Walking the Bridge.

I've made it a habit, more mornings than not, to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, do a lap around the City Hall Park Fountain, and walk back to Brooklyn, perhaps extending my walk by going left after descending from the Bridge walkway toward DUMBO, there to get some croissants, and maybe a baguette, from Almondine.

This morning, there was heavy fog at water level up to above the level of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. When I got up onto the bridge, I was above the fog. Here's the scene looking towards Manhattan, with the unlovely and unloved Verizon Building to the right and the lovely and much loved (even by James Joyce) Woolworth Building to the left.

Clinton concedes; Collins comments cogently.

Gail Collins has a valedictory for Hillary's campaign on today's New York Times op-ed page. After quoting some despairing remarks by Muriel Fox, one of the founders of NOW, Ms. Collins gives some historical perspective with this:

Feel free to make fun of them. The women of Fox’s generation ought to be used to it by now. The movement they started was the first fight for equality in which the opposition deployed ridicule as its most lethal weapon. They won the ban on sex discrimination in employment by letting a conservative congressman propose it as a joke. When they staged their historic march in New York in 1970, they heard themselves described as “braless bubble-heads” by a U.S. senator and were laughed at on the evening news.

She concludes with this:

For all [Clinton's] vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it’s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women’s issues she had championed all her life — repair of the social safety net, children’s rights, support for working mothers.

Gotta read this.

Twiffer on elitism.

I've been cogitating about a post on the same topic. It may yet happen. (I know, "Promises, promises... .")

Update: Towards a more colorful vocabulary. Reading the comments on Twiffer's article, I learned that arugula is also called "rocket".

I can't wait for my first opportunity to ask for a rocket, Bartlett pear and gorgonzola salad.

So sad that it's come to this.

As we anticipate the passing of this kidney stone of a Democratic primary campaign, Rumproast dubs HRC "Sen. Veruca Rodham Salt".

Update: Relief may be in sight.

Goodbye to a legend.

I'd like to think that Buddy, the Bopper and Richie (not to mention the King, Eddie and good ol' Roy) were tuning up, getting ready for a jam to rock the cosmos.

Update: DJ Stan has assembled a magnificent Bo Diddley/Buddy Holly playlist on Struts and Frets. Herewith a few humbly suggested additions:

Fleetwood Mac: "Buddy's Song". From Kiln House, an album I love that was critically panned--one scribe called it "Buddy Holly-obsessed" (although it includes no Holly covers). This is the second best Buddy Holly song not by Buddy Holly. According to the playlist on the vinyl album, the song was written by Ella Mae Holly, but the notes to the CD indicate it was penned by then Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer, and "generously credited to Holly's mother".

Bo Diddley: "Say, Man!" Oddly, this paleo-rap from 1959, consisting of a Platonic dialogue between Bo and his maracas-shaking sideman, Jerome Green, was Bo's only record to crack the top forty. For some reason, this exchange sticks in my mind:

Bo: Look-a here!
Jerome: What's that?
Bo: Where are you from?
Jerome: South America.
Bo: What's that?
Jerome: South America.
Bo: You don't look like no South American to me.
Jerome: I'm still from South America.
Bo: What part?
Jerome: South Texas!

Tom Rush: "Love's Made a Fool of You". A snappy cover of a lesser-known Holly song by one of my favorite 1960s vintage folkies, and a Hah-vahd man to boot. If I had to choose a theme song for my life, this might be it.

Buddy Holly: "Everyday". An inspiring song for people whose theme song is the above.

Blondie: "I'm Gonna Love You, Too". From the killer Parallel Lines, a hyperkinetic rendition of another lesser-known Holly song.

Alice in Wine Blog Land

A while back, someone offered me a taste of a California cabernet sauvignon. My impression was of a suspension of Woo-Woo-Welch's grape jam (without, however, the concord foxiness) fortified by a generous splash of Everclear. I spat and said the first word that came to mind, which was "Parkerilla."

It wasn't Graham Parker, whose album The Parkerilla was a blot on an otherwise distinguished, and still ongoing, rock 'n' roll career, to whom I referred. It was Robert Parker, fellow lawyer turned tastemaker, publisher of The Wine Advocate, author of several wine books, and unquestionably the most powerful person in the world of wine today. In assessing wines, Parker gives the usual "hints of black currants and kippered herring" kind of commentary (Some such commentary makes me think of Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."), but also assigns precise numerical grades to each vintage, in effect saying, Red Queen-like, to those scoring less than 90, "Off with their heads!", and thereby playing into the American mania for quantification and score-keeping. Consequently, lots of people do their wine shopping on the basis of Parker ratings, which many stores include in their ads and helpfully display next to each bottle.

Parker's preference for what he calls "hedonistic fruit bombs", that is, wines with overpowering fruitiness and high alcohol, has shaped demand to the extent that many wineries, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, have tailored their technique to produce wines that fit that description and stand fair to get high Parker marks. Because of these wines' massive, chest-thumping quality, I decided to give them the epithet "Parkerilla." As you may have guessed by now, I prefer wines with more--how you say?--nuance. So, I shudder as the Parker juggernaut rolls, apparently inexorably, along.

Fortunately, I have some allies who are waging anti-Parkerilla guerilla. One of them is my Kings County compatriot, Brooklynguy. Another, whom I have just discovered, is Alice Feiring, who puts out the estimable blog Veritas in Vino. Up top on her home page, under the heading "Appellation Feiring", she lets you know where she stands:

I’m looking for the Leon Trotskys, the Philip Roths, the Chaucers and the Edith Whartons of the wine world. I want my wines to tell a good story. I want them natural and most of all, like my dear friends, I want them to speak the truth even if we argue. ...I’m trying to swell the ranks of those who love the differences in each vintage, who abhor homogenization, who want wines that make them smile, think, laugh, and feel sexy.

Ms. Feiring champions the concept of terroir, which, like many French words, is hard to translate neatly into English, but boils down to the notion that a wine's taste should reflect the idiosyncracies of the environment in which it was produced (Again this brings to mind Humpty Dumpty: "When I make a word do a lot of work like that, ...I always pay it extra."). She has taken the battle into the heart of enemy territory, writing an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled "California wine? Down the drain", in which she characterizes the bulk of that state's wine as "overblown, over-alcoholed, over-oaked, overpriced and over-manipulated." In other words: Parker-ized to the hilt. This prompted a counter-attack in the same newspaper, in which Matthew DeBord called her a "terroirist" and delivered such gems of wisdom as:

[T]he "terroirists" lambasted California -- which by this time had become the most successful winemaking region in the history of, well, wine -- for imposing a bland style on the rest of the world. America promotes democracy and market capitalism. California promotes wines that don't suck. This cannot stand.

Alice, of course, responded, calling DeBord "the Sean Hannity of the Wine World" and herself a "terroir jihadist." The comment thread following her post, in which she participates, is well worth reading. She offered further commentary in a Q&A format here.

Alice is promoting her new book, The Battle for Wine and Love, or How I Saved the World from Parkerization, and, in furtherance of that, will be at my daughter's favorite after-school hangout, the new Barnes & Noble at 97 Warren Street (corner of Greenwich) in Tribeca, at 7:00 P.M. this coming Monday, June 2. New Yorkers, and anyone else who happens to be in town then, please take note. I'll definitely be there to:

(1) buy the book;

(2) get her to sign it; and

(3) blow her a kiss on the way out.

Subsequent events, including some in mid-June in California (this woman has intestinal fortitude!), are listed on her blog.

Update: I meet Alice! Yes, I was there at the Tribeca B&N at seven sharp yesterday, to find most of the seats already taken. With luck, I found a vacant one at the end of the second row. After a couple of minutes, a woman who looked like Jackie O. when she was a young Jackie Kennedy, but with a nasal piercing, took the podium and introduced Alice, who looks like the fifth grade teacher you had a secret crush on, pretty not in a cover girl fashion, but in a wise yet vulnerable way.

She began by reading several sections of her book. The first was how she discovered wine, when her father's second wife invited her to raid the cellar amassed by her previous husband. The second was about her quest to meet the man who made the Barolo that she took in that raid and with which she fell in love, a quest that failed but in the course of which she learned much about Italy, its wines, and the reasons for their sad decline. The third was about Burgundy and her meeting with Parker. After reading, she invited questions. There was much discussion of new winemaking techniques, especially something called "biodynamics", of which Alice generally approves, but is afraid may become simply a marketing ploy. Asked what wines she particularly enjoys these days, she said she was especially fond of Loire wines, as well as some Côtes du Rhône and some Beaujolais.

When my turn came to have my copy of her book signed, I handed her my blog card, and she said she had read this post, and liked it. She then signed the book, "Thanks so much." I will now put on my shameless shill hat and say, "Buy Alice's book. It's great."

Auf wiedersehen, Franz

...I have been concerned with...the way the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life. At the same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new myth, and that myth is part of the fiber of our own lives.
-- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)

I was a handsome man and had many women. But more important is to have a good wife, with whom one can share one's life.
-- Franz Künstler (1900-2008)

It's a commonplace to observe that World War I, the "Great War", was a hinge for history. Before August 1914, vistas of endless progress; after, disillusionment. Before, a balance of power; after, a constant struggle for supremacy. Of course, this oversimplifies. Bolsheviks had their belief in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat that would bring about utopia, but only after great struggle. Social democrats believed that melioristic policies could bring about a better world, but that belief was strained by the collapse of Weimar and the subsequent Great Depression. The Depression validated pessimism, and World War II enshrined it.

The number of people alive now who can remember the world before 1914 is quickly declining. Two days ago, one of the last surviving veterans of the war, and the last who fought on the side of the Central Powers, Franz Künstler, died at the age of 108. His life in a way reflected the turmoil of the just-over-a-century for which he lived. He was an ethnic German born in the Hungarian portion of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire to parents who were part of the German diaspora that extended through Eastern Europe to the valley of the Volga. When maps were redrawn following the collapse of the Empire, the place where he was born became part of Romania. He maintained Hungarian citizenship until the second defeat of Germany in World War II led to the expulsion of many East European Germans from their native countries to the now-diminished and divided Germany. Like Frank Buckles, the last surviving U.S. armed forces veteran of World War I, he also served in World War II.

Thanks to Ed Lenci for passing to me the news of Künstler's death.

From my window this afternoon.

The sound of an idling diesel engine brought me to the window, where I saw a busload of blondes in hot pink dresses competing to be the next Elle Woods in Legally Blonde (contest sponsored by MTV). They were assembling for a photo shoot on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. For a view of some of them there, with the lower Manhattan skyline as a background, see my post on Brooklyn Heights Blog.

Remembering Korea

Nobody wanted to call it a war, except those who fought in it. It could have been over soon after it began, thanks to General Douglas MacArthur's brilliantly planned and executed amphibious assault at Inchon, the success of which allowed Republic of Korea (ROK) and U.S. troops to capture the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, in October of 1950, less than five months after North Korean troops had invaded the South.

Shortly after American troops entered Pyongyang, as the late David Halberstam tells in his last book, The Coldest Winter, word came that some ROK units that had proceeded north from the capital towards the Yalu River, the border with China, had encountered some resistance and needed help. Units of the U.S. First Cavalry, still wearing summer uniforms, were sent north for what was expected to be a quick mop-up against remnants of the defeated North Korean army. What ensued was a horror, as inexperienced commanders, brought over recently from stateside, deployed the troops poorly, and headquarters willfully ignored intelligence that showed a substantial deployment of Chinese troops in the area. MacArthur was determined to take his troops to the Yalu, while China had warned that it would consider any move into the North Korean provinces bordering the Yalu an act of war. MacArthur, confident in his knowledge of the "Asiatic mind", was sure they were bluffing.

The unit that took the heaviest hit in the Chinese attack was the Eighth Regiment of the First Cavalry, which had been deployed in a northern salient that, as one experienced soldier put it, made it stand out "like a sore thumb." After the Eighth's position had been almost completely overrun, a battalion command post, where many wounded had been taken, remained with a tenuous escape route to the south. The soldiers there realized that before long their defenses would fail and the command post would fall. As Halberstam describes it:

On midday of November 3, Peterson, Mayo, Richardson, and Giroux went over to the CP for a final doomsday kind of meeting. Because he was not an officer, Richardson [a sergeant first class] did not attend the meeting, but he knew what it was about. All of the officers, many of them wounded themselves, were talking about a forbidden subject--what to do with the wounded in the terrible final moment that everyone knew was coming. ...

What heartbreaking decisions for young men to make, Richardson had thought to himself and still pondered half a century later.

Of these four men, only Mayo escaped. Peterson and Richardson both were captured, and survived two and a half years in prisoner of war camps. Giroux was also captured, but died of his wounds. Overall, in this battle, the Eighth Regiment suffered eight hundred casualties, losing half its authorized strength.

The Korean War began at least in large part because of an unintentional omission from a speech by a consummate diplomat: Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, neglected to include South Korea within the Asian "defensive perimeter" of the U.S. It was prolonged by the willfulness, in the face of convincing conflicting evidence, of a great military commander. Remember this.

Is Obama "too intelligent" to be President?

In an op-ed in Thursday's New York Times, Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins chided Obama for quoting from JFK's inaugural address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” They argued that Kennedy was made to eat these words after his "self-destructive" Vienna summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, and that the lesson Obama should learn from this is that "sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate."

There is a germ of truth in this. Kennedy agreed to the Vienna summit against the advice of his more diplomatically experienced advisers, including his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. The summit wasn't preceded by the usual intense meetings of lower-level officials who would work out all of the details concerning the issues to be discussed, so that the summit itself would be a well-rehearsed kabuki. Instead, Kennedy, Harvard educated and one generation removed from South Boston rough-and-tumble, went, as the current White House occupant might put it, mano a mano with Khrushchev, a gut fighter of peasant stock who rose to premiership in the wake of Stalin's death by dint of sheer ruthlessness (although Khrushchev, in his so-called "secret speech" to the Communist Party Politburo in 1956, denounced Stalin's excesses and his "cult of personality").

After the meeting, as Thrall and Wilkins recount, Khrushchev remarked that Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.” How was it that the Soviet leader could corroborate intelligence with weakness, and why should intelligence be considered a disadvantage in summit meetings? Here's Thrall and Wilkins on Khrushchev's approach to Kennedy:

...Khrushchev lectured him on the hypocrisy of American foreign policy, cautioned America against supporting “old, moribund, reactionary regimes” and asserted that the United States, which had valiantly risen against the British, now stood “against other peoples following its suit.” Khrushchev used the opportunity of a face-to-face meeting to warn Kennedy that his country could not be intimidated and that it was “very unwise” for the United States to surround the Soviet Union with military bases.

What I think Khrushchev meant was that Kennedy was intelligent enough to realize that there was some truth in what he had said. The U.S was, indeed, supporting reactionary governments (Franco's in Spain, Salazar's in Portugal, and Ngo Dinh Diem's--whose assassination Kennedy may later have approved, if not ordered--in South Vietnam, to name a few) on the theory that they were bulwarks against communism. Of course, Khrushchev did not live to see the Soviet Union's own old, moribund, reactionary regime collapse. In any event, what Kennedy may have been intelligent enough to sense was that neither superpower had a monopoly on truth.

Thrall and Wilkins would have us believe that JFK's performance at the 1961 Vienna summit was an unmitigated disaster. But here is the assessment of Jack F. Matlock, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987-1991, as set forth in his letter to the editor of the Times responding to Thrall and Wilkins's column:

In what sense did Khrushchev triumph — even temporarily?

The issue over Berlin was Khrushchev’s threat to deny Western access rights to West Berlin, by military force if necessary. After building the wall between East and West Berlin, he abandoned his pressure on the access routes, and the viability of West Berlin (Kennedy’s prime objective) was assured.

As for “fear to negotiate,” why should the stronger party ever fear negotiation? Ronald Reagan did not, when he sought out our Soviet adversaries.

Refusing to talk and refusing to negotiate are dead-end streets, as the Soviet leaders before Mikhail S. Gorbachev never learned. And that’s why they lost.

And, on the subject of summit meetings, we have this more recent cautionary example.

Quote of the day.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes.

--David Brooks, "The Alpha Geeks", New York Times, May 23, 2008.

In the same column, Brooks writes:

[E]ven as “Revenge of the Nerds” was gracing the nation’s movie screens, a different version of nerd-dom was percolating through popular culture. Elvis Costello and The Talking Heads’s David Byrne popularized a cool geek style that’s led to Moby, Weezer, Vampire Weekend and even self-styled “nerdcore” rock and geeksta rappers.

Soon, I'll be doing a post about a band made up of NYU faculty memebers. Can't get much geekier than that. Meanwhile, I've got to check out this "geeksta rap." Anybody have any suggestions?

La plus ça change, ...

...la plus c’est la même chose. (A tip o' the hat to Instaputz.)

Feh!

In my last Mets post, I wrote: "Just don't backslide."

Being the Mets, of course they did.

Update: The humiliation is complete.

So, just what is art, anyway?

In Little Murders (1971), directed by Alan Arkin, with screenplay by Jules Feiffer, Elliott Gould (seen at left, in stained white suit) played Alfred Chamberlain, a successful but disillusioned commercial photographer who took to wandering the sidewalks of New York shooting photos of what, in those pre-pooper-scooper law days, could all too easily be found there. He explained this unusual avocation by saying that he'd received several awards for work he'd done--photographs of consumer products that were used in advertising--that he considered artistically without merit, and that this made him conclude that he might as well be taking pictures of shit. Eventually, his excremental photos won plaudits as well. When Patsy, later to be his bride, first visited his apartment and saw his photos on the wall said she thought they were lovely, and added, "and they're all ...?" He nodded affirmatively.

Feiffer may have been inspired to create this scene, and indeed the whole episode of Alfred's scatomania, by an actual show presented at the Gallery Gertrude Stein in 1964. The artists Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie, who, along with Stanley Fisher, led the NO!art movement of the early 1960s, conceived a "NO! Sculpture" exhibition in which the sculptures were simulated feces, produced by extruding wet plaster from plastic "guts". The critic Thomas Neumann, writing for Art News, characterized this as "the direct, unsublimated expression of instinct".* Brian O'Doherty, a New York Times art critic, had this reaction:

These aggregations of colonic calligraphy contain many formal excellences for anyone whose purist education forces him to perceive them.

But the subject matter puts the joke on those who do find formal values in it. Those who do not are forced to deny the legitimacy of values that by now have been inculcated into several college generations--thus pointing up the current effeteness of the formal idea.**

Update: For a contemporary version, by Paul McCarthy, of the Goodman/Lurie project, see here.

So, is shit art? Here I will venture a bold statement: shit, per se, is not art. Why not? Again, I'll be bold. Art must be intentional. It must be the product of a conscious decision to make something of artistic value. Shelley and his Skylark to the contrary notwithstanding, I don't believe in "unpremeditated art". I'll leave aside for now the question, "What is artistic value?", thereby sidestepping the formalism versus whatever (postmodernism, emotionalism, "meaning") brouhaha, in which O'Doherty took the anti-formalist side. The point I want to stress is that a thing that was not created with a conscious intention to make art, be it dogshit or an orchid, is not art.

By including the qualifier per se, though, I've left open the possibility that both Alfred's photographs and Goodman and Lurie's fecal simulacrae may be considered art. Does the act of photographing or making a replica of something that is not in itself art, and displaying it, make it art? Does tagging it with spray paint (see my colleague Miss Heather's blog, newyorkshitty.com) do the trick? To take the question further, is it art simply to abstract an object from its usual environment, perhaps adding a bit of graffiti, and to show it in a gallery, as in the instance of Marcel Duchamp's urinal? In each of these, there is an element of intentionality.

Is intentionality a sufficient, as well as a necessary, condition? It's tempting to say so. Intentionality provides what we lawyers like to call a "bright line" test. Nevertheless, if we say that anything meeting the criterion "created intentionally as a work of art" must be considered art, we're letting in some hard cases. I'm thinking here of the controversy, as reported by my Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague Homer Fink with his post about the sculptor Tom Otterness, prompted by the installation of his "Large Covered Wagon" on a patch of greensward in DUMBO, just north of the eastern approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.

It isn't Otterness's whimsical sculpture that makes this a hard case, but something he did some 31 years ago, when he was a 25 year old trying to make it as an artist in the East Village. Homer quoted Gary Indiana, reviewing a retrospective of East Village art from the 1970s in New York Magazine, as follows:

I’m repulsed by this show’s inclusion of Tom Otterness, a sculptor of limitless nonentity despite his demonstrated skill at conning public-art commissions and taste-impaired collectors into making him rich. Mr. Otterness, once upon a time, adopted a dog and then shot it to death for the fun of recording his infantile, sadistic depravity on film. I’d like the New Museum’s visitors to keep that in mind while looking at this creep’s work. Mr. Otterness isn’t one of those special exceptions deserving the adage “Lousy person, terrific artist.” Lousy both.***

Otterness has since apologized for this cruel act several times, one of which was to neighbor blog McBrooklyn.

If shooting dogshit can be art, is shooting a dog, and committing its demise to film for the purpose of showing it as an artwork, art? It meets the intentionality test. Still, there's something in me that rebels against applying the word "art" to the result of an act of cruelty. "Art" is a word of approval. "That's a work of art!" is another way of saying "That's great!" Of course, not all art is great. Still, even less worthy art can be "nice"; I call it kitsch and consider it a guilty pleasure. For what it's worth, I put Otterness's sculpture in this category.

Here, though, I run smack-dab into what I sidestepped earlier: the vexed issue of what art is supposed to be. The various positions that art critics and academics take on this issue, I believe, fall into three general categories. For some, the answer might be: art should evoke a purely aesthetic response; it should challenge or expand our ability to appreciate form, color or texture. Others might argue that art should be a means for the artist to communicate her or his inner emotional state to the viewer. Still others might say that art should awaken the viewer to contradictions within the prevailing social-economic-political order.

While it is hard to see how "Shot Dog Film" could be considered art on a formal or aesthetic basis (I haven't seen the film, but I can't imagine how watching a dog be shot and die could expand my aesthetic awareness), it could be said to communicate Otterness's emotional state at the time it was done; indeed, Otterness indicates as much in his apology. It could also be argued that it serves as a critique of consumerist society and the attitude of disposability that it engenders. So, to deny "Shot Dog Film" the status of art, I must adopt a purely formalist position.

This I decline to do. My view is that all three of the positions described above concerning what art should be--formalist, emotive and critical, if you will--are valid. There may be other criteria, as well, that deserve consideration. Consequently, I am thrown back onto the intentionality test, which means I must renounce any attempt to ascribe a normative dimension to the word "art". There is good art, there is bad art, there is even evil art. In deciding what is good, bad or indifferent, we may resort to the categories of decision previously described, or to others that also relate to art-as-art. In deciding what is evil, however, we must be guided by something that transcends considerations of what is or isn't, or what's better or worse (from a purely artistic perspective), art; that is, our consciences.

Though I've given my answer to the question posed in the caption, I want to finish with a look at what goes into the making of art, in which we see that even trash can be a source of inspiration. This we can do by taking a hike with Thomas Nozkowski:

___________
*Neumann is quoted in Simon Taylor, "The NO!art Movement in New York, 1960-1964 (Final Draft, 7/21/95)", pp.15-16. (This text was available on line when I wrote this post; unfortunately, it is not now.)

**Brian O'Doherty, "Season's End: Groups at Castelli and Auslander--Plus a Shock at Stein's", The New York Times, May 31, 1964. This review also mentions a presumably then little-known artist, Christo, of whom O'Doherty noted that his "pet trick is a good, if quickly expendable, one--wrapped packages prompting curiosity." This was, recall, 1964. The "quickly expendable" trick proved to have considerable staying power.

***Gary Indiana, "One Brief, Scuzzy Moment: Memories of the East Village Art Scene", New York Magazine, December 6, 2004 (see text here).

Leon Kass wants you to drop that ice cream cone, NOW!

As a member, and former chairman, of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass has played an important role in determining the Bush administration's policy on matters such as funding of stem cell research, assisted suicide, and so forth.

Less well known than his views on these weighty matters are Dr. Kass's opinions concerning more mundane stuff. In his article "The Stupidity of Dignity," in the current New Republic, Steven Pinker serves up this juicy Kass quote:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America, but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive...Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays a lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ...Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to the mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ...This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

I just don't get it, Doc: "catlike" equals undignified? I guess you've never been owned by a cat.

Update: thanks to Eric of Classical Values, I now have the complete Kass quote, without ellipses, here. To be fair, Dr. Kass does admit:

I fear I may by this [ice cream] remark lose the sympathy of many reader[s], people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs.

He then goes into a diatribe against uncovered yawning, which is one with which I heartily agree. But failing to stifle or cover a yawn yields no pleasure. Dr. Kass would have us believe that the only reason for licking an ice cream cone or eating anything "in public" is "enslavement to the belly." Not so. On a balmy day, it is quite rational, even when not driven by the press of business, to choose the al fresco frankfurter (or suitable vegan alternative) over the confines of table. As for the ice cream cone, I think it really does taste better than with dish and spoon.

(Thanks to Just Your Average Joggler for the perfect image.)

Chicken soup for the Mets fan's soul.

Two decisive wins over the Yanks, the latest featuring the so far wildly inconsistent Oliver Perez over the redoubtable Chien-Ming Wang by the score of 11-4, makes up for a lot of earlier disappointment.

Just don't backslide.

Will this mean the Mets secure the default front-page-of-the-Times-sports-section position, at least until their record slips to worse than the Yanks'? I'm not counting on it.

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".