victim
of his own immurement as Fortunato
did of Montresor in Amontillado

Predisposed, he heaped word upon word
building an edifice to suit himself.
Disinclined to relate, with everything he read
he greased his skids of hate.

He owned the Racial Typology of the German People,
the works of anti-Semite Julius Lehmann,
and any pamphlet that arrived at pre-conclusions
—which proves:

a bookworm’s library may be vast
and worms may be well-read
but still be worms at last

by Evert Cilliers

“Larry, I can never get an easy explanation from Tim Geithner. He's always looking down, like he's talking to his dick. Explain to me how his bidding thing works to buy toxic assets.”

“Mr President, we now call them legacy assets. Words matter.”

“Words be damned, Larry. This is me talking to YOU, not to some dopes in Congress or in Turkey.”

“I hear you, Mr President.”

“I need me some straight guy talk, Larry, not the slick stuff we put out for public consumption. Tell me how this bidding thing works.”

1. ANY WOMAN NAMED HILLARY

“Like this, Mr President. The chosen hedge funds bid for the legacy assets with money we lend them, and then they hold the assets for a profit that could make an AIG bonus look like chump change. If they lose on the deal, we make up the difference.”

“So the hedge funds win whatever happens — and we're screwed whatever happens?”

“As your top economist, I wouldn't put it like that, Mr President.”

“How would you put it?”

“We protect them against any loss so they can bet in comfort.”

“We make it a sure bet for them.”

“As sure as betting that you won't find any woman getting reamed by Bill Clinton answering to the name Hillary.”

“Watch it, Larry. You're here as an economist, not a court jester. I've got Joe Biden for that. So who loses?”

“The taxpayer, Mr President.”

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David Schneider

Last Sunday, April 4, Spring came to New York City. Sixty-two degrees it was, and calm in the bright sun of a cloudless sky. The city had been waiting.

The winter seemed unusually brutal and long. As late as March we got mugged by the winds Chicago-style – sucker-punched from the northeast, a roundhouse kick to the southwest quadrant, then a blow to the kidneys and thrown into traffic. The winter was long. But the city was waiting.

Rites were given: the cruellest month, 1968. No, the City said, the greatest respect that can now be paid is called celebration, and forward. Miniskirts and boots, scarves sun-yellow and lollypop red, out the door on the long stroll and the City was again a New Thing.

In the East Village, across 3rd Avenue from the regal brown bulk of the Cooper Union on Astor Place (where Lincoln and Rushdie have spoken) a new extension of Arts and Sciences is rising: titanium cladding on the north, glass-frame on the south, and a delicious titanium wave cascading down four storeys: its form says, We'll surf this. It adds a dangerous excitement to the new skyline of the Bowery, where a white sail of a condo rises. Behind it, the textured white boxes of the New Museum totter like blocks stacked by Modernism's gargantuan infant.

At Lincoln Center, the new Alice Tully Hall is a clean, white, graceful dagger of 21st-century elegance, angling its excellence to a fine point: the classical performing arts yet have a home in this new era; “In this silicon world, art remains organic,” the Alice Tully Hall says with its soaring wood interiors. Is it unfortunate, or symbolically meaningful, that its broad, 30-foot-tall windows look out upon, and reflect, ugly '70s tower blocks and bland '80s condos? What does it say about this Temple of the Performing Arts erected on a razed block of Puerto-Rican tenements where West Side Story was sourced?

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Krzysztof Kotarski

The first time I visited Berlin, things looked a little more like this.

Or maybe not. I was young then, so my memory could be playing tricks on me. I know that I was on the eastern side of the city, so the grey concrete slabs in the photo look right, but I suppose that it's all a matter of perspective. Since I took the photograph above in April 2009, I could walk up to the wall, face southeast, and take a picture from a 30 degree angle. Back then, that may not have been possible.

In any case, this is not a post about the past, but one about the present. (Funny, I just reread that sentence, and if I wrote “future” instead of “present”, I would have captured the modern Republican Zeitgeist rather well.) And today, we like to think that the wall, if it still stands, looks like this.

Of course, the reality is a little different. The wall is almost all gone, and in present-day Berlin, a famous Joseph Beuys phrase is sometimes interpreted in a rather literal way.

Indeed they are. And Berliners tend to see this as a mixed blessing (at best), even if it is probably much too late to have an academic discussion on the virtues of this particular form of democratic expression.

Whether Berliners like it or not, the city is famous for its ubiquitous graffiti, which ranges from great, to downright awful. Of course, how one judges such things is usually a function of one's age, one's level of tolerance for non-linear expression, or one's cultural or political sensibilities. Still, when considering the photo above, most probably agree that the Beuys quote falls into the “awful” category since it sits atop one of the 100+ murals painted by international artists on Mühlenstraße, along a 1.3 kilometre section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery.

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Heidi Newfield's been getting a lot of press lately as the result of her five nominations for the Country Music Association awards. She's the former singer in a successful country band, Trick Pony. Now she's getting a lot of airplay for her new single “Johnny and June” (referring to Cash and Carter, respectively). She's a talented singer and songwriter. She's also the subject of some strangely unnatural photography poses.

Consider this image:

Here the hapless Ms. Newfield, who is a dynamic and dominant performer on stage, is reduced her to a physical position of submission, artificiality, and objectification. The photographer has placed her in a pigeon-toed stance, backed into a corner, with her hands pressed against each wall. Her blouse is suggestively open, revealing the top of her bra line. She is photographed from above, as if she's staring upward at a viewer who is larger and more dominant. Her face is radiating what used to be called a “come hither” stance.

In other words, she's been subjugated.

Then there's this image:

Here Ms. Newfield is perched on a couch, with her feet once again pigeon-toed. She is cantilevered forward and to one side, which gives her an unnatural center of balance. This picture has less of a sexual undertone. The primary subtext appears to be, “I'm off balance.”

This author was once one of the subjects of the photo shoot for a corporate brochure. The photographer asked me to perch on a desk, lean over a “colleague” seated at the desk, and point to the piece of paper she was holding in her hand. The shoot was interrupted while he taped my tie to my shirt, causing it to seemingly defy gravity. Then he insisted I increase my angle of attack on the paper until I, too, had lost my center of gravity. Finally the inevitable words came:

“Look natural.”

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Michael Blim

Banks have never been good to my family. My father’s father lost his life savings in a Depression bank failure. He lost his house shortly thereafter.

Three of my uncles worked for banks. They were Irish, or Scots-Irish, and their parents were cops, postal workers, and telephone operators. They were Irishmen who wanted to join the WASP world, and banks were their points of entry. All three made vice-president of their respective banks, but one was later fired, and the other two were forced to retire for health reasons.

They worked through the sixties and into the seventies in local Chicago and suburban Chicago banks. The banks weren’t small for their time, but they look like pygmies from the vantage point of today. Local banks were protected, and indeed my uncles were protected by Illinois law that until 1985 forbade “branch banking,” whereby a bank could operate out of multiple locations. The downtown, money-center banks stalked the local banks relentless, buying their shares privately, seeking confederates on their boards, and linking them to big loan syndicates. But the big banks couldn’t take over the local banks, and the local banks continued on servicing their local business communities and writing local mortgages that remained part of their asset portfolio. The local banks were dull, stable, and profitable.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, my uncles would warn me that branch banking was coming. The downtown Chicago money-center banks with their Fortune 500 clients and political influence, they said, were votes away from getting their way in state legislature. The spectacular failure of the Continental Illinois Bank, then the country’s 7^th largest bank, in 1984, scared the state political class into granting limited branch banking in 1985. By 1993, state law provided that a bank could operate at an unlimited number of locations statewide. Federal law in 1994 opened up the country to unlimited branch banking. My uncles’ banks became branches of money-center and soon national banks, and each uncle left his bank, each in his own unhappy way.

Fifteen years later, America’s banks had become so few and so big that the government dared not let them fail.

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