Music for one apartment and six drummers.

Do try this at home.

Can it get any worse than this?

The Mets have lost three of four to the worst team in their division, and in the final game of the series were unable to score a run against an unheralded starter who went seven innings and a bullpen that, coupled with some magnificent fielding, kept the Amazins off the board. Inability to capitalize on scoring opportunities seems to be this team's bugbear, as it has been in so many seasons past. Joe Martini, in his comment on my last Mets post, puts it thus: Eleven hits and two friggin' runs???!!!

Tim Marchman likens this weekend's Mets/Yanks series (which, given the predicted weather, is unlikely to start tonight, thereby giving both teams a bit of rest) to "a pair of bums fighting over a ham sandwich in an alley." Of the Mets, he notes: "The team...basically consists of players having All-Star-class seasons and bantha fodder." This last reference sent me scurrying to Google, where I learned that I'm not sufficiently into Star Wars geekdom.

Wedding scene from Little Murders

This probably is as comprehensive a summary of what y'all in God-fearing Red State America think about us anomic coastal elites as has ever been put on film.

I found this while doing research for a big post that will be coming soon, with the working title, "So, just what is art, anyway?" (Never let it be said that S-AB shies from the Big Questions.) I know you're all waiting eagerly. Meanwhile, enjoy Donald Sutherland in what has to be his best small role so far.

Oh. My. God.

I need this like I need another Republican administration.

That, and having Lastings Milledge support the "curse of the ex-Met" theory.

(OK, maybe it could be worse. I could be a White Sox fan, having to deal with Dollgate. Kevin Hench is my kind of sportswriter: one who can start a story with a quote from Virginia Wolff, compare her to Randy Wolf, then note that Mrs. Dalloway would bat fifth in the current Chisox lineup.)

Update: Figueroa's trash talk doesn't jinx the Mets tonight as Maine pitches a good six innings, Wagner gets another save while preserving his zip-uh-de-doo-dah ERA, and Church illuminates the scoreboard with four ribbies. Milledge, meanwhile, is held hitless.

Strange are the ways of Google

My Sitemeter tells me that the fifteen thousandth visit to S-AB was from New Delhi, and came to the blog via a Google search for "play boomer 10 ben mania". For whatever reason, Google directed the visitor to this post, which must have seemed perplexing, to say the least.

Joe Martini was visitor number 14.999. I'm glad to see Joe reposting his screed on ethanol madness, which is an issue on which we agree. I'll also take this opportunity to thank Joe for his thoughtful comment on my Paul Simon post. I wish I had been able to attend the Simon/Philip Glass discussion.

Cicely Nichols, 1937-2008

I can't remember when I first met her, except that it was some time in the late 1970s. I'm sure of where, though; the bar of the Lion's Head, a place that served mostly unmarried (in our instances, previously married) Villagers with a literary bent, as a sort of living room away from home. We may have been introduced by one of the many Head regulars we knew in common; just as likely, we may simply have found ourselves occupying adjacent stools and fallen into conversation.

Whatever was said that night, it was sufficient to establish a common desire to continue the conversation on other evenings. She was nine years my senior, and had been in the Village long enough to tell me about things that happened there when I was a college freshman in Florida thinking romantic thoughts about escaping to that fabled urban patch occupied by the likes of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. I was thrilled to hear that she had worked for Grove Press, the avant garde house that published Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, as well as works by Beckett, Ferlenghetti, Fanon, LeRoi Jones and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. More surprising was that she had led a strike against Grove and its publisher, Barney Rosset, demanding better conditions for editorial employees. Because of the strike, she had to take on freelance work, which in turn led her to become one of the founders of the Editorial Freelancers Association. At the top of the home page of the EFA website, you will find a link to a tribute to Cicely and her work in establishing and determining the character of that organization.

As the years passed, we became confidantes. She endured many a night of my maunderings about failed and longed-for romances, and I listened to such troubles as she had in the same department, hers being of a more sane and mature nature. Although I hadn't thought of it this way until now, she came to occupy a space in my psychic organizational chart, previously unfilled, marked "older sister". The night when I first brought the woman who is now my wife to meet my friends at the Head, Cicely said, with a sly smile at me, "This woman looks like trouble." She was right, of course. The "trouble" has lasted eighteen years (almost seventeen of them as spouses), and produced a daughter about to enter high school.

Marriage, work responsibilities and fatherhood combined to limit my time at the Lion's Head, and consequently my socializing with Cicely; later, illness limited her time at the Head even more. Still, she would find the strength, with some help from her daughters and friends, to put on magnificent combination Christmas and birthday (hers was December 27) parties. I last saw her this past December, during what may have been her last period of remission, bright and smiling and cut-the-crap smart as ever. That's how I'll remember her.

iPod Log 3 -- Xenophilia Edition

My iPod music library includes songs in eleven languages other than English.* The other morning, the iPod went on a xenophiliac binge, playing six foreign language songs in succession. These were:

E Inu Tatou E, the Kingston Trio. First, the bad stuff. These were white frat boys who named their group for the capital of Jamaica because they wanted to cash in on a craze for African-Caribbean calypso music. They affected fake Mexican accents on some of their songs; for example, "Coplas", "En el Agua" and, most famously, "Tijuana Jail" ("SEE-nyor come WEETH me, 'cause I want YOOOO!"). "Coplas Revisited", from their album College Concert, recorded live at UCLA in December, 1961, includes a line that I didn't understand for several years after first hearing it:

Show me a cowboy who rides sidesaddle,
And I'll show you a gay ranchero.

I guess that proves the old saw about California being a cultural bellwether. The good is that the Trio were all talented musicians who, over the course of a decade or so, and with one personnel change (John Stewart replacing Dave Guard in 1961), committed a lot of music to vinyl, much of which was quite good and some of which was superb. Folk purists derided them as inauthentic, middle-class, button-down shirt wearing squares. In truth, they were sometimes guilty of putting a bourgeois gloss on their material. I can't imagine a real working sailors' chantey including lines like "The ragged heavens open up / We sound the jubilation," as they put into their version of "Haul Away, Joe". Their eclecticism was remarkable: among the styles of music they interpreted and were influenced by were the aforementioned calypso, Hawaiian (Bob Shane was born and raised on the Big Island, and Dave Guard spent several years in a prep school in Honolulu), Appalachian and Celtic, Spanish and Mexican, African and blues. They have been credited with creating and nurturing a taste in American audiences for what is now called "world music". To top it all off, from my point of view, I learned from the Wikipedia article linked above that they even had a Mets connection. They learned what became their most-requested song, "Scotch and Soda", a blues-tinged lounge number, from Tom Seaver's parents, when one of them was dating Seaver's sister. "E Inu Tatou E" is an example of their Hawaiian repertoire. I couldn't find a translation of the lyrics, which are credited to George Archer. Some lyrics sources give it the subtitle "Drinking Song", and, on the Live at Newport album, Guard introduces the song and translates the title as "Let's Get Drunk".

Ebben, Ne Andro Lontana, East Village Opera Company. I've mentioned this group and this aria in an earlier iPod log. The aria is from Alfredo Catalini's seldom staged La Wally. At the first EVOC concert I attended, AnnMarie Milazzo introduced her nail-you-to-the-wall rendition by saying, "When you have to marry someone you don't want to, you get really, really mad."

El Preso Numero Nueve, Joan Baez. You also get really, really mad if you're a hard-working hombre who comes home to find his wife in the arms of un amigo desleal--mad enough to commit double murder, then tell the padre, just before you face the firing squad, that you have no fear, and will follow their footsteps through eternity. This is from Joan's auspicious first album, which, to the occasional dismay of my roommate, who called her "the screaming bitch", I listened to on many late evenings during my freshman year at USF.

Elama, Yasser Habeeb. I got this hypnotic, Indian-influenced song off Putumayo's Sahara Lounge. According to the album's notes, Habeeb is a Dubai native who started as a recording engineer and producer, then approached EMI with "Elama" ("Until When"), which became a hit throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. The notes give this translation of the lyrics:

Until when will this agony last? / Until when do I have to tolerate this torture when I have not harmed anyone? / The more you make me suffer, the more I am attracted to you / You keep hurting me, but I never complain / Just treat me fairly for once.

You can play a sample here.

Schlittenfahrt, Marlene Dietrich. If you've ever longed to hear the Blue Angel sing "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" from Oklahoma in German translation, this is it.

Usku Dara, Eartha Kitt. When I was about seven, and we were living in rural Hertfordshire, England, one afternoon my mother and I were listening to BBC radio when the disc jockey said, "And now, here's some Turkish music." What followed was a tune so hooky that it remained caught in my memory until some thirty or so years later when Mike McGovern, a New York Daily News writer who later became known as Kinky Friedman's sidekick in the Kinkster's detective novels, invited several of us who had closed down the Lion's Head to come to his place for a nightcap. He poured us each some whiskey, then put an Eartha Kitt album on his turntable. After a couple of cuts, I was amazed to hear the same exotic tune that had so captivated me as a child. Judge it for yourself (including the two deliciously non sequitur spoken English translations) here:



I'll close with a strong recommendation of another musically-oriented blog, Struts and Frets, by DJStan. His most recent post, on the late New York street musician and Whitmanesque genius Moondog, reminds me of a gaping hole in my music collection: I still don't have The Band's Moondog Matinee.

Erratum: Thanks to DJStan for pointing out an error. In listing the languages represented in my iPod library, I had assumed that "Kol Rina", by the Klezmer Conservatory Band, was sung in Hebrew. In fact, it's in Yiddish, and I've corrected the list accordingly.
___________
*These are: Arabic, French, Gaelic, German, Hawaiian, Italian, Malagasy, Spanish, Turkish, Yiddish and Zulu. (Breton and Czech are soon to be added.)

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Dear IOZ,

Quel horreur! I cannot bear the thought of another day without your bracing negativity.

Ever thine,
Sexually backward patriarch.

Update: O frabjous day! The real IOZ is back.

Nine unearned runs?

I hoped that the ghost of the 1962 Mets had departed this vicinity when the Polo Grounds stadium was demolished. Sadly, no. The current version of the team seems compelled periodically to re-enact the follies of their predecessors of 46 years ago.

Breslin's book about the 1962 Mets is a joy to read. Where is Joan Whitney Payson now that we need her, again?

Update: Tim Marchman says they suck, acknowledges that it's largely the players' fault, but calls for the manager's head. Meanwhile, Marchman dubs this year's edition of the Cubs "a true winner." Could there be a hot time in the Old Town come October? With my Tampa homeboy Sweet Lou at the helm, and given my long-standing love of underdogs, that might be a result I could live with. OOF-WAH!

FIAT Topolino

Cutest car ever? At least tough competition for the bug-eye Sprite. Brought to you by those wonderful folks at Fix It Again Tony. This one was caught parked on Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, on the Ides of March.

Update: If the trend in oil prices continues, the car of the near future may look much like this little "mouse".

Ben Stein is a jackass.

And to think, I used to like the guy. Thanks to Archaeopteryx and Pharyngula for setting me straight.

Addendum: I don't agree with everything the commentator has to say on this clip. His response to Stein's silly assertion that "Darwinism" (i.e. natural selection) implies "social Darwinism" (i.e. the belief that altruism in social arrangements is counterproductive because it goes against the grain of "survival of the fittest"), and Stein's equally silly extension of that concept to include Nazi racism, is off target. In particular, the commentator's analogy between Nazi ideology and the notion of the covenant between God and the Jews is not only wrongheaded but offensive. He should instead have pointed out that evolutionary theory supports the notion that altruistic behavior can be beneficial not only for species but for individual survival.

Also, the commentator's apparent belief that economic globalization provides proof against war is wishful thinking. World War I is the most recent and perhaps strongest historical counterexample to the notion that extensive trading relationships between nations prevent them from going to war. Nevertheless, I think it is valid to say that, all other things being equal (which, admittedly, they seldom are), nations that trade with each other are less likely to fight each other than those that don't. In particular, I think that a nation like China that depends greatly on export markets is unlikely to risk military confrontations with its customers.

Update: Read about the dishonest content of Stein's movie Expelled, as well as the lengths to which its makers went to suppress intelligent criticism of it (ironic in light of their assertion that there is a scientific conspiracy to suppress criticism of evolution) here. (Again, a tip of the hat to Archaeopteryx.)

A treat for TS and Blue Texan.

My friends Ross and Kathryn Petras produce a desk calendar called The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said. On this year's calendar, the quote for April 26 is by one of my friends' at Instaputz favorite putzen, Jonah Goldberg, from a speech he made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

The Great Plains used to be a giant forest. The Indians burnt it to the ground to hunt buffalo.

R&K helpfully add this caption: "...[W]e hear they're also responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer."

Fouad is out of jail.

A friend who is traveling in the Middle East e-mailed me this item from Arab News, in which the wife of Saudi blogger Fouad Al-Farhan is quoted as saying he has been released from prison. I double-checked and found confirmation of this on Ahmed Al-Omran's blog Saudi Jeans. It's a great relief to know that Mr. Al-Farhan has been allowed to return to his wife and two young children.

But is he now truly free? The Arab News piece quotes Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Ahmed as saying

The issue (of Al-Farhan) was not that important as it represented the mistake committed by a person on himself. A man who commits a mistake should bear its result.

This cryptic (and evidently awkwardly translated) statement gives us no clue as to the nature of Al-Farhan's alleged "mistake". Moreover, the article also quotes "an official statement" as saying he "was detained on Dec. 10 for violating the Kingdom’s regulations,... but no charges were pressed against him." Again, there is no indication of what regulations he is said to have violated. Perhaps more importantly, he was held in prison for 137 days without being charged with any crime. (Yes, I know that my own government is not immune to criticism in this respect.) One can only wonder what chilling effect the prospect of being once again torn from his family and held indefinitely without charges for some unspecified "violation" will have on his writing.

Nevertheless, this is an occasion to celebrate. Thanks to Mark Crawford and all others who joined me in signing letters asking for Mr. Al-Farhan's release. I like to think that we at least hastened the course of justice.

Paul Simon, "American Tunes", at BAM.

Saturday night, my wife and I had the privilege (thanks to a neighbor who had two tickets she couldn't use) of attending Paul Simon's "American Tunes" concert (part of the "Love in Hard Times--The Music of Paul Simon" series) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

My credentials as a Simon fan are pretty solid. In 1965, I plucked a copy of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Simon and Garfunkel's first album, from the "Folk" bin of the record department of the University of South Florida bookstore. I knew nothing about them, but the cover looked intriguing and I was a folk fanatic. Someone told me he thought they were from Miami, which would have given them a Florida connection, to boot. (Wrong.) I took the vinyl album to my dorm room, played it, and experienced the opposite of buyer's remorse. During winter break, I was playing it on my parents' stereo when a neighbor, a devout Catholic lady, came in just in time to hear them harmonize on the Christmas spiritual "Go Tell It on the Mountain (that Jesus Christ is Born)." She smiled brightly and asked me who was singing. "Simon and Garfunkel", I answered. Her aspect immediately went from beatific to baleful, and she snapped, "So what does Simon Garfunkel know about Jesus Christ?" I weakly replied that I believed they shared a common ethnic heritage.

My S&G fandom continued through my college days, although to an extent eclipsed by my devotion to Dylan, who appealed to my wild-and-woolly Hermetic, as opposed to my snotty-intellectual Apollonian, side. My third year of law school, in the throes of hopeless love, I would sometimes annoy my dorm floormates by attempting "Bridge Over Troubled Water" during my morning shower. "Kodachrome" provided part of the soundtrack of a joyous summer excursion to the West Coast following my discharge from Army active duty. When I hear it today, I can envision myself driving south on California Highway One, waves splashing rocks below to my right, the trees and hills of Big Sur to my left. Paul welcomed me back to New York with "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard". And so on.

Despite all this, I'd never seen Simon and Garfunkel, or Simon alone, in live performance. I wasn't sure what to expect of this concert, which featured several other singers and groups--only two of which, the Roches and Olu Dara, I'd ever heard before--as well as Simon and his band. The Roches opened with the concert's title song, "American Tune", followed by "Another Galaxy". I've liked the Roches without being a great fan, and their performance of these two songs confirmed my estimation--excellent musicians, but a bit too cutesy. Then they finished their set with a "Cecilia" that rocked the rafters, and set me and my estimation back on our heels.

I had expected the format to be all of the supporting musicians up first, in turn, with Simon out for the last set, perhaps culminating in a final song in which everyone would be on stage, singing in turns. I even imagined the last song as being "America". But, no. The Roches exited, and there was Simon, chugging into "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover."

Few, if any, musicians will perform their old standards exactly as recorded, for understandable reasons having to do both with their own sanity and, in most instances, a laudable desire to expand their audiences' horizons. Sometimes, however, this is done in such an aggressive way that it seems to express contempt for the audience, as if the musician is thinking, "I know you want to listen to this old crap instead of the exciting new stuff I'm doing, so, here it is, with stresses on all the wrong notes and way slow (or fast) rhythm. Eat shit and die!" I'm a great fan of the Byrds, and will collect just about anything of theirs. The only "live" album in their mainstream Columbia collection is one disc of (Untitled), on which they did several oldies (including the oldie-est of them all, "Mr. Tambourine Man") in ways that reflected influences on the band (principally from country music) since the time the songs were recorded, but still treated the songs, and the audience's expectations, with respect. About a year ago, I picked up a recording of a concert the Byrds did at Winterland, in San Francisco, in which the songs were done in such an assertively awful style that I could only guess at the band's motivation. Perhaps it was as I speculated above--simple boredom with their material. Maybe it was the Angeleno Byrds' contempt for Bay Area pretensions. Whatever it was, I donated the CD to the Grace Church Fair and prayed that nobody I like wasted a buck on it.

The point of this digression is to get something off my chest, and to lead into my observation that Paul Simon does it right. In this concert, he sang his oldies in ways that allowed the audience to discover unsuspected nuances in favorite songs without alienating them. Sometimes it was by doing a pre-Graceland song in a way that incorporates African pop influences, as he did in "Fifty Ways"; in others it was just by bringing out some aspect of the song that hadn't previously been stressed, as in his blues tinted performance of "Mrs. Robinson".

A Brooklyn band, Grizzly Bear, opened with an idiosyncratic but compelling version of "Graceland", then followed with "Mother and Child Reunion". The latter was originally done on Paul Simon with a bouncy reggae rhythm that seemed at odds with the song's somber lyrics. Grizzly Bear turned it into a slow, chant-like piece that was very affecting. This is a band worth watching. According to the program, they will be opening for Radiohead on a forthcoming tour.

Olu Dara and his band followed with "Slip Slidin' Away" and "Still Crazy After All These Years", both done in his unique jazz-blues-dance band style. His vocals and cornet solos were superb. I saw Dara once before, some years ago, when he provided musical accompaniment and counterpoint to a reading by the late August Wilson from his works, at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights.

Josh Groban was the only one to seriously disappoint me. The program quoted New York Times critic Stephen Holden:

His intonation is nearly perfect. He always sings directly on the note... He respects the melodic line of a song and brings to everything he sings an intrinsic sense of balance and proportion.

I mostly agree with Holden. Groban has a gorgeous voice. I'd love to hear him sing Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge, or something by Cole Porter. But on two of the songs in this performance, "America" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water", in my estimation he misjudged the material. "America" needs to start in an understated way, then build to a grand climax. Groban gave it the full-bore treatment from start to finish. On "Bridge", by contrast, he stayed too much in control at the end, failing to finish with the wild abandon that the song demands.

Amos Lee did competent versions of "Peace Like a River" and "Nobody", accompanied by multi-instrumentalist and Paul Simon band member Mark Stewart on cello, holding it like a guitar and playing it pizzicato on the latter song.

The real eye-opener of the concert for me was Gillian Welch, who, with her partner, David Rawlings, sent things to a whole new level with "Gone at Last", done in a style that combined elements of Bill Monroe, Tom Petty and Lucinda Williams, along with some original juice, to produce a sound that had many in the audience clapping and hooting along with the music. Welch then said Paul had asked her if there was a particular song she wanted to sing, and she told him there was one that she would cry if she couldn't do. I guessed "Duncan", and she proved me right, producing spine-tingling harmony with Rawlings on my favorite Simon song. After that, Simon joined Welch and Rawlings onstage to do "Boxer."

Simon's final set was all I could hope for. He reached way back for "Sounds of Silence", making it seem as pertinent now as it was in the 1960s, and leaped ahead to 2006's powerful "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" For his encore, I expected something upbeat, perhaps "Baby Driver", but he closed on a sweetly wistful note with "The Only Living Boy in New York".

Perfect baseball night.

Mets beat Phils, Red Sox won, Yanks lost (to the O's, no less). And, this morning, I find that the Mets have accomplished one of my goals for them: with their fourth straight win, while the Bronx Bullies flounder, they've supplanted the Yanks on page one of the Times sports section.

Update: Of course, the Mets have sucked mightily since I posted this, just before leaving for a short visit with my mom in Tampa. Driving past Tropicana Field, I wistfully thought of becoming a Rays fan. True underdogs starting to show some class, I reasoned, not perpetual (at least since 1986) underachievers. After all, I spent my middle and high school and university years in Tampa. Nevertheless, switching loyalties would be a violation of one of Bill Simmons's rules (of which I was unaware until August made his comment on this post, below), to wit:

Once you choose a team, you're stuck with that team for the rest of your life ... unless one of the following conditions applies:

Your team moves to another city.

You grew up in a city that didn't field a team for a specific sport - so you picked a random team - and then either a.) your city landed a team, or b.) you moved to a city that fielded a team for that specific sport.

(There are other exceptions that are irrelevant here. One of them is if the owner of your team has proved to be irredeemably loathsome. Of Fred Wilpon, I can only turn an oft-used New York-ism on its head: what's there to loathe?) As I've explained before, I first chose the Brooklyn Dodgers. When they went to L.A., they lost my loyalty (in accordance with Simmons's first exception), but it did not shift to another team. Instead, I simply lost interest in baseball. When I moved to Tampa, which then had no team (it was then, in pre-Steinbrenner days, the spring training camp for Cincinnati, so there was some local loyalty to the Reds) I didn't choose a random team, I just remained indifferent. Then I moved to New York and, in accordance with Simmons's rule, I picked the Mets as the logical successors to the Dodgers. But the Mets aren't moving (except into a new stadium next year), so I don't get the benefit of that Simmons exception, even though my old home town now has a team (which it didn't at the time I picked the Mets). Besides, my antipathy to the designated hitter rule makes it difficult for me to have any American League team as my primary loyalty. Finally, being a Rays fan would bring me into direct conflict with my wife's Red Sox fealty. So, I'll continue to suffer with the Mets and root for the Rays only when they play the Yanks.

Best description so far of the presidential campaign.

Gail Collins in today's New York Times:

You were all excited about this election and now you feel like someone who got all dressed up for a great event and wound up at a B-list party with a cash bar.

Addendum: This, regarding the recent Clinton/Obama debate, from Dawn Coyote on WikiFray:

Obama manages to be much more gracious, but really, this is like watching two people competing for the job of Head of Brain Surgery by being required to perform an interpretive dance while the other shoots spitballs at them.

Say it ain't so, Mo!

Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times starts off in full Peggy Noonan-esque cry: I was raised by decent, hard-working, churchgoing folks, and I'm no way bitter. Thus does she preface a departure from her usual occupation of Clinton-bashing (though she includes a remark about how "Hillary fights like a cornered raccoon") to take a roundhouse swing at Obama for his now notorious guns-religion-bitterness remark at a fund-raiser in San Francisco. She then attempts what amounts to a sort of Cliff's Notes encapsulation of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:

The elitism that Americans dislike is not about family money or connections — J.F.K. and W. never would have been elected without them. ... What turns off voters is the detached egghead quality that they tend to equate with a wimpiness, wordiness and a lack of action — the same quality that got the professorial and superior Adlai Stevenson mocked by critics as Adelaide. The new attack line for Obama rivals is that he’s gone from J.F.K. to Dukakis. (Just as Dukakis chatted about Belgian endive, Obama chatted about Whole Foods arugula in Iowa.)

Well, sheesh, I guess I can give up any notions I ever had of running for office (now about as realistic, anyway, as trying to become a rock star).

What's really rich, though, is Dowd's claim that San Francisco is "elitism's epicenter." Any fool who's read Frank McCourt's Tis knows it's Brooklyn Heights.

Titanic--nature's triumph or human failure?

The sinking of the Titanic has always been presented as a morality tale, one in which human hubris ("unsinkable") was humbled by the power of nature. However, according to William J. Broad's story in today's New York Times, two scientists who have examined both physical evidence from the ship's wreckage and the archives of her builder, the famous Harland & Wolff, of Belfast, have concluded that nature may not have had to win the contest, or at least not with as catastrophic consequences.

According to the researchers, rivets recovered from the wreck show an unusual amount of slag mixed with the iron from which they were forged. Moreover, minutes of H&W's Board of Directors meetings at the time Titanic was under construction document discussion of the difficulties in procuring sufficient rivets, which may have led H&W to rely on substandard suppliers, as well as problems in finding skilled riveters to hire, which could have led to faulty workmanship. Present and past officials of H&W have disputed these conclusions, one of them calling them "a waffle." Also, James Alexander Carlisle, grandson of an H&W riveter who worked on Titanic, has vigorously disputed the faulty rivet theory on the website of the Belfast Titanic Society.

If the researchers' theory is correct, Titanic is not so much a morality tale about technological hubris, but one about loyalty to an institution (H&W, at the time, was trying to complete on schedule what had to be the largest shipbuilding project in history: the construction of Titanic and her sisters Britannic and Olympic) trumping considerations of prudence and due regard for human life.

Goodbye, Lonesome Picker.

Sometimes, bad news seems to hide from me, taking its sweet time to reveal itself. So it was with the death, in January, of John Stewart. I finally got the news yesterday morning, paging through the New York Times "Week in Review" section, and seeing a teaser for an on-line only op-ed piece by Roseanne Cash.

I first knew of Stewart as the replacement for Dave Guard in the Kingston Trio (more about them in a soon to come--I promise!--post). Guard was an intelligent musician with an adventurous spirit that led to his break with the Trio when he thought their act was getting too formulaic, but Stewart brought a warmth and passion, as well as his own kind of intelligence, to the group. His voice was also an improvement over Guard's. I was a huge Trio fan through my high school and college years, and two of my favorite albums of theirs, #16 and Sunny Side, are from the Stewart period.

He left the Trio in the late 1960s to go solo, working as both a songwriter and performer. Perhaps his best known song, "Daydream Believer", was recorded by the Monkees, in my opinion one of the most underrated bands, and TV shows, of the '60s, and released in 1968. The following year, his album California Bloodlines, consisting entirely of his songs, was released. I fell in love with that album when I first heard it, in the summer of 1970, while visiting a friend in Greenwich Village. Along with contemporaneous work by Gram Parsons, Stewart, in this album, helped to lay the foundation for what has come to be called "alt/country" or "Americana" music, and today is exemplified by bands like Wilco and Son Volt, and singers like Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Tom Russell and Lucinda Williams.

Here are a pair of video clips from Stewart's career. The first is an audio of one of my favorites from California Bloodlines, "You Can't Look Back", accompanied by a series of reproductions of album covers and photos:



This one was made less than a year before his death, in a cafe in Pawling, New York, where he performed "Mother Country". This version, I venture, tops the one he recorded 38 years before on California Bloodlines:

So long, John, and thanks for so much.

Update: There's a splendid memorial site for John, with some YouTube clips, here.

Ouch!

Gail Collins, in her column titled The Revenge of Lacey Davenport, in Saturday's New York Times, wrote:

Long, long ago, Mick Jagger used to say that he couldn’t picture singing rock ’n’ roll when he was 40. His message, obviously, was not that the Stones planned to retire, but that Mick planned on remaining in his 30s forever. That which we cannot change, we ignore.

"Lacey Davenport" is a Doonesbury character thought to be based on the late Millicent Fenwick, who was elected to Congress from New Jersey at the age of 64, which at the time (1974), Ms. Collins observes, was considered "a geriatric triumph." She then adds: "These days, of course, as the first baby boomers are pushing 64, it’s regarded as part of the prime of life."

Well, of course it is. We boomers are a cohort of Jean Brodies, all in our prime:
Which, I suppose, is why, when I see a guitar store window, I pause and look longingly at those sleek Fender Strats and Teles, those gorgeous Gibson Les Pauls; why I'm distracted at the dry cleaner's by a poster offering guitar lessons. To quote the Beach Boys, It's not too late... .

Update: Ted Burke suggests (see comments) blues harp as a perhaps more attainable alternative to guitar heroism. Actually, I have an exemplar in that regard: one of my wife's friends' father, a septuagenarian living in the suburbs of Buffalo, who took up harp late in life and now bids fair to be the Sonny Boy Williamson of the Niagara Frontier.

Bonus: Hear and see Ted play blues in G here.

A tale of two stadia.

Anyone who's known me, or read this blog, for any length of time knows this if nothing: I love the Mets; I hate the Yankees. I've loathed the Bronx Bullies since I was in fourth grade, in an elementary school in the panhandle of Florida, when all of my  classmates were cheering for them and I, advocate that I was for the lowly and despised, knew the joy of seeing the underdog Brooklyn Dodgers defeat them in the World Series. I became a Mets fan in 1985 when a friend took me to a game at Shea, after a long baseball latency period precipitated by the Dodgers' move to L.A. During the course of that game, in which the Mets beat the Cards thanks to a dinger off what, that year, was called Howard Johnson's "unlikely bat", my friend, a Brooklyn native, said, "What you've got to remember is that the Mets are really the Brooklyn Dodgers continued by other means." That was enough to re-ignite the flame.

Nevertheless, as both teams play their final seasons in their long-time home venues, it's Yankee Stadium that I mourn, not Shea. To be sure, I've spent more time at Shea, and experienced more vivid emotion (mostly, I'm afraid, of the negative variety, but some moments of surpassing joy) there than in the older stadium in the Bronx. But, as most Mets fans will readily allow, Shea (photo at left above) is a charmless place. It's a product of the most dismal era of American architecture, the early 1960s, which produced such monstrosities as the Cadman Plaza apartment complex that looms over the northeastern flank of my beloved Brooklyn Heights. Painting Shea's walls blue only seemed to make matters worse.

Yankee Stadium (photo at right above), while graceful compared with Shea, has grown somewhat ungainly with recent revisions and additions. Its original facade, in a streamlined neoclassical style, is pleasing but unspectacular. What makes it special for me is its continued existence as a token of an era before my living memory. Shea was completed when I was a university student. Yankee Stadium, completed 23 years before I was born, was always the "House that Ruth Built". Babe Ruth, who died when I was two, was simply the most famous, and most charismatic, baseball player of all time. Most of his career was as a Yankee, and that's how he's remembered, but he came to fame with the Red Sox and made his last living appearance in a baseball uniform as a coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers. More than just a superb player, the Babe was a rare character. Herewith two of my favorite Ruth non-baseball anecdotes:

1. The Babe was invited by a New York society matron to be the guest of honor at a dinner party. Ruth's publicist subjected him to a Henry Higgins-like crash course in proper speech and manners. Like Eliza Doolittle, the Babe's first venture into high society rated an "excellent" for form but with a cautionary note for content. When the hostess passed a serving dish to him, he smiled sweetly and said, "No thank you, Ma'am. I never eat asparagus; it makes my urine smell."

2. A few months after Pearl Harbor, the Babe was to be interviewed live on a network radio show. At that time, it was imperative to relate everything to winning the war, so the host told Ruth that his first question would be, "Babe, how do you think sports can contribute to the war effort?" He had helpfully prepared an answer for Ruth to give: "Well, Bob [or whatever his name was], as the Duke of Wellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." They practiced this a number of times, until the Babe seemed to have it safely in memory. But when they went live, and the question was asked, Ruth said, "Well, Bob, as Duke Ellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton." After the show, the host said something like, "Gee, Babe, I thought you had that down pat. Why did you change it?" Ruth said, "Well, you see, I never met this guy Wellington, but Ellington, I know him. And I've never been to Eton, but I married my first wife in Elkton, Maryland, and I'll never forget that place as long as I live."

If there's an event associated with Shea that might make it worthy of preservation, it would have to be this (Note especially John Lennon during the last song, "I'm Down", on which he plays keyboard. I can't recall a moving image of a person, other than as an actor in a drama, in such an unalloyed state of Dionysiac fury; though McCartney, surprisingly, gives him a run for the money.)

The Beatles - I'm Down Live At Shea Stadium - Aug 15th, 1965 from Isaac on Vimeo.

Faith

The opposite of faith isn't doubt; it's certainty.
-- Anne Lamott

Having come to the Easter season (I began writing this on the evening of Easter Sunday; it's now two weeks and one day later, but still within the liturgical Easter), it seems appropriate to review my Ash Wednesday post, and reflect on what's transpired since. In that post, I wrote:

As I've noted recently, I have great difficulty with the notion of "faith" as it is commonly understood in a Christian context; that is, as a willingness to suspend skepticism with regard to propositions that are not amenable to empirical testing.

This drew a response from Marcia Tremmel, wife of my old high school and college friend Allan, and herself a deacon of the Episcopal Church:

I'm not sure that's my idea of faith. I am not at all sure that God expects us to suspend our skepticism or to walk away from such empirical testing as our current levels of science and knowledge permit. Those levels move almost daily - just look at the physics we grasp now compared to 50 years ago. The Letter to the Hebrews defines faith as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of that which we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1) It doesn't say a thing about maintaining a blind and stubborn certainty about things our empirical observations have proved otherwise. To me, being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see, is remembering that I (and you and all of us) are created in God's image, redeemed by the death of His Son, and sustained by the gift of the Holy Spirit. That, to me, is way bigger than any empirical testing done or not done, or that might become possible tomorrow or next week, so why not do that empirical observation? God's big enough to handle it.

The first syllable of 'remembering' is stressed because I'm thinking of the way my Vicar says the words of institution in the Great Thanksgiving - "do this in remembrance of me." He's stresses that syllable because he's trying to get across that we are not thinking about something that happened a long time ago, but bringing it into the present moment--into our lives today--anamnesis--right now. I catch it because I'm standing next to him at the Altar; the rest of the congregation I'm sure doesn't notice.

I remembered what Marcia had written to me during our Easter Sunday mass, when our Rector made the point about the resurrection not being some historical event, but something that is present for us and in us now. I still have trouble with the notion of a physical resurrection; indeed, I have a serious problem with the notion of "miracles" in general, and nothing that C.S. Lewis wrote on the subject seems convincing to me. (Update: I linked to Tattersall's article because his objections to Lewis's arguments in Miracles seemed pretty much in accord with mine, if better thought out. Now that I've had the opportunity to skim Darek Barefoot's response to Tattersall, I see that I'll need to revisit this issue in another post.) Nevertheless, the notion of "resurrection" as the remembrance of Jesus' teachings by his disciples, and by the heirs of those disciples down to the present and into the future, does not run afoul of that objection. Others might cavil that this provides the basis for only a denatured form of Christianity, but more about that in a later post.

It was what Marcia wrote about the definition of "faith," however, that particularly caught my attention. When I read it, I realized that I had used a meaning that was at variance with something I had read many years ago. That was Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith. I got it from my bookcase and quickly found my definition skewered at the beginning of Chapter Two, "What Faith is Not." Under the heading, "The intellectualistic distortion of the meaning of faith," Tillich writes:

The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. Something more or less probable or improbable is affirmed in spite of the insufficiency of its theoretical substantiation.

Tillich then distinguishes between faith and belief, the latter being based either on "evidence sufficient to make the event probable" or trust in some authority who has answers; that is, who has evaluated the evidence in a way I regard as trustworthy; much as I might trust the late Richard Feynman on the topic of quantum physics, or Jancis Robinson on what wine to have with roast duck. Such trust, however, is not the same thing as faith, because trust is conditional--if some other authority I respect publishes something that contradicts or modifies what Feynman wrote about quantum physics, I may decide to believe the new theory; if Ms. Robinson recommends a wine that I don't like, well, de gustibus non disputandum est--while faith is unconditional.

So, just what is this unconditional faith? According to Tillich, it is not knowledge.

Faith does not affirm or deny what belongs to the prescientific or scientific knowledge of our world, whether we know it by direct experience or through the experience of others. The knowledge of our world (including ourselves as part of the world) is a matter of inquiry by ourselves or by those in whom we trust. It is not a matter of faith.

In this respect, Tillich anticipated the late Stephen Jay Gould's argument for "nonoverlapping magisteria" or "NOMA"; that is, that the magisteria (teachings) of science and religion, as properly understood, cannot be in conflict because they address different spheres of human experience. As Gould put it:

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.*

But this still doesn't answer the question: What is faith? Faith, for Tillich, means "the state of being ultimately concerned." What would it mean for Gould? My quick-and-dirty research has failed to uncover anything Gould wrote addressing that question. Gould proclaimed himself an agnostic, but not hostile to religion:

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball).

(Now there's a man who had his priorities in good order.) Gould went on to write:

As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality), I prefer the "cold bath" theory that nature can be truly "cruel" and "indifferent"—in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological microsecond), and doesn't give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then become free to conduct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality.

I think that this passage indicates that Gould's "ultimate concern" (note the words "nothing could be more important") is the freedom of humans to determine the moral framework governing their lives through rational "discourse" rather than through revelation. While to many this seems the opposite of "faith," to Tillich it exemplifies a particular type of faith, specifically, a "humanistic" faith of the "moral" or "progressive-utopian" type. Of such a faith, Tillich writes:

The faith of the fighters for enlightenment since the eighteenth century is a humanist faith of the moral type. They fought for freedom from sacramentally consecrated bondage and for justice for every human being. ... It was faith, and not rational calculation, although they believed in the superior power of a reason united with justice and truth. ... As for every faith, the utopian form of the humanist faith is a state of ultimate concern.

Because it is "ultimate concern," it is faith; for Tillich, the only way to be without faith is to have no ultimate concern.

What is "ultimate concern"? According to Tillich, it is defined in Deuteronomy 6:5, the so-called "Great Commandment": "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." (N.R.S.V.)

This is what ultimate concern means and from these words the term "ultimate concern" is derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern.

Yet it is obvious that it possible to have faith, even "genuine" faith in the sense of the demand for total surrender, in something other than the "Lord your God." At the beginning of Dynamics, Tillich gives two examples. The first, making reference no doubt to Nazi ideology but with application to jingoism anywhere, is a totalistic nationalism, and the second is "the ultimate concern with 'success' and with social standing and economic power."

It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise--indefinite as all such promises--the fulfillment of one's being. ...When fulfilled, the promise of this faith proves to be empty.

Later, Tillich makes a similar, if somewhat qualified, assertion concerning humanistic or secular faith.

It is faith, but it hides the dimension of the ultimate which it presupposes. Its weakness or danger is that it may become empty. History has shown this weakness and final emptiness of all merely secular cultures. It has turned them back again and again to the religious forms of faith from which they came.

At this point, I confess to being a bit perplexed. I don't think Tillich is arguing here for the elimination or erosion of the separation of church and state. Rather, he seems to me to have asserted that a culture that is not informed by religious faith, even perhaps a plurality of faiths, has a fatal weakness. However, I wish he had given examples of "merely secular cultures" that had "turned...back...to the religious forms of faith from which they came." Perhaps some readers can help.

A more fundamental difficulty for me is defining the nature of that "ultimate" which, according to Tillich, is the proper--as opposed to idolatrous, like those discussed above--object of ultimate concern. According to the Great Commandment it is "the Lord your God." Here is where Tillich made a clever move:

The fundamental symbol of our ultimate concern is God. It is always present in any act of faith, even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God.

Well, OK. Tillich has already posited ultimate concerns--nationalism, success, humanism--that are not "God" as understood in religious terms. Suppose I were to say, as I believe Gould would have, that my ultimate concern is with human freedom to establish a moral order based on reason, and not on divine command. Would I be denying God in the name of God? To cut to the chase, what Tillich seemed to be saying is that whatever is our ultimate concern is, for us, God, and that, consequently, no one can be an atheist, or even agnostic, no matter what that ultimate concern may be. It all seems to me a bit, dare I say, tautological.

So where do I end up on all this? It would be easy if I could just state, "My ultimate concern is X." At my age, it should be a question I could readily answer. Not long ago, I would have given the same answer to that question that I hypothesized Gould's giving: that it is the freedom to determine the moral order through reason alone. I would have said that despite regularly attending church services. If pressed as to the sincerity of my religiosity, I would have given a flip answer (as I actually once did) like, "I'm just an ontological reductionist who gets off on good liturgy."

Today, I'm not so sure. The mere fact that I can "get off" on liturgy points to something: Tillich might have said it was an indication of a "sacramental" form of faith. I've sometimes been accused, with good reason, of wanting to have things both ways. Tillich's radical separation of faith from the empirical and Gould's NOMA give me some comfort in this respect. I like to say that my position is one of epistemological modesty. By this I mean that I retain a healthy skepticism about claims that are not readily testable, but also keep in mind, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."** There's a fine line between this kind of open-mindedness and credulousness, but I try to stay on the right side of it. At least, I hope that Archaeopteryx will concede that I still have functioning neurons.

Lastly, I must address the apparent conflict between the epigram at the start of this post from Anne Lamott, which I got courtesy of our Rector, Steve Muncie, and the words from Paul's letter to the Hebrews (11:1) quoted by Marcia. I like Ms. Lamott's statement that the opposite of faith is certainty because it seems in accord with my position of epistemological modesty. Yet Paul wrote of faith as being "certain of that which we do not see." On reading this, I was tempted to interpret it as meaning "certain that there are things that we do not see." This would mean a certainty of there being uncertainty, certainly in agreement with the modest position. Unfortunately, I don't have access to, or knowledge of, the original Greek, so I couldn't attempt my own exegesis. I looked to see how the verse was rendered in my Cambridge Study Bible (New Revised Standard Version), and found it was

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

The Cambridge scholars helpfully appended to this and the succeeding two verses*** this note:

The explanation of faith given here conforms in style to definitions in Greek philosophical writings, and the crucial terms, conviction and assurance, carry philosophical meaning as to how ultimate reality can be known. But the writer has made a crucial addition: faith is oriented toward the future and is grounded in the hope of fulfillment of God's purpose. The assurance is that the heavenly realities, which humans have not yet seen, will be revealed to God's faithful people, just as the ancestors looked forward to this reality. God's word, which was the instrument for shaping the creation...and the ages of history (worlds), is here seen as disclosing an eternal world which exists in the heavens but is not visible to humans.

(Emphasis in original; citations omitted.) Perhaps the crucial point here is that the certainty in question is "oriented toward the future" and "grounded in hope." This can be contrasted to the "certainty" of Biblical literalism, or fundamentalism, which is oriented towards the past (and which, I suspect, is the "certainty" that Ms. Lamott had in mind). (Biblical literalism is also, for Tillich, a form of idolatrous faith; a point I mean to take up in a later post.)

Over to you, Marcia (and anyone else who wants to chime in).

Update: Thanks to Archaeopteryx for linking to this post both on his blog and on the Faith-Based Fray, where it's already generated lots of discussion.
_________________________

*Gould recognized that, while the magisteria of science and religion do not overlap, there are important issues that implicate both:

Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both [magisteria] for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult. To cite just two broad questions involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments: Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species? What do our genealogical ties with other organisms imply about the meaning of human life?

**Hamlet, I, v.

***These are

2. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.
3. By faith, we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Hebrews 11:2-3 (N.R.S.V.). The second clause of verse three may be a restatement of Democritus' atomic theory.

An important (ahem!) announcement.

I will be interviewed live tomorrow (Thursday, April 3) from 5:30 to 6:00 P.M. EDT on Sirius Satellite Radio, Indie Talk Channel 110, the "Blog Bunker" show.

For those of you who don't have Sirius receivers or haven't already signed up for Sirius Online, you can get a free three day trial of Sirius Online by going here.

Update: Things went so fast that I didn't get a chance to put in a plug for the other blog on which I participate, Brooklyn Heights Blog. Please give it a look, especially if you live in or near the Heights, are thinking of living in the Heights, used to live here and miss it, or were a big fan of the Patty Duke Show.

Mets, Santana, cruise to opener win.

I should worry about this.

It's what comes of being married to a Red Sox fan. The better they do early, you're told, the worse they'll do later.

Nice, though, to see newbies Church and Pagan contributing to the victory. And, the tab scribes won't yet be calling for Santana's head because he's getting four figures for every pitch.

4.1 update: April Fool's day sees yesterday's euphoria exposed for the fool's paradise it was, as Pedro's injury after a rough start means the two and three spots in the starting rotation must be filled by Maine and Perez, with the four and five spots taken by Pelfrey and who-knows-who.

Meanwhile, on the Times op-ed page, David Brooks offers this analysis of what makes for success in pitching, based on the work of sports psychologist H.A. Dorfman. Apparently, self-absorption is a serious hindrance.

A record month, thanks to the Times and Catnapping.

S-AB has set records during March for both visits and page views (1,116 and 1,578 respectively, so far) for a single month. This is largely because of two things: (1) a huge spike in traffic on the 18th when Patrick LaForge of the New York Times City Room blog linked to my post on Vampire Weekend; and (2) Catnapping's posting of an unusual birthday greeting (see below)

in her comment on my Ed Lenci gets shorn post, which has caused everyone who does a search in Google Images that incorporates the word "birthday" to be directed here. Many thanks!

Stanley Greenberg: the romance of infrastructure.

My earliest memories of New York City - I was five years old, staying with my mother at the old Henry Hudson Hotel on West 57th Street waiting to board a ship to cross the Atlantic and join my father, an Air Force officer who had been sent to England for a tour of duty - prominently include being awestruck by the magnificence of its public works. Yes, the skyscrapers, the bustling crowds, and the "Manhattan" the waitress served me at Longchamps (ginger ale with a dash of grenadine, garnished with a maraschino cherry, in a cocktail glass) were impressive, but so were the mighty pillars holding up the elevated West Side highway, and the piers jutting into the Hudson sheltering a phalanx of passenger and cargo liners. On later visits - I was through New York as a port of embarkation or debarkation three more times in my childhood - my experience grew to include the great East River bridges, with their soaring towers, tree trunk thick cables and stupendously massive anchorages, and the interior of the old Penn Station, an early twentieth century high-tech cathedral.

So it was that I came to love the photography of Stanley Greenberg, whose camera ventures into places where ordinary citizens do not or cannot venture, such as the interior of the Lower Gatehouse of the New Croton Dam, shown above. His books Invisible New York and Waterworks elegantly document this hidden or often overlooked infrastructure of the City and its environs.

My wife and I attended the opening reception for Stanley's current exhibition at the Gitterman Gallery. Among the photographs displayed were some of City infrastructure, others of buildings under construction, and others comprising a series showing sand castles on the beach at Coney Island. They thereby encompassed the enduring, the transitory and the evanescent. You can see images of the photographs included in the exhibition here.

The exhibition will remain open through May 10. Gitterman Gallery is located at 170 East 75th Street in Manhattan, telephone 212.734.0868 or see info@gittermangallery.com.

Ed Lenci gets shorn.

No, he wasn't heavily invested in subprime mortgage backed securities, or a major holder of Bear Stearns stock. As explained in this earlier post, Ed volunteered to have his head shaved to help raise money for children's cancer research through St. Baldrick's Foundation. So, on this St. Patrick's Day afternoon, Ed repaired to Jim Brady's, on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan, to submit to the shears. Here he is, gamely awaiting his date with destiny:


He takes the fateful chair:


Going, ...


... going, ...


... gone.


Congratulations to Ed on his shiny new look, and thanks to all who made it worthwhile by contributing to St. Baldrick's.

Scenes from a morning walk through DUMBO.

Coast Guard cutter heading down the East River to take a position near Governor's Island. This happens whenever the President is due in town.

Women exercising Great Danes under Manhattan Bridge.

Looking southward along Anchorage Place and Pearl Street.

Looking southward along Adams Street.

Brooklyn Bridge from Plymouth Street.

Powerhouse Arena window.

Truck on Water Street.


There's more on DUMBO here.

Update: Thanks to Anonymous for correcting my geography. What I thought was Jay Street is actually Pearl (I checked a more detailed map to confirm), and it, along with Jay and Adams, actually runs north-south rather than east-west (my mistake here was in thinking that anything perpendicular to the East River must run east-west, but DUMBO lies next to a stretch of the East River that runs east-west instead of north-south). I've amended my text accordingly.

Oddest Google search to lead to a hit on my blog.

married nashville women wanted for casual sex

Sorry to disappoint.

Whither Spitzer?

Louise Crawford put the wood to me, at the delightful Brooklyn Blogade hosted yesterday by Joyce Hanson, AKA Bad Girl (we're talking "bad" in the probably now hopelessly archaic hip-hop sense). Anyway, amid all the bonhomie, Louise let me know in no uncertain terms that the volume of my production of late has been a bit less than up to snuff. All I could do was hang my head and nod "Yes."

So, I should certainly find something blogworthy in our (I'm referring to my fellow Empire Staters here) Governor's admission that he's shelled out major coin for some choice nooky. At first, I thought of trying to do something about how this provokes an intra-cerebral civil war between my classic liberal (what consenting men and women do in private, whether out of purely erotic or commercial motivation, is no one else's business, even if one of them happens to be a politician, televangelist or whatever) and Burkean conservative (prostitution is bad because it gives rise to conditions in which persons can be exploited without meaningful consent) sides. But that was going to demand a long essay, and I didn't have the energy or desire.

What I kept hearing was, "How could he be so stupid?" Stupid, I'll agree, but perhaps not in the sense of just failing to realize the risk. The phrase that kept repeating in my mind this afternoon was spoken by Maggie Smith playing the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: "Beyond the ordinary moral code." In the movie (and novel by Muriel Spark from which it was derived), Brodie is a teacher in a fancy girls' school in Scotland during the period just before World War Two, and a vulgar Nietzschean with fascist sympathies. One of her students is so beautiful, intelligent and talented that Brodie is convinced she is a true uberfraulein. In order to nudge this girl towards her rightful (as Brodie sees it) destiny, she connives for her to have an affair with the art teacher, a man in his thirties, married with six children. This all ends, inevitably, in disaster for both the art teacher and the girl. Brodie's excuse, of course, is that the girl was "beyond the ordinary moral code."

There are people who believe this about themselves. Some turn to overt crime: murder, rape, theft. We call them sociopaths. Others hew to more conventional career paths, and are often quite successful. Because this belief is strongly correlated with narcissism, some of them go into show business (of which televangelism is a part) or politics. Spitzer may exemplify the latter.

Alternatively, if we take seriously Spitzer's statement that his actions violate his, and anyone's, sense of right and wrong, we could conclude that there was, in his psyche, some desire for self-destruction.

How to answer the question in my caption for this post? That's a matter of practical politics, not philosophy. I suspect that the pressure from the Democratic Party in a presidential election year will prove irresistible: Spitzer will be out, and soon.

Update: There's an AP story that quotes several psychologists on the question, "Why do smart people do dumb things?" As you might expect, opinions vary, with some of the experts supporting a theory of hubris that is close to what I expressed above.

On the question whether Spitzer should resign, the lead Times editorial harrumphs mightily about it not being, as Spitzer asserted, primarily a "family" matter, but just calls for a more complete and public act of contrition, and does not demand his resignation. Comments on Instaputz (click on the word "Comments" to see them in Haloscan), including some by Brooklyn Heights Blog regulars, are generally taking the perfect-act-of-contrition no-resignation tack.

Second update: Newsweek's Howard Fineman has another theory about what motivated Spitzer. He thinks it may have been an inner conflict over his career as a politician. This brings to my mind a New Yorker cartoon by William Hamilton that depicted a sixtyish, besuited man sitting with several similar gents, all with drinks, in a club lounge, and saying, "Steel, of course, has been my life. But sometimes I wish my life had been a sunny cafe in Provence, with a pretty girl and a bottle of beaujolais."